malvasia bianca

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.

I learned about the game Achievement Unlocked from Ludus Novus, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a game that looks like a single-screen platformer, but is in fact all about unlocking achievements: rather than traditional platformer goals, your only goal is to unlock the 100 achievements in the game. And these are not grand achievements: you earn three or so just for starting the game, followed quickly by several more for doing stuff like jump for the first time.

I’d expected it to be funny in a sort of postmodern and superior way, but while there’s certainly some of the former, there’s none of the latter: the game is taking the concept of achievements to a ridiculous extreme, but I never got the feeling that the author was particularly looking down at us for enjoying earning them. The game certainly acknowledges how ridiculous the quest for achievements can be, but acknowledges it in a “the things we like are a bit silly if we look at it from a certain angle” way rather than a “you poor sap who is so foolish as to strive for achievements” way. (I particularly liked the achievements you got for earning 10, 20, 30, etc. other achievements.)

Beyond the humor, though, it’s surprising how much plain fun the game is, how it managed to keep me entertained through the end of the game while making 100 achievements less of a slog than a single achievement in a lot of other games. My gameplay went through three phases: at first, I was just exploring the screen, going to all the areas, seeing what popped up, and seeing if I could think of more ways to get achievements. (What if I died by doing X?) Then I went through the list of achievement names on the right, and tried to figure out what I needed to do to unlock each of the ones that remained. There were a few that I couldn’t figure out, so I went to the hint list for those. And all of that kept me moving to the end, kept me feeling challenged and entertained without getting frustrated.

But the reason why I’m blogging about this, instead of just twittering a link, is that this was fun for two unexpected reasons. One is that it’s fun in a meta-game way: rather than being fun because you’re accomplishing something directly, it’s fun because you’re figuring out the rules of the game. (And I want to emphasize: when I say fun, I don’t mean witty or clever, I mean that I enjoyed the puzzle of trying to figure that out.)

And the other is that it’s unexpectedly fun in a traditional gameplay sense, in a way that other games could learn from more. The game world consists of a rather mundane platformerish level; if it were a traditional platformer, I would have had a single goal, to collect some objects or make it to a spot or jump on some people’s heads or something. As it is, you have to do some of that, but there are a lot of other goals that are quite a bit more arbitrary than that, or at least quite a bit less common when viewed through a traditional platformer lens.

But, it turns out, those other goals are still fun: I wouldn’t have expected a game to cram 100 goals into a single screenful and have me still enjoy them, but I did. So, to me, the lesson is: rather than spend their time crafting many levels with one well-thought-out goal/path through them, game designers should spend more time thinking about how to reuse the same levels in different ways, by providing a well-thought-out set of different tasks to carry out in that level.

This isn’t a new idea, of course: for example, one of my favorite parts of Perfect Dark was its collections of set-piece challenges to work through in the multiplayer levels. And many Xbox achievements do this to some extent, though far too often in the vein of “do this extremely difficult thing” instead of “do this thing that you wouldn’t normally try but that is fun to attempt”. Still, I think it’s an idea that could be mined a lot more than it has been so far. If nothing else, game designers should think twice before adding yet another fetch quest: surely there’s some other sort of task that they can set within their game world that hasn’t been trodden so deeply into the ground?

I think I first got interested in the idea of working while standing up when I was reading the book Brain Rules. That book, in fact, doesn’t just suggest that you work standing up: it suggests that you work while walking, by installing a treadmill at your desk! I’m not about to put a treadmill in my office at work, but after reading that book, I started noticing blog posts extolling the virtues of working standing up. The first was from 37 Signals, with a followup suggesting the practice had spread; and then a trio from Evolving Excellence got me thinking that it really might not be a crackpot idea.

I did a bit more googling; 43 Folders also chimes in on the matter, as does the Canadian analogue of OSHA. The latter was actually rather sobering: as somebody who basically spends all day at a computer, I sometimes forget that there are millions of jobs out there where people regularly work standing up, not always with the best consequences. Still, I found enough positive reports that I thought I’d give it a try.

So I spent the last week before break working standing up. My desk’s height is somewhat adjustable, but not adjustable enough; fortunately, there were enough office supplies (reams of paper, mostly) lying around to let me build stands for my monitor, keyboard, mouse, and notes, so an hour later I had a workable setup.

It’s hard to say yet how it’s going: as expected, it was uncomfortable (though bearable), and I haven’t been doing it long enough to get past that stage. Though even the discomfort had a surprising effect: it seems to have cut down on my procrastination, because one of my typical ways of procrastinating is to do something at my computer other than what’s most important (e.g. I check my e-mail too often); that is singularly ineffective in removing what is now my top annoyance, however, namely that my feet hurt! And that made procrastinating seem silly, so I spent less time doing it and more time getting more work done. I don’t expect that benefit to last, though.

Some people report that working standing up gives them more energy; that would be a welcome result (I frequently have a lull in energy in the early afternoon), but I haven’t noticed it yet. Other people report that it helps their back; my back does get uncomfortable after spending too much time typing, and I think that actually did improve over the course of the week. If that continues to be case, it’s certainly to the good, as long as I’m not, say, trading back pain for knee pain.

Along those lines, another effect of the experiment is that it’s reminded me how out-of-touch with my body I am. I’ve mostly given up on the idea of good posture while sitting, but I figured that, if I’m going to stand, I should put in a bit of effort figuring out what my posture should be like, so I can get good habits ingrained. The problem is, I don’t really know what good standing posture feels like! I was expecting there to be some positions that just felt right, if I would listen to my body; I haven’t yet reached that level yet, though. (I did some web searching for posture tips, but I didn’t find any that impressed me; any recommendations?) So I’m still working on my posture; for what it’s worth, though, I did end up raising my monitor on two separate occasions after my initial attempt (by a couple of inches or so each time, the height of a ream of paper) as I became less slumped and realized that I was looking down at my monitor; it’s certainly good that I’m managing to stand taller.

Some sources also recommend that you have a low step available, so you can rest one of your legs. I found one that’s about the 20 centimeters high that the CCOHS recomends, and using it for any length of time really hurt. So I’m not planning to make a habit of that, though it’s available for occasional use. I am at least shifting my body around some: in particular, I take a break from typing every 10 minutes, and now I’m sitting during that time, to give my muscles and blood vessels a break.

This is still very much a work in progress; I’m planning to keep it up through at least the end of January before making a firm decision one way or another. (I’ll report back with an update then.) If my back really feels better (and my legs/feet stop hurting), I’ll probably keep it up; ditto if I find that standing gives me more energy. If it remains uncomfortable, though, I’ll probably stop. I’m still curious about the “working at a treadmill” idea, but that sounds like a big enough experiment that I’m not planning to do it now; maybe if I ever get a job that has me working at home, I’ll give that idea a try.

Animal Crossing: City Folk is a marvelous game; I’m very glad that the series is out on the Wii, I recommend it to anybody who hasn’t played a previous iteration.

It is, however, in no significant sense a new game, so I don’t see any reason to spend further time talking about it here.

I had the pleasure of being one of the guests of the special holiday edition of the Gamer’s Confab. I haven’t listened to it yet (and wow, that’s a lot of podcast, it won’t come close to fitting into my commute during this abbreviated work week), but I thoroughly enjoyed participating in the recording of my segment, and I have no doubt that the other segments are fabulous as well.

From Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, p. 102:

Cna yuo raed tihs?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef but the wrod as a whloe. Azanmig…

Azanmig indeed: I was pretty shocked to find that I could read that paragraph pretty much as fast as I could have if it had been spelled correctly. especially once I relaxed a bit. (Typing it in was another matter…)

Another datum for the “kids new to reading and writing are doing a completely different thing than I am” point of view. (Or is it? It’s related somehow, but I’ll have to think about exactly what it might imply.) I wonder if we should put something like this in the PACT parent ed new parent training, to give people a bit more sympathy for what K-1 kids are going through?

I think I’ve said this here before, but I’ll repeat it: it wasn’t until I started learning Japanese that I really had sympathy for what kids were going through. (My experiences with Greek and Devanagari scripts are far enough in the past to not have a current impact.) I’ve been studying it for a while now, and I still can’t even read Hiragana script with anything like the fluency that I can read Roman: I’m literally unable to misread Roman script in ways that I’m quite capable of misreading Hiragana and that first-graders are quite capable of misreading Roman. But that’s just script-to-sound translation; the above points out that that’s not what’s really going on when fluent readers read…

As our third game, the Vintage Game Club chose Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Which has the distinction of being the most actively annoying game that I’ve played in several years.

For one thing, it’s a really difficult game: it’s not unusual to find areas that you’ll have to play through dozens of times before succeeding, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an area in there somewhere that I played through a hundred times. Difficulty alone I can take: N+ and Orbient are games that I played this year that had levels that were plenty tough. (Mind you, I didn’t finish either of those games!) But both of them felt different from Abe somehow, and I’m trying to tease out why.

I think having clearly delineated levels is part of the reason: in Abe’s, in contrast, you’re never quite sure whether or not you’ve made it to the next checkpoint until you die and see where it respawns you. Also, both N+ and Orbient had a simple set of mechanisms to play with; Abe’s didn’t have all that large a set, but they were somewhat inconsistently implemented. For example, enemies frequently follow you from one screen to the next, but sometimes they don’t; sometimes throwing a bomb to the next screen will kill the enemy in that screen, but a lot of times you’ll walk to the next screen and see an enemy standing right where the bomb must have gone off. Even in situations like that, the game has its own internal logic, but it’s one that goes out of its way to prevent certain possible solutions to puzzles.

What annoyed me more than that, though, was the feeling that, at some basic level, the game designers didn’t respect my time: the game play was all about them, not about me. There wasn’t anything as extreme as the tower in Final Fantasy VI with no save spots anywhere in it and with a boss at the top with an insta-kill attack (which caused me to immediately give up on that game), but there were plenty of bits where I thought the designers could have been a bit gentler, a bit more humane without giving up anything important. The ending in particular really drove home this attitude: if you haven’t invested the ridiculous effort required to save more than half the Mudokons, you get treated to a cinema where people look at your character being threatened with execution, say “nah, he didn’t try hard enough”, and let your character die. And I, for one, felt that I’d tried quite hard enough, thank you very much, and had in fact gone out of my way to try to appreciate the game simply by virtue of the fact that I’d slogged through the whole damn thing! (I was also amazed by the notion that the game designers apparently thought that the game would be the start of a quintology; and rather put off by the combination of the title with, as far as I noticed, a complete lack of further Homeric references. But maybe that’s just me being snotty.)

It’s not the game designers’ fault, but the hype in our pre-game discussion also ended up backfiring on me: people talked about how great the presentation is, how funny it is, and it’s just not. Don’t get me wrong, the presentation is good, but you spend a lot more time going through rooms made out of the same nice but not stunning design elements than you do watching the cut scenes. And I appreciate the idea of including comic poetry, but the actual poetry left something to be desired.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, however, the game does have some things going for it; I think people were looking back at their memories of game through rose-colored glasses, but there really are some good bits here. In particular, what a game like this boils down to is the quality of the sections between checkpoints: as annoying as many of those were, there were also many that were pleasant enough, and some sequences (frequently annoying ones!) were actually rather well-constructed set pieces.

Above, I complained that you didn’t know what the distance is between checkpoints. This is true; but you get a decent feel for that fairly quickly, and the frequency of dying means that you are never in doubt for very long whether or not you’ve reached the next checkpoint. And the game designers were actually pretty decent about not making you replay too much stuff before you got back to the last place you died: usually, once you figured out how to make it past a given obstacle, you could make it past that obstacle in the future fairly reliably and fairly quickly. (Though there were certainly some areas where I had to spend more time than I’d like waiting for enemies to be in the right location before I could do my next action.)

Also, given the small number of moves you could do, the small number of enemy types, and the small number of objects, they did a quite good job of figuring out different ways to combine those elements, and doing so in such a way that you could generally figure out the new technique that an area demanded. I managed to make it through the game without going to gamefaqs a single time; there were some bits where that was luck, but there were a lot of sections where I was stumped, thought about what I had to play with, and managed to figure out a way of combining the elements at had that I hadn’t thought of before. (A pleasant change from the VGC’s first game.)

Take, for example, the very last section in the game. On the one hand, it’s full of fiddly actions: you have to disable bombs at just the right time, you have to make just the right jumps. But, by then, you’ve done that dozens of times before, so that’s not really a significant challenge. What is a challenge is an area where two guillotines are coming down, with the right one coming down before the left one: it’s easy to move right-to-left, but then you have to come back through it left-to-right. And that seems like it should be flat-out impossible.

I’m not sure how many times I tried to go through that: 20 or 30, maybe? But it wasn’t nearly as frustrating as it could have been, for two reasons: for one thing, it was pretty clear that it was the next thing I had to figure out, so I wasn’t second guessing myself, and for another thing, once I got the timing down on the approach to that section (in particular on disabling a bomb), I could get to guillotines within 10 or 15 seconds of respawning after a death. So I was spending a fair portion of my time trying to figure out that puzzle, as opposed to traveling around or dying for other reasons.

And once I figured out that puzzle, I was impressed: it turns out that, if you jump at what seems like an impossibly early time, you can clear the right guillotine, and in fact clear it with ease. Simple when you see it done, almost impossible to believe until you’ve done that. I died a few more times in later sections in that area, but there weren’t any more really hard puzzles there: sure, it took me three times to get through the final screen in that section, but dying three times in this game is barely worth noting, and once I knew what to do, I could get from the respawn point to that final screen in a minute or so.

So: I don’t begrudge the choice of game, and on the whole I’m even glad that I stuck it out through the end. (Though I certainly don’t blame other people for giving up a third of the way through: I completely understand why they made that choice, and came very close to making it myself on more than one occasion.) I learned a few things from the game, and had several moments of real gaming pleasure during the time I spent with it.

But I also never want to see the game again. And I hope that our next choice of game will be something more forgiving, something less self-absorbed.

At any given time, I’m normally in the middle of one game that I don’t let Miranda watch; but that slot in my schedule has been open ever since I finished No More Heroes. I was planning to finally get around to playing BioShock, but recent events have rendered my 360 unavailable.

Any suggestions? My PS2 and a Wii are both useable; I’d been planning for some time to get around to Persona 3, but now Persona 4 is about to be released, and my twitter feed was all abuzz about Yakuza 2 not that long ago. And doubtless there are other good ideas that I’m not thinking of. Or maybe I should take a hiatus, and do something else with my time?

Art Style: Orbient is the first new game (i.e. not a repackaging of one previously published) that I’ve purchased via download. (For the princely sum of six dollars.) And it’s a delightful little game, and one that makes me happy about the increasing variety of mechanisms by which games can be disseminated.

It’s a very simple game: the control scheme uses just two buttons (and in particular no direct directional control: no joystick, no D-pad). You play as an asteroid (by which I mean a circle) meandering through space; one of the buttons increases gravity, drawing you closer to nearby bodies (other circles), while the other turns on antigravity, pushing you away. If you get close to a larger body, you can get drawn into orbit; that, combined with gravity and antigravity, is your movement mechanism. You can absorb other bodies of your size or smaller; eventually, one of the bodies starts to glow, and you clear the level by drawing it into orbit.

Which is a pleasant concept; I’ve never seen a control scheme like that, and I was curious to explore it. And it’s presented in a simple but charming way; in particular, you can also attract smaller bodies (and eventually a moon) into orbit around you, which the game reacts to by adding more layers of music. There are, I believe 50 levels; I went through just over 30 of them, and more than felt I got my money’s worth.

It’s not a revolution in gaming or anything. But it’s got a nice idea, a pleasant presentation, a good amount of content, all at an impulse purchase price. And I think it’s great that the industry is finding ways to potentially make it economical to develop and sell games like this: I like the big budget extravaganzas as much as the next person, but there should be room for a lot more in the medium than just that. My only quibble is that I wish that it had been a DS game; no downloadable content on that platform yet (at least in the U.S.), but Nintendo is in the process of rectifying that flaw.

I just got a copy of Call of Duty 4 in preparation for tomorrow’s VGHVI play session. I figured I should get my fingers used to the game first, so I went to play it tonight; I launched the game, futzed around with the menus, started a game, and it froze. (Soft, not hard, the guide button still worked.) Hmm.

I then rebooted the console, and played; this time, I could start a game, yay. I made it through the tutorial, then started the first mission, and it froze after (or in) the opening cinematic. (A hard freeze, this time.) I’ve now repeated that four times, without a single success.

So: bad disc or bad console? I’m leaning towards the latter: I played a bit of Burnout Paradise a couple of weeks ago (also for the first time, also prompted by VGHVI); the opening cinema was glitchy, and I couldn’t play the game from a hard drive install. (I can’t play CoD4 from a hard drive install, either.) I didn’t see any problems with Burnout Paradise after the opening cinema, and I haven’t had problems with other games, but that combined with today’s problems makes me think that my optical drive is going south.

Fortunately, I’m still within the warranty, even for non-red-rings problems. But this is really the wrong time of year for me to be console-less: there are a bunch of games I’d like to play, most of them are on the 360, and I’ll have time off from work soon. And the fact that shippers will soon be overloaded delivering Christmas presents makes me worried that the turnaround time will be longer than normal, too.

So: crap! Though I’ll muddle through somehow, even if I am 360-less: I can play more Spore, and World of Goo, Aquaria, Persona 3, Yakuza 2, and A Mind Forever Voyaging are all very much on my radar. Heck, maybe I’ll just spend the holiday holed up with Chrono Trigger DS. Or (gasp) read books and/or program! Still, not the way I’d like things to be.

Though I can’t say I’m surprised: I bought my 360 knowing that their quality was much worse than that of any other piece of consumer electronics that I’ve ever heard of. And I don’t regret that, I’ve had good times with it. But I very much hope that Microsoft has few enough interesting exclusives in the next generation that I’ll be able to skip their next console.

I’ll call 1-800-4MY-XBOX tomorrow and kick off the process, I guess: if I act quickly enough, I hope I’ll have it back in time for my holiday break. Whee.