malvasia bianca

One more thought I had overnight about puzzle gameplay: they can have a real social aspect. Watching somebody else play a shooter or a platformer can be reasonably entertaining, but if you’re watching somebody else play a puzzle game (which neither of you has played before), then it’s effectively a cooperative game: it’s almost irrelevant who is holding the controller, both of you can give suggestions for what to do next.

And it also sheds a new light on the aggregation technique that I mentioned in my previous post. The idea there was to reduce uncertainty (in this case, of the solvability of the puzzle) by increasing the number of puzzles that you have to solve. But you can also reduce it in another way, by increasing the number of people who have a chance to solve the puzzle.

And this isn’t just a theoretical point: Liesl and I basically played through Zack & Wiki together. I think that made it more fun for both of us, just as a social thing; I am quite sure, however, that there were several puzzles in that game that one of us would have been unable to figure out alone, but fortunately those puzzles were generally different for each of us.

I’m not entirely sure what this suggests to game designers, however: I can’t think of ways off the top of my head for them to actively encourage cooperative play in puzzle games. The flip side of that, though, is that it’s a technique that game players can use without depending on game designers for help at all – the next time you play a puzzle game, grab a friend, have a blast, and don’t be surprised if you find it a lot easier!

Over in the Vintage Game Club forum, Michael posted an interesting question, “Do modern gamers still want puzzles?”:

I’m working on a blog post focused on this, but I wonder if puzzles in narrative games are a relic of a bygone era of gaming – or are they a necessary ludic element? Has shooting replaced puzzle-solving as the “gameplay” aspect in narrative games? Is there still an audience for puzzle-solving narrative games? Why not just play a game like Professor Layton and the Curious Village if puzzles are your thing?

(He’s also posted a related blog post.)

Actually, to be honest, my first reaction to this was more that it was a ludicrous question rather than an interesting question, but I started to come around after thinking about it a bit more. Of course, shooting is far too restrictive as a gameplay concept, but say we expand that to include other methods of directly manipulating your character/environment in ways that don’t depend too much on the details of the environment at that particular moment: jumping, pressing colored buttons on a plastic guitar simulacrum while strumming, rolling a ball around the world to suck up items. (Obviously the last two don’t show up so often in narrative games, though now that I think about it, I rather like the idea of a narrative game that you can play with a guitar controller! Like Gitaroo Man, only better.)

If we call the above “direct gameplay” (a lousy name, somebody please give me a better one), then there are real differences between direct gameplay and puzzles. In the “direct gameplay” side, it’s a lot easier to judge the difficulty of any particular situation: if you have two rooms in a shooter, one with twice the number of enemies or three-quarters the available ammo or whatever, you can predict relatively easily how much harder one of those rooms is going to be compared to the other room. Also you can train players to do a better and better job, so that they can reliable successfully make it through situations after playing the game for five hours that would have them dropping the controller in frustration if they’d seen that after five minutes. And you can even tune the difficulty level, so that players of different skill can be presented with appropriate challenges while still getting the same narrative payoff. (Or, as I find myself doing increasingly, players who care more about skill than the gameplay mechanic can turn down the difficulty level.)

With puzzle-based mechanics, though, none of that works: person A may find puzzle 1 obvious while running to gamefaqs (or giving up in frustration) when being confronted with puzzle 2, while Person B may have exactly the opposite experience. I suppose “none of that works” is a bit of an exaggeration: we have intuitive ideas about what puzzles are easier and what are harder, and I pretty much agreed with the difficulty ratings for puzzles in both Zack & Wiki and Professor Layton. And it is possible to train people to some extent in puzzle-solving games: Zack & Wiki again provides an example of that. But it is true that your ability to predict whether or not people will be able to solve your puzzles is much lower than the corresponding prediction in direct gameplay, and that matters: if there are 20 puzzles and you can only predict correctly 90% of the time whether or not people will be able to solve them, then that means players are going to have to run to gamefaqs a couple of times during your game. And I suspect that most game players (and game designers) would rather avoid that.

Having said that, this argument doesn’t run entirely in the “direct gameplay is good” direction: the nice thing about running to gamefaqs is that it reliably works. I’d prefer to never have to go to gamefaqs, but it doesn’t bother me too much if I have to do it a couple of times over the course of playing a game, and at least I can be confident that I’ll be able to finish any puzzle-based game should I chose to do so. Whereas, in direct gameplay games, if something really is too hard for me, then I’ll just stop right there: I can think of a few games (Metroid Prime 2, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy X) where I found the gameplay to be so annoying as to be insulting, and even if I could have finished the game (which I’m sure was the case in those three instances), I had no desire to go through the last few bits of gameplay if that’s the way the designers felt like treating me, despite the potential narrative payoff at the end.

Of course, the boundaries between these categories of gameplay elements aren’t sharp; unsurprisingly, the fuzzy categories can suffer from both problems. Boss battles in direct gameplay games are the best example of this: those are situations where you typically have to both do some puzzle thinking (to figure out the boss’s weakness(es)) and also to be quite good at the relevant direct gameplay techniques. If the game doesn’t balance both of those right, then you can have the double-whammy of the player running to gamefaqs to figure out what to do and also pushing the buttons in just the right way to carry out that plan. (And, indeed, boss battles were my downfall in the three examples I mentioned above where I gave up on the game.)

So, where does the above rambling leave us? I appreciate Michael’s question more than I did when I first saw it, but I still don’t like the suggestion at all: my gaming world would be much much less rich if designers avoided puzzles entirely. And, as he admits, it wasn’t posed completely seriously:

I’m obviously playing devil’s advocate a bit here, but Ben’s frustrated exit from Grim Fandango made me think about these questions and how modern gamers would respond to them.

But if we accept the (to me) obvious fact that game designers need to have puzzles in their gameplay toolbox, that ghettoizing puzzles only impoverishes us all (well, only is too strong a world, given the massive heap of awesomeness that is Professor Layton), what should they do about the above issues?

One obvious suggestion: hints. My first reaction is that that’s a lousy suggestion, that it’s really hard to have hints work well. But if I’m remembering correctly, I didn’t have to go to gamefaqs a single time when playing through Professor Layton to solve a puzzle. (I did have to do that to locate some of the puzzles, but that doesn’t bother me at all.) And, while I would generally prefer to solve a puzzle without hints, they did a good job of giving hints that pointed me in the right direction while still leaving me with a bit of creative thinking to do. So, done right, hints can do a lot to alleviate this issue.

Of course, they’re hardly a panacea: I’m sure I would have felt differently about Professor Layton if I’d needed to look at the hints for half the puzzles instead of a tenth of them, and I’m also sure that, for many of the puzzles in Grim Fandango, you wouldn’t be able to give hints without completely spoiling the puzzle. This is a real constraint on game design, it demands creative solutions, and if the conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the puzzles in Professor Layton are better-designed than those in Grim Fandango, that’s a conclusion that I can accept.

The other technique that this suggests is to use aggregation. This is a standard technique for reducing uncertainty: if you have multiple variables with a wide range of uncertainty, and if those variables are uncorrelated, then you can reduce the uncertainty by increasing the number of the variables. (This is why, e.g., long playoff series are good, at least if you want the better team to win.) In concrete gameplay terms: instead of making the player solve three specific puzzles to progress along the narrative, make them solve three out of five puzzles to progress.

And again (surprise, surprise), Professor Layton does that: they give you a zillion (well, not a zillion, but 150 or so?) puzzles to play; and many of the gameplay/narrative gates force you to solve a certain number of puzzles to pass without restricting exactly which puzzles to solve. (Which is hardly unique to puzzle games, of course, e.g. Super Mario 64.) That’s not the case for every gameplay gate in Professor Layton; is it the case that the mandatory puzzles in that game are easier or more predictably solvable (at least with hints) than the optional puzzles? I don’t know, I’ll have to go back and see. (That certainly is the case with the mandatory gameplay gates in Super Mario 64: they’re battles with Bowser, and those depend on relatively generic platforming mechanics.)

If nothing else, writing this has taught me one thing: not only is Professor Layton a massive heap of awesomeness because of its puzzles and because of its art style, but it’s also a massive heap of awesomeness because of the way in which it navigated the puzzle gameplay design shoals. (If it weren’t late at night, I would come up with a Scylla and Charybdis metaphor here – good thing I’m responding to The Brainy Gamer instead of Living Epic.) Hmm, come to think of it, what’s up with that apparent claim of his that Professor Layton isn’t a narrative game? I sure remember a plot in it…

It’s nice that the Vintage Game Club is giving rise to questions like this. Don’t get me wrong, talking about the game itself with people is a lot of fun, but I’m also happy that it’s giving rise to questions that go beyond the boundaries of that one game. And, reading back through this, I realize that I’ve taken the question in a fairly different direction than Michael has, because I’ve completely ignored the question of what modern gamers want. To that end, I’ll just suggest that a million modern gamers do seem to have some fondness for puzzles…

The combined obtuseness of KitchenAid and A&E Factory Service (with a tip of the hat to Western Appliance) has defeated me: rather than getting our broken garbage disposal replaced under warranty, we’ll just call a plumber to take it out and put in a pipe. In retrospect, I don’t know why we bought the garbage disposal in the first place: having one didn’t improve my life in any way, even when it was working…

On a more positive note, we have a new car now, and our experience with Toyota Sunnyvale was, in general, quite pleasant. I don’t know what their regular salesmen are like (though 5 years ago they were normal annoying car salesmen), but the internet sales person we dealt with was pleasant and straightforward.

I’m very glad that Michael suggested Grim Fandango as the introductory game for the Vintage Game Club, because adventure games and I go way back. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I’m fairly sure that I was aware of the Colossal Cave adventure before we even owned a computer: I think my brother got an account (or used our dad’s account?) on the Oberlin College systems, they had a version of it there (a 550-point version, not the standard 350-point version), and he told me about it. In fact, he was once willing to let me “play” it via a typewriter, with him simulating the computer – isn’t he a sweetie?

We didn’t have any game consoles when I was growing up (I didn’t own any until grad school), but we did get an Apple ][+ at some point. (The summer after fifth grade sounds about right, but I can’t remember for sure.) I played quite a few games on that system; probably the ones that stuck with me the most were the Infocom adventure games. (Though the various Ultima games are a close second.) Most people think of Zork when they think of Infocom, but we didn’t have a copy of that (or its two sequels); I’ve played it since, but I’m not sure it added all that much to the Colossal Cave formula. We did, however, have the tangentially related games Enchanter and Sorcerer, and I very much enjoyed those: they present a much more coherent environment than their predecessors, they add a well-done magic system as a gameplay element. And the games were actually solvable without hints, which mattered a lot more in that pre-gamefaqs time. Though I do remember having to bang my head against the stairs in Enchanter a lot – did I eventually figure that out myself or did I get a hint from a friend somehow?

I believe (but I’m not entirely sure, I might have only played it later) that we got the Hitchiker’s Guide game; not one of my favorites, they chose jokes over gameplay and the jokes were a lot better in the books. (At that time, the fact that works in other media rarely survive the journey to video games wasn’t yet burned into my brain.) A game with experimental gameplay that worked better was Suspended, where you had to switch back and forth between six robots with different senses and abilities to explore the world.

Which brings me to the packaging. Those were the days when (the best) games came with real, well-written manuals. Actually, ‘manual’ isn’t the right word, since that suggests something focused on instructions for playing the game: these, instead, were generally artifacts from the world of the game, e.g. a newspaper issue from the game, a one-zorkmid coin, etc. And Infocom was one of the best at this. (Though I also fondly remember the cloth map and ankh that came with Ultima II, if I’m remembering correctly.) Some of you may have seen the grey box editions of their games, but the earlier packaging of the games was even more impressive: I had the edition of Suspended that came with the huge inset plastic death mask and a map with tokens for the robots to move around, and I’m still kicking myself for not having saved that.

My favorite of their games, however, was Planetfall. Great gameplay, well thought-out puzzles; but the reason why the game sticks in my mind a quarter-century is Floyd. I’m probably missing some good examples, but I’m still not sure I’ve run into another video game NPC that mattered as much to me as Floyd did: he was this wonderful childish robot who tagged along, helping and entertaining you, and the scene where you have to send him to his doom (for which he bravely volunteers, if I’m remembering) combined with this later reappearance still choke me up as I’m typing this.

Sigh.

I didn’t manage to play their later games at the time: Spellbreaker needed too much memory to run on the Apple ][+ (perhaps a blessing in disguise, I played it later and it wasn’t nearly as good as Enchanter and Sorcerer), and I also missed out on Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging. I did play a bit of the former eventually, but I still haven’t either finished the former or gotten around to the latter; both would be excellent choices for later Vintage Game Club installments. (As would almost any of the games I’ve mentioned here!)

One other Infocom side note: their games were written in a language that compiled to a virtual machine, the Z-Machine. It has since been reverse engineered, and I wrote an interpreter for it in order to learn C++ when I was transitioning out of academia; if any of you are thinking of learning a new programming language and are looking for a decent-sized project to implement, you could do a lot worse than that.

I don’t recall playing many (any?) adventure games during my undergrad years. During grad school I rounded out my Infocom experience a bit more, and played Myst; I thought that game was excellent, but for whatever reason it didn’t inspire me to seek out more graphical adventures. Maybe I was jaded; maybe (despite Myst‘s phenomenal popularity), adventure games just weren’t near the center of the video game world the way they were in the early 80’s; maybe I was spending too much time learning math, doing research, reading books, and other unwholesome activities. Which was probably the correct choice at the time, but I’m very glad to have this opportunity to fill in a bit of my missing cultural heritage.

The club launches today; please join in! Just play Grim Fandango, hop on over to the discussion forum, and you’re all set.

It’s been a while since I posted a recipe, hasn’t it? Anyways, if you’re looking for a chocolate frosting, you could do a lot worse than this one: one of Liesl’s coworkers used it on a delightful cake last year, we just got the recipe from her (thanks, Amanda!), and tried it out tonight, and it’s great. Very easy (and easy to work with), though it takes a while; it makes a ton of frosting, but if you have any left over, I’m sure you’ll find something to do with it. No idea what the original source of the recipe was.

Whipped Chocolate Ganache

24 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
4 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon corn syrup

Put chocolate and cream into a medium saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly with a heatproof rubber spatula, until thick (30-35 minutes). Remove from heat. Stir in corn syrup. Transfer to a large, wide metal bowl. Refrigerate until frosting is cool enough to spread, about 2 hours, checking and stirring every 15 minutes. Use immediately.

I didn’t have much luck getting Grim Fandango working under wine; some of my colleagues suggested VirtualBox, so I thought I’d give that a try. And it worked better (helped by one amazing piece of blind dumb luck); not perfectly, but well enough that I should be able to participate in the inaugural run of the Vintage Game Club.

The steps, as best I remember them:

• Install the virtualbox package, create an image using the suggested XP defaults.
• Run it with an XP installation CD that came with my defunct laptop. Fortunately, the CD turned out not to insist to be running on Dell hardware or anything.
• Click on the window, and notice that keyboard input stops working when I do that. Curse; what is it with these keyboard problems that I’m having when trying to get this game working? Right-control doesn’t work to get out of it, so I switch to a non-X login (Control-Alt-F1), kill virtualbox.
• Try again. Note that keyboard passthrough works fine as long as I don’t click on the window, so I can either use the mouse or the keyboard. Well, the installation seems to not require me to move the mouse, so let’s go with that.
• Except that it does require me to click on the screen where I’m entering user accounts. Sigh. My keyboard has occasionally temporarily lost mouse control – maybe there’s something weird about the PS2-to-USB converter that I’m using? Run out to the store to buy a USB keyboard and trackball. (Incidentally, my hand doesn’t like the trackball that I bought any more than it likes a mouse; I wish non-laptop keyboard with integrated trackpads hadn’t gone completely out of fashion.)
• Come back, plug it in. And have a remarkable stroke of luck: I’d left the computer in the non-X console. When I switched back to the X console, my typing monitor that forces me to take periodic breaks decides to kick in. And it managed to grab the mouse/keyboard back from virtualbox, yay! So: click the mouse on the entry field where I need it, wait for the typing monitor to kick in again, then type in the information I need.
• After that, the rest of the installation completes. And, when I get XP installed, I can install the “guest OS extensions” which allow mouse passthrough as well as keyboard passthrough. So now I can click and type without excessive workarounds.
• Do a zillion OS updates, because I can’t bear to have an old XP install, even if it’s behind two layers of external network protection. Pleased at how the networking stuff Just Works in virtualbox.
• Install Grim Fandango. Seems to work, but no sound? Ah, I forgot to tell virtualbox to provide a sound card to XP; when I do that, I get sound.
• But the sound is choppy. Grumble, but there’s not much I can do about that, and it’s not so bad as to make the game unbearable.

So I’m ready to go; I’m looking forward to the game club kickoff on Monday. Hmm, why didn’t we start on a weekend? This weekend is busy, though (Miranda’s birthday, she’s 9 years old!), so I guess that’s just as well.

All in all, I’m pleased with my virtualization experience; the keyboard problem was a serious one, but (unlike with wine), I managed to resolve it, and I’m getting the feeling that there must be something weird about my setup. Given the complexity of what’s going on, I was pleased how smoothly things went other than that.

The other nice thing about virtualization: I saved snapshots of the machine at various points. In particular, if I want to revert to a clean XP install (after applying updates), I can; that might be useful for future games, if I run into weird conflicts.

Not the best week computer-wise. The server that hosts this blog (and that my e-mail resolves to) has been going down daily; I am optimistic that we’ve found and fixed the problem but, well, I’ve been optimistic about that once before in this round, and I was wrong that time.

And then I did my weekly e-mail spam folder scan, and discovered that gmail’s spam filters have been on overdrive the last few days; I get the feeling that it’s been rejecting a third of the mailing-list mail that I received, and a few important pieces of non-mailing-list mail. Sigh.

As regular readers are aware, I’m a big fan of JapanesePod101. On the off chance that any of my readers are thinking about learning a bit of Japanese, I wanted to let you know that they’ve just started new seasons of most or all their shows: in particular, they published the first episode of a new Newbie season (starting from scratch) yesterday.

Incidentally, don’t be confused by the naming, the Beginner series isn’t quite for raw beginners, that’s what Newbie is. (Well, the first Beginner season was. But the later ones weren’t.) Also, the buttons at the top of the web page don’t include the later seasons of the show: if you want to browse by category, use the ones on the right side. The free feed only contains the last week of lessons, but older lessons are all available on the web page. (Or via the feed for the paid subscriptions; if you do commit to learning the language, I recommend signing up for one of the subscriptions, I’ve found the reading practice from the PDFs to be worth the Basic subscription price alone.)

I was all excited to start playing Grim Fandango, so when my copy arrived today, I figured I’d spend the evening getting wine to work.

Which took a little bit of doing, enough to create a blog post out of, but ultimately I got to where I could launch the game and go through the opening movie.

Which ends: ah, I’m in control now! I hit an arrow key, my character moved. And then no other arrow keys did anything.

I repeated a few times; in later attempts, I couldn’t even move once. I could hit F1 during the cut scene to get to a menu, but the arrow keys didn’t work there. So: the first keystroke works, nothing after that? Not good.

Sigh, I am frustrated. One of my coworkers mentioned VirtualBox; I guess I’ll give that a try next? I really don’t want to have to drag my old Windows machine out of retirement…

Apparently I’m not the only person who feels like playing through old games and talking about them with other people: Michael Abbott and Dan Bruno noticed my throwaway comment on the subject, and, a weekend of e-mails later, the Vintage Game Club is formed.

Our first game will be the classic LucasArts adventure Grim Fandango. If playing through that and talking it over with other people sounds like fun, then go find a copy and get ready! We’ll get started on July 21; Michael has graciously offered to host the discussion, so go to his blog to chime in.

I’ll save what few other thoughts I have on the game until the start date. My first challenge actually will be making sure I can actually play the game at all, which I will spend a bit of time poking at over the next two weeks: it looks like it shouldn’t be too hard to get the game working under Linux, but who knows. (Hmm, I guess I haven’t actually thrown away my old Windows laptop yet, but I’d really rather avoid using it: the screen is held on with duct tape, the power supply and batteries are flaky, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve even tried to turn it on…) I just hope that, if it’s broken under Linux, it’s obviously broken: I will be unhappy if I start playing and run into a serious bug 10 hours into the game…

I spent a little while yesterday poking around with getting Japanese input to work on my home Linux machine, since I’ll need that for entering vocabulary cards into the memory program.

To make a long story short: largely, it Just Works. (At least under Ubuntu 8.04.) I was a bit confused at first by the wealth of possibilities: in particular this page talks about UIM (better but less standard?) versus SCIM. I compared the pages that it pointed at (both for 7.10), and then I found this page which was an updated version of the SCIM recommendation for 8.04; reading through that, it seemed like some of the UIM advantages had gone away, so I decided to go with SCIM and follow the steps listed there.

I made it as far as turning on Japanese language support (including the support for entering complex characters), and got confused at the next line on the HOWTO: it was directing me to edit a file in my home directory which didn’t currently exist (so why not ask me to create it instead?), and it was telling me to edit it via sudo, which didn’t make any sense. While I was googling to make sure I wasn’t about to do anything stupid, I ran across this page on SCIM, which claimed that things should work now with no further configuration.

So I tried typing Control-space, and up popped a SCIM window; a bit of typing later, and I had both kana and kanji appearing! Pretty cool. And the input method does seem quite usable; I didn’t have to do to much experimentation before I felt like I could enter characters fairly reliably, without too much extra typing. One thing which I might want to tweak is using a key combo other than Control-space to enter it, because I use that a lot in Emacs; fortunately, SCIM only recognizes the actual control key instead of the caps lock key that I have remapped to control (perhaps related to this bug), so the default mapping isn’t interfering with Emacs use; if it starts doing so, it should be easy enough to change.

The upshot is: under Ubuntu 8.04, Japanese input Just Works, as long as you have it turned on! I wish I’d found that latter page first, rather than the longer page. For now, I’m not doing anything more with the longer page (and am considering removing the extra repository it had me add); the next thing on its list is a handwriting recognition system, which sounds cool but which I have no particular desire to use.

I am considering following its font instructions; in particular, I agree that it’s annoying that kana look blurry at small sizes. Having said that, for now I’m holding off: my main planned use for Japanese input is in the memory project, and I’m planning to use larger font sizes for the flash cards there, so it may not be a big deal. And these days, I’m generally in the mood to go with defaults whenever possible: I have other ways that I’d rather spend my time than fiddling with system configuration.

One thing which it pointed out which is useful: go to System / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts and turn on subpixel smoothing. (It also recommended clicking on Details and making sure hinting is set to ‘full’, which was already the case on my system.) That noticeably improved the look of my (roman character) fonts on my monitor; if you’re using an LCD monitor, you might want to check that your system is configured that way, even if you don’t care about Japanese at all.

Edit: I’m no longer so convinced of that last sentence: fonts started looking a bit green when I did that. It’s worth trying, but I’m thinking of going back to ‘best shape’ instead.

The original Smash Bros. was a mind-opener for me. It (and its sequels) may still be, in its own way, my favorite multiplayer game; I’m admittedly not much of a fighter aficionado, but I haven’t seen anything else with quite its brand of chaos. (Well, maybe Power Stone 2 (and presumably its predecessor, which I haven’t played) matches it.)

Also, it had one gameplay feature that, in my opinion, should be standard fare for all competitive multiplayer games: automatic handicapping. When playing the game with friends, I’m usually better than they are (not that I have great skills, I’ve just played the game a bit more), but that’s no big deal: we turn on automatic handicapping, and after about 10 minutes, we’re all winning the same number of matches.

So of course I had to give the Wii version a try. Unfortunately, I’m not currently in the habit of inviting people over frequently to play video games, and Miranda wasn’t particularly in a Smash Bros. mood at the time. No problem, the game has a good-length single player mode, I’ll just give that a try: I’ll have some fun, and I’ll unlock all the characters.

Unfortunately, that mode (Subspace Emissary) isn’t very good. It’s a platformer, and a bad one: in particular, using up on the stick to jump works fine when fighting on a stage, but is lousy when exploring a level. And there was rarely anything particularly interesting about the level design; I was just slogging through levels, hoping to reach the end. Really, it felt a lot more like a vehicle for cut scenes than anything else; the cut scenes were fine, but not worth the gameplay that I had to put up with. (I played through most of it single player; I did a bit of it with a friend, and it was even worse that way.)

At least that’s the way I felt most of the way through that game mode. And then I got to The Great Maze; I’ve heard other people complain about it, but in my mind this is the best part of the mode. The reason why others complain is that it has you replaying sections of earlier levels, but they’re handled in a completely different way: rather than slogging through a long level to make it to the fight/cut scene at the end, it instead has snippets of short platforming sections, punctuated by fights against each of the different characters. (Plus a few enemy bosses.) The platforming is short enough to not grate, the maze design lets you do a bit of exploration, and you spend lots of time doing the core fighting gameplay. Also, you can chose your character, and I find the platforming a lot more pleasant with some of the characters (Kirby in particular) than others.

So I ended the mode feeling well-disposed to the game, much more so than I was the previous weekend. I had happy enough thoughts that I started poking through some of the other modes, and I’m glad I did. The game is certainly best enjoyed by having a few friends over and fighting against each other over and over again, but there are a lot of other options there as well. The Event Battles are a pleasant set of challenges (have I blogged about that aspect of Perfect Dark?); the Challenge Board is a good mechanism for focusing your game play, if you want suggestions for what to do or want help unlocking stuff. (I won’t go into it here, but there’s a lot of stuff to unlock.)

So: a pleasant single player game, seriously marred by the most prominent single player mode. I don’t want to mislead people who haven’t played the game, though: this is a great great multiplayer game, one which anybody with a Wii and friends should own. (At least local friends; I haven’t tried the internet play, but apparently it’s pretty bad.) The above talks about my recent single-player experiences with the game; that I can take or leave, but it’s largely tangential to what the game is really about.

I’ve been going through the back episodes of the Brainy Gamer podcast, and I must say that I am extremely annoyed with Mr. Abbott. The problem is his game recommendations: he has the most infuriating way of talking about games that I was aware of and favorably disposed to and turning them into games that I really have to play Right Now. Or at least Very Soon.

Just how much time do you think I have, Mr. Abbott? Sure, I can probably squeeze in a few hours to play Rez HD—if I’m remembering correctly, the original wasn’t that long—and I should be able to play A Mind Forever Voyaging when I’m on vacation, but but how on earth am I supposed to find time to play Persona 3? Or seriously explore Burnout Paradise? I hope No More Heroes isn’t too long, and I think I’ll manage to resist the lure of Odin Sphere, but I do have a day job! (And, on a more mainstream note, I’d like to play BioShock soon. And GTA IV. And I’m trying to avoid saying the word Oblivion too often.)

If my coworkers report a rise in my “working from home” at some point, you’ll know whom to blame. Good thing I only have one and a half podcasts left to listen to; mercifully, he only records one every three weeks or so, and at that rate I shouldn’t get into too much deeper a hole. But there’s no way I’m going back and looking through his older blog posts.

(Hmm, a more serious thought that this sparked: how about the idea of a video game club? Like a book club, a group of people who play the same game at the same time and talk about it. I realize that this happens all the time with new games right when they’re released, but how about trying it for older games?)

One frustrating aspect of my Rock Band experience: account management. Maybe all of this makes more sense to people with more multiplayer Xbox 360 experience, but here’s what I’ve gone through since buying the game:

• First, we played anonymously, because there didn’t seem to be any way to create characters from the multiplayer screen. (At least in non-world-tour mode, we weren’t interested in starting a band yet.)
• Then I read the manual, and figured out that you had to create a character in solo mode. So I created two characters, David and Miranda.
• Then we started to play; she could sign in, I couldn’t. Hypothesis: we were both signed in under my account, maybe it only lets you use one character per account at a time?
• So then I figured out (first time I’d done this) how to get different accounts signed in on different controllers, and we created a new Miranda character under her account. But I still couldn’t use my character?
• That was all last week; when starting a band, this seemed important to sort out. In world tour mode, it was willing to let me create a character; but when I did that, it said I already had a character named David. So why wouldn’t it let me use it???
• I went back to my account in solo mode, and noticed the microphone icon next to my character. Ah: I guess the character is linked to an instrument? (Or pair in the case of guitar/bass?) So I deleted the old character, and created a new character who was a guitarist. Using the very annoying d-pad on the guitar, where up and down did the opposite of what I expected.
• After that, we were all set, and had a lot of fun. But now, I’ve just linked to my Rock Band portal account, and my band doesn’t show up! And the old characters do show up, but not the ones I created today?
• Maybe it only updates some of that once a day? Seems odd. But, turning the game back on again, I now doubt the band will ever show up, because it turns out that we created it using the (regular non-instrument) Xbox 360 controller, because it’s by far the most natural one to use. And that’s the one that is linked to the microphone, hence the one that was logged in to Miranda’s (non-Xbox-Live) Xbox account. Or something like that, I can only try to reconstruct what must have happened in retrospect.
• Grumble. Should I ask Miranda if we can start a new band, linked to my account? Probably not, I’d prefer it to be linked to my account, but realistically I don’t think it matters much one way or another, given that we’re only using it locally. Still, it would be nice to show off our progress to the world…

Sigh. Sure, some of this is my ignorance, not initially knowing about logging into different accounts on different controllers. Though there, Microsoft really could have done a much better job of making that whole setup easier to figure out, e.g. adding a “create new account” item on one of the main menus, instead of requiring the user to think of signing out of the primary account (using a different mechanism) first. But it seems to me that I didn’t do anything particularly unnatural in the above scenario, yet I took wrong turns several times that I only became aware of much later.

Miranda and I formed a band today on Rock Band. We are going by the name “The Brosstones”; perhaps not the best, but I’d neglected to think about possible band names in advance. (Alas, the other Bross has yet to join us; she did spend a fair amount of time this weekend playing DDR, for what that’s worth.)

I assume there is a way to link to some page associated to my band online somehow, but I haven’t yet figured it out. Or maybe I need to register somehow? I did create a page at the Rock Band website; at some point, I’ll link that to my Xbox Live gamertag, and then happy things will happen?

Miranda was on vocals, I was on guitar. Lots of fun was had by all; we went as far as winning a van, so on to Amsterdam and/or London next. I managed to add facial hair, which made me happy. She wasn’t familiar with most of the songs (and, for that matter, neither was I), which can cause problems with vocals, but she did a good job of figuring them out on the fly, and the guitar parts were easy enough that I could go into overdrive periodically to get her out of the danger zone.

At least on Medium, I could; Hard was just hard enough that I couldn’t reliably go into overdrive frequently enough when playing through the songs for the first time. I spent a little while in the afternoon starting to go through the songs on Hard, so I’ll be more used to them. Medium is pretty boring, even on the first time through the songs; either my memory is faulty or this seems easier than the original Guitar Hero was. Which makes a lot of sense, given the multiplayer/party focus of the game.

I still haven’t tried drums. (Or vocals or bass, for that matter.) Maybe next weekend? Probably not, I usually like to finish one thing first, so I’ll probably concentrate on our band and on solo guitar for now.

I haven’t listened to pop music much since around 1989 or so, so most of the songs and artists were new to me, but I quite liked the songs in general. I’m very open to recommendations for downloadable content. And I’m very much hoping that the rumor that The Beatles might be showing up soon is true; I would happily spend the price of this game again, or even more, to get all of their albums…

I’m now two-thirds of the way through my Japanese textbook, and the second third went much more smoothly than the first third did. All but one of the chapters took two weeks each; that one took three weeks and, if you throw in the two vacation weeks, it only took me 23 weeks to go through this chunk.

For whatever reason, the grammar in the middle third didn’t seem any harder for me to learn than the grammar in the first third. And there are actually fewer vocabulary words to memorize than in the first third; I suppose it makes sense that, when starting the language, they have to throw more new vocabulary at you to enable you to read anything.

I’m also getting better at memorizing vocabulary and kanji. I’m now up to 448 kanji on my journey through the joyo kanji; I can reliably learn fourteen a week (seven every three days, actually), whereas before I only did seven some weeks. I still have a hard time believing that I won’t run into a wall at some point during the 1500 kanji that remain, but I could be wrong; if I haven’t run into problems so far, maybe I won’t run into problems later? I still have a good two years of kanji memorizing ahead of me, unless my rate speeds up dramatically, but that trip is starting to look increasingly manageable.

If I could wave a magic wand and fix one thing right now, it would be my retention of vocabulary (and, to a lesser extent, grammar) that I learned a few months ago. I don’t have a magic wand, but I’m hoping that the memory project will solve that problem. (I still haven’t started programming on it—bad David—but I did write my first toy Rails app this evening, so I am taking baby steps.)

It looks like I’m about five months away from finishing the textbook. Which isn’t exactly right around the corner, but it’s close enough that I should start thinking about next steps. Some possible areas to work on:

• Speaking Japanese.
• Listening to spoken Japanese. (E.g. in movies or video games.)
• Reading Japanese.
• Increasing my vocabulary.
• Learning more grammar.

For now, my main goal is to improve my ability to read Japanese, so I’m going to have that drive my next actions. (Though if we decide to travel to Japan next year, I’d want to bump up the priority of speaking Japanese.) I’m getting some pretty good ideas of what I might want to do next in that vein: Japanese volumes of Hikaru no Go, the annotated books I recently purchased, some kids’ magazines that Jim mentioned. (I realized that I’m acting like some of the people mentioned in the NLP book: I want to learn Japanese, so I try to imitate people who learn Japanese better than I do, so I act like a Japanese kid (or an American kid with Japanese parents), so I order Japanese children’s magazines!)

And, of course, reading Japanese will require me to increase my vocabulary and grammar; I’m comfortable with my plan for the former (words that I run into in books, the joyo kanji), and I have some resources for the latter.

All in all, pretty happy. I just need to get off my butt and start programming, so I’ll have the memory program available before I go on vacation. (Or before I run out of blank cards in my vocabulary box!) And I should probably just go and subscribe to a subset of those magazines; I might as well start trying to read some of the younger ones right now.

I’m very glad I ran into this right after finishing Half-Life 2.

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it.

But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) pictures: it’s a theory about the nature of life. (He’s not one to hide the ambition of his goals: the subtitle to the series is “An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe”.) While, of course, my first reaction to such sweeping claims is to roll my eyes at them, I just can’t do that here: he asks too many uncomfortable questions for me to simply ignore him.

Over lunch today (Cafe Brioche, yum), I finished the section talking about how the fifteen fundamental properties appeared in living objects. Which got me thinking: where else do they appear? I have go on the brain these days, and if any game is going to show signs of life, surely that’s the one, so let’s test them.

To my readers who are not go players, I apologize for the lack of context for the following. (And I have suggestions for how you can fix that!) I looked for good go pictures, but had a hard time finding ones I really liked; here’s one famous example, but that’s an abstract picture of a position, and of course in Alexander’s context I really shouldn’t be ignoring the actual physical objects involved. (Unfortunately, people who post pictures of go boards on flickr seem to like to take them from odd angles.) Anyways, let’s go through the properties:

• Levels of Scale Individual stones, adjacent stones, eyes, living groups, walls, territories. I can’t really imagine cramming in more levels of scale, given that we only have a 19×19 grid to work with! (And, if we talk about the physical objects involved, there are the lines on the board, the grain of the wood, the grain of the white stones, the room you’re playing in.)
• Strong Centers Thick positions, stones casting influence, the ear-reddening move, the pon-nuki that the proverb tells us is worth thirty points, areas of white or black territory.
• Boundaries The borders between black and white territories, that can be as proportionately thick and contested as any of Alexander’s examples.
• Alternating Repetition I’m not convinced that go games do a particularly good job of exhibiting this property. (The go board itself does, a little too rigidly perhaps.)
• Positive Space Territories expanding against each other. On a conceptual level, the space of two eyes giving life to the surrounding stones.
• Good Shape I don’t think I have to comment on the importance of this to anybody who has played any go at all.
• Local Symmetries The go board and stones exhibit this, of course; I’m not sure that positions generally do in a meaningful way. Though I suppose there are some conceptual manifestations of this idea, e.g. the notion of miai.
• Deep Interlock and Ambiguity White and black positions butting up against each other, a group of one color on the run between two groups of the other color and then, suddenly, turning the tables so the attacker becomes the attacked. (In fact, Alexander has a picture of a go board in his discussion of this property.)
• Contrast Black and White. Life and Death. Thickness and Weakness.
• Gradients I’m not sure the game does a great job of manifesting this.
• Roughness Boundaries between positions are never straight lines. Leaving a position slightly unfinished to move on to other areas of the game. The fact that people don’t place the stones exactly on the intersections: this stone is a little up, that one is a little to the right.
• Echoes I’ll have to think about this one a bit more; I think there’s something to it in the go context, but I’m not sure yet.
• The Void The board at the start of a game. Moyos. Large territories. The fact that (in Japanese rules, at least), you win by enclosing more empty space than your opponent.
• Simplicity and Inner Calm The game’s made out of a board, a grid, and black and white stones, nothing else.
• Not-Separateness The effects that stones have on adjacent stones, that groups have on adjacent groups, that (in the context of a ladder) a stone on one side of the board can determine tactical success or failure on the other side of the board.

Works for me; maybe this Alexander chap is on to something? Makes me wonder if I could improve my go game by concentrating more on expressing his properties.

What about a video game example? (I don’t expect them to do nearly as well as go.) I just finished Half-Life 2, so let’s use it as an example.

And, immediately, I run into a problem. The examples in his book are physical objects; in my go example, the physical positions of stones gave enough grist for my analytic mill that I didn’t have to go beyond that. But just talking about the physical layout of (the abstract space in) a video game leaves out so much of what makes them important! Not sure what to do about that; I’ll follow my nose and see where I end up.

• Levels of Scale Small objects, large objects and characters, vehicles, rooms, buildings, areas, levels, the game as a whole? Shooting a weapon, fighting an enemy, fighting a group of enemies? And perhaps some of my earlier complaints about excessive repetition could be ways in which the game misjudged this?
• Strong Centers The strikingly different character of some of the levels? The clear distinctions between types of weapons? Alyx? Large battle set pieces (boss battles, effectively) punctuating levels? Different places to take cover (with different virtues) in those battles? Maybe the levels could have used more of this in their physical layout, actually: if I’m going through section after section that feels the same, that’s a sign that I wanted more strong centers.
• Boundaries At first, I thought the game did a bad job of the sort of thick boundaries that Alexander is talking about. And there really isn’t that much transition from section to section. Then again, maybe the mini-levels (typically involving hooking up with the resistance) that punctuate the longer levels are an example of this? Or the approach to the prision (with bugs!) is a boundary between the travel level and the prison itself? So now I think there are some, but that the game could use more.
• Alternating Repetition Battle, quiet, battle, quiet. Building, outside, building, outside.
• Positive Space The buildings, the roads and the plazas between the buildings? That works to the extent that, for example, you can enter the areas on either side of a road; to the extent that you can’t, I don’t think roads feel like positive space. So they probably weren’t in the rural levels; the urban levels may or may not have had some positive space, I’d need to have a better global feel for the map.
• Good Shape Hmm, not sure I felt this one too strongly. At least on a larger scale, maybe the individual objects did a better job of manifesting this.
• Local Symmetries Maybe present in the objects/buildings; not sure. Not seeing it on a more conceptal level.
• Deep Interlock and Ambiguity I’m having a hard time finding good examples of this.
• Contrast The “Alternating Repetition” examples? The different feels of different levels? The fight of good versus evil? Not sure.
• Gradients The progression of enemy strength, of the strength of weapons, of the number of options you have available.
• Roughness I think the game does a great job of this in its physical design, the way buildings are lived-in, run down without descending into ruins.
• Echoes Again, I’ll have to think about this one; this may be the property that I understand the least.
• The Void Almost completely lacking (unfortunately the case for most video games). Maybe that’s why the “carried on a track through the Citadel” scene made such a big impact on me?
• Simplicity and Inner Calm Again, pretty much lacking. Though the game did a decent job of sticking to a not-too-large set of gameplay elements. (E.g. the limited set of weapons.)
• Not-Separateness At first, I was going to vote against this one: you couldn’t make choices that had significant ramifications elsewhere, the plot was going to do what it wanted whether you liked it or not. Then I went and read the description of the property, and now I’m not so sure: you are presented in the context of a larger world with signs of its own history. So maybe it’s not as lacking here as I thought.

Hmm. It seems like an interesting enough set of analytical categories, at least. And I suspect game designers could use the list to improve the design of their games. And I’d be very curious to see games that did a better job of bringing out The Void without having it dominate the games. Hyrule Field in Ocarina?

Of course, I came to Alexander through the programming community, specifically through groups influenced by his thoughts on patterns. (Which haven’t really lived up to their potential: Kent Beck seems to be the only person getting much mileage out of building a pattern language at multiple scales.) Can I use these ideas in my programming? Can I tell live code apart from dead code by how well it expresses these properties?

Something to think about. But later; this post is already quite long enough, and I’ll need some time to get my thoughts straight in that area anyways. Time to start looking at code through different lenses, though.

Via a link from Niels ’t Hooft, I ran into Sean Malstrom’s Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy. By far the most interesting explanation of Nintendo’s business strategy that I’ve seen, and it turns out that he has a whole website full of articles like that.

Which I’ve spent most of the evening reading. A warning: his articles are quite a bit longer than is fashionable for web content; fortunately, they more than make up for that by being quite a bit better thought-out than most web content (and I think they’d be of interest to anybody curious about business innovation), but you might want to make yourself a cup of tea before you start reading, or something.

No RSS feed on the site, but it seems that he has a blog; presumably he announces new articles there?

I managed to avoid playing any of the Half-Life games in the past: I’ve been almost exclusively a console gamer since 1998, and the few computer games I’ve played since then are ones that can be played with a touchpad (my hands and mice really don’t get along), which pretty much means that PC FPSes are right out. And, frankly, I’m kind of burned out on FPSes; I played and enjoyed some in the mid 90s, but even then there were aspects that I didn’t like so much, and I have so many more gaming options now that my quality bar is pretty high.

Having said that, I knew that I’d missed something important by not playing Half-Life and its sequels, so while I primarily bought The Orange Box because of Portal, I also saw it as a reason to get to know the Half-Life series better. So I was very happy to give Half-Life 2 a try.

I was pretty impressed by the start of the game. I liked the fact that you begin completely without weapons, and how you make your way from resistance cell to resistance cell. I thought the initial weapon introduction was well done: first you get the crowbar, which is really a tool rather than a weapon, then you get to spend a bit of quality time with your pistol, then you move up to the machine gun, all at a nice pace. I enjoyed the level design: linear while giving you a few nooks to poke your nose into, a coherent art style by section without being too monotonous. And the quite short levels at the beginning were a welcome surprise: no interminable wandering through corridors or mowing down countless hordes of enemies, you instead moved briskly from plot point to plot point, learning new techniques relatively frequently.

This initial infatuation lasted for about two and a half levels. By the time I was halfway through the third level, I was definitely seeing traditional single-player FPS aspects that weren’t my favorite: yet another corridor, yet another corner for me to carefully stick my nose around looking for enemies, yet another room to enter, to back out of, to wait for enemies to come into view so I could kill them. I realize that it’s a bit silly to complain about that in an FPS: that’s the core mechanics of the genre, I’m no more surprised by that than I am by battles on a separate screen against wandering monsters in a JRPG. But just because I’m not surprised by that doesn’t mean that I have to actively like it, especially when I’m also seeing hints of gameplay that I rather prefer.

Having said that, given that style of gameplay, it was carried out in a manner that I enjoyed. I played at normal difficulty, not even needing to go down to easy, and I still was rarely in danger of dying. There were a few environmental puzzles sprinkled about, giving some pleasant challenges of a different nature. Ammo and health were plentiful, and spaced appropriately to give a bit of tension in the big battles without turning the game into a resource management chore. My temperament encourages me to save rather more often than is healthy; the game let me do so at any time, and the save functionality was reasonably fast.

The fourth level was also long, but at least they mixed things up by giving you a boat to ride, and (halfway through) a gun on your boat. Then another short plot level introducing that most fabulous of weapons, the gravity gun, followed by a long level, going rather heavier on the horror aspects of the game while letting you use your gravity gun to great effect to slice them in half with sawblades. And then Highway 17: drive along dunes in your buggy, periodically encountering buildings where you have to fight enemies.

At this point, I was seven levels into the game; while I wasn’t actually regretting playing the game, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the second half of the game. I’d seen many things that I liked, but I’d also spent rather too much time time going around corners looking for enemies and then dropping back and spraying them with bullets. So, on the whole, I got the feeling that, at the core, it was an FPS much like many other FPSes that I’d played, I could guess how the plot would turn out, and I’d seen what new there was to be seen in the game.

And then things started getting a whole lot better. I first perked up when I killed the antlion queen, and got the ability to control antlions (and use them to attack my enemies): the game suddenly changed from a first-person shooter to a first-person bug-wrangler, which was certainly an interesting change of pace! That lasted for significant chunks of two levels; even when that was over, there were still new gameplay twists, e.g. the turret management in later prison battles, the strider battles. (And, to be fair, the earlier sections also changed up the gameplay once or twice a level as well.) I wasn’t too into the gameplay aspects of the squad play of later levels, but it was nice at least to have some people around who were glad to see me instead of more masked enemy hordes.

And then I reached the last two levels, which were thoroughly delightful. I loved the long scene where you were carried on a track through no end of corridors; a perfect way to take a break from the game, to give you a chance to look around and appreciate the wonderful world that Valve created. And then they threw away all your weapons and gave you only a souped-up gravity gun (and, to boot, made health stations so plentiful as to make health almost irrelevant): for the (pleasantly short) length of those two levels: the game was saying to me, “yes, we’re a shooter, but we’ll spend a few minutes showing you what makes this game different and special, not what makes it the same as a hundred other shooters”.

Also, looking back at the last half of the game, while I wasn’t thrilled with the corridor grind, I thought the set piece battles were extremely well done: the bridge battle on Highway 17, the approach to the prison, the turret fights, the generator plaza fight, the three generators that you had to disable, the strider battles were all loads of fun.

I’m perhaps not as enamored of the plot (either in its substance or presentation) as some people are: while it beats the crap out of Doom in that regard, that’s not exactly a high barrier, and I have fonder memories of the stories in Marathon and System Shock than I do of this game. And, for that matter, I’m not sure the plot here was all that much better than, say, the plot in Dark Forces or Halo, though the presentation of the plot was more interesting. Still, in general I’ll count the plot as a definite positive aspect of the game, and I was always happy to see Alyx.

So, having come to the end, I really do think this is a great game. Don’t get me wrong: I stand by my complaints above, and think it could be significantly improved. If they’d just cut all of the long levels in half (or all but one, for variation’s sake: maybe leave Ravenholm intact?) while leaving in all the weapon transitions and major battles as they stand, I think the game would have been significantly tighter while losing nothing. But I’m very glad to have played it; I’ll certainly play its two sequels, and I may well go back and play the first game, if I can find a copy that runs on a system that I have access to.

But I won’t play the sequels quite yet. (Warning: this is the part where I switch from game discussion to navel-gazing queue-management strategy minutia.) When I bought my Xbox 360, the games I most wanted to play were Portal and Mass Effect; third on the list, however, was BioShock. That game, however, falls squarely into the category of “games I’m not going to play with Miranda around”, and I move through that category rather slowly.

And, when I finished Mass Effect (my previous game in that category), I thought “I’ve already started The Orange Box; why not give the other games in there a try?” So I played this game. Which was great, but in retrospect clearly the wrong choice: I shouldn’t let inventory cloud my judgment of what I most want to play at a given moment. In particular, if I follow that logic through, then I’d next have to play the two mini-sequels to Half-Life 2, and it would be a miracle if I weren’t too burned out on FPSes after that to really enjoy BioShock.

So I’ve learned my lesson, and am putting the Half-Life series on a brief hiatus. (Actually, it may or may not be brief, depending on when I get around to GTA4.) In fact, I think I’ll probably change genres briefly before diving into BioShock: perhaps the Penny Arcade game would be a good brief palate cleanser? I’m not sure; for the next couple of weeks, I’m planning to spend my time when Miranda is in bed doing stuff like catching up on my blogging and getting started on the memory project, instead of playing video games. But I’m very much looking forward to both that game and the remaining games in this series.