The Armchair Designer's notepad

Mitigating ebils.

2011-09-25T04:30:00.004Z

[Version courte pour les non-anglophones: l'est temps de se tirer de fessebouc,

qui est sur le point de publier des photos de ta grand'mere en culotte au 20 heures,

avec son adresse en prime.]

I've never been a huge fan of FB. I find it messy, noisy, and phishy in the ways it tricks ingenuous users (meaning most normal humans) into exposing more of themselves than they'd care to (if only they realized) to anyone willing to lurk.

The latest development, however, is seriously shifting gears, and kicking unsuspecting people right into Stalker Central, which itches me the wrong way, so I'm out.

Facebook acting rather callously about user privacy is nothing new, obviously, and it only worsened over time, yet Timeline is something else, and the way FB is going about deployment isn't pretty either — it's so creepy, the ever-upbeat WIRED can't wholly manage to spin it in a favorable light.

Is Google better, really ? Well, in a sense, yes they are.

For one, they're more about co-opting the internets and less about attempting to pull and AOL (which FB clearly is, and it stinks to high heavens), and also because the nature of each company is subtly different.

Mark Zuckerberg fancies himself the new Steve Jobs, and runs FB as a one-man-cult. As proven over time, it's often a very potent strategy to get stuff moving, and to deliver a daring product, as the vision suffers no interference but that of what is feasible.

On the other hand, it only takes one guy losing his marbles to drive the whole train over the cliff, and when it comes to protecting your privacy, an overcompensating narcissist nerd shan't be thy first pick, imo.

Despite their motto of "Don't be evil", the other Church of Nerdery over at Mountain View is not staffed entirely with EFF angels, obviously, but the sheer scope of google's reach, and their 'try every path' approach to product development and marketing means they attract a lot of very bright, naive, hybrid-limo-libs, which are allowed and encouraged to somewhat think for themselves (within reason, ofc) and are more likely than not to either actively oppose, possibly blow the whistle, or at least passive sabotage stuff that stinks too heavily.

Without being a democracy, google sports some of the built-in sanity checks that come with a large headcount of educated and relatively free-willed denizens. That's a plus in their column.

The erosion of privacy in general terms probably files under regrettable inevitability, yet google has some incentive to protect the semblance of intimacy that comes from perceived protection of privacy, because they're not in the business of antagonizing their followers (which compound users and employees), when Zuckerberg has nobody to keep FB in check but his own sense of decency (and some would say The Law, but let's be serious here).

The skinny of Google-over-FB being: more than a fraction of people at google are likely to care and feel guilt if/when BadThings™ happen to innocent, relatable human beings (kids, females, nice elderly/underage white males) as a result of google being lazy or callous about enabling users to protect themselves from stalkers and crazies. As a result they will be both proactive and reactive about mitigating such adverse side-effects inasmuch as they can — something that's obvious from the very design of G+ Circles.

On a more personal level, I can't be arsed to actively maintain a presence on more than one social network, so I'm going to grab my stuff and take a hike. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to stick to G+ and this bloggy thing here for the most part, and rely on some gadgets to leave crumbs behind on FB and Twitter.

…and no, I'm not moving to Diaspora just yet — don't ask.

You're in the ACME now !

2011-06-25T21:18:00.002Z

Because telling stories is sometimes so much better than showing them.

Mitchell Zuckoff & Jon Stewart discuss the former's book: Lost in Shangri-La.

Seriously ?

2011-05-02T10:22:00.002Z

OBL is dead, and obviously the world is a better place for it, right ?

That's what they say, at least:

"World stocks rise after death of Osama bin Laden"

Now, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but a few things seem off with this:

The end of OBL (if verified) isn't the end of the jihad/terror/civilization agit-prop/yni:

He was a bogeyman of our own doing in more than one way, and notably because he wasn't as lionized anywhere as he was in the 'western world'.
Bin Laden was seen by many in the middle east as nothing more than a philanthropist of sorts, funding the worthy cause of ousting american imperialism and fighting the perceived judeo-christian hegemony, yet not so much as a warlord of strategic leader (which he indeed wasn't). OBL was just a rich heir with a grudge, and was first tolerated only because of the dough he brought to the table, but not taken seriously besides, and he eventually turned into a real propaganda asset after we made him the bugaboo.

At the end of the day, one of the post-facto leads in the cast of the 9/11 soap opera just got written out. That's not exactly a franchise-ender, though.

Why would you summarily execute a PR golden goose ?

According to the official news, it seems OBL took a headshot during a close range engagement, which doesn't look like an accident.

Obviously there are many reasons why him dead is possibly better than him alive, starting with the fact he can't say anything embarrassing to the U.S of A anymore, can't be rescued nor escape, etc. Still, you'd think after all the effort put into hyping him, the U.S and Obama would want to milk this PR win for all it's worth, and that's better done if you can drag a defeated OBL in front of cameras — whenever convenient — for the weeks and months to come, while making a righteous circus of his trial in front of both U.S and international courts.

Is it only for fear of likely "release OBL or else" terrorist threats that terminating him was determined to be the best course of action, or was it really just one of the acceptable outcomes of an arrest attempt that didn't go as smoothly as it coulda/shoulda/woulda… I don't know, and probably never will for sure, but it still feels like a weak and anticlimactic end for the biggest PR game of this past decade.

Why dispose of the body thusly ?

Killing the guy on the spot to take control of the narrative and avoid subsequent unintended developments, I get (even though I feel it's sub-optimal), but the whole 'Sorry, we already tossed the corpse at sea from a helo' charade is just ludicrous.

This is creating the impression of a fake hit, the kind of cheap, cookie-cutter twist you expect from a made-for-TV thriller: "Oh, he wasn't dead after all, he faked his own death to instigate a turf war among his rivals", or somesuch.

Plainly put, if you kill a notable enemy with no witnesses, and hastily dispose of the body while still claiming the credit for the hit, it does look fake, and you'll be called out on it.

So is OBL really dead ?

I wouldn't put money on it either way.

Occam razor dictates he most likely is, or at least the U.S intelligence is confident enough that he is to not expect he'll show up live on TV sometime later today to point and laugh at them.

My best bet: he died a few days/weeks ago of unrelated causes, and the U.S figured they'd better hurry to make it look like they did it before the word got out.

Hence no arrest, no fresh corpse to display, and what we're witnessing now is the best CIA and special forces could make of a bad situation on short notice and a ticking clock.

And ttfn: back to your regular programming.

Busy-ish.

2010-07-23T23:56:00.000Z

Just for those keeping tabs on this place: I'm not quite dead yet, just busy woodworking and thinking about issues.

Think About It - Flight Of The Conchords

Some stuff literally hurts on sight.

2010-06-25T05:49:00.000Z

Between Twilight and Harry Potter, it's a tough call which is working harder on grooming kids to Olympic levels of brat-ness.

On a related note, I saw New Moon about 4h ago, and my brain still aches… I fear permanent scarring.

Distraction.

2010-05-02T21:53:00.001Z

While thinking hard about fiscal justice in a globalized-yet-uneven economical landscape…

Legal dress code.

2010-04-22T01:16:00.012Z

After a couple trial runs at city level, Belgium is about to pass a law forbidding the public display of full-head veil in public spaces, and Frogland is next in line — according to the local ruling clique.

What strikes me as fairly dumb in both cases is the pretense under which such laws are pushed through, namely in the name of protecting women and their humane dignity from oppressive traditions, when it's plain as day the real target here is militant Islam, perceived by some in both countries as a mounting peril for the local culture, and that rubs me the wrong way, as a matter of principle.

See, I'm a sucker for consistency, in game design or in public affairs, and despite my personal understanding of religion as a mental disorder, I can live with the fact constitutionally secular countries such as France or Belgium recognize freedom of faith, and even their endorsing religions to an extent, as long as it's under a principle of equal treatment.

And that's where I see some issues with the dress code laws…

Not all Muslim women routinely wear a face-covering veil, but almost all women who wear those (and insist on not removing it in public places) happen to be Muslim. As such, these laws effectively target and punish people on the basis of their religious affiliation, which both in Belgium and France should be impossible under their respective constitutions.
The second argument is public safety, as in wearing a face-covering dress allows one to conceal his or her identity in public and therefore could be instrumental in the perpetration of criminal offenses, encouraged by the increased odds of getting away with it. This may have held at least shallow water, if not for the fact campaigning for those laws clearly revolved around the Muslim veil as topical item, so it's a serious case of 'too little, too late'.
The third point, the one the French supporters of this bill plan to hammer on to get it passed into law is the preservation of 'humane dignity' on behalf of the poor, oppressed burqa-girls (although what you mostly — and seldom — see in France is simple niqāb), and this angle qualifies as Broken, For Real™. This last one warrants a bit of elaborating…

The 'humanist' argument hinges on the assumption women don't choose to wear a niqāb and are — explicitely or implicitly — coerced in doing so by mysoginistic and machist traditions imposed upon them by men in their families and communities. Furthermore, it posits forbidding the cloth will liberate these women and allow them to connect in a 'normal' way with society and with their inner feminist self, thus sapping the foothold Islamic bigots have gained in our precious secular democracies.

Right. This is going to end well, I'm sure.

If niqāb-wearing women are indeed victimized by their community and can't stand up to the pressure they're under to dress as told, they aren't guilty of anything and shouldn't be punished for it. Good luck finding a way to establish causality and fine the husband because of the wife's dress code — although this would probably be more effective and could be good fun. Fail.
Regardless, helpless-by-definition women (in this context) won't grow a pair because the law says so, so they'll simply stay at home or pay the fines (less likely), with a direct result of alienating them further for lack of opportunity to connect with 'normal' society (which seems to be the purported end goal here). Re-fail.
Conversely, if they actually are making a choice in how they dress and express their religious beliefs, then they aren't victimized, and thus there's no legal basis to oppose their behavior, (insofar as it doesn't cause explicit harm to others) unless one purposefully intents on persecuting Muslims, which — as pointed earlier — should prove unconstitutional in either France or Belgium. Triple fail.

Either the 'human rights' proponents of the niqāb ban are right, and these women really are hapless victims, or they're wrong, and the burqa is a matter of personal choice and religious expression… in any case the proposed bill is a non-sequitur.

My 2 eurocents ? Handle religions for what they are: a mental condition ranging from a harmless quirk of personality to a serious psychosis, depending on the severity of the delusional state, and treat it as such.

Get the patients professional help, don't feed their neurosis by encouraging it, and when necessary, take the usual steps to protect them and society — starting with screening out overcompensating midgets lacking a super-ego *before* they get into presidential office.

For a different take, here's what the hive-mind has to say on the issue.

My euro-tip: for consistency's sake, if we must harass and fine women to protect them from humiliating themselves as a result of peer pressure, can we outlaw boob enhancements first ? At least there is evidence of bodily harm, there.

***

Food for thought.

2010-04-19T05:53:00.001Z

It just occurred to me that in the matter of credit attribution as to where we — as a species — are today, too much is given to our fabled neo-cortex, while way too little recognition goes to our palate and digestive tract's prowess.

So here it is: our gut smarts are underrated.

To clarify, I'm not about to go all redneck on you, and argue the case that guts know better than brains as a rule (even though it may happen sometimes), and I'll leave truthiness to whom it belongs: comedians, teabaggers and choking-on-pretzels ex-POTUS.

Instead, I'll go out on a limb, as per standard protocol here, and tentatively argue: our guts play an under-appreciated yet decisive part in the historical making of our brains, both as a facilitating agent and enabling device.

Consider this: we humans come omnivores as a standard issue, and tend to embrace it unless constrained to a less diverse diet imposed by circumstances or personal/cultural biases. At face value, our gut would deserve praise if only for its ability to use almost anything we stumble upon for fuel — on the omnivore's radar, anything that is or was alive once could be dinner.
We partly owe to our guts to have survived and thrived in a variety of environments that non omnivorous species can only dream of, but I'd wage that's only half of it…

Opposable thumbs are cool, for sure, but they're of limited relevance if all you do is twiddle them: how and to what end you put those to work is what's key.
Our brains are a spectacular learning machine, a difference and inference engine that can find patterns in a chaotic wealth of information, derive meaning and build narratives or concepts to organize the universe, with us as its focal point.

As it seems obvious a direct relation exists, between the diversity of experiences and stimuli we're exposed to and the opportunities we get to make new and smarter inferences, anything that helps us survive and explore new horizons is increasing our odds to have a eureka! moment, or its intuitive, less conceptual equivalent.

And just like our opposable thumbs, our guts enable us to explore and experience more, not only by keeping us fueled and clanking beyond the point where the Duracell rabbit would finally stop, but by providing us with the means to experience more. Non-omnivorous animals don't get the chance to try much of the gastronomical aspects of pleasure and discomfort, simply eat whatever limited selection of food they trust to process without falling sick, and won't even think about ordering off the menu, even when it sucks — ask any panda how they feel about their last meal(s) for a very fucked up perspective on this.

Long story short, being able to process diverse foods extends our biotopical reach and our ability to move around, yet also broadens our mental horizons and sense of aesthetics. Diversity of tastes, textures, shapes and colors all give our brain those little jolts that once in a while may spark a new and interesting connection, even though we may not always realize it at the time, and the same goes for those different landscapes, climates and environments we would never have dreamed of, had our omnivorous bowels not kept us alive through there.

Thus, I suggest you make today (which is whenever you happen to read these lines) your personal Gut Recognition Day and celebrate GRD by thinking hard about how much we owe our intestines for coping with our whims as they do, be thankful for that, and vow never to deny your guts their rightful part by ensuring you don't eat the same grub every day from now on, if you can afford it.

Your neo-corticoïdal bowels thank you in advance.

***

They love cake, and they're not afraid to sing it.

2010-02-28T00:40:00.001Z

Seconded, heartily.

CloudGaming

2010-02-22T10:19:00.000Z

Cloud computing moves the computation and rendering entirely server side, albeit in some high-level, abstract fashion, where the server-side capacity is managed as an utility rather than as a finite asset.
This leaves the client with a fairly dumb terminal shaped like a smartphone, HDTV set or pretty much anything that can display a video feed received through a broadband connection (wired or air), and send out standard user input (key commands, motion sensor data, possibly voice and video in some applications) back to the cloud.

In a nutshell, it lifts most of hardware and software requirements currently associated with 3D gaming from the user end, thus enabling a myriad of cheap, everyday devices to perform suitably as HD gaming platforms.

On the server side, the high-concept tends to favor decoupling server ownership from operation and usage, and to move computing and rendering power towards a model akin to that of bandwidth brokering. Game operators are expected to rent both processing and rendering power by the metric ton just as they would rent bandwidth to serve the resulting video feeds to the end users' client devices.

Contrary to the console platforms, which by nature are subject to vendor lock-in, cloud-based gaming should allow developers to code for whichever suitable software environment they choose, as the server software is meant to be loaded seamlessly, on demand, onto the rented hardware.

On the business side of things, this is obviously an attractive proposition. Game operators will be able to serve a nearly limitless user base with a single core product version: cross-developing for different platforms will no longer be useful, and only minor resources will be devoted to maintaining compatibility, mostly on the interface side of things, to accommodate the variety of typical gaming devices (display layouts, standard inputs and such).

From a game developer standpoint this is a wet dream, with all the benefits of console development (well-known, controlled hardware/software environment) but none of the drawbacks (no vendor lock-in, unlimited processing and rendering power scaling gracefully on the fly), provided suitable business models are found to share the burden and the revenue associated with the server architecture.

***

Applied to R-POWs, cloud computing promises even more goodness by tackling, or at least mitigating, the infamous reverse-economies of scale that currently apply to customer support.

The more sophisticated and popular the game, the more diverse and complex the overall hardware and software client base becomes, and the more likely users will run third party 'helper' software alongside the game client. As a result, technical support gets proportionally costlier as the user base grows and as time goes by and the variety of more-or-less recent configurations to support increases.

A despotic control over the gaming platform, insulated from user interference, translates in enormous savings on technical support and a proportional increase in customer satisfaction — by way of less dissatisfaction.

***

Here be other entries tagged with CloudGaming.

Head in the cloud, and beyond. Of the visual and simulationist goodness potentially unleashed in the cloud.

Co-Optimus

2009-12-31T20:37:00.001Z

I was talking about coop-centric gamedesign (and specifically AI) yesterday, and I forgot to link to this interesting topical website — linked by Chris M. Park's blog, also very much worth reading, for that and more.

Merry '10, people, this will be an interesting year, in the Chinese and any other sense, I reckon.

Coop vs AI

2009-12-30T08:59:00.002Z

An emerging trend in the world of strategy/tactical games of late is the focus on coop multiplayer vs AI, as opposed to the more traditional use of AI as a stand-in for an absentee 'real' opponent.

While not entirely new, this is an interesting development, and one of the many subtle ways in which the wargames (as a broad category/genre) are finally getting payback from the adventure/action/RPGs that have shamelessly 'borrowed' from strategy games forever, without giving back much love until recently.

***

While other genres have evolved spectacularly over time, thanks to genre fusion/bending and cross-pollination, strategy games have known few significant changes since the emergence of RTS:

at core, most strategy games tend to fall in either of two categories: computerized renditions of boardgame-styled designs, or mildly brainy action games sitting in a fancy simulated environment, with eyecandy added to taste.

The reason for that is simple: strategy and wargames are traditionally and by nature thought of as 'versus' games, yet current AI do thoroughly suck at emulating a 'real player' opponent.

Thus the tried and true solutions to make the AI look good boil down to either very solid game mechanics that even a seriously retarded bot can't screw up, or relatively simple game design (that an AI can handle, with cheats if needed) fleshed out by a rich enough simulated environment to overload the cognitive capacity of the human player and create the illusion of lifelikeness.

As a result, designing for single or multi player(s) has often been perceived as an either/or choice: a good single-player campaign usually will hinge on RPG-like scripting, crafty level design, extensive playtesting, with some storytelling and cutscenes thrown in to thicken the sauce, while the multiplayer PvP mode requires solid boardgame-like game mechanics to work — it's really tricky to do both at once and well enough in a single game.

***

Luckily, other game genres bring a comparatively lateral-thinking answer to this dilemma: cooperative multiplayer.

As hinted above, this is a counter-intuitive option for strategy and wargames, and although coop mode has been present in the multiplayer options of many a RTS in he past, it generally has been there for the sole sake of exhaustiveness, and rarely if ever been a defining feature of any srs bzs strategy game until recently…

Just to be clear, I'm talking about coop vs computer here, not team-based PvP, which is indeed cooperative too and can spice PvP quite a bit, but is still PvP at core and is not an essentially different play mode from FFA PvP, mechanics-wise.

Coop vs AI (CVA) comes from CRPGs (notably MMOGs) and action-adventure genres, which have been struggling for a long time to reconcile their single-player heritage with the commonly accepted wisdom (and now built-in expectation) that multiplayer adds value to a game. In those genres, Coop gameplay is a fairly obvious way to go about bringing more than one player on the same boat, and is also a welcome answer to the seemingly insurmountable problem of Artificial Stupidity of henchmen and other computer-driven teammates in RPGs and action-adventure titles.

***

Applied to strategy games, the eureka moment of going CVA involves putting the genre on its head: the common ancestors of all wargames are about two guys sitting on chairs across a table and duking it out over a board and tokens — at face value, making it about two guys helping each other to beat the crap out of a machine is more of a leap than a stretch — but in hindsight, CVA looks just as elegant and obvious applied to strategy games as to CRPG.

CVA works best when freed from the preconception that the AI's there to substitute an absentee human opponent, which AIs are notoriously bad at.

Dropping the Turing-test idiot ball and instead embracing a PvE-centric design approach allows to build a game that can be equally interesting in solo and multiplayer mode, as the game mechanics no longer need to cover for Artificial Stupidity. It's certainly extra work over just bolting more seats on a single-player game, but it's definitely the easier path (compared to faking human intelligence with scripts) to get something worth playing.

Coop doesn't mean the challenge, tension and sense of accomplishment have to be diminished, either : the human factor and drama fuel can be just as strong when players try to work together rather than intently butt heads, and a CVA design can still be spiced up with multiple coops competing against both the AI and each other, as long as the AI is clearly defined as the primary threat/target.

The brilliant (despite disputable looks) 2009 poster child for that approach is probably AI War — go check it out now if you haven't yet.

…and if you want to know more about the AI in this particular design, here's a good and thorough writeup series.

***

Entropy

2009-12-29T07:18:00.000Z

I used to be precocious, and now I'm old and retarding…
— things even out that way.

Head in the cloud, and beyond.

2009-11-30T04:00:00.003Z

There's a lot going on vis a vis cloud computing these days, and it has been occupying a good share of my time lately, especially considering what it can do for the future of R-POW gaming…

I was so busy trying to wrap my mind around its potential from an infrastructure and business standpoint, how it could inform game design practices and tie with other pink unicorns like augmented reality and AI/AGI, I missed the obvious… frickin' gorgeous games.

Minesweeper on Windows™

R-POW, in their various MMO* incarnations to date have been plagued with the general curse of blandness at best, ugliness at worst, with a few notable exceptions such as EVE online and World of Warcraft, which have managed to make for reasonably good looking games by banking either on a hardcore g4m3rZ userbase with matching rigs, or on insane talent and production value, respectively.

Cloud-based gaming, by moving the computing power out of the end-user field, not only brings hardware requirements down (all you need is a decent display hooked up to broadband — read any HDTV-capable appliance), it opens the possibility to code games with previously unreel hardware reqs that would have reduced the potential market to the niche of very special nerds operating liquid-nitrogen-cooled gaming clusters, purpose-built for one title.

Incidentally, such systems exist, they're called military-grade training simulator platforms, and for some reason it's an approach that never made it big in the consumer market — I blame the terrible dress-code and hairdos, personally.

Moving on…

Cloud computing doesn't just hold the potential to bring down development and operating costs of R-POW, to let studios finally make a buck by steering clear off parasitic publishers & retailers, or to open the way for easy licensing and high-quality indie games by allowing costs to scale up gracefully with user base growth. The biggest change may yet come from the fact games will no longer be defined by the limitations of the end-user hardware. People (and designers) will be able to make decisions based on what they need/want, rather than what the target PC or console can handle.

No longer forced to design and code within the confines of 5 years old consoles or $600 office/family PC, game makers will be able to trust the platform to glitchlessly churn out the latest in rendering algorithms, and may even gain access to on-the-fly throttling to beef up the simulation engine to meet the demands of a climactic scene.

Minesweeper in the cloud.

Movie-level visuals, plus solid simulation engine, massively multiplayer, always on, from your smartphone to your wide-screen TV… now we're getting somewhere.

***

Apple in bed with BigPharma™ companies ?

2009-11-29T16:47:00.008Z

Here, get a tinfoil hat so I can talk to you safely, and hang on, you're in for a treat…

Apple has figured a new way not to honor AppleCare warranties on their very expensive hardware — preexisting conditions.

If your machine has been taken out of its original shipping box, or at any time since purchase otherwise ventured outside of a clean room and into contaminated environment, a.k.a RealWorld™, Apple will not service it under AppleCare, because frankly, you brought it on yourself by daring to, you know, use the computer, instead of setting it on display in your personal gallery's sealed, bulletproof shrine, with Colorsync-matched gentle UV-free lighting.

Apple computer used as intended.

This should only come as a mild surprise, considering the high standards of customer service Apple is known for, and how Apple service reps are encouraged to deny warranty claims on the slightest pretext (one Apple service center employee explained me how he's been briefed on the not-so-subtle art of tripping 'submersion sensors' to turn warranty-covered faults into revenue-generating after-sale servicing).

The recent stories about second-hand smoke as a warranty-voiding 'clause' however, show Apple reaching to a new level of creative callousness that warrants notice.

Here's the reasoning: Apple is not refusing to service the machines that show (?) signs of having been exposed to tobacco smoke out of a misplaced sense of anti-smoking righteousness or — perish the thought — as a flimsy excuse to save costs at the expense of the customer, oh no… it's doing so because it can't in good conscience expose its employees and service reps to bio-hazards…

What would you want Apple to do ? Knowingly poison techs by feeding them your toxic waste, you monster !?

I wish I was making this up, but no: apparently it is part of the standard service procedure that Applecare techs are required to lick every part of your machine chassis to clean it up thoroughly before re-assembling it — which also implies part of the training for Applecare servicing certification centers on learning how to lick one's way around the aforementioned moisture sensors.

Leveraging imaginary health-hazards to shift the blame on the customer for its ailments and therefore deny coverage, while painting ghastly pictures of alternative protection systems faintly reminds me of something in recent US news, but I can't quite put my finger on it right now… nevermind, it'll come back.

Not to be insensitive to the ordeal of career Steve worshipers with an oral fetish for delicious machined aluminum alloys, but I'm starting to wonder if Apple seriously means to end the hackintosh excursion, or if they're just pretending to, for the sake of maintaining their image of batshit-insane control freaks, while really plotting to push their users into switching to cheap knockoffs ?

If your machine must be disposable — by virtue of being more expensive to maintain than replace — do you really want to shell the extra 30% Apple-brand tax on it ?

I didn't think so.

Best of luck.

2009-11-27T03:25:00.001Z

Believe it or not…

…these two are soon getting married.

***

[Here be the photo gallery, and go there for a nice behind-the-scene look at Big Daddy's inception.]

Story of my life.

2009-11-24T09:06:00.001Z

Either I'm getting complacent and easier to please (which would be subtly ironic, given the link below), or I'm on a roll for finding stuff worth reading, lately.

In this case, and for my sake, worth re-reading at least once a week until it sinks in.

Another bullseye.

2009-11-23T15:56:00.004Z

You may remember I mentioned Eschaton Online a few days ago.

Turns out Gnostic Labs seems very much dead, but unless I fell prey to an eerie case of fortuitous homonymy, I believe I've picked the scent of one Jake Cannel, once of the Eschaton Online team, who's nowaday focusing on computer graphics, on the western US coast.

As it happens, he blogs, like anyone with access to tap water is required to nowadays — seemingly by law — yet to the difference of most, it's definitely worth reading, at least if you're into his kind of stuff.

This, especially, about the evolution of gaming platforms and how it could impact development practices is at once well-written and spot on, imnsho.

Not much more to say right now, although I poked a company that's working on the kitchenware version of that idea, roughly… I'll get back to that if/when I get word from them.

Economic crisis update.

2009-11-23T08:42:00.000Z

…or why the way we do capitalism deserves to die.

Getting there.

2009-11-22T16:15:00.000Z

The rapture of the nerds is on us, or close by, according to Itamar Arel, who gave an interview last month to Sander Olson. Read it there.

The skinny is Dr Arel believes we're just a decade away from the first proto-human artificial intelligence, roughly baby-stupid (or smart, depending on your personal bias), and from that point on, there's no stopping the singularity from happening within the next few minutes.

Meanwhile, I'm being clever trying to figure ways for MMO* to suck less… Considering the likelihood of success on that front, I suspect it will be a relief to be ended by our mechanical overlords.
Yay.

How the MMO* production model is broken.

2009-11-21T13:27:00.004Z

Not spanking new, not illuminating (because of the next proposition), this entry by Scott Jennings summarizes so neatly a bunch of points I subscribe to, I figured I'd just link it here for future reference — at least until one of the younguns educates me on shared bookmarking or somesuch.
In the meantime…

Bullseye !

And don't miss the comments, Lum's readership is half the goodness.

Economy in playmonies

2009-11-19T17:40:00.004Z

Managing a Virtual Economy

From the Virtual Goods Summit 2009.

The meaning of PvP.

2009-11-19T12:13:00.001Z

…meanwhile, on the other blog.

I usually try to keep things separate between my EVE-specific rants and musings, and the broader design issues I discuss here. The last two downtime fillers on EVE is broken obviously relate to EVE, but really are what I believe to be generally valid observation about the nature of the relationship between carebear-type players in R-POW and the PvP playstyle(s).

If you're interested in pop-psychology applied to PvP, you may want to check at least the first entry: it was a bit of a shocker even for me as I drafted it (obviously, odds are I'm not the first to have this specific eureka! moment).

Today's filler is a bit more EVE-centric, but I reckon anyone with a passing familiarity with the subject in other R-POW can work their way around the spacenerd-flavored rocks easily enough to keep it legible.

ttfn, time for coffee.

Eventually Stuff Rendered Bland

2009-11-16T08:05:00.013Z

As I was doing the rounds of various game-related websites today, both designer and end-user oriented, it struck me: almost all popular western R-POWs are tween-to-teenager friendly — or at least try to be, according to their ESRB ratings.

The only exceptions I found after a cursory search are Age of Conan (rated M to AO/18+ depending on who's talking), a Korean-made mediaeval-horror I don't think I ever heard of before (although the name is so generic it's hard to tell), and, in its own contorted ways, Second Life (while Linden Labs hate seeing their over-hyped cathouse lumped with vulgar MMOG, SL still qualifies as a R-POW, I guess).

Two of those are deemed NSFW on a basis of a lot of gore and gratuitous violence, plus the occasional b00bs and semi-explicit deviant sex, and the last is… well, Second Life, homeland of furries and middle-aged local politicians who love to go wild in latex diapers.

But I digress… my original point, I guess, was that it's surprising how few commercial R-POW take advantage of the creative freedom afforded by not having to give the time of the day to the hysteric 'for the children' lobby.

An Adults-Only rating allows designers to drape pretty much anything under the First Amendment (or applicable equivalent) and be reasonably safe from moral crusaders and wrong-footed art critics …which would be nifty enough on its own, yet the real beauty of it is: it doesn't require you to actually produce boring pornography or unimaginative Nazi-flavored gorefests… seriously.

Going AO essentially amounts to running a private club: you can post the most stringent EULA you want, and nobody will be able to build even a half-decent case against your policies on the basis they were too lazy to read, or to claim a natural right to access in the holy names of free market and consumer choice.

Much like this blog is set as 'Adult Content' — although I don't think I ever posted anything even as mild as a wardrobe malfunction — taking the non-family-friendly approach means you don't have to answer to the mouthbreathers who'd want to dictate their terms in your space.

A double side benefit is you'll still get the kids, as per the first law of Forbidden Fruits and attractive exclusivity, yet the onus will be on them to behave like grownups in order to avoid being detected (and subsequently insta-banned without trial).

Honestly, I can't see a downside to hanging a large AO/18+ sign on your door — without even stopping to consider if you could go for a T instead, and try to sneak your most controversial material under the radar of rabid soccer moms.

The only obvious (if short-sighted) rationale for the lack of AO offer on the R-POW market would be that game makers live by the mistaken belief their only potential market gravitates around the kids demographic… that could go a long way towards explaining why most MMOs are firmly planted on the stupid side of the creative spectrum, though.

Not to imply kids are stupid, or only going for brain-dead entertainment, obviously: rather to say that if you can be so far off the mark on who your userbase is, you probably also hold very flawed assumptions about what they're paying you for.

New Gaming — HowTo (New Gaming, part 2)

2009-11-13T10:40:00.008Z

[read me first, if you dare.]

New gaming is what you'd get if you were to design a hardcore game such as it could attract casual gamers and be playable by them, without dumbing down the gameplay. That's roughly it.

Because 'Real' Casual Players will not commit more than a very small amount or time, brains and money (if any) to a given game, and because old-school hardcore nerds make for very small niches, both by their head count and by the number of titles which they will devote their individually high commitment to (while dictating exclusionary gameplay/styles in the games that cater to them), New Gamers are where most of the (smart) money and designers' attention should go.

New Gaming is not just a fancy rebranding tag for the fabled 'mainstream' Casual Gaming of the last decade, though: you can perfectly design niche games for New Gamers, and don't have to go for maximum eyeballs at every turn, at the expense of theme or gameplay originality.

What sets apart New Gaming from the usual understanding of Casual and Hardcore Gaming is it doesn't target any specific age-class, hardware requirements or gender (to name but a few). Those standard demographics parameters are something that the feature set, gameplay and theme can be concerned with if the designers so choose, and they're of importance, but New Gaming is less about who you expect the player to be than what New Gamers would expect from any game they will play.

As such it is more a positive than subtractive definition: a game must meet a set of conditions in order to reach New Gamers, as opposed to reach out for players who fall in a specific market demographic.

New Gamers demand games that acknowledge players who want deep, immersive, challenging and engaging gameplay, and are willing to commit brains, time and money to that, under the provision the game makes it easy to get in, allows them to play unobstructed by poor usability or frustrating artificial difficulty, and lets them learn as they go without fearing a forced restart from scratch halfway through the game — oh, and it must not look ugly, either.

Yes, I know it sounds like a blanket 'make better games' admonition, without consideration for realistic funding, release dates, or production and technical limitations. Weirdly it is not, and it can be managed by sticking to a few rules.

1) Do it right, or do something else.

New Gaming designs assume players are reasonably smart, and as such will both notice and cringe at sloppy work. That they're also smart enough to work around design or engine quirks doesn't mean they're OK with those being there in first place: most likely they just crossed a mental checkbox towards the total that will qualify your game for a trip to the nearest tradeback store and a scathing review on Amazon.

New gamers don't care for groundbreaking AI if their units can't pathfind their way through an empty parking lot. It could know how to flirt with them in their native language and deduce their favorite breakfast dish from unspoken clues in the player weapons' choices, it would still be broken if it doesn't do what the player can sensibly expect it to manage as a matter of course.

On the upside, they will buy in games that don't sport a grocery list of features if there are a few good reasons to play the game, and the rest of it doesn't spoil the fun: in that sense they're closer to casual gamers who will play something because it's fun, even if it's not the most cutting edge on the technical side, as long as it doesn't make eyes bleed.

2) Stuff must make sense (in context).

It ties to 'do it right…' above, but applies more to internal consistency of the design, ruleset and universe than to individual features' merits, performance or polish. Players should be able to make informed guesses about new content and game mechanics from their prior experience of the game levels/worlds.

That doesn't require the gameplay to be in any way dumb or simplistic, only that — however complex — the arrangement and relationships between moving pieces (and scenery) shouldn't be unduly complicated or arbitrary.

If some stuff is so arcane that it can't readily be understood early on, but is deemed too important to drop (because it enables really interesting gameplay later down the road), either provide players with ways to circumvent it during the early stages, or give them the means to both gain at least a superficial understanding of it, and to use it with reasonable (if limited) success without relying entirely on luck/cheats/hints/save-reload.

3) Replayability value is a one-way street.

Notably, that a game is even better on the second run shouldn't mean it's fine if it only becomes worth playing after the first play through. New Gamers won't make it through the first run if the game sucks until you know it by rote, or pack 00ber gear.

It is true that RealLife™ doesn't always do this favor to us monkeys, and many things only start to make sense retrospectively, with the invocation of external knowledge not readily available at the time you first faced a problem — there's a reason why New Gaming is not called New RealLife™.

Easter eggs, hidden gems, unlockable s33kr1t levels and equipment are not a mortal sin against New Gaming, but if you need that to justify finishing the game, you have a serious design problem.

4) Learn early, learn often, learn easy.

Internally-consistent 'laws' should be hinted at early and through the learning stages of the game, while the visible connections and interactions within a limited feature set make plain that upcoming content will follow the same internal logic.

Combinatory functions are cool because they reuse content (saves monies) in many ways , and if done right make for exciting deductive challenges and exploration (as opposed to robotic 'try every possible combo'). If players can stumble on entirely new toys with significantly different effects from previous ones, but can correctly figure how to use them and what to expect without too much poking around, you've done something right.

This 'common wisdom' allows to introduce progressively more intricate and complex content to the players as they venture further through the game, which they'll be able to learn on the fly as they build up on previously acquired knowledge.

Formal, mandatory Tutorial segments longer than a few minutes (beyond teaching the control schemes) are generally a copout in this regard. 'Lab' zones that allow players to experiment and practice at their leisure (without breaking immersion and rule 2 above) a by far preferable if some mechanics are worth taking time getting the hang of.

5) Shine shouldn't blind.

No matter how cool your particle algorithm is, or how much you like flare effects, if I can't use my torchlight without losing half the screen-estate to various graphical fluffery, it better tell me something I didn't know until then about my circumstances. Likewise, I don't care if true-3D rendering is more reelistic, I'll take roto-sprites over 3D any day if it means I can tell my soldiers apart from my peons at a glance.

While we're at it, if the game challenge hinges on the scenery and objects being semi-illegible, and if a simpler rendering would make the game 'too easy to play', there is a problem: graphics should add context, emotion, and possibly tell me more about the gamestate, not obfuscate it, unless it really serves a purpose — I'm not averse to walls being opaque, mind you.

6) Fun, polished fun.

Fun is something you make for yourself, as the saying goes, so it's a rather subjective thing, but if you have a game idea that sounds like it would be fun for you, chances are you're not alone — that's not a bad start.

Beyond that, making things fun is more art than science, and discussing it in detail would turn this article into a book, something neither you nor I look forward to — so let's assume you can recognize fun when it bites you.

…and that's the gist of it: look for it, see that every step of your game, from the intro to the controls, to accessing inventory management or moving around is, at least, not a bore, and whenever possible enjoyable.

7) Design early, design hard, design a lot.

Probably the worst thing that can happen during the early and core design stage of a game aimed at New Gamers is to leave too much to be sorted out later, especially if something doesn't quite feel right about an important feature that you know you'll reuse a lot.
Good design is cheap, compared to do-overs: it takes mostly time, talks, paper and a handful of people with various perspectives, using each other as sounding boards. Putting some stuff out in the open on a forum during pre-alpha may sound scary (OMG, BlizzardArts™ stole my ideas), but if you've been at it for a while, you may have a head-start in familiarity with your design that's hard to beat, and you don't have to go fully public either.

There's no such thing as having too much material: there are plenty of ways to prioritize the goods and decide what won't make it to v1.0… On the other hand, finding yourself forced to make up critical design elements as you go, halfway through production or (much worse) during crunch time, is a recipe for sloppy if not downright terrible results — neither will pass muster with New Gamers.

To conclude this once-again way too long entry, here's a quick summary and two examples:

New Gamers want games that are easy to get in, yet reward the dedicated and skilled, without screwing too hard on the beginner, unlucky or underdog — if there is a wealth of world/game mechanics to explore, all the better.

A near-perfect example of such design, far from R-POW and sandbox games is Mario Kart, which is not exactly a $50 million development project.

Another, which could probably turn into a commercial sleeper hit on the iPhone or any comparable device, with only a very slight coating of shoeshine on, but has everything that matters already in the box…

If you started videogaming this side of the 80's, odds are you never played anything like it. It's not old-school iso, or top-view 2D, it's ascii, which is beyond exotic ; and not only does it not hurt the eyes too badly, it's a fantastic game to play. Not 'good for an indie title'-good: it's worth playing regardless of any outside considerations. It's Dwarf Fortress.

I will write more about this beauty of a game someday, but until then I recommend you take a look at this page, yet only after you've spent a couple hours digging caves and fending off bat-shit insane mourning dwarven.

Gaming species (New Gaming, part 1)

2009-11-12T23:15:00.014Z

Games are art (not only, but also), and as such they're seen differently by the critic, historian, designer or budding artist than they are by the players.

While a botched game can still be worth the attention of a critic or game designer, who may spot the promising new feature or hidden gem amidst the debris of a production or artistic train wreck, the player who paid 5 movie seats or good paperback books worth of expected fun may not be so well-inclined toward a game that crashes, doesn't play well, or sports glorious-yet-ultimately-illegible graphics.

Because video gaming started as a niche hobby chiefly dominated by obsessive teenagers and early twenty-something, it used to be that the critic and player culture largely overlapped, in ways that made many players tolerant and supportive of ambitious-yet-failed attempts, as they knew to focus on the potential for the genre/platform to forgive or overlook flaws in a product that pushed the envelope.

Kids these days…

Most critics nowadays are gamers with soda-induced ADD, who grew up on games with a very high ratio of shiney/gameplay, while the player demographic has broadened to such a point that the gamer genus now encompasses uncounted species, many of which have never heard of each other.

More and more people are new to games, regardless of their birth date: the broadening of game demographics and the multiplication of platforms types (cell phones, browser games, cross-generation consoles) is bringing (back) new consumers to the games market every day. As all players before them, their tastes and expectations are shaped by their early experiences, and the near-instant availability and variety of today's offer mean they don't have to spend any more minutes than they feel like on games that aren't satisfying to them.

The emerging majority among this 'generation' of players share only one characteristic: they will settle for what they perceive to be the best in the current readily available crop when deciding where to put their time and money. They won't seek out promising monstrosities, or stroll a forum in search of a rare indie game that sports a unique feature or gameplay style — they game surf like they channel surf or watch DVDs: from the top 20 sellers in their favorite genre/shop.

New Gamers vs 'Real' Casual Players.

This trend has been widely acknowledged by the industry, and identified as the 'rise of casual gamers', which I believe to be a fallacy.
New gamers aren't inherently different from old-school gamers, many among them crave deep, challenging, involved gaming experiences, while casual players will never commit more than 15% of their brain's bandwidth for cycles longer than a few minutes to an hour at a time. What has changed is access and expectations.

The 'Real' Casual Players, who are only interested in 'light', non-committed playstyles now have more readily-available games that cater to their tastes, thanks to increased accessibility (notably via new platforms): this demographic is less growing (in absolute head count) than it is discovered and reached out to by a suitable offer, which wasn't the case before.

As for the New Gamers, even though they started video games in the current century, and can take internet for granted as their shopping mall, playground and grapevine through which hearing what's worth playing now, they have the same hunger for immersive, compelling fantasy worlds and alternative realities the two earlier generations of gamers had — except they won't eat their delicious gaming marmalade if it's spread on a burnt toast, even if served on a day-glow plate …which we were willing to do, because that was the only way we knew 'serious gaming' could be.

The intarweb ate my homework !

New Gamers and Casual Players both are raised on games that are instant-on, don't crash, come cheap of free (at least during the demo/trial/early play), can be jumped right in, unencumbered by arcane instruction manuals, clunky control schemes and configuration requirements, and provide a satisfying experience from minute one.

How come they get to enjoy such a carefree player career, compared to us who had to rebuild entire PCs and hunt down *custom* video drivers on BBSes to get a single game to run, hopefully without setting our study/dorm on fire in the process ?
Curiously, not because games nowadays taste less like burnt toast on average (although arguably, they do), but simply because New Gamers will dismiss games who fail those basic usability and enjoyability litmus tests without a second thought, a luxury they can afford because they have alternatives we didn't. It may not be 'better' games in your or my eyes, but they are humanly playable games, which is more than can be said about many of those responsible for most of my all-time fondest gamer memories.

Picking targets.

From the above, today's gaming market basically breaks down to three categories of potential customers: 'Real' Casual Players, old-school hardcore nerds, New Gamers. Platforms and RL demographics distinctions are largely irrelevant to that breakdown, although there may be more natural affinities between some than others.

To have any reasonable hope of a headshot, any game project can and should aim for only one of those groups at once.

'Real' Casual Players are both the most numerous and fickle, in theory.

In spending power, they may not be the strongest group, as they are raised on free (as beer) games, leaving you with nothing to get revenue from but ad-placement and possibly micro-transactions — both of which I personally think are largely doomed models for this, but that's beyond the scope of this article.

On the plus side, real-casual games can be made for reasonably cheap, are typically low on art assets and coding complexity, and make easy to itemize and derivate new products from a single codebase. They can potentially support a low-overhead business model in its own name, or act as gateway drugs to lure in potential New Gamers toward more ambitious products.

Old-school hardcore nerds are a stable niche.

Due to increased life expectancy and the OCD type of most hardcore gamers, they are in for the long haul, and won't stop playing and buying games as long as they can afford the time and money.

Capturing the attention of those players is a good way to build up ambitious game designs that take years/lots of sequels to reach their full breadth. Hardcore gamers play a game (series) as much for its development potential as for today's game as is, if not more.
The high barrier to entry that comes with games that are almost certain to never fully deliver on their overambitious promises (and player expectations) means they are not for the faint of heart, however: players and game makers alike who sign up for these projects must be ready to enter a world of pain and frustration, only redeemed by the occasional moment of pure bliss and ecstasy when things accidentally fall in place just right.

Because of the opposite aims of OSHN games compared to 'Real' Casual Players games, almost no bridging between the two groups is possible inside a given game, and if it was, it may not be beneficial for either party to allow anyone to cross over too easily.

The ranks of OSHN can be replenished to make up for those who fell to diabetes complications, by tapping the pool of New Gamers: provided a OSHN game offers some desirable features that can't be found in more user-friendly titles, and the game look'n'feel is not too much like a smelly shantytown, a fraction of New Gamers can be enticed into taking the leap in OSHN-land. Once there, they'll start growing bellybutton lint with their new brethren, soon to morph into proud OSHN forever, after they've alienated all relationships dating from their former New Gamer life.

New Gamers are not exactly sitting in the middle…

New Gamers aren't 'Real' Casual Players, by a long stretch: although they may occasionally play those, they don't consider real-casual games are 'true' games, as they expect more from theirs.
This doesn't make them OSHN, either, as they don't subscribe to the notion that poor gameplay and ergonomics, ugly graphics and show-stopping bugs are an acceptable and worthy price to pay for a richer game experience, which sets both groups apart, divided by fundamental values. …at least at first.

Designing for New Gamers requires the game to be accessible and easy to enjoy from the first moment in, yet to also hint at hidden depth and complexity early on, without making it overwhelming or angst-inducing. The second-to-last thing a New Gamer product should do is have players worry about making irrecoverable mistakes during their learning phase of the game, the kind that will only become obvious hours or days into it, forcing them to re-roll/re-start (hint: they won't, and will quit in frustration instead).

To an extent, successful design for New Gamers can be achieved without ever venturing further into complexity and depth than a lap-dance: the mere tease of flirting with deep gameplay can be enough to capture most New Gamers' attention for a long (and paying) time.
Good examples of this can be found in many modern CRPG, where the save-everywhere and 'rewind' mechanisms ensure no drastically unforgiving consequences can result from player choices, while still imposing some sense of loss/worth through the penalty imposed on 'wasted' playtime by the 'rewind' option.

In multiplayer games, New Gamers are looking for deeper and meaningful experiences, where their decisions do have lasting consequences and manifest impact on the gamestate and others, but where 'losers' always get a chance to bounce back and at least catch up with the head of the pack.
Although they will be welcoming high amounts of content if it is diverse enough, they usually care more for variety and emergent gameplay potential than for sheer quantity of features or size of the map.

Animals Crossing.

To a large extent, RCP, OSHN and NG don't mix well inside a same game: the antagonistic expectations about what makes a game worth playing (or dropping) mean it's rarely possible to reconcile them in a common environment.
What is true of individual games isn't of individual players, however, and just like many New Gamers can occasionally enjoy some RCP-aimed games, they can be lured into mainly OSHN-flavored titles that offer extra depth at not too steep a toll on accessibility.

'Real' Casual Players will usually not cross over into NG territory, because of the insurmountable time and attention commitments required by more involved styles of play — when they do, they're possibly budding New Gamers who didn't realize it before, and are likely to spend most of their play-time on NG games after they've taken the leap once.
Barring serious blows to the head, RCP obviously never slip as far as OSHN-land, and run away tearing their eyes out if they mistakenly do.

As for OSHN, they're savage, smelly creatures living in caves, jealously guarding the entrances of their basement dwellings and spiteful of anything that roams the earth in the sunlight — don't expect them to waste any time on n00bt0yz: their games are srs bzns.

***

[In the second part of this series, I'll have a look at how to make games that cater to New Gamers.

Stay tuned.]

Homeworld Cataplasm Online

2009-11-09T11:10:00.001Z

I've been spending quite a few hours dusting off years old pieces of design, mainly EVE-related stuff, since the announce of their December ~~train wreck~~ expansion… My most recent WTF? moment — and the ensuing drawingboarding of ideas about tactical maps and in-game intel management got me thinking: am I sketching a full-featured wargame, here ?

…and more importantly, does anyone remember Eschaton Online, a space-themed wargame a few years ago, that revolved around the notion of multiple play modes, ranging from god's eye strategy to in-cockpit dogfight ?

If you've played it and have opinions to share about that, send an email my way, pretty please: I'm curious to know.

The tales game designers should write.

2009-11-05T12:25:00.015Z

A common and well-known problem, when adapting an IP from its original medium to another is to avoid alienating the fans by betraying the source material, intentionally or not.
Some stories simply don't 'translate' well to any other medium, while others will simply crash into impossible budget, production or artistic constraints on the new medium that didn't hinder the original, and will inevitably force compromises.

Nowadays, creators across platforms and genres are aware enough of the issue that many of them try to factor the potential for adaptation in their original production — this is especially true of written fiction, which is a difficult trade to make a living from by itself, but where a single movie deal over a readily written book can sometimes — literally — get one from rags to riches.
Whether factoring the limitations of a different medium when writing a novel does any good to literature is debatable, but it certainly can help ensure the filmic adaptation will be less likely to betray the original book.

What of videogames, then ?

While there is no shortage of insightful work about the peculiar challenges of interactive storytelling, and of the difficulty to port a story from a linear, author-at-the-wheel medium such as a novel or movie to a more freeform experience, most of the discussion usually revolves about the pitfalls of 'too much' freedom or control granted to the 'audience'… How can you stop people from taking powergaming shortcuts with your story, or from simply killing off the insufferable protagonist/love-interest/sidekick the first chance they get, and still keep them somewhat engaged in a game experience ? — yes, Harry Potter, I'm looking at you.

It seems however that the converse issue of coping with the restrictions imposed by limited interactivity gets less attention, or rather the question has been largely abandoned, whereas more interactivity used to be the obsession of gamemakers during the pre-and-early 3D era.

ChocoPuffs Online — the slasher game.

Are we so happy today with the completeness and perfect seamlessness of the physics and visual engines in our current 3D game worlds that the only thing that separates videogames from movies is strictly a matter of artistic choice ? Bluntly put: I think not.

Perversely, every improvement in graphics and physics in videogames only makes matters worse by raising our expectations about immersion, verisimilitude and interactivity freedom to heights that can't reasonably be met, short of reaching Matrix-esque simulationist quality.

Videogames versions of beloved franchises tend to prove generally about as reliable and faithful to the original IP as you can expect the similarly-themed breakfast cereal to be: Mrs Butterfly's Morning Surprise: now with raisins !
…OK, bad example, those would be kinda cool, actually.

Everybody wants to be a Jedi !

With sandbox-themed games being all the rage these days, new problems arise, and MMOs are a spectacularly unforgiving platform for adaptation of original material that hasn't been created with massively multiplayer in mind.

Star Wars Galaxies is possibly the uber-example of that: when your IP is beloved for its rich and colorful universe, yet your entire storyline is entirely focused on the respective and successive, all epically-scaled hero's journeys of a son, his antagonist father, and the father's own father figure (because he's an orphan, true story), things get hairy shortly after they fall in the hands of the enemy.
If spinoff novels, comic books, CRPGs and even tabletop RPG can take the time to plead a good case to the fans in favor of delving into other, previously undeveloped aspects of the Expanded Universe, thanks to the directive nature of the medium (or willful association for TT RPG), MMOs don't have that luxury, and the capacity of thousands of free-roaming players to collectively drag each other down and afar from playing the game as intended by design can't be overstated.

I'm pretty sure my class should be able to climb stairs…

Denying players their rightful heirloom as the putative unique son of the greatest king to ever roam the galaxy is only a side dish in the seven course meal piling up on the plate of the designer in the process of porting a story to a R-POW sandbox, however: the entrée comes in large helpings of game mechanics/engine limitations.

Source material, whether books or movies, doesn't just define the gameverse and backstory, it paints the spectrum of typical in-verse actions heroes can perform, beyond the mundane or within. If the videogame version even so much as brushes near any topical feature taken from the original IP, players brains will be primed to jump right into action, and if they can't because the game engine won't let them, much disappointment ensues.

The nature of a massive sandbox makes it extremely likely any given player will not brush near, but instead run into a great many such topical features, and the odds of disappointed expectations are proportionally heightened.

Not to bash on the Star Wars videogames franchise, as I have a long love story with many LucasArts titles, but having to run the long way around an open grass lawn to reach the handifriendly wheelchair ramp, simply because my friggin Jedi can't step over a 4" thick kerb edge kind of kills my Force-induced buzz.

Thus, fiction writing and MMOs have a contentious relationship. Backstory books and chronicle-type novelizations are powerful immersion devices and seamless tutorial tools, and can vicariously enhance the otherwise limited experience some players have of the gameverse, but they can also shine a searchlight on stuff that simply feels like it ought to be doable in game, yet isn't.

Twisting the record straight.

There is a simple way to avoid the clash between a sandbox MMO and its derivative products or supporting source material, and that's to design and write source material hand in hand.

Many designers use snippets of written fiction, or simply roleplay during brainstorming sessions to get a feel for how a given scene or situation coulda-oughta-shoulda play out in game. This makes perfect sense, and builds on the well-known effect having to explain your ideas to somebody has on your own understanding thereof. For mysterious reasons, this practice has not been given much credit in the industry, and is largely considered anecdotal, a personal trait or quirk of some individual designers rather than part of any formal method of sandbox game design.

If done early and soon, and if actually made a defining part of the design process, design by tales can be a very powerful tool for designers to maintain design consistency, craftily expose players to content they didn't yet realize existed, and shape players expectations about gameplay.
On the designer end, writing helps figure gameplay 'musts', to better prioritize and plan new features or changes, and can be a great source of inspiration for new content or design elements.

There's only one risk with fiction writing as a game design method: one may sometimes get carried away while jotting down a quick illustrative example…

Derek goes global !

2009-11-03T23:51:00.001Z

Derek Smart's 3000AD is cooking a MMO based on their Galactic Command IP !

This will earn the qualifier of awesome, for real.

…it will also be entirely unplayable for regular humans, but that's par for the course with anything Derek Smart™, and it shouldn't stop you from checking it out.

3000AD is a unique studio, and everything coming out of it is crazy-prophet type stuff: they do games nobody else would, maybe with good reason, but you never know until someone tries, and Derek Smart (Derek Smart Derek Smart) does try, in his boisterous, rambunctious, compulsively driven way. That alone is worth respect, in an industry that is growing more risk-averse and vision-impaired every year.

I hear space-grognards moans of arousal coming from the basement, already…

Oldie but goodie.

2009-11-02T20:09:00.005Z

I know it's old, I know if you read this, odds are you're familiar with this stuff, but just in case you somehow missed it, as one of my good friends had until it popped up in the course of a conversation today, here's a link to a seminal paper by Nicole Lazzaro, of XEODesign, which is most definitely worth your time.

You'll thank me later.

Game stakes ≠ Gameplay Goals

2009-11-01T13:25:00.004Z

A consistent pattern in MMOs is that designers seem to believe 'high stakes' are enough to make any content worth playing.

The assumption is that if you create a huge enough penalty for not participating, or a high enough reward for the winning side, players will feel compelled to experience your content and find it Epic.
This is valid to an extent, as high stakes add tension and bring context to an event or action, which can act as multipliers of excitement, and bump something from merely exciting to positively thrilling. Still, a big virtual jackpot alone is no substitute for good gameplay, or gold panning simulators would be more successful than FPS and racing games combined.
If the only reason for most players to partake in a major feature of your game is what's at stake, and they play through it despite — and not because of — the gameplay experience, then the drawing board wants you to get back to it right about now.

As a corollary, a litmus test for good gameplay is to see if people still want to play a feature that has been stripped/nerfed from its rewards.
Enjoyable gameplay is largely its own reward, and when the design is good enough, game goals matter mostly insofar as they guide the gameplay, even if accomplishing said goals can lead to rewards with more or less high stakes — in soccer, you score by putting the ball in the opponent's cage, and this goal guides a gameplay that is about moving a ball around, not about increasing numbers on a scoreboard.

This is not to say everything should be easy, or that you can't submit your players to some duress, once in a while: a little pain adds flavor, and 'hard' difficulty can contribute to a player's sense of achievement. The real question you want to ask yourself is this:

Am I using my carrot/stick to steer players towards content they'll enjoy playing, and would people want to play this part — on the whole — if they didn't have to ?

Reality… as basement gods know it.

2009-10-31T15:52:00.007Z

[Part 1/x of the World building for dummies series.]

Game worlds are not MeatSpace simulators.
As obvious as it sounds, this basic truth about the nature of games seems too often lost on the most myopic nerds among players and MMO designers alike.

It's easy to understand the urge: lots of insanely cool/scary/exciting/epic stuff has happened through history, or could have happened, had history been willing to go just at tiny bit differently to fit our personal preferences, misconceptions, and power-fantasies.

— Think about it for a minute, dude: if Albert Einstein had been born Japanese instead…

— Of course ! Nukular rocket-riding Ninjas would rule the world ! Maan, how cool would that be ?

— Amen… I tell you, those Nazis really ruined it for us.

For better or worse, game worlds are teleological, designed to serve a purpose rather than the consequence of such fun-agnostic principles as the laws of thermodynamics and special relativity, thus the best can happen when designers fully embrace their god-like role, with the attached responsibilities of keeping internal consistency and making the universe interesting for its mortals.

Teleology is for the worse when game designers miss the point of 'fiction' and try their best at making a 'realistic' game world, based on their limited understanding of how reality works, which they take to be a valid guiding rule to achieve a consistent design — not only does it fail to produce anything remotely verisimilar, it practically guarantees the only places the game will successfully emulate reality will be at its most uninteresting.

— Do we seriously have to roll a check for Mildly Uncomfortable Bowel Movement at -7 on every combat round ?

— Doh… yeah: it would be Unreelistic not to !

The very worst case — and most common — scenario happens when game gods get bitten by the "But I'm one on TV !" bug, and start believing in their own infallibility — a faith they will defend in the face of contrarian facts with any shaky rationalization they can muster, under the delusion that coming up with lousy excuses for a sloppy job magically un-lames the results.

— Nukular rocket-riding Ninjas !

— Er… no-nonsense ancient Greece setting, here ?

— Ain't that a great mystery for the players to solve, then ?

Yes, if it sounds like fan-fiction, that's usually a good indication the design sucks.

World building for dummies.

2009-10-31T15:49:00.003Z

Fictional worlds are created for the purpose of providing a good setting for storytelling, or in the case of a game world, to support fun or meaningful gameplay, or both. The flip side is, without the rigid rules of reality automatically imposing themselves on your game universe, nothing but your own design's internal consistency protects the game world from behaving like fan-fiction, which is why you want to think hard about your core design elements and never, ever depend on the players' willingness to play as intended.

This series will look at the most common mistakes that can be done when building a game world, how to avoid them, and how to make world design more an asset than a liability for your game.

As the saying goes: once you go live, your game is in the hands of the enemy.

Ep 1: Reality… as basement gods know it. [2009/10/31]
Ep 2: Mapping the territory. [in the pipe]

Goofram — tastes twice as funny.

2009-10-17T12:40:00.005Z

Sure, you love its guidance in navigating the intarwebs, but the Church of Gloogloo is a bit bland at times… ever wished you could shpritz a dash of ebil genius to top your ad-browsing experience with something a bit edgier ?
Say no more, friend, for I have jumped on the bandwagon of Goofram, a Firefox plug-in (and standalone search webpage) and so should you, if you enjoy computer-generated deadpan comedy.

Of course, Wolfram Alpha won't know how to make love, and neither will it be able to make head or tails of most of your typical search queries, but there is some nice zen to how it fails — sometimes a much welcome perspective.

Epilepsy, meet dyslexia.

2009-07-31T20:36:00.000Z

Nowhere near the uncanny valley

2009-06-02T22:05:00.004Z

…but still: this gives me a warm and nostalgic feeling coming straight from the early eighties.

Maybe we'll get our flying cars, too, at some point ?

A Better Place than Google Earth.

2009-05-31T22:18:00.011Z

Looking for a poster child for the western world and whole earth future, if there's any to have ? Look no further, we have a friggin' winner right there.

Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place, is well on his way to put internal combustion engines and coal power plants where they belong: in museums.
All that within the next two decades, mind you.

Best part of it is, it could actually work.
With a single eureka and a deployment plan that shows uncanny smarts for context analysis, the same man / company could be both the inventor, the initiator and the main agent of the most significant milestone to date on the way to green power and CO2 emission reduction.

The idea is simple: gas-powered cars are responsible for about 25% of the human-related CO2 emissions, but electric cars are plagued by their limited autonomy and the recharge time of today's batteries , not to mention their unfavorable cost of ownership.

Eureka.
Agassi's solution is to remove the battery from the end-user's side of the equation, and not for trolley wheels.
In the Better Place model, the killer app is gas stations equivalents that can swap the main electric battery of a car in the same time (or less) it takes to fill a tank of gas today, with less hassle for the user. Better even, by taking advantage of a car's downtime on the parking lot to recharge the batteries, these pit stops would be only occasional, and in any case less frequent than with a gasoline car.

Swapping the actual battery instead of recharging it is genuinely brilliant, largely because it's practical, provided the infrastructure allows the process to be fully automated, a plan that doesn't have to worry about backward compatibility or established providers slowing down the penetration of Better Place-compatible battery swap stations, because there is no competition yet.

Electric car owners don't have to front the cost of the batteries anymore, and re-pay it over time through the e-miles they're billed on battery swap (much like today's cell phones are sold below cost by telcos and repaid by the customer through her phone bills/minutes recharges).
Not only does this solution reduce the cost of acquisition and total cost of ownership for the customer while solving the autonomy issues, but it also enables all electric cars to seamlessly upgrade to the latest in batteries technology as those become available in power stations, further reducing the per-mile cost and environmental footprint of cars over time.

The required infrastructure may seem like a huge barrier to entry, until you realize building charge spots at home, on the workplace parking lot isn't such a big deal, since they're basically smart power outlets.
As for the much more innovative Battery Switch Stations, it definitely takes more heavy duty work, what with the cars on conveyor belts and the automated underside extraction/replacement of batteries in under 5', but I'd guess in these times of economic collapse, the extra jobs are welcome, and the real estate for that can be found at affordable prices, where simply converting existing gas stations is not an option.

Double-plus smart.
You would expect such a perfect plan to be instantly torpedo'ed by BigOil™ with all the weight they can put to milk the last of the gasoline profit until the world ends, right ?
That's where Agassi's business acumen really shines: after solving the practical issues on the wares front, he figured how to reach critical mass to force his way in by going for the most eager early adopter for anything that gets them out of OPEC and Iranian grip: Israel.
Then he moved on to the euro tree-huggers with their 100+ % taxes on gasoline and gas-powered cars, and to the third-worldish/developping countries that aren't too happy about spending their limited monies on Saudi oil when they could use homegrown electricity instead.
Australia, Canada, Japan are hopping on the bandwagon already, with many others to follow …well, pretty much any place gasoline is expensive and not locally produced in sufficient quantities to feed domestic needs can see the incentive in the model.
The US of A lag behind still, as usual when it comes to not entirely burning down the planet, yet the combo of Obama's green bent with a totally wrecked economy should steer Uncle Sam toward the clean electrons light sometime before people start shooting each other for jerrycans, Mad Max style.

Full spiel @ TED '09.

Although there obviously are some bumps to iron out before the Better Place EV go global as intended, such as the big issue of actually feeding all those batteries with clean juice — lest eco-friendly EVs have to run on on dirty electrons from coal/diesel power plants — there is a good chance this model might work out: context has never been better for radical changes in the human transportation industry, and green is the new pink.

Where Google claims Do no evil as its motto (which is unrealistic, sounds a bit holier-than-thou and is largely disproved by the facts), Agassi takes a more radical and uplifting approach of not just dreaming the world was a Better Place.

My 2KW.
The enabler value of this project is not to be overlooked either: not only does it have the potential to single-handedly grow the market for clean electricity to critical mass, but it should make green juice available anywhere you have cars, which is also where consumer of electricity (for other purposes) hang out.

Once the infrastructure is there, and you can buy clean electrons right at home or at the corner shop for cheaper than the no-name current of your local utility company, both on tab and canned, the realm of possibles for creative/derivative applications (and lawsuits) is rather shweet.

Despite appeasing cookies thrown in the general direction of electric utility companies such as "Better Place’s services will also create an opportunity for utilities to utilize electricity produced from intermittent renewable energy sources more effectively (e.g., wind power generated at night).", it's pretty obvious where this is headed: the electrons route is about to become a two-way street as consumers awareness of electricity as a product (as in good/commodity) rises.

It's a recurring theme in Better Place's discourse that not all electrons are equal, depending on how they are produced, harvested, distributed and used.
With the green fad nowhere near ending, organic junkies will jump at the opportunity to switch to clean electrons for much more than powering their cars, as soon as convenience meets quality.
It won't be long after Better Place goes gold before homegrown and farmer-market styled electrons offers begin to flourish.

Will the utility companies cling on their crumbling monopolies, or embrace the change to get in business with local producers by offering to store and distribute their green juice ?
My guess is: both, and the former will go down lobbying and suing till they're blue in the face and get washed off.
The remaining ones will have to fight for their lives, by competing on retail price and/or perceived value (green is better, hence worth more) driving up the demand for affordable clean electrons.

I suspect Shai Agassi knows this already, but I can see clean electrons becoming an everyday alternative currency before 2030 if Better Place works out halfway as good as announced.

Meanwhile, I'd put my money in flywheels and efficient small scale water turbines if I had any (I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to work out what just crossed my mind, here).

Me luv Charlie.

2009-05-21T01:10:00.007Z

Charles Stross is one of the most endearing SciFi writers of the past decade, and I mean that in a good way.
He mans a very stimulating online diary, which he recently moved into a previously deserted domain of his: accelerando.org.
While announcing the relocation, he mentioned his Singularity ! A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds, which is not only funny as hell but also happens to be TiddlyWiki-powered.

Mom, I think I'm in love, I hope you'll understand.

PS: those stranded in Baltimore over this coming weekend (I know at least one who is) may find comfort knowing it's also where Charlie is (lolcat and stuff).

Operating system of me.

2009-05-16T15:02:00.024Z

This post summarizes a few ideas I subscribe to, and which you can assume I take for granted in any piece of opinion I write.
Being one of those people who are never entirely comfortable with certainty, and live with the nagging feeling that confidence is mostly about overlooking stuff — the paradox is only apparent — there isn't much I take for granted.

This list is intended as a helper resource for whoever decides to enter a discussion with me: if any of those seem too deeply flawed to you, you'll save us both time and frustration by first correcting me on those postulates you deem broken before you try to skin any other beast — either that or drop it.

Thanks.

[For lack of a more sensible ordering (that I can figure), entries are organized by growing character count.]

Less is (often) more.
You can't un-fry things.
Diversity is inherently desirable.
The passing of time has no purpose.
90% of any human production is crud.
No matter where you go, there you are.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Convenience beats quality under most circumstances.
The map is not the territory — don't get caught in metaphors.
Hard work and steadfastness can't alone salvage flawed designs.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Those who most tend to seek power are less likely to exert it wisely.
Our brains don't naturally grasp statistics, not even simple percentages.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Ideas should not be held responsible for the people who claim to defend them.
It's unlikely there is a god… even more unlikely it cares in the least about you.
Evolution is not a perfecting principle, it works on the just-good-enough principle.
Concepts should not be judged based solely on the success or failure of their implementations.
In most competitions, the optimal strategy is to hamper opponents' ability to compete whenever possible.

• New one-line-beliefs will be added as they come, if/when applicable.

• These one-liners each ought to link to a full entry eventually, but as usual, don't hold your breath, this blog is a low-priority item as far as I'm concerned.

• Catchy zingers that happen to be corollary to any of the above have been purposefully omitted from this short list, and will be covered — if ever — in the full-entry versions.
Ex: I strongly support the notion that "Universal Suffrage is a scam", but it doesn't warrant an entry in the list above, as it is merely a corollary of several of other listed postulates (primarily but not limited to) "the optimal strategy in most competitions…", "convenience beats quality…", "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." and "those who most tend to seek power…".
Ditto for: "Don't wait for your afterlife to make something of your time, there is no respawn for you noob."

On the way to Slate,

2009-04-30T00:37:00.004Z

we paid a visit to Tokyo Toys (their catalog is pretty nice, but the B'n'M shop doesn't measure up) in Trocadero mall, which hosts other amenities, including an arcade, a bowling, and this very cute cybercafe-cum-gallery where strange robots live.

[click the pic for more]

13, Coventry Street: first floor, better accessed by the ramp next to the Passaje del terror attraction (no kidding).

Steampunking the MacBook Pro…

2009-04-22T05:36:00.007Z

Right about to get one of the 'new' unibody 17" MacBook Pro, I'm told these tend to run *hot*.

Looking at Apple's specs, the operating ambient temperature range for these machines is 10°C to 35°C.
Needless to say, I routinely run my laptops on the high end of these temps, if not higher, which is a good enough reason to be concerned that those figures may not just be a matter of CYA on Apple's part.

Add to that the double issue of battery life and dust buildup inside the machine, both of which are tied to how often and how hard the two fans at the rear of the MacBook have to blow on the CPU/GPU heatpipes' heat exchangers, and it becomes obvious that anything which can be done to improve the cooling of this laptop by other means is a GoodThing™.

[Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure how much of the air intake is done from the rear grille and how much is dependent on semi-improvised various holes such as around the keyboard, etc.]

Since I want to keep the drilling through the MacBook Pro chassis to a minimum of roughly zero (and it's not like there's much room to spare inside the box anyway), the back of the display casing seems like the best place to hook up some external cooling apparatus.

Yet before I even begin to worry about where the heck 'plate' type heatpipes can be procured, or how to build a small thermosyphon, I'll have to figure out the first and so very weak link in my thermal chain, ie: how to extract the heat from the 'cold end' of the factory heatpipes, and bring it to the 'hot end' of a back-of-the-display thermal circuit ?

The wiggle room between the internal heat pipe and the unibody shell is about 3 millimeters at best, and right next to the rear grille, so I figure a sheet of copper attached with clips and connected with thermal paste to the 'cold end' of the factory heatpipes can get me out of the chassis without sigificant adverse effects on the factory cooling system.
…yet from there I still need to work my way around the bottom of the display (which rests inconveniently below the topside plane of the main chassis) to reach the 'hot end' of the external heat dissipation circuit.

And no, hard plumbing is not an option, the display must still be able to open, adjust and close with the external cooling system mounted on, so the thermal bridge better be flexible.

Ideas ?

[See here for an in-depth look at the innards of the 17" MacBook Pro Unibody.]

Glaswegian Computing.

2009-04-22T05:12:00.003Z

I'm currently looking into options for an unpowered and silent yet efficient cooling system for a mid-to-high end gaming rig.
At first, I looked into heatpipes and/or thermosyphon based designs, but I recently stumbled on an old experiment, and it got me thinking.

Yes, at the uncanny crossroads of Scottish cuisine and Xtr3m3 nerdiness, people figured deep-fried computing was an operating concept, provided the tub is see-through.
Seriously, follow the link, I'll wait…

The quick and dirty cooking-oil-in-a-tub proven surprisingly solid, especially on the noise reduction end of things, which is kind of a big deal for me.
I also like the elegant simplicity of a pure convection liquid cooling system with zero pumps or extra power requirements.

The main limitations of the oil-immersion model (besides the yuck factor when adding extra RAM) seem to be the potentially harmful capacitance and corrosive characteristics of cooking oil, but provided a similar fluid without those drawbacks can be substituted, this approach has real potential.
Oil-like liquids, despite being less thermally efficient, are especially attractive as they don't evaporate as easily, which fits the general less is more angle I'm going for.

It would seem practical enough to build a kit based on a ready-made durable container, where the motherboard and PSU would be placed near the bottom, while everything that needs to remain easily user accessible such as drives and I/O connectors could be installed above 'sea level'.
Some passive funnels could also be mounted inside the cooling pool to boost the convection cycle.

Provided the side walls of the containers were made of acceptably transparent material, plexiglass style, and that two or more (non-soluble with each other) fluids of different densities could be found (that fit the conductive/capacitance/corrosion bill), a 3GHz lava-lamp becomes a distinct possibility.

Obviously the one big technical bump is finding the right fluid(s).

Any ideas ?

The mathematics of hatred.

2008-11-05T22:53:00.016Z

While I have some objections to universal suffrage and democracy as flawed by design, I can't demonstrably prove myself right or wrong about this solely based on historical data.
From an empirical perspective, however, a solid argument can made that only a rough half of voters on any election vote in favor of something/someone, while the other half vote 'against'. That's enough to fuel the argument that majority rule sucks unwashed goats, yet also shines an interesting light on last night's election results.

Card-carrying members are taken for granted.

Just as with any other brand-pushing PR effort, more resources during a presidential campaign are devoted to bring in new supporters than to comfort the existing userbase, which naturally tends to reinforce itself when their beliefs are challenged.
Thus, campaign strategists go first and foremost for those undecided or uninvolved, and seek the fastest and cheapest way to bring them into the fold.

Why, oh why the hatred ?

A simple fact of a majority rule election is that it's really difficult to groom your own pony (no matter how good he/she may be) to look like a prize stallion in any possible voter's eyes.
Meanwhile, it's a reasonably trivial task to throw each and every accusation of awfulness you can muster (no matter how fictitious or far-fatched) in the general direction of the opposition and hope a little something will stick for everybody watching.

Ensuring a voice doesn't go to the other guy may not look as good as securing a vote for your own candidate, but it's at least half as beneficial when it comes down to the scoreboard: the worst that can happen is the voter is turned off badly enough by all parties that he/she simply doesn't vote at all, which is certainly better than him/her voting for the 'enemy'.

The more polarized the election, the stronger the case for this approach: when the game boils down to a duel, there's almost no apparent downside to smear tactics, since they can't result in outsider victories or kingmaker configurations.

From-the-hip probabiliguesses.

With this strategy as the default line of any strongly personalized campaign, one could expect the proportion of 'anti' voters to exceed that of 'pro' voters, but my guess is it's closer to a 50/50 split, as strongly polarized contests naturally tend to reinforce and freeze people in their preexisting biases, thus leading the 'positive' potential voters to opt in earlier and harder in favor of their candidate (than they would in a less intense election) which makes them largely impervious to the influence of smear tactics — either way.

Whether the final score is 50.1% vs 49.9% or 65% vs 35%, it is sensible to assume about half the votes on each side of the fence are cast in genuine support of their party's candidate/proposal, while the remaining half merely try to prevent a catastrophe by endorsing whichever candidate seems more likely to beat the one they don't want to see win the race.

[Caveat: This rule of thumb holds only within some limits of the scoreboard, however: the more extreme the final majority (from 70-30 up to 100-0), the higher the proportion of voters are likely to have cast a 'con' rather than 'pro' vote, and the more likely for the ballot result to simply mean: "This selection of choices is fubar, let's get the most scary stuff out of the way and run another, more sensible election, please ?"
This can be explained by an outlandish situation turning usually moderate people into temporary hardliners against the election configuration itself, rather than split over the choices divide.]

Speculating, one far-fetched idea at a time.

Obviously I have nothing to back this up to a reasonable certainty, my guesstimate roots in what I could gather over time from polls and talks over drinks with people of various political orientations (yeah, whoever they are for you, you can safely bet I'm all pally with your personal bad guys), but what I got from this thoroughly unscientific probing is nonetheless interesting.

Regardless of where the voters are on the political compass, or how polarized and ferociously fought the election is, each individual voter is just as likely to be motivated by genuine enthusiasm for "his" guy as he's to be only driven by a will to take down the opposition.

To clarify, the core values of one's personal political church are largely irrelevant to the proportion of 'positive' vs 'negative' voters in a group: obviously the farther out from the center one sits on the political spectrum, the more likely he/she is to be driven by hatred/fear of some 00ber ebil, be it soulless commies, vulture capitalists, christians, jews, muslims, atheists, fags, negroes, yni., and the main reason for people to niche into some extremist-yet-clearcut enclave is usually they're scared witless…
But that's not the nail I'm trying to hit here: extremist values certainly run on a hate/fear fuel mix, yet hardliners of any political group still can be separated between those who mainly idolize their leaders/candidates and those who mostly hate the guts of some specific political enemy/target/scapegoat, and when you take a bit of time to listen to them, both categories draw about equal numbers in the group.

So what ?

Well, by looking at this map, and in light of the 50/50 pro/con breakdown rule'o'thumb described above (assuming my hypothesis is of any merit), the spectacular victories achieved by either ticket in most states are telling a different story altogether.

The ballot scores on this presidential election sit in a 55-45 to 65-35 bracket, both in blue and red states, with few exceptions.

Using the 50/50 pro/con RoT, we can read about 30% of the voters in red states were strongly hostile to the Obama/Biden ticket, 30% were really favorable to the McCain/Palin ticket, while 20% of the voters were totally in the tank for Hopey/Joe-not-a-plumber, and another 20% hated McCain/Palin's collective guts.

Perfect symmetry in blue states, I'll spare electrons by not typing it.

Why half of the voters in each camp, boiling down to half of the total of voters would hate/fear the opposing ticket is left as an exercise for the reader, as the reasons are both plentiful and uncanny (for some at least), but one interpretation of the picture is that about 50% of the registered voters in any state each hate/fear the winning or losing ticket, and by extension, 40 to 60 percent of their fellow statemates.

On a national scale, the popular votes scores 52-46 at this writing , and it's a simple matter to extrapolate: 26% of the citizenry is ravished by Obama (hard to tell about Biden), and 23% just freak out about the idea of a commie-muslim-terroriss' nigger in the Oval Office, and plain want him dead.

Which could mean a healthy 49% sighed in collective relief (including John McCain) at the thought of Palin as president being no threat 'naymore — at least for now.

And yeah, because we're ugly cynics, we started a new betting pool on how long for some wacko to put a bullet in Hopey — predictions to be expressed in fractional values of a JFK term, obviously.

Enjoy the postponement of WW3, I know I do.

X-over 4 free 111

2008-10-28T04:22:00.004Z

[Full disclosure: I am a CrossOver Advocate, for EVE Online, Teamspeak and Ventrilo apps, albeit an unpaid one, so you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt over potential fanboism — but not corporate whore-ing].

CodeWeavers' CEO seemingly blew a fuse a while back (around july '08) with the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge, and then another a few days ago when some hiccup in the US of A high-velocity circling of the history drain sent the gas price at St Paul's pumps back down to $2.79.

End result: Crossover if offered for free (today) at CodeWeavers' website.

Does it look like a shameless plug to you ? It is, certainly, but in no way a shameful one in my view, as CrossOver is one of the best standalone WinXX emulators on the MacOS X platform (at least).

I'm a daily user of Parallel's Desktop for Mac, TransGaming's Cider (as it's the official platform for EVE Online's Mac 'client'), and CodeWeavers' Crossover (which, did I mention it, you can get for free today).

Objectively, Crossover smokes Cider on everything but audio, of which there is none at this writing: it doesn't crash nor pukes as much in the RAM, and most importantly for laptop users, doesn't attempt to melt your GPU the instant you launch a second client — and who plays EVE with less than two sessions, I ask you ?

There are obviously things you can't do with a WINE-styled WinXX emulator, compared to a machine-level emulation a-la Parallels Desktop, but when it comes to gaming, you can't beat the performance of Crossover, short of rebooting in native Windows mode — which is usually something I personally try to avoid.

So if you have a MacOS X machine, give it a spin, it's free as beer for one year if you jump at it today…

Don't trust the candyman…

2008-10-18T19:24:00.003Z

Not all wishes come true, and in the world of electronic hobby publishing less than in most places, but still… the Other Blog is finally on, and there's a slew of articles coming up for that one.

As for AcDpad, I'm still waiting on the long overdue upgrade to run more than one instance of self concurrently so I have time to write here too, but I'm not losing hope entirely on plan B, which is merely me becoming fantastically smarter and more efficient at time management.

Don't hold your breath though, or don't sue me if you do.

Harpo and C°

2008-09-13T08:44:00.003Z

R-POW stands for Recreational Persistent Online World.

Anyone who's been gravitating around MMO*, MUDs, MUSHes long enough has come to hate the MMOG/MMORPG acronyms with a passion, for a number of all very good reasons:

Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games is not a mouthful, it's the after-action of competitive eating (think what comes just after a bulimia attack).
The Massive(ly) is an abomination to grammar, and we look retarded enough spending our lives playing games way past our prime as it is.
The whole Game thing irks bearded academics and self-important hiveminds alike, not such a bad thing in itself, but kind of gets in the way of level-headed debate.
Also, everybody thinks of WoW when you invoke MMO* (or Everquest, back last century) which further skews the discussion when you're talking about POWs-without-elves.

Hence my coining (?) R-POW — pronounced Harpo.
Persistent Online Worlds is self-explanatory, and while the multiplayer angle is only implicit, it's also obvious from a craft/business perspective: there's little benefit in creating a persistent universe on the intarwebs if it's not to share the experience, and the more the merrier.

R-POW encompass the games, but also social/business experimental worlds such as Second Life, as long as the users are expected to enter and stay in the world on their own volition and for the purpose of entertainment/fun/recreation. This remains true even if the experience actually sucks goats, is a painful grindfest, and a fraction of the population really aims at making a buck by farming gold, and is not there for fun and giggles.

E-POW (pronounced Hippo, obviously), are Educational, and can include many forms of Serious Games, such as those meant to raise awareness about political or social issues, teach history to kids and whatnot, as long as they fit the POW part of the bill and aren't just a Civ-like edutainment tool.

T-POW (teapot, pronounced Colbert-style), are Training POWs, typically military or specialty simulations meant to teach and hone practical skills (as opposed to support general education/information/debate on select issues). They can also include simulations designed to help businesses evaluate employees or build team spirit. Generally speaking, they differ from E-POW by being purposefully designed for a select audience and heavily goal-oriented.

With that out of the way, expect to see me maliciously sparkle future articles with both *-POW and MMO*, for variety's sake…

Fall update.

2008-09-05T21:11:00.007Z

It has been a while…

And the drought is not over yet, I'm afraid: although there are quite a few notes piling up in my hard drive, I still am not the blogger for real, having sort of a block on pushing half-baked content in the open.

Namely, I've been goofing around with articles for the other blog, and reading like crazy, once again faced with the limitation of running a single instance on a linear 1 s/s time.

That said, I do sleep, and even dream. Thanks to one of the daily reads (I suspect), I woke up today with the vivid (albeit quickly vanishing) impression of a "perfect moment" kind of evening.

There was duck on the menu, but that's not key: I had the unrealistic privilege of sitting at the same table as Glenn Gould, Neal Stephenson and Will Wright, while Scott Adams was stuck in the elevator with Ayn Rand, to everyone else's relief (unfortunately, Charles Stross had missed his plane).

Unrelated, but the first episode of The Shield season 7 is out…

PS: Yeah, flight schedules are an insurmontable obstacle in my dreams, when death isn't, go figure…

I didn't take the week off.

2008-04-25T01:47:00.004Z

...I swear.
For some reason, 6 days flew by since last post, and I have no idea where they went.
Subjective time flow here is really weird, and/or I can't seem to get the hang of it.

I've massed notes on design and world building, but I can't bring myself to post half-cocked rants, for some reason (believe that, previous entries aren't a fifth as bad the brain drool as they could have been without copy-editing) ...maybe I'm not blogger material after all.

Anyway, I'll play tease, be it only to guilt-trip myself into finishing those articles.

Coming Soon™ on this screen:

Monica VS Phoebe: the dirt.
MovieOS — Part II: The Bad.
The other blog: because I can't post daily on one, why not make it worse ?
Game making and the meaning of life: of the great why ? that keeps us awake at night.

Until then, I recommend this Gama article about MMO*s and addiction (yeah, it's about as original a topic as RMT and Virtual Property debates, but it still got me thinking).

ttyl.

Frogs had Boris Vian...

2008-04-19T16:11:00.006Z

...the anglo world still has Tom Lehrer.

Lucky bastids.

[More where that came from]

Pentimento-free area.

2008-04-18T23:26:00.002Z

Since I started populating this blog in earnest, about a week ago, I've improved the template and blog on the fly, cosmetics-wise.

A side effect is I've been looking back at already published posts more than once, and occasionally edited released content beyond mere spell checking and copy-proofing, which is probably a good thing on average, but it got me thinking about the abstraction layer of the blog template.

If I had a hard time writing here, up until I tweaked this blog template to an approximation of my taste, what does it say about reading it ?

I realize I'm using this platform as a poor man's (tiddly)wiki, because I'm lazy, and I can't help but try and emulate the organic nature of tiddler-based writing on a support that is meant as a fire-and-forget journaling platform.

Thus, I overdo on production value, revising the past as I go, which wouldn't be so much of a lie if it wasn't for the fact blogspot is conveniently (?) devoid of versioning and history.
A few months/years from now, will I be updating old entries to account for new developments ?
What of interface and cosmetic tweaks, could context change be enough to affect the meaning of old content ?

Does it matter ? In any way ?
Guess that's what the Brainfart label is for.

Cooking made easy.

2008-04-18T14:36:00.017Z

This is a shameless plug for a piece of MacOS X software, but since it's freeware, you don't even have to worry about me having a vested interest in pushing this to your Dashboard.

Reminder ?

Reminder is a Dashboard Widget that took me some time to find, and which I've been depending on ever since, for everything from cooking to calling people back, to keeping the infamous *just 5 minutes* computer-time warp in check.

What it does is deceptively simple: create iCal events (complete with alarms) in the future with minimal keypresses and interface fiddling.

Usage:

Summon Dashboard, and if you — like me — leave Reminder on as your last/default text input, all you need is to type the number of minutes until the event, optionally hit Tab once to edit the name of the alarm, and press Return or Enter before you resume normal activity.

Time units can be toggled to hours or days prior to digit input, by hitting the h or d key first. Beautiful in simplicity.

Notes:

This is one of those *basic* tools I'm confident no MovieOS designer could overlook, yet is consistently absent from RealWorld™ vanilla OS distros.
In fact, before CASE Apps became Gravity Apps, their slogan was:

Applications that should have been in the box.

Spot on.

Their other stuff is nice, too — I'd buy Steel in a blink if it was cross-platform, but I'm still entangled to good ole S3's PasswordWallet, for compatibility reasons.

As a final note, it's worth mentioning what a nice chap Martin Kahr is:
Back in 2006, when Reminder 1.x was still Rem!nder, published by CASE Apps, I had problems getting it to work reliably on my tuned version of Panther (notably using case-sensitive FS), and Martin whipped a custom build overnight that fixed it and got me running up to the 2.0 release (Leopard friendly).

Tip'o'the hat, that's solid freeware support.

Zulu Time 4tw !

2008-04-17T23:52:00.009Z

Seriously folks, as if DST wasn't stupid enough, do we really have to combine it with the retarded concept of time zones to make things even more uselessly confusing ?

One would argue having hours all fuzzy and mixed up around the clock has a redeeming value, would it contribute to raise awareness about the notion that time is not, in fact, a constant and frozen dimension, but c'mon: grab anyone at random in the street — not on campus, you cheater ! — and ask them how switching the clock forward one hour every spring makes them feel about their LightCone.

Chances are the answer will be something akin to "Huh ?", or "Go away, you pervert !", depending on gender/age differences between the guinea pig and yourself.

Not only are Timezones stupid in essence, when no one sets their clock by sundials anymore, but they are botched beyond repair. Check the map, and tell me if it makes sense to you...

As national borders erode in favor of continental (global) and regional (local) spatial references, clinging on a literal translation of sovereignty from map to clock is about as relevant as the defense of flat earth theory, or the selection of rulers based on physical prowess.
...hold the presses, does "best hair" count as physical prowess ?

Moving on.

Zulu to the rescue.

That's an easy fix: let's all switch once and for good to Zulu, GMT, UTC, UT1, TAI, however you want to call it, and be done with that.

No matter where you go, then you are: no more clock fiddling, local time confusion, longitudinal discrepancies over nonsensically expanded/shrunk timezones. US east-coasters would have diner around 23.00h, just like they do now, only their clocks won't be blinking stupidly on 6 PM anymore, and it will still be about breakfast time in Osaka, just like today.
[And yes, we would take the opportunity to get rid of the dumbalicious AM/PM notation, as it really, really wouldn't mean squat anymore.]

If people can adjust to DST twice a year — a change just big enough to be unsettling for a couple weeks every time it happens — odds are pretty good they can adjust to a one-time, however severe change of display on their wristwatches.

Maybe the transition could be helped by going for dual-display of *old* and *new* time, while I suspect it could be more a drag than anything.
Alternatively, clocks could be upgraded with a fourth hand, coupled with geolocation, that would point solar noon for your current locale, and give a feel for one's "when" in the day.

That would be cute, and sell a lot of wristwatches, gotta love it.
[If someone knows how to hack a google gadget for that, eternal love shall ensue.]

Why UTC and not InternetTime ?

Short answer: because Swatch's iNet Time is a proprietary time.
Long answer: because Swatch Internet Time is just as ridiculously stupefid as the short answer above hints.

It's locked on Biel, Switzerland (no kidding), and not even accurate at that ;
It substitutes an arbitrary unit everybody is used to for another no one will get used to, as it doesn't fucking divide (because-we-can type of design flaw) ;
who wants to to mesure 2.31481481481 friggin beats to properly cook an oeuf à la coque, anyways ?

Case closed, as far as I'm concerned.

Wrapping up

Zulu is good because it's already a standard for time-critical applications, like airlines, high-sea navigation, and basically anything that has a non-cosmetic use for timekeeping.
Also, most people who routinely relate or travel to distant locales are already up to speed on their relative position to UTC.

As an ancillary benefit, coming to agree on giving each other the time of the day could be a nice first step towards acknowledging we're all more or less on the same boat.

Holy Carpaccio, Melissa: how campy can I get with punchlines ?

Ball-point ride.

2008-04-17T11:17:00.008Z

Toss a couple random items in a beta-grade teleporter, and you don't quite get that flying car I was promised in the 50's...
but this thing still makes for some cute future shock.

[PS: free cookies for anyone who can tell me how to avoid borders on pictures.]

[PPS: Found it ! Free cookies for meh.]

MovieOS — Part I: The Good.

2008-04-17T08:03:00.010Z

Don't let the Anal Nerd Squad put you off: MovieOS is great.
In fact, it's probably one of the best hopes for the otherwise sclerotic field of computer user interfaces to ever improve.

This is Part 1/3 of a short series about the relevance of MovieOS to designers.
Links to Parts 2 and 3 tba.

For those who are behind on their nerd jargon, MovieOS is the umbrella porte-manteau blanket label (picture this !) that applies to the peculiar logic ruling over all things computing, and notably user interfaces, as depicted in movies and TV shows.

Why you shouldn't hate MovieOS.

MovieOS is generally blamed by the Anal Nerd Squad for its lack of "realism" and technical soundness, in view of what is deemed CommonSense™ about computers and user interfaces.
It says more about the lack of imagination and insecurities of computer nerds than anything, except maybe for their cluelessness about story telling.

MovieOS generally does its job, which is that of a prop or plot device, meant to tell us somehing and further the story line.
As a believable operating system and user interface, it is usually out of touch with the state of affairs in RealWorld™ computing, and that's exactly why it's interesting to this armchair designer.

What MovieOS can do for us, already.

User interfaces, like all things human, are the product of their history, and it shows.
To this day, even though the available memory, computational and rendering power of most computers and appliances exceeds by far the requirements of spartan implementation, we're generally stuck with interfaces that say a lot about their ancestors and about the culture of the nerds and marketing drones who botched them, yet have little relation to what the user intends to do with the software/hardware, nor how she'd like to do it.

MovieOS, on the contrary is all about the user intent, purposes and ways: its form is supposed to let us know all we need to learn about function, because it is mainly through MovieOS that we will experience the impact of the protoganist's actions on the computer/traffic light/giant combat cyber-bunny.

So... MovieOS is all about usability, with iconic representations, symbols and metaphors which anybody in the audience can relate to and intuitively grasp.
...yeah, that's pretty much what you'd expect from a good OS/GUI.

— Except *in reality* computers don't work that way ! (object the 1337 nerds)
— Guess what ? It's a damn shame they don't, for the most part. (counters I)

Precisely that which irritates the ANS is what makes MovieOS a great bootstrap for reflexion on user interface: it's designed "backwards".

Let's dive in...

What MovieOS can do for us, almost.

A frequent objection to MovieOS is how it often performs seemingly impossible/ludicrous feats, like infinite image enhancement from a grainy CCTV/satellite shot.
Without pulling the Advanced Technology≈Magic joker card, we already have software that can provide us with results of seemingly finer granularity than the sample item provided as user-level reference.

While the classic "magic endless zoom" of Hollywood movies may be overreaching, what is within reach already (in some areas), is the possibility to pull pinpoint geolocation for a target from a satellite shot, and poll all relevant CCTV data from the immediate surroundings and timestamp.
If we assume streaming video pooled from multiple angles, even at low res, we end up with a solid base material to build a full 3D image, possibly in higher resolution (interpolated) than that of any individual witness camera.

With SmartDust sprayed in the wild or embedded in wall paint, no place is safe from such visual recompositions.
For a nice example, of SciFi-grade tech turned RealWorld™ product overnight, check this.

Another of the archetypal fallacies pointed by its detractors is MovieOS apparent predictive capabilities:

— How comes the M-I laptop knows in advance Tom will need to bring up a satellite view of that specific area in Chile, to have it at the ready just on cue ?

— Because there *is* a cue: It's scripted, stupid !

In some ways, MovieOS bashers, for all their technical superiority posturing, are just like 5 year old kids who can't help themselves and yell at the actors on the screen: Watch out ! He's behind you !

Because we can tell from MovieOS display what the protagonist just did, that's clue enough for us to guess her likely next moves, one of which will be confirmed by MovieOS eye-candied display.

Believe it or not, it's not too hard for a contemporary expert system to guess, either.
It's not a walk in the park, but provided enough background and context, it's not far-fetched to imagine automated systems making educated guesses, or responding fast enough to complex situations to seem like they anticipate.

For a RealWorld™, relatively mundane example, see trajectory correction, anti-spin/drift and electronic gear shifting systems on high-end cars: some of those rides would make you think they actually use the onboard GPS to tell the next curb in advance (they don't), and notice the pavement is wet and slippery before you did (they do).

Give an expert system enough history about your typical behavior, some good heuristics to turn that into meaningful context, keep it available as a portable/ubiquitous and non-obtrusive resource, and you got yourself an OS that will be one steap ahead of you 80% of the time.

Before anyone gets shot: no, Microsoft Office Assistants and various Wizards are not a step in that direction (because they ask you too many questions, too early, in a context with too many options in the decision tree anyhow), but the "recently used items" in Windows™ Start Menu are.

Wrapping up the goods.

Not encumbered by the software designer's set of aesthetics prejudices, moviemakers certainly overlook a number of technical objections, and generally make horrible mistakes, but no one among the large number of me is saying we should use MovieOS as a literal blueprint for an OS/GUI (although I'm a huge fan of Galaxy Quest).

Instead, we should see MovieOS for what it can be to us, a strong source of inspiration for usability, as it gives us a hint of how people who aren't software designers — yet know a thing or two about getting a message across — imagine what an OS/GUI should look like for a given application, and how it should perform.

Those of us willing to break the ranks of the Anal Nerd Squad and look beyond the superficial (and irritating) misrepresentation of hacking and engineering may realize this kind of fantasy tech data can be mined for gold.

[To be continued in Part II: The Bad.]

MovieOS

2008-04-17T07:49:00.008Z

MovieOS is a blanket designation for the way Hollywood movies and pop SciFi (in comic books, film, TV, etc.) depict human/computer interaction.

Summarily, MovieOS combines:

infinitely interoperable hardware/software (you can plug everything into anything, sockets match and much succesful handshaking ensues) ;
seemingly limitless computational and rendering power (sound and image can be enhanced to crystal precision from the crappiest original image/recording) ;
psychic-grade usability (a couple of neatly placed obvious pads/buttons activate just the function you need next, regardless of how unlikely it is for you to summon an Instant Satellite Hijack wizard in the middle of perusing the Online Traditional Thai Cookbook) ;
ubiquitous interconnection (you have link anywhere, unless the plot requires you don't, and the webcam in your backyard dog-house not only has X-ray and thermal modes, but is direct linked to NSA surveillance grid, and to every soda vending machine in South Africa) ;
GUI that come in three main variations, possibly mixed together, (1-DEU mode) visual -impaired, size 72 clear-on-dark glowing text and full-screen zooming kindergarten-themed icons, (2-Xpert M0de) manyfold-plentiful fast-scrolling lines of tiny blinking text filling the screen, (3-4L1EN Mode) 3-D floating glyphs resolving through smokey/watery effects, Jaron Lanier phant'sy ;
quantum computing, or something similarly magic, is implied by the ability to reconfigure any piece of hardware into almost anything (including nuclear grade power source/weapon) by mere fiddling of the software ;
obviously MovieOS doesn't crash or bug out, yet is susceptible to advanced malware, notably video-enhanced virri.

I have a passion for MovieOS, expect to read a lot about it here. Just follow the flag...

Reality TV, what if ?

2008-04-13T23:58:00.005Z

Anyone with a passing interest for the genre knows by know how Reality TV (like documentary film) is all about storytelling, be it at the expense of facts and 'reality' (unlike good documentary film).

So why do we still buy in Reality TV, knowing it is, in no way, 'real' ?
Call me biased (I am), but I'd wager it is somehow tied to expectations management.

Reality TV sets us in a hawk/voyeur mindset, were we expect to see 'real people' confronted with situations they aren't entirely prepared for, without the lifeline of a script, or the pact with the director she will try to make the best of their performance.

Ofc, this is a broad generalization, Reality TV is not so much a genre as it is a technique, or a platform, and not all shows focus on the same story, nor tell their stories the exact same way, yet beyond the pure voyeur shows exploiting the assumed candor of the consenting stalkees (which are pretty much constant in their mechanics and attraction), players' performances in recent shows generally stand apart from the typical lamb-to-the-slaughter of yore.

We all have stopped being naive about the medium a long time ago, both the viewers and the protagonists of reality TV.
The we-know-that-you-know-that-we-know convention may be why, ultimately, we can still identify, empathize with the people on display: both they and us are trying to bring out some depth and relief from what we all see through for a shadow play.

This dynamic may be more obvious in "People" shows (a la "Big Brother") than in game/adventure shows (such as "Survivor"), where the weight of character drama on the storyline is mitigated by action-centric plot devices, but even gamey shows such as Survivor would make for a pretty poor show of Iron-Man-Next-Door, without the backstory and character contextualization.

Why I am rambling on that now ? Well, because of a TV Show I've been watching, of course.
It's called "The Comeback", ran for only one season of 13 installments in 2005, and revolves around a has-been TV actress who agrees to be stalked by a Reality TV crew as the condition to get a part in a fledgling sitcom.

There are just as many good reasons to watch this show as there are to explain why it didn't make it past season one: it's unsettling, lacks pace and rythm, and is actually painful to watch (at times) for being eerily verisimilar — arguably more than most audiences are asking for.

And there's a catch: it's not Reality TV, it's fiction, docudrama-flavored.

The Reality show in "The Comeback" isn't real, the main protagonist (Valerie Cherish, of non-real "I'm it!" fame) is portrayed by an actress (Lisa Kudrow, of undisputable "Friends" fame), followed around by a pretend Reality TV crew, led by Jane (Laura Silverman).
Valerie's misery is exposed yet staged, as she's filmed acting a supporting part in a (nonexistent) network sitcom called "Room and Bored", directed by Jimmy Burrows (as himself).

Shown to us (directed by James Burrows, how clever) is what we're told to be the raw, unedited footage shot by a single camera, assumed to be that of the quite-not-entirely-fake-then-maybe Reality TV show.

Yeah, like it wasn't enough of a mess already. Eyeballs melt under matriochka-induced overload.

It's really hard to believe we're talking about one-take, no-edit footage, despite the aforementioned aching pace of the show... since we know what we're witnessing is an act, shown to us by professional actors and showbiz people, presumably following a script.

There's a strong disconnect happening here, not the least because of the irreprochable acting — man, these people pretending not to act really look like they're not acting... — yet also because our trained couch potato brain isn't sure what it's meant to look at/for.

The hurdles of grainy footage, mumbled lines, dragged-out developments and semi-boring memes we are willing to endure, or even embrace for the sake of watching something 'real', but they unsurprisingly turn out to be more than most viewers can take when watching a fiction.
Unless you stamp a large 'modern art' sticker on it, this turkey won't fly better than a videogame designed by the Windows Vista Experience Team.

Our perverse curiosity can get no satisfaction here, as we know from the onset we're watching a scripted performance, but neither can we indulge in a cozy ride of crafty entertainment, for half of the skill here goes to make "The Comeback" everything but cookie-cutter entertaining.

In a nutshell, "The Comeback" feels too close to reality to be entertaining or funny, and is not real enough for us to hope for any moment of truth, except maybe flaws in the fabric and cracks at the seams of the showmanship.

"The Comeback" feels very much like a labored jaywalk about the immediate surroundings of the Uncanny Valley.
That it doesn't quite ever makes it there is titillating, irritating, and definitely food for thought.
...enough that I'll ramble about it some more in an upcoming "Monica vs Phoebe" entry.

Linkz:
"The Comeback", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon
"Big Brother", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon
"Survivor", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon
"The Osbournes", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon

Live museification.

2008-04-13T13:09:00.002Z

George Clooney googles himself for Esquire, artfully pretends to be a virgin.
Because one really has to make the most of any Georgean Encounter, there is a "behind the scene" feature about the feature about george looking into the webospheric mirror.

I don't know what exactly yet, but it flipped a switch in the back of my mind.

Does that count as a post ?

2008-04-12T22:39:00.010Z

I couldn't say, really: although I'm vaguely aware electrons aren't among endangered species, the whole stream-of-(un)consciousness trip is something I usually keep for special circumstances — quality rambling time, solo under a hot shower, preferably barely awake, or drunk, or both.

I'm probably not the best judge of what's appropriate when it comes to blogging... let's go for a second opinion on the intarweb.
...and a third.

During my poking around, I stumble on this, which I will probably be wasting some hours on over the next couple days.

Still, the hive mind isn't helping much, and I feel stuck for about as long as it takes to fix a coffee, until I realize I'm sitting at ground zero of the blogosphere, or pretty close, and I oughta take a look around.

So I hit the "Next Blog" button in the navBar a couple times.

Christensen Family (English)
My Planet ... (Spanish)
Momentos OURO (Spanish)
Tenablog (Spanish)
Cheyenne Autumn Huber (English — cheaters disabled the navbar, I had to spin the wheel manually)
Football (English)
Liliana (Spanish)
Running the Beards (English)
DE ANTRO EN ANTRO .COM (Spanish)
Blog do Mario Mello (Portugese — Brasil)

At last, I learn something about the blog-geist: at 11 PM GMT on a saturday night, half of the most recently updated blogs here are spanish speaking.

Moving on.

Apparently a header can't be taken seriously these days if it doesn't sprawl halfway down a 17" screen...

I've been fiddling around with the 'pad layout, in order to make it a tad less awkward, and finally took advantage of a nice 3-column template from SuckMyLolly.com, thanks to it being released by Sharnee under a CC Attrib License.

As you can see from the demo blog, this is a very nice layout, but it's sort of a waste at resolutions larger than 1024*x, since the main central column is static in width (a common issue with most blogger templates I've seen so far), so I quick'n'dirtied my way around that, switched the theme to trog mode, and finally got rid of the classic photo banner that forces you to scroll just to get a good view of the last post and sidebars.

Speaking of screen real estate... the tiny composing window of Blogger is annoying as hell, so I guess I will have to find a third party-editing tool, since the (otherwise peachy) Resizeable Textarea FF add-on doesn't work on Blogger's WYSIWYG editor.
Any clues/hints welcome about that.

Anyhow, not only is the 'pad much less of an eye sore than a couple hours back, but I believe I also crossed all the required boxes on the checklist of a typical blog entry:

Blogging about blogging: check
Linking to other blogs: check
Ranting about my frustration/struggle with the medium: check
Pointing to a few authoritative/semi-useful resources: check
Not getting anything done while I muse about stuff to do: check

Hey, this thing is easy as pie — and I guess it counts as a Post™, after all...

Periodicity...

2008-04-01T06:33:00.009Z

OK, one entry every three months probably doesn't exactly fit the bill of online journaling, unless one lives on geological clock.
In my defense, I'm not really happy with the medium, and would rather use some tiddlywiki-like sort of platform, if I could find the time to tweak it to my taste for blogging.

Meanwhile, I've been stockpiling articles drafts on the laptop, waiting for some quiet time to sort notes out into something akin to legible content.
That time, I believe, may be about now.

Thanks to a recent relocation to an otherwise pleasant but internet challenged locale, I've spent the past 10 days sieging the local great firewall of censorship, and generally just trying to get on the damn intarweb.

Now that things are more or less sorted, I'm slowly making my peace with the notion that I'm just about stuck in a 20th century-flavored asynchronous online paradigm, where mail and semi-static content rule.

After I found myself firing up IRC as a substitute for MSN/Gtalk (because it's easier to catch up on group chat logs when one drops unexpectedly on IRC), Blogging suddendly started to make sense, in a @well mailing list way.

So... stay tuned, something may yet happen before another three months.

Oops.

2008-01-31T14:38:00.003Z

This place is the armchair designer drawing board.

It is not an artsy (of the eye-gouging school) book of prophecies, nor the feverish questing for absolute truth of a nerd groping at pseudoscience to reassure himself making games is grownup stuff after all, nor a lot of other things...

It is the semi-honest, barely edited, account of a journey through a world of thoughts, written in perfectly broken English.

This journey, and the relation thereof, have no clear beginning nor end, little periodicity or schedule, and only a vague notion of direction, in that everything that happens and is told herein relates more or less to the weird, sticky, mildly sick and wildly confused art and craft of building game worlds.

As to why you, or anyone should or would want to read that, I have no definite, much less convincing, answer. It is intended as a personal notepad, for reference mostly, meant to get half-gelified ideas out of my system before they clog a pipe, or something.
...which is not to say it couldn't be your thing, maybe you'll enjoy parts of the reading, maybe it will click for you like it clicked for me at the time I wrote it.

Possibly you'll identify, find some echo of who you are, were, or may turn into, but there's no lesson here, no deep truth or all-encompassing theory of the world, nor of the self of the gamey world creator: only what you get when a freewheeling mind jolts down stuff so he can move on to a different ramble.

Because of all of the above, there will be a lot more first-person voice than is usual on pseudo-technical/academic/theory e-writing, for I speak unto thee, reader, from nay higher place than this non-ancient, unimpressive armchair, and do so only in my own name, wary that I am to find myself — or you — in bad company.