malvasia bianca

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!

We’re kicking off a discussion on what game the Vintage Game Club should do next.

The final year of Grim Fandango was my favorite. Plot-wise, it drew things together nicely, letting you visit some of your old haunts in the bargain. It was perhaps not quite as interesting in that regard as year two (though, now that I think about it a bit more, I’m not so sure – year two had you spending time with people who don’t, in general, advance the overall plot), but it more than made up for that deficit by having localized puzzles.

The year sets its tone right from the start with its first puzzle: it’s centered on Glottis, introducing you to a bit more of how the world works, but without making you wander all over the map in the process. And the solution was something that you’d been given a hint of in year one; I happened to remember the hint once I’d solved the puzzle (partly because the hint led me down a false path back in year one), but remembering it certainly wasn’t necessary for finding the solution. The solution of that puzzle brings you to Rubacava again (though, mercifully, a restricted subset of Rubacava), and you’re off and running.

I only had to go to gamefaqs once; I think some of that was just dumb luck, but in general the puzzle design seemed pretty good to me. Though the one place where I needed help was pretty annoying: in every single other place in the game, you can pick up objects by doing keypad-enter, but there’s one place in this level where keypad-enter activates something without picking it up while you need to do keypad-plus instead to pick it up.

So: what have I learned from playing through the game? I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with the game: it has a better sense of style than most games I’ve played recently, and its specific choice of imagery (death in Latin American traditions, mixed with a hefty dose of film noir) was something that I hadn’t seen before in a video game. The voice acting was great, and the plot was pretty good for a video game; it also managed to not veer too far in the “save the world” direction that is the default for narrative video games. (There was a bit more heroism as the game went on, but Manny’s motivation remained mostly focused on a rather more individual level.)

What was more interesting to me, though, was what I learned about what kinds of adventure game gameplay I enjoy. In the abstract, the idea of having multiple puzzles to solve at once over a large area attracts me, but in practice I enjoyed the parts of the game where you had one thing to do and few areas (or items) to do it. I’m still not entirely sure how much that has to do with my tastes and how much it has to do with the occasional bad design of the puzzles, but I think at least some of it has to do with the former. (The Phoenix Wright games are quite restrictive in terms of what to do next, and I both enjoy those and am rarely stuck in them.)

I’m still not sure what style of environmental interaction I prefer in graphical adventure games. Having your character wander around individual screens looking at things has its advantages; but the invisible walls were a bit much, and Manny was really small in large environments, making it a bit hard to see if he’s looking at something. So I’m really not sure if I prefer avatar manipulation to a point and click style; I’ll need to think about/experience that a bit more.

(Hmm, what that really boils down to for me is which interaction style make it easier to not accidentally miss key parts of the environment, or methods for interacting with the environment. Which makes me wonder: would I prefer an adventure game where there was a mode that highlighted all the areas of the screen you can interact with? I certainly didn’t appreciate having to find the item in the tailpipe of the car in one of the Phoenix Wright games.)

I also preferred the years where you have a relatively limited inventory, but need to use the same item in multiple situations. In retrospect, the different uses of your scythe were rather cleverly done, though I got frustrated by a couple of them at a time; maybe they game should have had a few more easy scythe puzzles first? (Or maybe I’m just slow.)

The most fun, though, was having other people to play through the game with. On a self-centered level, that gave me an excuse to think/write about the game a bit more than I normally do when playing through a game, and I learned a few things as a result. But it was also a real pleasure reading what other people had to say about the game, sharing our triumphs, frustrations, pleasures, insights.

Many thanks to Michael and Dan for getting this going (and in particular to Michael for doing the actual work of getting the forum going – Dan and I just sent e-mails!), and to all of the people who participated in the forum for their many delightful conversations! I’m definitely looking forward to the next Vintage Game Club playthrough; I’ll give a heads-up when we kick off the forum discussion of what the next game should be, in case anybody reading this wishes to have a say.

Year 3 of Grim Fandango has come in for a lot of criticism in the Vintage Game Club forum, so I wasn’t expecting much when I started playing it. And my fears were confirmed by the first puzzle: the obvious thing to do doesn’t work, but it’s not at all obvious that it doesn’t work. Your boat can be in two positions, you can try to move your boat four ways, you have two anchors that you can raise and lower independently (and that will hit the sea floor in different places depending on where your boat is), quite the combinatorial explosion there. After half an hour or so, I gave up and looked at the year 3 thread in the forum, where somebody else was annoyed enough at the puzzle to rant about its solution; I’m glad I did, because I wouldn’t have figured it out on my own, and I didn’t think the solution was particularly elegant.

Which semed to be confirming my worst fears about the year but, in retrospect, that was the low point of the year for me. In fact, from a puzzle point of view, I’m not at all sure that I didn’t prefer the puzzles in year 3 to those in year 2: I did dip into gamefaqs several times, but no more so than in year 2, and there was only one other puzzle that I thought was out of left field. (In fact, even that one might not have been out of left field if I’d been paying attention more – I was told about it in gamefaqs, which I wouldn’t have been reading if I hadn’t completely missed one of the rooms in the game, a room giving clues about that puzzle.)

As compared to year 2, the main environment in year 3 is somewhat smaller; it’s large enough to give you enough places to go to be interesting, but the smaller size means that you’re not constantly traipsing from one end of the level to the other. There are two overarching puzzles instead of three; I actually preferred this amount of parallelism, because I didn’t have to spend as much time worrying about which overarching puzzle each change of state (or item that I can’t yet get or whatever) would fit into. And you have at most three items in your inventory at any given time, which limits the “pick up random item to be used 8 puzzles later” possibilities. (And, as a bonus, means that one item can be the solution to several puzzles, a bit of design that I appreciate.)

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why other people strongly prefer year 2. Rubacava is a lot more interesting than a factory prison, the NPCs there have a lot more, well, character, and, if push comes to shove, I’d accept that the year 2 puzzles are a bit better integrated into the environment (and, more interestingly, into the psychology of others) than the year 3 puzzles are.

Having said that, I’m not even convinced that year 3 is such a disaster in terms of narrative: I’ll defer to people who have thought more about narrative structure in non-video-game contexts than I have, but a structure where the first quarter of the game introduces the plot, the second quarter stays in one place exploring characters, the third quarter is transitional and shallower, and the fourth quarter (I hope) brings it all together in a fitting climax doesn’t sound all that strange to me. Don’t get me wrong, I could imagine a game divided into quarters, each of which explores a town and its residents in more depth, but that would be a different and, I suspect, quieter game. (Hmm, what’s the closest thing the medium has to Invisible Cities?)

So, as with year 2, I end up being a contrarian, but this time that’s good news. I’m looking forward to year 4; others speak highly of it, I hope I’ll be closer to the mainstream in that instance.

The latest Brainy Gamer podcast is up, and it’s an interview with N’Gai Croal. The whole thing’s great, go listen to it, but in particular one thing that he talked about is something that’s been on my mind: the way that enthusiast press coverage of videogames is heavily weighted towards the preview period. I’ve talked about this before, so I don’t want to belabor the point, but it’s nice to hear more people saying this.

And he said something else that I thought I’d noticed but was glad to have confirmed: it seems like preview length (i.e. the length from when a game is first shown to when it launches) has shrunk over the last year or so. Nintendo, in particular, more and more frequently isn’t letting people see a game until six months to a year until launch. Which, potentially, puts a different spin to hardcore gamer complaints about Nintendo’s E3 press conference this year: I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they release a new Zelda game in 2009, despite not having shown anything along those lines this year.

He also talked about how, once you pull yourself away from the lure of the big enthusiast press sites, there’s not much reason necessarily to be frustrated that you can’t be like them: it’s so easy to make your own space talking about what you want to talk about! (Or something like that; I should really go back and listen to at least that part of the podcast again. Maybe I’m just talking about what I want to talk about, instead of accurately representing his views.) Which raises a question: what do I want to talk about?

Which, actually, isn’t what I’m going to talk about right now, but rather the somewhat related question: what do I want to play? There’s such a drive to always be playing new games; but, now that the scales have fallen from my eyes, I’m not at all sure that’s particularly healthy. Certainly I would never consider restricting myself to only reading new books, or to only listening to new music; why should video games be any different?

I actually have been playing some older games recently (or at least not-brand-new-games), but there’s still an important difference: even though those games were released a while ago, I hadn’t played either one before. I reread books (and especially listen to music repeatedly) all the time, whereas I almost never do that with video games; why is that?

First, a spot check: is that actually true? Looking at the current list of the last fifty books I’ve read, I only see five that I’d read before. If that’s a representative sample, I’m only rereading books 10 percent of the time; seems a bit low to me, but who knows.

Still, I’m sure that’s higher than my percentage for video games. Or is it? Looking at the corresponding list there (only 25 items long), I don’t see any games I’d played before, but I’m pretty sure I dipped into two other games in that period. Having said that, “dipped into” is the right phrase: I didn’t finish either of them, or even play them for more than a few minutes at a time, which is a rather different thing.

What’s going on here? Part of it is that familiar works of art are like comfort food for me; that’s the reason why I recently reread The Dark is Rising, for example. And comfort food is probably most needed in small doses, or at least in smaller doses than your typical video game. (I’m sure that’s a big reason why I listen to old music frequently, and of course an album is a good deal shorter even than a typical book.)

Or sometimes I revisit books because they’re important to me. I’m not sure how that ties in with video games; several video games are quite important to me, but not quite in the same way that, say, my favorite nonfiction books are. I think there is a genuine difference there; I also think that, in some sense, it’s a sign that I haven’t been taking games seriously enough, to try and find what I could learn from repeatedly playing through them.

I’m pretty sure that a big factor, though, is being swept along by the tide: if everybody and his dog is talking about a game at launch and if I genuinely think that it’s a game I’d enjoy, then the idea that I should play it sticks in my head unduly. So while it’s unlikely that I’ll play it at launch (because of time constraints), it gets stuck in a queue in my head. And it’s probably worth making a conscious effort to try to fight that.

Sometimes, when I notice my reading habits go out of whack, I put myself on cycles for the books that I can read. (Though, retrospect, that may have been a sign of bad inventory management more than anything else; I haven’t felt a desire to do so since I fixed that.) Maybe I should try the same with games? Play on a four-game cycle: new, old but new to me, new, old friend? (Where “new” means “released within the last year and a half”, say.) I’m not sure if I’m going to do exactly that, but I really should find some time to replay an old friend or two.

I’d been intending for a while to write a program to help me memorize stuff, most notably Japanese vocabulary. I’d been kind of goofing of for a while, reading much of the Rails book and taking the first few baby steps towards creating the Rails app, but nothing serious. Which is a problem, given that I’m going on vacation soon.

So I spent most of the day getting serious about it, and I’m proud to say that I just finished my first quiz through it! At the start of the day, I had the structure for entering items (almost all of which Rails gave me completely for free, I’m not sure I’d spent as much as 30 minutes working on it); today, I tweaked the layout for that and then added the quiz functionality. So now I have a nice slightly AJAXy quiz page which shows the next question to review (if there is one), plus an “Answer” button; if you click on that, it reveals the answer, plus another pair of buttons to mark your answer as correct or incorrect. Click on one of those and it brings you to the next question, and updates the data base with the appropriate review time, winning streaks, wrong answers, etc. for the one you just answered. (And the next review time takes all of those factors into consideration, so you see harder items more frequently.)

Amusingly, the process of working on it gave me examples of how I can use it for things other than Japanese vocabulary review: I don’t program in Ruby in my day job, so I occasionally forgot bits of syntax and other functionality. So, from now on, I’ll just enter that stuff into the database! Which turned into a feature request: I was already planning on making sure that newlines were preserved, but I decided that I’d better make sure that indentation is preserved as well…

There’s a lot of work to do: it’s incredibly ugly (in appearance, the code is much nicer), there’s no search functionality, there’s no pretense at security (I’m running it on my home machine, so it’s inaccessible from elsewhere without ssh port forwarding), there’s no multiuser support. (Sorry, Jim and Praveen, you’ll have to wait a bit, but multiuser support is very much on the road map!) But what is there is genuinely useful, and (as far as I can tell) works. I’m planning to switch my vocabulary review over to it as fast as possible; and I’ve added nightly database backups, including offsite replication, in case anything goes wrong.

And my experience with Rails as part of this has been quite positive: I didn’t have any Rails experience before this other than what I’ve gotten from books, I’ve spent something like 6 hours programming, and I have something useful at the end. That’s really good, as far as I’m concerned.

After hours of phone calls (and weeks of calendar time) dealing with garbage disposal annoyances, I made an appointment to have the damn thing taken out today – I’d never had a garbage disposal in any place I lived before, why did I need one now?

Turns out it’s not so easy: the building code now requires a garbage disposal if you have a dishwasher (unless the latter has a separate line), as part of an effort to avoid having clogged sinks cause dirty water to go into your dishwasher. (Reasonable enough.) So that is my new fact for the day.

Fortunately, we’d gone far enough in the warranty process that we actually had a brand new uninstalled garbage disposal sitting around. Now it’s installed, and I look forward to months of blissful freedom from dealing with annoying companies.

Today’s consumer score card: I wasn’t planning to shop at Western Appliance again, but after hearing the plumber’s appraisal of the disposal he removed, now I’m really not planning to shop at Western Appliance again. On the flip side, if you live near Mountain View and need a plumber, I wholeheartedly recommend Master Plumbing and Sewer, 650-691-0400: they’ve been pleasant and professional, and the guy today seemed thorough and knowledgeable.

I finished year 2 of Grim Fandango last night (I played it over the course of three nights), and in several ways I didn’t like it as much as year 1.

I spent my first play session getting familiar with the environments; what this mostly meant was that I wandered all over the map, repeatedly. Typically, over the course of one wander, I would solve a few puzzles, which meant that the next time I wandered through the whole level, some other state had changed in some other area, giving me another puzzle to solve there.

By the end of the first play session, I’d gotten far enough that I knew what the three overarching puzzles were, that I’d made it at least a step or two along each of them, and I had a pretty good idea of what at least one later step was going to be in each of them.

My second play session was pretty frustrating. I managed to make a little bit more progress; but I was also starting to get stuck on the puzzles. And, at this point, the environment was getting in my way: I’d run into lots of situations where doing something in area 1 meant that now somebody would have appeared or act differently in area 2 on the other side of the map. So I constantly had this double-whammy of, on the one hand, feeling that I was probably stuck but, on the other hand, having to run all over the map just to make sure that I really did have to solve one of the puzzles that I was aware of, instead of needing to go find some newly-triggered event.

There were also a few red herrings that didn’t improve my mood – e.g. for all I knew, reading poetry was a necessary part of solving a puzzle. And there are a lot of areas that are nice in terms of scenery but useless in terms of gameplay. (E.g. the path to your club.) And there’s that elevator that it’s almost impossible to avoid running into. (Tip: you can hit escape to eliminate the cut scene there.) At some point, I accidentally noticed that hitting shift-keypad-5 teleports you to more or less the middle of most rooms; this can speed up your transit time, but there are at least two rooms (the morgue and the room with the aforementioned elevator) where doing that teleports you to a location that you can’t get out of, forcing you to reload from a saved game.

So on my third playthrough session, I hit gamefaqs early and often. Hmm, I’m trying to get the metal detector out of the cat pit? Let’s try the scythe – it waves around, but doesn’t pick up anything. Am I doing the right thing or not? No more messing around for five minutes experimenting, I’ll just look it up.

In fact, despite the fact that the puzzles in year two are a lot more coherent than in year one, I did a lot worse job of solving them on my own. Part of this is just that there are more puzzles. But part of it is that the puzzles in year 1 are much more localized, and the year 1 puzzles that make no sense at all (i.e. the petrified forest ones) are very localized indeed. The only year 1 situation where I remember running over portions of the map not being sure what to do was when I was trying to steal a good work order; having to do that once is okay (and indeed I managed to solve that puzzle myself), but having to do that all the time wasn’t as good for me. (Hmm, to what extent do I prefer having only one accessible puzzle at any given time? I’ll have to think about that more.)

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the environment, its coherence, the fact that the puzzles were integrated into the environment. But the actual puzzle solving was a bit of a downer.

Glottis really does look dashing in a white tuxedo, though.

In response to my earlier post on puzzles in narrative games, a couple of the commenters noted that contrasting the puzzles in Professor Layton with those in Grim Fandango isn’t fair, because the puzzles in the former game aren’t integrated into the game world in the the same way as puzzles in the latter one are. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as Daniel did, that Layton isn’t a narrative game at all – we’re not talking Picross here – but it clearly isn’t as far on the narrative end of the continuum as Grim Fandango is.

But, thinking about it some more, something is still bothering me. I was responding to a forum post containing the sentence “Has shooting replaced puzzle-solving as the ‘gameplay’ aspect in narrative games?” So, rather than sticking within the context of games with lots of puzzles, what are narrative games like outside of that genre, and how does their direct gameplay (or “interaction”, to borrow Iroquois’ term) fit in with that?

To take games where shooting plays a prominent role: is Half-Life 2 a narrative game? Is Halo? Is GTA? Is Mass Effect? They all have some narrative aspects; then again, so does Professor Layton. More to the point, to what extent is the gameplay natural within the narrative context?

My first answer to that last question was “a lot more so than in Professor Layton“: in the latter, solving puzzles is quite artificial, while in the former games, shooting people is quite natural. Now, though, I’m not so sure: maybe that reaction has a lot more to do with my constant exposure to the extreme violence in games (and other media) than with anything else? I’m quite sure that if, in real life, you were to act as violently as you have to in GTA, you’d find out very quickly that behaving that way is widely considered unnatural, or at least strongly discouraged in polite society. And, for that matter, I have been in situations, albeit rare ones, where solving puzzles as arbitrary as any in Professor Layton has been essential to my overcoming real-world obstacles, much more so than violence ever has been for me. (Then again, I have a checkered past.)

In particular, let’s consider RPGs. That’s generally considered to be a narrative genre, and I think most people would say that Mass Effect is a narrative game. And it presents a context in which shooting people is a natural way to progress in the environment. To move away from shooting (but staying firmly within the genre), Golden Sun is also a narrative game; there, instead of shooting, you select actions (e.g. the powers given to you by your djinni), but your actions still fit within the narrative context.

Then what about Puzzle Quest? All of a sudden the gameplay feels completely artificial: you’re not supposed to fight monsters by playing Bejeweled, you’re supposed to fight them by choosing attacks and shooting and stuff! Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the game, but, for me, it flipped over to the artifical, puzzles-not-integrated-with narrative side the same way that Professor Layton does.

But I can’t convince myself that my reaction there is justified: maybe it’s just my conditioning from other games that causes me to think that the fighting in Golden Sun is linked to the narrative in a way that the fighting in Puzzle Quest isn’t. And if we accept that the fighting (or, more generally, overcoming obstacles) in both of those is really a matter of convention, entrenched within the world of the specific game but with a tenuous natural link to either real-world convention or narrative requirements, then isn’t the same true for Professor Layton?

At this point, I’m pretty confused, and I hope some people will be kind enough to comment on this post to set me straight. Circling back to our original contrast of Professor Layton versus Grim Fandango, though, it raises an interesting question: I still agree that you can make a good case that the puzzles in Grim Fandango are better integrated with the narrative than those in Professor Layton.

But if we also accept that there’s at least something to my suspicion that, in most “narrative” genres, the mechanics of the gameplay have only a conventional tie to the narrative structure, then maybe Grim Fandango suggests that puzzles give a mechanic that can actually work uniquely well with narrative gameplay! Again, going back to Michael’s question, asking “I wonder if puzzles in narrative games are a relic of a bygone era of gaming – or are they a necessary ludic element?”, maybe the answer is that they are a necessary ludic element, or at least a ludic element that’s uniquely capable (because of its versatility) of reinforcing narrative gameplay? This may also tie into Iroquois’ comment that puzzles are at a different level in the game design hierarchy than more direct forms of gameplay (shooting, jumping, whatever).

I’m still not sold on the thesis that I’m describing here, but I’m surprised at how interesting the journey is turning out to be. Michael, I don’t want to hold you accountable for your every forum post, but I’m curious: what did you have in mind when you used the phrase “narrative game”? Maybe the next step would be to dig into that phrase a bit more.

(Edit: Fixed a typo where I accidentally wrote “ludic” instead of “narrative”.)

Some thoughts on year 1 of Grim Fandango, mostly culled from my posts on the forum:

• Glottis is one of my favorite NPCs ever.
• I’m really pleased at how well the graphics hold up, I love the art deco style. Looking at Glottis, my first reaction was “wow, that’s not very many polygons, is it”, but my second reaction was “so what?” I mean, maybe it would have been better if each of his teeth had been lovingly crafted out of 100 polygons (instead of existing solely as textures on the face), but maybe not: that might have shifted the designers out of bringing out the humor of Glottis’s size and behavior and into, well, modeling teeth. Not to take anything away from tooth modeling, but it may be harder to present a strong unified style when you’re going down to that level. See also Dan’s recent blog post on graphics.
• About the controls: since I haven’t actually played many graphical adventure games, my point of reference there was “would I prefer controlling this like a text adventure or not?” And sometimes the answer is “yes”: as other people have mentioned, the movement is a bit wonky, and even if it wasn’t, it might be nice to just be able to type “n; e; e; n; w; d; n; e” (or whatever) to get from my office to the balloon guy. The recent graphical adventure games that I have played are the Phoenix Wright series, and I have a new appreciation for the limited number of rooms in those games: it’s not like Grim Fandango is particularly spread out or anything, but it still makes a difference.
• But what I do like is the simplicity of interacting with the environment and managing inventory: it’s very nice to not have to play “guess the verb”. Instead, I just hit enter on the keypad when standing near a point of interest and holding an object; either something appropriate will happen or nothing will happen, and either way I know I’m not missing anything in that interaction.
• Another difference I’ve noticed between this and text adventures that I’ve played (and, for that matter, from the Phoenix Wright games): the use of inventory. In those games, you have a fixed set of items which you (almost always) get exactly one of, and (except for a few red herrings), you can use each one in exactly one place. (One annoying puzzle in Enchanter excepted. ) Whereas, in this game, you can get multiple copies of some of the items, and you can (at times) misuse them, forcing you to go back and get another one. Not a big deal, but I do have to get used to saving a bit more often…
• I was surprised how different the puzzles in the forest were from the puzzles in/near your office: much less moving around, many fewer items to work with. And that limited scope is a good thing, because the puzzles in the forest were crap: there’s no way I would have solved them without help if there had been any more options for me to trigger with. For the tree, the only thing that kept me going was that the wheelbarrow was basically the only thing I had to play with; and I completely agree with others that the beaver puzzle is very unnatural, in that you have to be in the right place to use the right item, even though you should be able to use it elsewhere. I had to look up on gamefaqs to figure out how to get the key; and, of course, in a gap in the game’s weird internal logic, there’s a route between the key and the gate once you’ve gotten to the key but not before then.
• So: not ideal puzzles for me,at least in the forest. (And I don’t think it’s just me.) Still, I’ve had a pleasant journey this far, and the puzzles have, on the balance, added to my enjoyment more than subtracting from it; I’m glad I’m playing this game rather than an alternate reality GF where Manny shoots his way through the forest with a gun. And given the quite different nature of the puzzles in the first two halves of the year, I’m curious how the nature of the puzzles will change going forward.