malvasia bianca

When I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus, I was impressed by it, but no more than by several other games from around the same time.

Then at some point, perhaps a year and a half later, I was browsing the web and came across a picture of the game. And I gasped, I shuddered. I’d never had that sort of physical reaction to game media before; clearly the game has gotten its hooks deep into my soul, much deeper than I’d imagined.

Given my current Christopher Alexander obsession, I thought I should examine the game in the light of the concepts from The Nature of Order. Shadow of the Colossus is perhaps the best example of a living structure in video games that I know of; and that structure has as its focus the beautiful, loving care with which the colossi are developed as centers.

Alexander’s list of fundamental properties in living structures:

Levels of Scale

Each colossus shows this off wonderfully: they’re huge, they’re detailed down to their hair, and they have visual/physical structures at at least a half-dozen levels in between. And these structures aren’t just there to look beautiful: they affect the gameplay, in that the protagonist is at a much smaller scale than the colossi (in a similar scale to the weak spots; the sword is a still smaller scale), and you have to follow paths at a scale approaching that of the colossi, with barriers at an intermediate scale made out of elements at a smaller scale. (And during each boss fight you have to navigate an arena at an even larger scale than the colossus itself.)

Of course, levels of scale aren’t only present in the colossi: the largest scale in the game is the entire game world (with hints at a broader world beyond it!), and there are many, many meaningful levels of scale between that and the blades of grass. And, indeed, the game world is wonderful, and is part of what gives the game its power. But the density of levels of scale within the colossi are one of the truly remarkable aspects of this game: in few other games will you find bosses as richly crafted as these, and in perhaps no other will you find such interplay between the visual/physical layers of scale in the bosses and the gameplay of the boss fights.

Strong Centers

The colossi are, of course, the most glorious examples here. But there are others: the protagonist, the girl, the horse. (The horse!) The central building. The birds soaring overhead. The world that you explore in the game. (Set off from the rest of the world that you can’t explore, that only exists by implication.) Your sword. The temples that dot the landscape. The ruins, the water, the crevasses, the plains, the glades. The lizards. The components that these are crafted out of, that are beautiful enough to stand on their own.

And then the conceptual centers of the came: love, combat, sacredness, power, sadness.

Boundaries

A point that Alexander emphasizes: it’s not enough that boundaries between different components exist, they have to be thick enough to stand on their own, to be centers in their own right.

One example, perhaps, is the arena around each colossus. A colossus isn’t just plunked in the middle of the game world at random: it has its own territory, which is large enough to give it room to roam yet small enough that your attention is always focused on the colossus when within that area. The surface of each colossus (its boundary as a three-dimensional object) is a center in its own right, and one whose thickness gives life to the gameplay of the boss fights; as are the boundaries of that surface, its feet and its face.

Buildings, too, have thick boundaries: those are thick stone walls, not sheets of wood, drywall, plaster. On a larger scale, the game world is divided up into different geographies, with significant geographic barriers between them, such as the crevasses that cross the landscape.

Alternating Repetition

You fight. You travel. You fight. You travel. Within each fight, you find a way to get to the vulnerable spot, then you attack. (Frequently with further repetition, e.g. between periods when the colossi are shaking furiously and when they’re calm enough for you to be able to move here.)

On the one hand, I’m not sure this is a property that the game goes out of its way to explore. But the simplicity of the game play in its own way brings it out very strongly nonetheless: in particular, the constant repetition of fight / travel / fight / travel, with each aspect taking a comparable amount of time, is unlike any other game I’ve ever seen.

(Side note: Versus CluClu Land had an interesting piece recently linking Shadow of the Colossus with Punch-Out!!. And, indeed I hadn’t thought until reading that about how both games are structured as a sequence of boss battles. But this property points out one key difference: the space between the battles is almost completely absent in Punch-Out!!)

Positive Space

Not a property that the game goes out of its way to explore. At least I don’t think that it does: perhaps a closer look at the game map would prove me wrong, indeed perhaps the arenas you fight in could themselves best be thought of as positive space? And certainly it’s there on the colossi, e.g. the spaces between the armor that they typically wear, the spaces that so frequently form the paths that you can climb, that contain the vulnerable spots that you can stab?

Good Shape

The colossi are full of examples of this, from the details of their bodies and armor to their overall physical layout. The designers were wise to model the colossi on animals; they were wise to pay such close attention to the real world (with its living structures), to have the architecture based on older, living models.

Local Symmetries

This one puzzles me. Of course, it’s all over the place in the physical design: from the bilateral symmetry of the creatures to the local symmetries that are everywhere in their component parts. You’ll have no trouble finding a hundred local symmetries in this picture, and you can’t even see most of the body of the colossus in it:

See More Shadow of the Colossus at IGN.com

So this property is certainly there visually. Is it present at a more conceptual level? I’m not sure…

Deep Interlock and Ambiguity

The morality of the game is all about ambiguity, of course. But this property is one that is more interesting than you might think from its name: deep interlock is how, when adjacent centers meet, they form an area with its own power, an area that emphasizes the power of both the centers that join together there.

To that end, consider the feet of the colossi. These are, in some sense, the locations where the colossi and the ground interlock; in gameplay terms, this forms a wonderfully productive region of ambiguity, in that, when this interlock exists (i.e. when the feet are on the ground, and on the ground long enough for you to take action), they transform the colossi into territory, they provide the mechanism by which you can begin ascending the colossi! The joints of the colossi (giving the interlock between upper and lower limb, or limb and torso) can provide a similar, though less powerful form of interlock and ambiguity.

And then there’s the protagonist and the horse, joined together in travel and, at times, in battle. I’m not sure why the horse in this game moves me so much, but this may be part of the answer?

Contrast

Is this a game of strong contrasts? You versus the colossi, certainly, or areas on their bodies where you can climb and areas where you can’t. They as the forces of darkness, you with your sword of light, that seeks out the patches of light within their bodies.

Or perhaps they’re the forces of light, and your sword is just the vehicle through which that’s revealed? In a lot of ways, I see more grey here than contrast.

But then I go back to pictures of the game, and see how lighting is used, to bring out stark relief. Consider, for example, this picture:

See More Shadow of the Colossus at IGN.com

The dark of the colossus against the white of the sky, with the fins of the colossus bringing that out still more via Alternating Repetition. Indeed, the darkness that your horse shares with the colossus (is darkness the color of life in this game, or at least of nature?), contrasted against the light of your body, of the sand.

In fact, the game engine goes out of its way to artificially enhance contrasts in lighting: see this interview which, among other things, discusses how they use high dynamic range techniques.

Gradients

Is this brought out in the design of the individual colossi? I’m not sure – maybe the design elements are more closely spaced at their tops than at the bottom, maybe not. There is, of course, the gradient that occurs in any video game: the colossi get tougher, larger, farther away as the game progresses. And the morality gets more and more ambiguous…

Roughness

The game shines here. To be sure, “shines” is probably the wrong adjective to use when talking about roughness, but that aside: no unnatural artificial regularity to be found. The pieces of the colossi fit together in a way that just feels right: the armor is natural on their bodies, but it shows its age, it’s not freshly mass-produced out of a factory that knows nothing about the colossi, it instead fits together enough to be functional, to be properly placed, and no more. In fact, the game goes out of its way to go away from roughness, with its ruined buildings and desolate landscape.

Echoes

This is another relatively subtle property: the centers should have “deep internal similarities between them which tie them together to form a single unity.” (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 218.) Which is unquestionably the case here: the colossi, despite the significant differences between their details, are unquestionably all of a piece, indeed the game has a very strong unified aesthetic.

The Void

When reading the above, it may seem that I’m treating these properties as a rorschach blot that I could project onto any game. I don’t believe that to be the case: I think that this game is quite unusual in how it’s possible to find what I believe to be significant manifestations of all these properties in it. But some of those properties are present more superficially than others (typically the ones where my explanation boils down to the way the colossi look), while others are more deeply present.

Strong Centers is one of the properties that is most deeply present, and The Void is another. In another blog post on this topic, I suggested that The Void is almost completely lacking in most video games; it’s present here in spades. It’s here most obviously in the open wastes of the game, and more subtly in the melancholy, contemplative atmosphere that pervades the game. But it’s also present at a structural level, working actively to strengthen the centers that are present. As The Process of Creating Life says (p. 74, in the midst of discussing how the properties develop dynamically):

Part of the process of structure-preserving requires cleaning out from time to time, just as an orchard must be pruned. When a situation occurs where there are too many centers, too crowded together, in a confusion of structure, a structure-preserving process must be applied to the situation, since the conglomeration of centers becomes so confused that it begins to undermine the coherence of the centers. That means the process must act to discern the deep structure, the most important structure beneath the confusion. This important structure must then be preserved and the rest cut away.

As a result, structure-preserving transformations frequently act to create The Void. As structure is preserved, the transformations act to preserve distinctness. One of the ways this happens most frequently is that dense highly differentiated structure gets set off against empty, clean smooth structure, and distinctness is maintained.

We may also express this by saying that crowded complex structure often ends up living at the edge of a much larger homogeneous void, and that the contrast between the intricate structure and the vast emptiness is needed to maintain the structure of the intricacy.

I don’t know what process was used to create the game, but that’s a perfect description of the result. Everything in the game is subordinate to the colossi: all extraneous design is swept away, and as a result those centers are enormously powerful. And the other secondary centers have a similar clarity arising from their pruned environments: no lush characterization (almost no characters), no complex combat mechanics, no cities to explore, not even side rooms in the main building. Very few games are brave enough to sweep away complexity in the environment like that; the resulting void gives a deep resonance to the game’s soul.

Simplicity and Inner Calm

There is certainly some amount of this in the overworld, but I’m not sure I can make a strong case that each colossus itself is “the simplest [configuration] consistent with its conditions.” (Phenomenon, p. 287.) Though it’s hard to say: for one thing, you’re trying to kill them, which isn’t the best situation to bring out whatever inner calm may be inherent in their natures. And, for another thing, colossi are, well, colossal, and manifestations of something still larger, so it’s perhaps natural for them to be somewhat elaborate. A bit of a stretch, but on p. 228 of Phenomenon Alexander shows a picture of “A carved Norwegian dragon. Very complex, but it still has inner calm.” And I think some of the same applies here.

The game design and mechanics are certainly close to the simplest configuration consistent with its conditions. Which brings us back to the discussion in The Void above; these two properties seem strongly linked to me.

Not-Separateness

The colossi are very much part of their surroundings: each time you encounter one you feel that it’s in the most natural place where it could be, that it’s an integral part of its arena. And the arenas themselves are of a piece with their surroundings: while the arenas typically do have some framing, you don’t just turn a corner and find that suddenly you’re in a completely different area with a colossus in the middle. Instead, you travel around, feel the the suitability of the area for holding a colossus increase, and then, well, there it is.

And there’s the not-separateness of you and your horse. Of you and the girl, of you and the girl and the colossi. Of the colossi from each other.

I’m not sure the game manifests this property as strongly as some of the others: the presence of The Void is so strong that the strong centers in the game are somewhat isolated from each other, that they stand out in the environment. Still, there is a deep underlying connection that brings them together with each other and makes that distinctness much less jarring than it would otherwise be.

Final Thoughts

I’m currently in the middle of reading The Process of Creating Life, which makes me wonder: what was the process by which these living structures were created? I can easily imagine it unfolding via the processes outlined in that book, where you start with a few centers and then transform them in a way that brings out those centers (and others that appear later), by elaborating one or another of the fundamental properties.

Start, for example, with the idea of a colossus. Then, to emphasize its size, add a second, smaller figure nearby. But even nearby isn’t good enough: have that smaller figure actually crawling up the larger one, to make the size contrast as vivid as possible, to emphasize that the larger is a colossus. Gradually elaborate the colossus, drawing from real-life models but also taking care to generate a sequence of centers that provide life at the scale of the smaller center, that shape the details of the gameplay.

And then generate echoes, the other fifteen colossi. Apply the same process to each of them; but what should the echoes be in deeper sense? Realize that, when creating the original boss fight, there’s a roughness, a majesty, a melancholy in the interaction; use that as the dominant aesthetic for the entire game. And, of course, we need a game world to set this in: create it in such a way that preserves that aesthetic, but that strengthens rather than weakens the colossi as centers, using the void as one of your main tools.

I have no idea if that’s what happened; I did some googling for interviews discussing the seeds of the game, and didn’t come up with much. Though I was struck by this interview where Kenji Kaido, in response to the question “What was the reason for not giving you anything to do between fighting each colossus?” replied: “It was in order to enhance the spirit of fighting, and so the team’s resources could be concentrated on the [colossi]. The contrast between the quietness of travelling and the fighting is more pronounced.”

Which they’ve carried off remarkably. More broadly, there seem to be three points that come through that combine to make the rich living aesthetic of the game:

• Strong Centers and The Void: Everything in the game is designed to bring out the colossi; they have a huge impact as a result.
• The individual colossi as living structures: Each colossus is beautifully designed, detailed via choices that bring out Alexander’s properties and result in a wonderfully alive creature.
• A unified aesthetic: There’s a feeling of roughness, of age, of sadness, of wabi-sabi that pervades everything in the game.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for bearing with me. (I fear that there’s more Alexandrian discussion to come; unsubscribe now!) Let’s all take a break and go play a game together…

I was making my way through The Process of Creating Life last night, and was rather surprised to see Christopher Alexander mention XP! Here’s the quote (p. 198); emphasis and ellipses in the original.

This chapter was first composed as a lecture to the computer science department at Stanford University. After the lecture, I had a chance to hear comments from many of the computer scientists in the audience. Much of the commentary I heard went something along these lines: “This is really interesting…perhaps you should call it ‘evolutionary adaptation’ instead of ‘generated structures'” and “We computer scientists ourselves often practice various form[s] of evolutionary adaptation in software design. Good software grows, by steps with feedback and evolution, to something better…” And so on.

The essence of all these comments was what I call gradualism. It says “Yes of course, in the case of a complex structure, we cannot hope to get it right first time around, so we build it, run it, test it, fix it, change it…and keep on doing this so that it gets better.” What has become knows as Extreme programming is a way of doing this for software development, with a very short cycle of evolution and adaptation, repeated many times.

Of course I am in favor of small steps, of adaptation through trial and error, and of what we may call evolutionary adaptation (see chapter 8). But this is not the central point at all. After listening to all these computer scientists’ comments, and taking them to heart, I realized that I had failed, in my lecture, to emphasize the real essence of all generated structures. The real essence lies in the structure-preserving transformations which move the structure forward through time, and which are primarily responsible for the success of the generating process. The needed transformations are not merely trial-and-error steps, or some neat way of continually checking and making things better. In chapter 2, I have referred to the fifteen transformations which act, in all structure-preserving transformations, to move a while structure forward in a deliberate and explainable way. It is because of these fifteen transformations and their effect, that a whole may be said to “unfold.” It is because of these transformations that a whole becomes coherent, and beautiful, And it is because of this unfolding, and the way the unfolding processes work, that the structure is able to become “mistake-free.”

To assume that the point of generated structures is merely slow, step-by-step evolutionary adaptation, is to make the same mistake that early adherents of Darwinism made in biology—to assume that small steps alone, modification coupled with selective pressure, would be sufficient to get a genotype to a new state, hence to create entirely new organisms… and so on. This does not work, and is now widely recognized not to work, because it lays too little emphasis on the (hitherto) unknown transformations which actually do the hard work of moving the evolving organism through stages that lead to its coherence and its geometric beauty in the emerging genotype.

I’m only a sixth or so of the way through The Process of Creating Life, but the ideas there are really getting my brain racing today for some reason. He gives these beautiful little examples of evolving living structures step by step: looking at those, you (or at least I) say:

• What a great paradigm shift: don’t think of creating something by putting it together from the outside, instead create something by growing it outward from its center(s), with every step a living collection of centers on its own.
• Those examples look really simple; maybe I could do something like that?

And right now (literally right now, today, this hour) I seem to be swimming in ideas that are pushing in that direction: I’m also reading the Presentation Zen book (which is full of wonderful ideas on a topic that, frankly, I spend very little time on these days, which perhaps has the benefit of making me more receptive to ideas out of the blue), I spent the last two days at Agile Open California, I was listening to a podcast on interactive fiction on the way home; invitations to creativity are all around us, if you just stop and listen for a second.

Which is all well and good, but how to harness it? Not in the abstract: how should I personally harness it?

Hmm, here’s a question: forget creating a living structure externally, the living structure that I’m most directly involved in is my own life. What are my life’s Strong Centers, my life’s Levels of Scale, my life’s Boundaries, my life’s Good Shapes, my life’s Echoes, my life’s Roughnesses, my life’s Voids, my life’s …? And how can I nurture and grow these centers, enriching them, giving birth to new ones, while helping to also enrich the centers around me?

Agile Open California 2008 was yesterday and today; like last year, it was a wonderful experience. I’m a bit too tired to post much now, but the bare-bones report:

It started off a bit slow: in a corporate building (which was perhaps more functionally laid out than last year’s, but sorely lacking in sailboats and the Golden Gate Bridge), with a main room that was badly shaped (long and narrow) for all the participants to be all sitting in a circle together. And then came the call for sessions, and a lot of people seemed to have actual presentations that they wanted to give, instead of conversations that they wanted to have. (In retrospect, such people were probably overrepresented among those who were first to nominate their sessions, since they clearly came prepared.)

But then, the magic of open space begins: just like last year, I had no intention at all of leading a session when I showed up, but then I found myself thinking “hmm, we’re about linking principles with practices, and I just saw a very interesting set of principles recently”, and the next thing you know I was up there suggesting a session on Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order. And, showing my lack of imagination, I then remembered another book that I’d read recently, and decided to propose a session on code generation. (Which really was a bit half-baked; once I’d thought about it for a bit more, I decided that what I really wanted was a session on Refactoring Writ Large. Fortunately, I’d scheduled it for the second day, so I was able to explain the changed title during the evening news.)

I started by going to a discussion on distributed teams, which is certainly relevant to me at work right now; I decided to experiment a bit with wandering around, so I left halfway through and stuck my head in the other sessions, but decided that none of them suited my taste (and in particular the one other I was interested in seemed to be more of a presentation than a conversation), and I ended up back in the distributed teams conversation. In another time slot, I started with one on tools because the person running it seemed like the sort of person who had interesting things to say, but I quickly decided that I wasn’t interested in getting the sorts of things out of it that she was, so I went to one about performance reviews in an agile context, which turned into a lovely discussion among four or five of us. A third session I attended was on TDD and emergent design: the person running it wanted to have a chat related somehow to the topic, had no idea how it was going to work in detail, so it took a few minutes to get going; but 15 minutes into the session we were having a great conversation, and probably a more interesting one than if the convener had had a stronger agenda at the start! And, being a sucker for lean, I couldn’t skip the one on lean and TOC; the convener had a presentation available, which he was willing to either use or not use; I actually asked him to run through some of it, because the one slide he had up got me curious, and then he ran into a rather, um, aggressive crowd. I felt sorry for the poor guy, but I guess that’s the way these things work: the people in open space conferences have their points of view they want to express and their ways that they’d like the conversation to flow, and the mere fact that you’re convening a session doesn’t give you any particular privilege to get the crowd to play along with you!

The second day was a really wonderful example of what can happen at conferences like this, where you can find a small group of people to explore any topic you’re curious about: I started my day discussing agile and adaptive parenting with three others, and my Christopher Alexander topic was also quite far out on the fringe of the conference. (And I’m very grateful to the other people who attended that session for being willing to go along with me and help me try to figure that out. I’ll definitely put up a longer blog post about that one.) I also went to one on pride, which was interesting because, having just listened to Bob Martin talk about craftsmanship on the drive up, I’d assumed it was about pride as a good thing; but the convener had intended it to be about how pride could cause problems on an agile team! This lead to a great discussion, going in all sorts of directions. And I had my Refactoring Writ Large session, again a pleasant discussion.

I was surprised at how few repeat participants there were—Rob Myers, where were you?—but there were several faces that I was happy to see again, several people in my Twitter feed that I was happy to meet in person, and several people whom I met for the first time whom I’ll look forward to interacting with in the future. In general, the “gathering of the tribes” feeling was a welcome reminder: I’ve spent a lot of time recently in video game communities at the expense of, among other things, blogging about agile, and this was an important reminder to me that agile is important to me and that I don’t want to neglect that part of my life.

Going back to my misgivings at the start of the conference: for all I know, there might have been many sessions that were more presentations than discussions. (Just comparing the number of participants, the number of simultaneous sessions, and the number of people in the sessions that I attended suggests that I spent more time in the fringes of the conference than in the popular bits.) But I wasn’t in them, so even if that’s the case, it doesn’t matter to me: I got out of the conference what I wanted to, and if other people wanted something different and got that different thing out of the conference, that’s wonderful! I left the conference feeling energized, and judging from the atmosphere in the room, I was far from the only one.

And I will stick with my opinion from last year: open space works remarkably well, to the extent that I’m not sure I want to go to conferences run any other way any more. (Well, I guess that’s not completely true, given that I am very much looking forward to AYE next month, but I bet that conference has its own idiosyncrasies in its organization.) It’s amazing how well it works to gather together people who are interested in a topic and let them run free.

As previously threatened, I tried out the drums in Rock Band today. And they’re fun! But mysterious.

It turns out that skill in playing plastic instruments does transfer, at least to some extent: I started on Medium, and I was passing the songs fine. For the first few songs, my leg hurt like crazy; then one of the pre-song splash screens told me that I could keep my foot down pretty much the whole time, only raising it to play the pedal, and after that, my leg felt a lot better.

What was disconcerting, and remains disconcerting, is that I’m missing a lot of notes, and I can’t tell why. Of course, sometimes I can tell why: I’m playing the wrong thing! But sometimes it seems to my brain and ears that I’m playing the right thing (I was going to say “playing the right notes”, but that’s not correct – pads? Hmm, I guess I’ll stick with notes) and I’ll still lose my streak. Some of that is probably simple user error, but I think there’s something more subtle going on in some circumstances: if I fall out of a streak partway on the seventh iteration of a repetitive sequence, then clearly my hands and feet are capable of getting it right, so if it sounds right to my ears, what’s going on? In fact, I caught a few situations where I fell out of a streak immediately after hitting the last note in a star sequence: clearly I got all the notes right, since I got star power credit for the sequence, and I hadn’t played any notes since the end of the sequence, so how could I have lost my streak?

My best guess is that I’m occasionally double-tapping somehow, especially with my left hand; I’ll need to experiment with more forceful strokes or less forceful strokes or a looser grip or a tighter grip or something until I figure out what’s going on. It was fairly frustrating: I went through the first 15 songs in the morning, and they generally felt quite easy, yet my longest streak was 63 notes, and on half the songs I didn’t even reach a 4x multiplier once. (I never got 5 stars; I think I only even got 4 stars on one of those songs.)

I did better in the afternoon: I had streaks over 100 notes several times, and had several songs where I hit 4x multipliers repeatedly. Still no 5 stars, though, and still more 3 stars than 4. Ironically, I frequently had an easier time getting good streaks going on the harder songs; in fact, I did my best on the next-to-last song. (Is it Run to the Hills? I can’t remember.) I did my worst on my old nemesis, Green Grass, despite its only being tier 6 on drums; it’s just really long and had a few sequences where my foot and left hand accidentally got synced up instead of being on opposite notes.

A very different feel musically than playing guitar: a lot more repetition, no solos. Which was reflected in the way star power works: you can’t turn on overdrive at arbitrary points (though you do have frequent opportunities), and in fact I found it a bit annoying to hold off on using it, but that’s fine because there aren’t as many hard sections where you need lots of stored-up overdrive to rescue yourself. (Or if there were, I didn’t notice them on Medium.) Interesting to see the way the notes and rhythms were varied, especially on the harder songs; I should clearly pay more attention to the drum parts when listening to music.

Lots of fun; I certainly wasn’t expecting to play through all the songs in a single day, but it’s quite addictive. (I skipped the bonus tracks, but I did do Still Alive.) I even tried the first five songs on Hard; quite doable, but I imagine I will run into trouble on the later songs at that difficulty level, and my foot definitely needs training. (I imagine my hands will need training as well on the later songs, as the notes come faster, though that wasn’t an issue on Medium.) Fortunately, I saved a link to this Game | Life article which gives some useful tips; I’ll have to study it. And maybe I’ll hold off on Expert until I’ve switched over to Rock Band 2, so I can take advantage of its improved drum training modes?

But I’m holding off on RB2 for the time being: my experiences today have confirmed my idea that I want to spend more time exploring what the original has to offer before moving on to the sequel. (Though I imagine that guitar will continue to be my primary instrument.) I’m not done with drums yet, I haven’t tried vocals, and I suppose I should even try the bass. And there’s some DLC I want to try out, too, though that could conceivably wait until after I’ve seen what RB2 has to offer.

What a game Rock Band is. “Game” isn’t even the right word: what a platform, what a medium. It seems entirely likely that I’ll still be regularly playing it or one of its successors a year from now; I wouldn’t be surprised if I were doing so a decade from now.

Not much to say about Brain Age 2. The formula is the same as in the original; if forced to chose, I probably like the new challenges a bit more, but not enough to make a difference. (Speaking of which, how do non-piano players do on Piano Player?) And I’m not nearly as into sudoku as I was when playing the first game.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite good for what it is, I’m just not so interested in that right now.

When I last discussed Rock Band, I’d remembered the existence of the solo buttons, and thought I should give the hardest songs a try that way. So, the next weekend, I put down my GH3 guitar, picked up my Rock Band guitar, and gave Flirtin’ with Disaster a try.

It took a while to get used to the feel of the guitar and the location of the solo buttons; after a bit, though, I was rather enjoying myself on the solo. It felt a bit odd never to have to strum, but there’s enough to think about in that solo to keep me busy, and the failure modes felt more realistic than when I was playing the traditional way. (I.e. I missed a few notes, but didn’t completely fall off the rails when I messed up as I did when doing hammer-ons/pull-offs.) Not that I really know what realistic guitar playing feels like—I’m mainly a piano player, though in a pinch I can play Alice’s Restaurant on a guitar over and over again—but messing up the rhythm on a real guitar doesn’t kill you.

So, after a bit, I managed to finish the song: in fact, it said that I’d done a good job on the solo, rather better than I did on the non-solo parts! After which I spent an hour or so with Green Grass, both in practice mode and with the real mode. Again, I did noticeably better than with the old guitar, but this time it wasn’t enough to make a difference: that second solo is really long and, in a few places, really hard even with the solo buttons. Eventually, I decided that I wasn’t motivated enough to finish it: I’m fairly confident that I could if I put in enough effort—there are only two areas in the second solo where I absolutely need star power, and there are enough manageable star power recharge sections between them that, if the stars align, I should be able to squeak by—but it would probably take a whole afternoon, I’d largely be doing it for the achievement (since I still wouldn’t be able to finish the song at all reliably when playing with others), and it’s not worth the effort for me. (Dan, can you finish that song on expert? Do people at Harmonix generally find it pretty doable?)

After that, I decided to go through the bonus tracks to figure out which ones I was going to export to RB2. (Answer: Brainpower (and I really should go buy a Freezepop album); Day Late, Dollar Short; I Get By; Outside; Time We Had.) And, at some point during this process (when playing Seven, I believe), I realized:

The Rock Band guitar is awful. Sure, having the solo buttons is nice during hard solos (though I actually prefer the way hammer-ons and pull-offs play during the fast non-solo bits, e.g. the start of Green Grass). But you have to put up with lots and lots of pain to get those solo buttons, and in no way is the tradeoff worth it. It’s not an accident that I did better on the solo of Flirtin’ with Disaster than I did on the non-solo parts: the neck buttons are hard to press reliably, the strum bar is a lot worse. Initially I’d chalked this up to not being used to the guitar, but by now I’d been using the RB guitar for a couple of hours, so I should be used to it enough by then. But I was still having a hard time making it through Seven; I switched back to the GH guitar, and I couldn’t believe how much better it felt. My fingers could just glide over the neck buttons, my strumming improved drastically, and I was suddenly enjoying myself, instead having the game feel like a chore.

Which is, after all the point here: I’m not doing this because of the achievements, I’m doing this because I enjoy the game, because I want to be able to feel as much of the music in the songs as possible, and because I want to do so in multiplayer mode. In particular, I was hoping to be able to play expert more in multiplayer mode, since the songs just aren’t as musical in hard; but the difference there is dwarfed between the difference between the feeling of the RB guitar versus the GH3 guitar.

So: no more solo buttons for me. I imagine the RB2 guitar is better, but at this point I don’t trust Harmonix’s instrument production skills enough to be willing to pay for it without giving it a try first. (Anybody in the Bay Area have one and want to let me try it? And what is the deal behind the instrument quality difference, anyways? I accept that Red Octane has a lot more experience in that area, but Harmonix is full of musicians, I can’t believe they don’t find their guitar frustrating to play. Is it that hard to get neck buttons that feel good?) Will the GH4 guitar let you use the touch pad as solo buttons? If so, I’ll probably give that a try at some point.

So my journey through RB expert guitar comes to an end. I guess it’s time for me to try out the drums next?

• Achilles’ Phat Lewtz, on the Iliad and MMORPGs; huge amounts of fun from Roger Travis.
• Jordan on David Foster Wallace.
• My heart sank when I saw that Retronauts episode 49 was almost 3 hours long. But it’s all about the Dreamcast, including a great segment with Tycho, the best three hours of podcast listening I’ve had in a while.
• Plants I’ve never seen before.
• One of my favorite products that’s come out of the VGC Deus Ex playthrough.
• Cho Aniki released on the Virtual Console in the US? Amazing.
• Good questions.

• Video Games and Sex.

• A marble adding machine.

  (Via Collision Detection.)

• Sales numbers for Infocom.

• A really interesting experimental game demo:

  (Via The Dust forms Words.)

• The Blue Ocean explanation for the DS models.

I was reading Delany’s About Writing recently when I ran across the following (pp. 408–409):

Excitement, Drama, Suspense, Surprise, Violence

Each of these five nouns names a very different effect. What makes so much popular narrative (especially in films and TV) seem so mindless is that someone, usually a producer, has mistaken one for the other or tried to use one in an attempt to get the effect of another. Most often violence is used in places where one of the other four might have been more interesting or effective.

Consider your response to violence in real life: if you are walking down the street and a stranger thirty feet (or even three feet) away is suddenly injured or hurt, often your emotions lock down. The very shock shuts off any immediate emotional reaction, sympathy, sadness, or empathy. Violence to strangers armors us against involvement with them. The fact is, this is a useful reaction, whether we decide to help the person or simply to move quickly away to escape the danger ourselves, or because it’s not feasible for us to do anything useful just then and we want to make room for someone who can. Clear thinking is necessary in such situations, not emotional involvement and personal identification. That’s probably why we’re wired like that.

[…]

Violence can be surprising, but it is not interesting or exciting or involving in itself. What caused it may be interesting. Its effects may be of intellectual interest. But it is not emotionally interesting in and of itself. On the contrary. The psychological use of violence in art is, paradoxically, not to engage our emotions but rather to put our emotions on hold, heighten our perceptions, and get us ready to think. But since so few public narratives—as offered by television and film—give us much to think about, most of it is wasted.

The reason why this struck such a chord with me is my recent experience with Deus Ex. I’m enjoying the game very much, but, as I mentioned before, the parts I enjoy the most are those with the least violence. There are various reasons for that, of course, and many of them have more to do with my personal idiosyncracies than any truth about narrative. But I’m fairly sure that Delany is onto something here: my reaction to violence in video games isn’t to be overcome with sadness, to consider the enormity of what’s happening. Instead, it turns into a puzzle, my brain shuts down sympathetic lines of thought and tries to come up with the most economical way (on strictly personal survival terms) of making it through the situation.

In particular, in retrospect I’ll largely disagree with Corvus’s contention that “the enemies in Deus Ex have a very important narrative purpose. They force you to seriously consider how to approach any given situation and put a human face on the political struggle, emphasizing that the true cost of these sorts of schemes is the little guy, the grunts, and the innocents.” If the game were designed differently, with fewer enemies and more getting to know them first, perhaps that would happen. And, actually, that did happen to me to some extent: I didn’t want to kill my brother and I didn’t want to kill UNATCO troops because the game had given me experience with them before I had the chance of killing them. And the Naval Base level starts out with people who might be considered as enemies but who are actually on your side, and throws another one in later on (if you take the appropriate route through the level); largely because of that, I suspect, I actively avoided killing some of the other enemies later on in the level. But, in general, the enemies were just another puzzle to get through over the course of the levels, and not a puzzle that I happened to particularly enjoy.

In fact, Delany also has something to say on how violence leads to intellectual puzzles: the bit that I excised in the ellipsis above is the following (ellipses in the original this time):

Numberless times now I’ve been handed manuscripts by young writers that begin in the darkness with a shout, a scuffle, a thud, followed by the sound of breaking glass, whereupon people rush in to find Colonel Mustard (or his equivalent) dead in the sitting room. Alost immediately the writer follows with the life story of Colonel Mustard, under the impression that, because Mustard has been killed, the reader is now interested in him. But this is to confuse a strategy from the genre of the analytic detective story (where it can indeed be quite effective) with that of general fiction—usually because so many film and TV producers have already made the same mistake, and simply through unexamined exposure it comes to them second nature.

What’s interesting about Colonel Mustard’s murder is not, of course, Colonel Mustard. Rather it’s the twisted iron bar, red paint at one end and blue at the other, which is lying on the floor, beside the mantelpiece, three feet from the body. One end of the bar was on top of a calling card, with no name on it, but which nevertheless showed a golden seven-point star with a black band across it. Now, the bar itself had obviously been used to break three pieces of glassware, which had been sitting on the mantel—the shards were all over the green carpet. Nevertheless, while the side of Colonel Mustard’s head had been beaten in with a blunt instrument—surely the cause of death—there was no blood on the bar! As is the blue on the other end, the red is clearly enamel paint…

In short, the potential for mystery and interest is entirely intellectual—for those readers who enjoy a good mystery. The violence at the beginning is precisely what has closed off the possibility for emotional identification, however, and moved our interest (if we have any) to the intellectual plane: Who did it? Why? And how? Those Sherlock Holmeses, Philo Vances, Philip Marlowes, Jane Marples, or Matt Scudders are ready to investigate…

The details of the effects of violence in a mystery are quite different from those in most video games, but I think the basic point holds very well: when I get shot at in Deus Ex, this serves to emphasize the fact that I have to accomplish something, that I have a potentially interesting puzzle in the choice of path and mechanisms by which I’ll accomplish that, and that the people shooting at me give a certain bite to my choice of path and mechanisms. Which is great, it’s part of the reason why I love video games, but it has nothing to do with emotions.

One last quote from that section, which may be a useful thought for somebody who is trying to heighten the emotional interest in a video game:

What does tend to get our emotional interest and identification is watching someone put out energy to get something she or he wants. But, in an attempt to make “something happen,” don’t confuse that with violence—a murder, a fight, or a robbery.

(While I’m on the topic, by the way, I’ll give a shout out to my fellow Delany-loving VGC participant!)

I’d been feeling a bit nonplussed for some time by the fact that I was using the WordPress default theme for the blog. But not nonplussed enough to actually do anything about it: I have other ways in which I’d generally prefer to use my limited free time, I don’t have strong design skills or a stack of photos lying around to select a header picture from, and whenever I browsed theme directories, I always found something to dislike in any theme that I saw. So I stuck with the default, with a few slight tweaks.

Over the last few months, though, I’ve run across more and more blogs and other web pages which took a very plain approach to layout. This is something I understand: I’ve read thousands of books that take that approach, why not use it on the web? So, last night, when I ran across one such blog that was using WordPress, I scrolled down to the bottom to see what theme it was using, and took a look.

The theme was basic2col. It’s a very plain theme; as the author says, “Basic2Col is just what it says – a basic two column theme for WordPress. The theme was created to have a basis for a new theme, but you can of course use it as is.” And I rather liked it as is, so I decided to download it today and give it a try.

After giving it more of a look, there were a few things I wasn’t thrilled about. Most notably, it sets the font size in the body to 70%. This is something that I see all the time, and I never understand: as a web user with aging eyes, I like to set the default font size in my browser to something that’s comfortable to me. So why do so many web pages feel compelled to disregard my preference? And, of course, they almost always override it to make the font smaller instead of bigger. Kids these days.

Fortunately, as mentioned above, the theme is designed to be customizable: in fact, the download page also contains a “customb2c” wrapper that lets you segregate your changes in separate files, for ease of upgrading. So one

body {
  font-size: 100%;
}

later I was off and running. As a bonus, that also made the body wider, which was another thing that had bothered be about the original design.

I did a bit more poking around: I increased the margins here and there, I did some header bolding to give a bit more of a visual separation between posts, and I changed the sidebar a bit. But I mostly left it as-is, and I was pleased with how easy it was to do the tweaking I wanted.

Yours in simplicity,

A while back, I mentioned that the book Good Calories, Bad Calories had gotten me curious about low-carb diets; here’s an update.

On the reading front, I figured I’d take a look at the Atkins book, since he has the most experience with diets of this sort. And, frankly, I wasn’t too impressed: if I’d read that book first, I probably would never have started on this path.

Which is a bit unfair: that book is primarily targeted at people who want to lose weight, and I have no particular desire to do so, so I’m simply not in its target audience. But there was too much propagandizing, and too many recommendations that didn’t fit my core beliefs of “eat good food” and “don’t pretend that X is a substitute for Y”.

I am largely unwilling to eat sugar substitutes, and I’d be quite surprised if the low-carb flours that he mentioned were a good substitute for the real thing. Also, I roll my eyes at the notion that wild rice could be considered a substitute for other forms of rice. (Not that I have anything against wild rice, it’s a fine food, but you want to pair it with an almost completely different set of foods than you’d want to pair white rice with.) Most of all, my eyes rolled every time they encountered the phrase “Dr. Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution”.

The book also didn’t go very far in terms of answering my questions about the science behind the diet. For example, he recommends an induction phase where you eat almost no carbs: is the claim here that this phase is useful somehow to cause your body’s metabolism to change paths (i.e. is it the case that the sequence 1) lots of carbs, 2) almost no carbs, 3) moderate carbs will have your body processing food differently than if you skip step 2) in that sequence?), or is it just useful in the context of a diet, to prove that you can lose weight this way? Also, Good Calories, Bad Calories suggested that it’s not just the number of carbs that matters, it’s the way that your body processes them (so, for example, brown rice is better for you than white rice), while Atkins didn’t make any such distinction (other than between fiber and other forms of carbs); what’s the deal there?

And, finally, it didn’t give me as much practical advice that I’d like, given that I’m not trying to lose weight. For example, the single area where I find it hardest to avoid carbs is at breakfast: I don’t have a lot of time weekday mornings, so ideas like cooking eggs or bacon are a non-starter. So what should I do? He had a few suggestions that fit my constraints, but not nearly as many as I’d like.

The above paints an overly bleak picture of the book: on the whole, I’m glad I read it. But I’m also glad I checked it out of the library instead of buying a copy.

So that’s my reading. As to eating: we did try brown rice and whole-wheat pasta. We’ve stopped using whole-wheat pasta: it tastes pretty different from regular pasta, and Liesl and I both felt that it went significantly less well with our pasta recipes than regular pasta. (For what it’s worth, pasta turns out to have a better glycemic index than most grain products, by the way.) Brown rice was a pleasant surprise, though: yes, it tastes different from white rice, and has a different texture, but I actually perhaps prefer its taste and texture. It’s not for all situations—I wouldn’t want brown rice sushi, for example—but I’m quite happy to eat brown rice with Indian food. The only drawback is that it takes longer to cook than white rice (we’ve been cooking it for 45 minutes and then letting it sit uncovered with the heat off for 5 minutes), but it’s usually easy to work around that with scheduling. And if not, the occasional white rice won’t kill us.

In general, our dinners are less pasta-heavy than they were; we’re cooking it twice most weeks, but that’s less than we were before. When I started this, we were only cooking pasta once a week; maybe we should get back to that more often?

Lunches have been a big change for me: instead of packing a big tupperware full of pasta, I pack it only half-full of whatever dinner leftover I have (still usually pasta, because pasta meals are easy to double and hence overrepresented as leftovers), but I now always pack three side dishes as well. Exactly what the side dishes are varies, but my most common selection is some form of cheese, some kind of nuts, and a veggie. This only adds a couple of minutes to my morning routine, which is no big deal, and I’m extremely pleased with the results: while I wasn’t complaining before (I quite like the main dishes that we cook), the extra variety really improves my lunches. (Especially the cheese. Fresh mozzarella, yum.)

As I mentioned above, breakfasts are the biggest problem: on weekday mornings, I still don’t see any good alternative to cereal. I took a look at my cereal cabinet and decided that I should try to avoid refined sugar almost entirely (fortunately, I’m just not that big a sugar fan), and the more whole grain the better. What I’ve settled on for now is plain instant oatmeal, topped with cream and fruit. That’s a bit of a shot in the dark, but I will say this: I really like having an excuse to have cream every morning.

Desserts have stayed the same: we still eat a lot of chocolate. I haven’t changed the food I eat when going out very much, though I do try to avoid potatoes now.

As far as my health goes: while I haven’t noticed any particular difference in my day-to-day experiences, my doctor’s reaction to my last blood check was “Your cholesterol levels are excellent. They are so good that I am actually wondering if you’ve changed the way you take the medication or changed your diet or exercise. Whatever it is that you are doing, keep doing that.” I don’t want to ascribe all of that to the diet: my previous results were only a month or so after I started taking simvastatin, and for all I know it may take more than that amount of time for the drug’s full effects to be known. But I am pleased that my triglyceride level has plummeted compared to where it was before: triglycerides are apparently pretty important (rather more so than, say, LDL levels), and one of the claims of low-carb diets (or low-glycemic-index diets) is that they specifically help triglycerides.

But even if I can’t ascribe all (or conceivably any) of the improvements in my cholesterol level to my new diet, that is at least strong evidence that my eating less carbohydrate and more fat (see the cream and cheese mentions above) isn’t hurting me in the way that low-fat diet proponents claim that it should. So I’m sticking with it for now: I’m enjoying what I’m eating, I see no sign that what I’m eating is causing me any health risks, so what’s not to like?

If any of you are a fan of books with experimental presentation and/or books as physical objects, I recommend And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, by Nicola Griffith. It’s a memoir of her early life, leading to when she was starting to become a published author; it’s rather well done as such, and I think she must have been a difficult person to be, a difficult person to be around, an interesting person to be, and an interesting person to be around. (And presumably most of those are still true!)

But the reason why I mention it here is that it is the only book I have that comes with scratch-and-sniff cards. At least I think it is; I’m quite sure that it’s the only book that I have that comes with a scratch-and-sniff card of an English pub. (“The smell of an English pub that’s been around for two hundred years or more is like nothing else on the planet: old wooden floors sticky with spilt, fruity-smelling ale, sun on scarred tables, ashtrays.”) There are other non-written artifacts in it, too: childhood works, a CD with music from a band she was in, but the scratch-and-sniff cards stand out the most. Well, that and the postcard from the publisher showing the delightful technique by which they “have just convinced a party that they had better buy their books at Payseur and Schmidt.

It’s a limited edition, of course, but copies seem to be still available. I really should read more of her books; I read her first three, and seem to recall rather liking the second and third, but she’s written more in the intervening decade.

Rock Band is the first game I’ve played in ages where I’m actively trying to improve my skills at the game, replaying challenges at harder difficulty levels instead of going through it once, enjoying it but moving on to the next game on my shelf.

I’m still trying to figure out why this is. It’s a wonderful game, of course; I half believe that Rock Band and the other music games that we’ve seen recently are the most important cultural phenomenon of the last decade. Music has been woven deeply into our species’ psyche since before the dawn of civilization; the last half-century has seen a huge flourishing of the amount and variety of music in our midst, but most of us, most of the time, are just listening to the music. With Guitar Hero, that changed a bit: we’re not actually playing the music, we’re just pressing buttons with no direct relationship to the notes that are produced (and, in fact, we’re not producing the notes, we’re responding to them), but it gets us more involved in listening to the music. And, in my view, that’s unequivocally a good thing.

You see people occasionally lament that we should move away from the TV, stop pressing plastic buttons, and learn to play a real guitar; I won’t argue against that, but most people wouldn’t do that whether or not these games existed. So, given a choice between listening passively to the game or pressing buttons along with the game, I know which I’d choose, and I know which I’d bet would encourage more people to pick up a real instrument. And Rock Band takes it that much further, adding two new instruments where we really are more or less playing the music. (No caveat necessary at all for singing.) Given the success of these games, it wouldn’t surprise me if, ten years from now, all music was published in some sort of Rock Band-ish format; that sounds like paradise to me.

So: music and video games combined make up a big win in my book. (Though it’s not the only reason why I’m challenging myself against the higher difficulty levels: I’m sure the relative lack of narrative structure helps as well, giving me fewer other things to look for in the game.) And one thing I’ve been surprised to learn playing through the guitar on expert difficulty: the game really is a lot more musical on expert than it is on hard.

I’d noticed this to some extent in Guitar Hero: in easy mode, with just three buttons, there just wasn’t that much of a connection between what buttons you were pressing and the notes that came out, because even basic concepts like buttons further down the neck giving higher notes went completely out the window. And, of course, that continues with the higher difficulty levels: the fifth button makes a difference as well, especially as they use it more freely in expert. Equally obvious is that, when comparing expert to hard, you press a button on a significantly higher proportion of the notes in the actual music, so you get a richer musical experience that way.

What I wasn’t expecting to be a big difference between hard and expert: they use a much wider variety of chords in expert, switching between button combinations much more freely. And this isn’t done for the sake of making the game gratuitously difficult (which, as far as I can tell, it never is): the different button combinations really do represent different chords in the game. This allows them to bring out much more of the harmonic structure of the music you’re playing: you’ll be playing along in a certain sequence of finger positions, then you’ll have to switch to something new, and that’s exactly when the song changes key or the music takes a little twist somehow.

Another thing I’m surprised to find myself enjoying: hammer-ons and pull-offs. This is something that, historically, I suck at. Then I noticed that, actually, I could do them okay in the context of a brief trill, which got me noticing trills. That was enough for me until I got to the very hardest songs; out of necessity, I realized that, in those songs, in the more melodic sections you can actually go for quite some time without hitting the strum bar. Which, in turn, got me paying closer attention to the nature and structure of the melodic sections.

So I’ve learned a lot from the harder difficulty settings: they’ve got me paying closer attention to the music. I don’t want to claim that Rock Band is uniquely brilliant in this regard: I’m sure that, if I were into FPS games, I’d learn a lot about the structure of those games as I played them on higher difficulty settings or on multiplayer with more talented opponents. But it has opened my eyes in this context.

Which brings me to world tour. I had been playing that on hard; as Miranda’s gotten more familiar with the songs, though, I almost never have to rescue her, and I’d gotten far enough through the songs on expert in solo tour that I figured that it was time to play in expert on world tour.

The problem is, I still can’t play all the songs on expert. And we’re at a stage in our world tour career where we’re running into hard songs, and into multi-song random setlists. What this means is that, if I do play on expert, there’s a reasonable chance that we’ll run into a song that I won’t be able to finish. And that sucks.

So I went back to playing on hard. But it just wasn’t as fun: the challenge wasn’t there and, as I’ve discovered, the music isn’t there either.

What I want is to be able to play songs on a difficulty setting where:

1) I can finish them.
2) The gameplay brings out as much of the music as possible, given constraint 1.

(Side note: of course, 2 frequently correlates with difficulty, but I’m absolutely not looking for difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Which is one reason I haven’t yet played Guitar Hero III, despite having bought a copy to get a second guitar.)

And Harmonix is making me chose between these two constraints. Which would be fine in a single-player mode, but in multiplayer, 1 ruins the game for everybody. So I have to compromise on 2, which is a shame.

And doubly a shame because it would be so easy to fix! Fine, let me run through the song and fail once. But don’t force me to drop out of the setlist there: let me, on a per-song basis, decide to retry the song on a lower difficulty level. Heck, if you must, just let me fail that song completely and continue on the tracklist. But don’t make my band live in fear if I choose to play in expert.

(Does Rock Band 2 give such an option? They seem to be intelligently moving in the direction of not having traditional video game barriers get in the way of multiplayer enjoyment, including a no-fail mode, but I haven’t heard about this specific issue.)

That’s too bad, but I’m still having huge amounts of fun with the game, and I’m not about to stop playing. I have two songs left to finish on expert guitar; no bonus points for you if you can guess which two they are. I spent some time on Flirting with Disaster in practice mode (incidentally, I’d never explored practice mode before, but it’s rather well done); I’m confident that I will be able to make it through that song if I put in an afternoon on it. I’m not nearly as confident about Green Grass and High Tides, though.

To get back to hammer-ons and pull-offs: the non-solo sections of both of those songs are good tutorials for how to use those techniques, but their solos are where you really learn how long you can go without strumming. The problem there is that I don’t have a good recovery strategy: if I miss one note, then I have to strum again to get things going, and I’m still quite bad at finding the right timing to do that.

Except that I realized as I was going to bed last night: I actually don’t have to do that. I’d been using the Guitar Hero III guitar, but of course the Rock Band guitar has extra buttons on its neck exactly for this purpose. I clearly have to give that a try next weekend: it seems entirely plausible to me that I’ll be able to make it through both remaining songs that way. I’m still not entirely sure what I think about the solo buttons: hammer-ons, pull-offs, and strumming do add their own richness to the game, but on the other hand the problem of not being able to get back into a solo if I miss a single note wouldn’t happen on a real guitar, either. So, on the balance (and without having actually tried them out), I’ll provisionally declare the extra buttons to be a good thing; and anything to let me make it through all the songs is a boon in my book.

I’m not quite sure what I’ll do after finishing or giving up on expert. I was thinking about skipping the bonus tracks on expert, since they in general weren’t nearly as good as the regular tracks; but they’re not all bad, so I should probably play through them all once more so I’ll know which ones I want to export to Rock Band 2. And then the question is: which instrument to tackle next? Bass feels like an excessively easy route, and Miranda favors vocals (and Liesl sings along, for that matter), so I guess drums? Though I might throw some bass into the mix: I imagine I’ll learn more about the harmonic structure of the songs by playing bass than I would via any other instrument. Heck, maybe I’ll throw vocals in there, too: I certainly want to try that at some point.

And eventually I’ll get Rock Band 2. And there’s all that downloadable content out there – what should I get? I’m severely handicapped by not having listened to pop music much for any period in my life other than my four years of high school; a lot of great music has been produced in the last two decades, I just don’t know what it is.

So much to do; I’ll probably still be blogging about this game a year from now.

As expected, I found the second week of Deus Ex to be a lot more relaxing than the first week. I had a better feel for the game and my character had a full inventory; this meant that my brain could stop seeing potential disaster every time I failed to be perfect at something and start letting me enjoy going through the levels, letting me appreciate the environments and world-building.

What I wasn’t expecting: the plot started to get more interesting. It turns out that your brother is on the side of the terrorists, that the big military government organization you’re part of isn’t always on the side of the angels. (Big surprise, I know.) I liked the way this was revealed, with you making it through a terrorist base only to discover at the end that your targeting icons were green instead of red, and then to learn that the reason is that your brother has asked the “enemy” forces to stand down.

I didn’t so much like the way you were forced to join the NSF almost immediately after that: I trust my brother more than my former coworkers, but at that point in the game the NSF and UNATCO looked like two organizations that had dubious motives and were both way too violent for my tastes. (At least in the real world, in the game I hand out bullets like party favors. Um, like arsenic-laced party favors?). So I’d really rather have some time to sort this out, instead of being forced to quickly and affirmatively choose to throw in my lot with the NSF. Still, better that than a game in which you stay with UNATCO the whole time; and my subsequent misgivings about the situations where I was encouraged to kill UNATCO troops (i.e. my former coworkers) are something I’m not used to experiencing in a game.

Another change that I wasn’t expecting: I believe (though I could be wrong) that the frequency/density of hostiles in levels is decreasing. In the first week, my favorite part of the game was the UNATCO HQ, where you could wander around a reasonably rich environment without worrying about hostiles at all. In this week, the MJ12 prison had some number of hostiles, but there weren’t very many of them, and they came in small groups, giving a very similar effect: I could spend most of my time just sticking my nose in places.

Hmm, that’s actually something worth thinking about: what is the purpose of enemies in narrative games? I’m pretty sure they have some purpose; I also suspect that a lot of narrative games could have a lot fewer enemy encounters without their narrative structure losing anything. I’ll have to think about that one. (The joys of twittering while blogging: before finishing this, Matthew Gallant pointed me at this Man Bytes Blog post.)

(A similar point, which I hope I will find time to expand into a blog post soon: what is the point of failing songs in Rock Band? I was playing in world tour mode with Miranda today; I generally enjoy the game more when I’m playing in expert mode, but if I do so and we run into one of the wrong two (or three or five) songs, then I won’t be able to make it through the song, which is no fun for either of us. And I’m not sure there’s a good reason for me to have to make the choice of less enjoyment versus failure in that context.)

I continue to be pleased with the VGC’s choice of second game, and in particular I’m very impressed by the quality of discussion in the forums. I’m very curious what next week’s play will bring.

Miranda does her violin practice in the library/guest room; while she’s getting things ready, I spend some amount of time looking around at the shelves. Most of my books up there are nonfiction, and in particular I have a bunch of math books up there.

In order to keep my books under control, I have to periodically give books away. Which raises the question: why haven’t I given more of the math books away? I gave a bunch away when I left academia, and haven’t missed any of them; do I have any reason to keep around the remaining ones?

I’m increasingly thinking that the answer is, in general, no. Which makes me a little sad, but only a little; I’ve made my peace with that. What I was surprised to realize today, however, was that I actually do have a good reason to keep some of them around.

I reread books somewhat frequently; not as much as I like, but it’s still an important part of my life. I’m not in general in the habit of rereading math books these days, but I got to thinking: why not? In some cases, there’s a good reason: I might have read them for largely utilitarian reasons, they might demand a level of sustained concentration that I don’t want to invest my time in these days, or they might demand a familiarity with material that has slipped through my grasp over the last five or six years. Also, in general I read nonfiction because I think I’ll learn something, because it will change the way I think about something or do something, and that’s not likely to happen if I reread those math books.

So I’m not, for example, likely to reread my old textbooks. (Though I was amused to see Miranda pick up Basic Algebra I today. She decided it was a bit much for her, however.) But those aren’t the only reasons why I read nonfiction: sometimes, it’s just for the pleasure of the words, of the argument, of revisiting ideas that are old friends.

And some of the math books that I have qualify very well under those criteria. Local Fields, for example, is a fabulous book, and without the rigidity of presentation that charactizes a traditional textbook. I seem to recall thoroughly enjoying Bott and Tu as well; why not go through it again?

And, for that matter, why reject the idea of learning something new? The proof of the Weil Conjectures brought together some of the most important ideas of the twentieth century, beautiful ideas whose impact will still be making itself felt at the end of this century, and I never learned etale cohomology well enough to follow the proof to the end; maybe I should remedy that? For that matter, progress has hardly stopped since I, say, left grad school; are there any well-written monographs that have appeared over the last decade that I’d enjoy? (Any suggestions, Jordan?)

I’m not going to start reading any of them right now: I’m a bit busy with things to do in my evenings these days. But I should find time to revisit some old friends one of these years.

The Vintage Game Club chose Deus Ex as its second game. I think I’ll probably do most of my commenting on the game in the forum, but I’ll leave some notes here periodically, too.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the first week of gameplay is watching how badly suited my brain is to the game, and how I’m managing to adapt. It’s largely a stealth game (though you have the option of engaging in a fair amount of violence), with significant RPG aspects; there are many choices as to how you progress through the level, and how you upgrade your character.

This leaves me somewhat paralyzed: I’m not a particularly good stealth game player to begin with; I get worried when things go at all wrong, which means that I reload my saved games a lot if I get hurt or use too much ammo; the experience point bonuses for reaching milestones on each route through the level mean that I have the tendency to try to explore all routes to some extent; and I’m afraid to level up (chosing one advancement path over another; the ongoing choices here are much more stark than they are in, say, Mass Effect), lest I rule out future possible choices.

The result is that I played through the first level at a snail’s pace, reloading constantly, refusing to upgrade, and barely paying attention to the story. The gameplay is actually well-enough done that I still mostly enjoyed myself, but I couldn’t relax and get into it.

The end of the first level drops you at the UNATCO headquarters (UNATCO being the group that you’re a member of; they decided to name the terrorist group the NSF, and I really wonder what the story is behind that choice), and that was fun: nice to wander around and explore things, with limited scope for making choices that you might regret in the future.

The second level started by ratcheting up my anxieties: what, you mean I can only carry four weapons, so I have to decide which ones to keep and which to discard? The number of secondary missions available at any one time increased, too, which left me a bit at sea.

Towards the end of the second level, though, I finally started feeling comfortable with the game. I’d settled on four weapons that I thought were okay, and hadn’t noticed any serious negative consequences for my choice. (And I only feel strongly about two of them; if I have to drop the other two later, no big deal.) I’d maxed out the ammo on some of those weapons, which meant that I no longer had to worry excessively about ammo management. I’d had enough experience with going through levels with relatively few skill increases that I figured that, no matter which skills I chose, I’d do okay. And I was starting to get a feel for the pacing of the game and the mission design, so I no longer felt compelled to maintain my health at 90% all the time lest something go wrong.

(If only I could climb down ladders reliably, though: I’ve died more falling down ladders than through any other cause…)

I’m looking forward to what the next week’s gameplay will bring. I expect it will be more relaxing than the first week, which will give me more time to notice other aspects of the game. (E.g. the world construction: there’s a lot of back story presented via books, newspapers, e-mails, etc.) Who knows, maybe I’ll even start taking the stealth aspect more seriously, avoiding trouble instead of always shooting my way through it? Though, on reflection, that latter seems unlikely.

A good choice for the VGC’s second game.

Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length…

• Visualizing the Python commit history.
• Leadership, responsibility, and sausage.
• Solving sudoku games via package management.
• Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.)
• Breakpoints as a checklist.
• Programmers, insecurity, source control.

• I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that walk along beaches) before; the creator has done a TED talk with more background.

  (Via Giles Bowkett.)

• How to draw hands.

  (Via Drawn!)

• This year’s rice paddy art.
• I am a sucker for dialogues; having them be about the video game business is even better.
• Minus, a thoroughly delightful webcomic. I should go through them all again… (Via Dan Bruno.)
• I laughed out loud at the second menu. These ones are amusing, too.
• Abandoned cities. Provides some interesting context for the second part of Shenmue II. (Insert obligitory lament on the nonexistence of Shenmue III…)
• Transcriptions and discussion of Zelda (specifically Ocarina) music.
• How adding tools for user-generated content can significantly shorten the developers’ content-generation time. Constant refactoring, taken up a level.

• Pachelbel’s Canon and Korean breakdancers. And now I know what a gayageum is…

  (Via How the World Works, which also has several other nice renditions.)

• Brecht and MGS2.

The World Ends with You is an, uh, RPG? from Square-Enix. Honestly, I’m not sure which pigeonhole to stick it in: in particular, I’m pretty sure that the main reason why my brain leapt toward the RPG category is its publisher, because it varies significantly from traditional RPG design. You return to the same areas over and over, there are (almost) no dungeons, the town and overworld are one and the same, fighting is interactive, no character classes (sort of), very untraditional leveling up. Maybe it’s an action game? But fighting happens on a separate screen. Action RPG, I guess?

My confusion as to how to label it is all to the good: I’ve been known to enjoy the occasional traditional JRPG, but that’s unquestionably a genre that has gone stale, indeed whose shelf life expired quite a few years ago. And the innovation doesn’t stop with its boundary-blurring nature: in particular, the most noticeable aspect of the game is that you fight on both screens at once, controlling the bottom screen with the stylus and the top screen with the D-pad.

Which I found somewhat less confusing than I expected, actually. The game will control the top character for you, if you wish, and I left that setting at its default value (computer takes over if you don’t do anything for three seconds) the whole way through the game. The computer-controlled actions aren’t all that great, and in particular it’s quite hard to build up the combo meter that way, but I didn’t find it all that difficult to pay enough attention to the top screen to build up the combo meter while tapping and slashing enough on the bottom screen to do a fair amount of damage.

Not that I would want this sort of gameplay to be the norm, or indeed something other than a rare gimmicky exception. In particular, while I could attack reasonably well on both screens at once, I gave up almost completely on the idea of defending. I think my brain and fingers did a reasonable job of keeping on track of two of the four tasks of attacking bottom, attacking top, defending bottom, and defending top, but doing more than that was almost completely impossible. So there’s some amount of potential richness in the fighting system that I just didn’t have access to, which was a pity. Also, each of your partners (there are three, you have a different one each week) has a slightly different mechanic, and the third partner’s mechanic was frustrating in that, if you let him autoplay, he may well take actions that actively work against setting up your combo meter. I did end up fighting enemies in the game somewhat more than was necessary, which at the least is a sign that I thought the fighting mechanic was intriguing, and probably enjoyable.

A lot of the buzz for the game has been around its style; it’s certainly nice to see a game set in (a variant of) modern Shinjuku instead of a fantasy or SF setting, and I liked the art design. (I do hope a future Vintage Game Club round can revisit Jet Grind Radio…) I didn’t like the music, however, and the drawing of your first partner was pretty creepy: a not-all-that-old teenage girl with a broad hips, a wasp waist, low-cut pants, and practically an arrow drawn on her saying “this is her crotch”. Ick.

For collectors, there are a lot of badges and clothes to accumulate. I didn’t spend too much time on clotches, and it didn’t hurt me very much; badges are more important, but you’ll get enough of the important fighting badges through the normal course of the game as long as you don’t go out of your way to avoid battles, so there’s no need to obsess about collecting if you don’t want to. To make matters a bit more interesting, you can lower your level when fighting battles: this increases your chance of getting badges while allowing you to have a bit of a challenge even when fighting monsters that you would otherwise far outclass.

There’s an unusual variety of leveling up mechanisms: you can level up your character, you can level up your badges, and you can even do this while you’re not playing the game. Which I thought was pretty neat when I started playing the game, but as the game went on, it didn’t work as well for me. At first, you only have a few badges, and you can level them up reasonably quickly when playing against the first monsters in the game. Pretty soon, you have access to a much larger number of badges, so you have to actively choose which ones you want to level up; that’s not so unreasonable, that’s part of shaping your character in an RPG. But, as the game progresses, it takes longer and longer to level up a badge, and you start getting new badges with the same mechanic as older badges but with more power; as this goes on, leveling up your badges stops being a particularly, important mechanic, replaced by just making sure that you’re using the most powerful badges whose attack mechanic you don’t mind too much.

Damage doesn’t last from battle to battle: like Puzzle Quest, you start each battle with a fresh slate. Unfortunately, TWEWY could have learned something else from Puzzle Quest: in the latter game, if you lose a battle, the game simply dumps you back out on the overworld, letting you fight the battle again. TWEWY, however, puts you at a “game over” screen when that happens. Once you get a few days into the game, you have the option of retrying the last battle at that screen, possibly at easy difficulty level, but that isn’t good enough: you may want to change the experience level that you’re playing at and/or your badge selection, and you don’t have the option of doing either of those at the game over screen. So the upshot is that you want to save your game before almost every battle, or indeed before almost every screen transition or after every lengthy bit of dialogue, which is a pain, and a completely unnecessary one.

At least you can save anywhere, though. Or at least almost anywhere: during the sequence of final bosses, you don’t have that option. You can adjust your badges between battles (and you’ll presumably be sensible enough to be fighting them at full strength), but woe be it to you if you enter one of those battles with an inappropriate set of badges. (Which, fortunately, didn’t happen to me.) In general, I wasn’t impressed by the final boss sequences: rather than having those battles be a capstone of what you’d learned before, they significantly changed the playing mechanics at a couple of points in those battles, forcing you to fight without your partner or without your badges.

I’m glad I played the game: it has several new ideas, some of which I genuinely enjoyed. I’m not sure exactly what specific ideas I want other games to learn from it, however. And it was a bit longer than I’d liked: about halfway through the second week, I felt (correctly) that I’d learned pretty much what I was going to learn from the game, and battles were starting to turn into a chore at times. But they did a reasonable job of not dragging out any individual part of the game, and I enjoyed it enough to be happy that I saw the game through to the end.

Through the start of the year, I was pleasantly busy: working, hanging out with family, playing games, reading blogs, blogging, reading books, learning Japanese, doing some non-work programming. Lots of stuff, but none of it was overwhelming, and I enjoyed the mix.

This has, unfortunately, changed over the last few months: I’ve changed from feeling pleasantly busy to pretty overwhelmed. Looking back, I think the main event that happened was that Miranda started taking both German and violin lessons. These are both great ideas; but she needs me to help her practice German, and her violin teacher does the Suzuki method, which means that I’m not only expected to attend lessons (no big deal) but also help Miranda with her daily violin practice. Which I completely approve of: it’s amazing to see Miranda make noticeable progress in her violin playing literally every single week!

But this has completely sunk my weekday evening schedule. Before, I’d get home at 6:15. Between 6:15 and 8:15, I’d go jogging (on Tuesdays and Thursdays), have a bit of time to do something else (on other days), usually be able to squeeze in my Japanese vocabulary review, and still have time to cook and eat dinner. And then, at 8:15, Miranda would start getting ready for bed; every other day, I’d be the one to tuck her in and read her a story, and sometimes I needed to do some vocab review, but in general I’d have the time from 8:15 to 10:15 to read blogs, maybe blog myself, maybe play a video game, maybe watch a movie, maybe read a book.

Now, though, things are completely different. Between 6:15 and 8:15, I have to add in violin practice: this means that I don’t have any time to do something just for fun in that period, and I probably don’t have time to review Japanese. And between 8:15 and 10:15, I have to add in German practice (for Miranda), and Japanese review (for me). The result is that I don’t start having free time until around 9:15 or so: one hour (or less) of free time an evening, instead of two hours (or more) of free time an evening. Which is about enough to keep up with my blog reading, but nothing else; for example, my midweek blog posting rate has dropped to approximately zero. And, as much as I enjoy the Vintage Game Club, it doesn’t help: when that’s going, I want to play along with the games, which I sometimes have to do midweek, which means that I don’t have any free time at all!

Not a sustainable pace; but I’m not sure what to do about it. I really am glad that Miranda is doing violin and German (and, incidentally, they’re seriously eating into her free time, too); I hope that, at some point over the next two years, she’ll transition to needing me less on those, but for now she does need my help. I’m not going to stop learning Japanese: I’ve invested enough into that that I really do feel that it’s going to pay off, but it’s not doing that significantly yet, so now is no time to stop.

I though about using blogging as a bit of a touchstone here: my blog, like my life, is a bit of a mishmash, so can I come up with a theme for my blog and use that to shine clarity on what I want to do? For example, the VGC activity has turned this into more of a video game blog than it was in the past: do I want to run with that? After thinking about it for a while, though, I’ve decided that the answer is no: I like writing about video games, but if I were to turn this into a video game blog (or fork off a separate video game blog, or even have three blogs, one for games, one for personal stuff, and one for lean / agile / theory of constraints / gtd / managing), then I’d have to focus more on video game playing/thinking and exclude other things that are important to me, and that’s not the right thing for me right now.

So I’m pretty confused as to what to do. I think I’m going to start trying to move Japanese vocab review to lunch times at work, as much as possible: that’s possible now that the system is computerized, and even if that only frees up 20 minutes or so an evening, that 20 minutes will make a big difference to me right now. I should probably remove a few blogs from my feed reeder for the time being, too. (Which is another VGC annoyance: I’ve discovered several interesting new video game blogs through it…) I doubt I’ll be taking on any new programming projects until something else calms down, either; fortunately, the memory project is now at a stage where it’s useful, so while it could use more work, it’s okay if I only do that on weekends, and not every weekend.

Maybe that will make a difference? I’ll give it a few months and see. And it’s good that this hasn’t happened because of inertia, that I can point to specific events that have caused this overcommitment: it may take a couple of years, but those events will go away eventually, and it gives me an idea for what warning signs to look out for in the future.

One aspect of GTD that has surprised me is the weekly review. The idea here is that, once a week, you go over all your projects (and their associated tasks) and all your someday/maybe items, to make sure that your current projects are all on track and that your current projects are what you think is most important to work on right now.

This seemed like a sensible enough idea to me: in particular, it’s all to the good to have an reminder to lift your head a bit and step away from the details in order to get a broader overview of what you want to be doing. And, at home, it’s worked out in a fairly straightforward fashion.

It’s worked out well at work, too, but with one surprise: doing a weekly review takes forever! Well, not forever, but about an hour on average: put another way, even though I have GTD and the whole agile toolbag to help organize both my general priorities and my specific next actions, I still have to spend around two percent of my working time making sure that I’m not going off the rails. (Hmm, what percentage of my working time is spent on planning and organization in all its forms?)

It’s definitely worth it, though: much better to spend time to learn each week how I’m starting to go off the rails than to save time in the short term by doing the wrong thing! (Ending up with a bad product and, probably, spending more time later picking up the pieces.)

So what’s going on there? Part of the difference between work and home is that I just have more moving pieces at work than at home: I’m interacting with more people, and I have more projects. Come to think of it, maybe I have about the same number of projects at both places, but I’m generally happy for the ones at home to be done when they’re done, while the ones at work have more pressure behind them.

Part of the weekly review at both places is a sweep through my e-mail folders: actions/waiting/scheduled/conversations. That definitely takes more time at work than at home: I save a lot more e-mails, and I’m more likely to have to spend time thinking about whether or not I’m comfortable with, say, letting an e-mail thread in ‘conversations’ rest, or whether there’s a covert action / project / someday lurking in it.

But probably the biggest difference is that, at work, I accumulate new potential tasks at a much higher rate than I do at home. Each week, new high-priority items will come along; I’ll typically shuffle them into the projects / action item lists somehow, but every week I need to take a hard look and ask myself if I can really expect to make progress on all of these projects. And the answer is almost invariably no, at which point I have to move something from projects to someday / maybe, and communicate that decision to other people.

Looking back, it seems that I’ve been doing GTD for more than half a year now. I remain convinced that it’s a great system: well-thought-out parts, simple ideas, and I’ve found it personally quite effective. Though I still have a ways to go to implement it fully: in particular, I’m seeing more and more that I need to regularize my filing system at home. But I have a project for that (together with its next action or two) in my projects file, so I’m confident that I’ll accomplish it!