Playing at
This tweet by Nick made me a little sad, and I keep thinking about it even three weeks later:
@playglitch looks nifty, I think they should hire @markpasc asap.
because that would be totally kickin' rad.
I'd like to be doing something more game-like. I'm not sure what I'd really like to be doing, but this much seems obvious, judging from the amount of attention I give to reading and thinking about games (not even playing games per se, since I haven't been playing many lately). The rough passes I've taken at Make A Face (and the newly revived Six-a-phone) are game-like without being games—there're neither rules nor a particular narrative, which I'd say makes them toys more than games.
The nagging suspicion I'd be happier doing something gamier abuts an existing point of pride: I make the world better by helping people communicate. This argument doesn't apply if games aren't communication tools (under some circumstances they can be), so with what do I replace it?
There's one available argument, a sort of blanket art exception. I was enamored of some of Jim Rossignol's articles on and linked from Rock Paper Shotgun recently, so I took the opportunity to pick up his book, This Gaming Life. You find when you've barely started that, in this book's argument about the value of gaming, he intentionally avoids the topic of artness:
For the purposes of this text, I think that the issue of whether games constitute art can be safely ignored. I think this partly because there are so many other reasons to value games and partly because, as [game-themed artist Brody] Condon insists, "the question of what is considered art (or not art) hasn't been relevant since 1929, when Duchamp put a urinal on the wall."
The rest of the book is good, and might help me better reason the value in that sort of work beyond feeling it would be fun.
As one-words-for-you go, games are already this decade's plastics. We're a couple years into a game-ification of everything, so a grounding in games goes a long way toward designing interactions in any software application. The absurd example Jesse Schell gives to close his DICE talk (everyone and their dog linked to it already so I won't bother) makes it sound like we're about to also score everything, though, and I don't think that's true. Jim Rossignol makes the same point in a new article on RPS:
The less interesting players of my [pen & paper] games, however, were the ones who were excited by something else: loot. They rapidly became fixated on the material rewards earned by their characters, and would start to ignore the events that were delivering them. They now remind me of narrow-minded gamblers, where what mattered were the chips on the table, and the odds, rather than the mental challenge. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a scoreboard... It’s just that I see the greatest rewards in gaming elsewhere: in competitive games, where I’d be playing and (hopefully) beating other people, or exploratory games, where I’d be opening up something and seeing more of the world.
Real life has many metrics to score yourself against, including the messy amount of overall happiness you accrue; in the same way, it's hard to play Animal Crossing with an eye towards a score (bells? Happy Room Academy scores?) and not turn it into a boring grind.
Last weekend I was clicking around Topatoco and fell into the middle of MS Paint Adventures' Homestuck, a webcomic that's a clever amalgam of the strange worldbuilding of Unicorn Jelly and the virtual world prognostication of Everyone in Silico. It's also right out of Reinventing Comics for its use of the medium, and not for having an infinite canvas (that seems downright passé nowadays) but in that it's animated. Each comic is one "frame," but each frame ranges from a microanimation as in the first page to an entire Flash minigame where a character's exploration of a new space is directly controlled by the reader.
(The entire presentation of the comic—the naming of the characters from an unseen outsider, the sylladex logic applying to the characters' "real" lives, the commands you issue to go to the next page—implies that everything you see in the comic is itself the inside of a game. It's an interesting subtext that perhaps the entire comic is merely one playthrough of the real Sburb, with each character named and controlled from outside by a player in the real world. It may all end in a Tommy Westphall mindfuck moment, but somehow the story being a fictitious fiction doesn't lower the dramatic stakes, at least for me.)
A lot of its world model could apply to an Animal Crossing-style VW like Village (and I would consider what I could steal if I harbored the misapprehension that anything will ever come of it without a drastic reckoning of how I spend my time). As a narrative story, the characters don't have scores per se; the main number that comes to mind is amount of grist, but they're only resources to manage and expend toward an end. They won't win the story by hoarding the most grist, but by spending it in the right ways to meet their entirely non-numeric goals.
I also got around to reading this Tim Rogers piece in Kotaku, which is a treatise on how video games relate to one of their inherent goals, which is to make you happy.
According to Taito's Happy Button development team, happiness is knowing that you're better at something than someone else, knowing that someone else is better than you at something, and then knowing how much better it's possible to get.
What Rogers ultimately arrives at I can confirm from personal experience: to some extent there is an inverse relationship between a score and delivery of happiness. I have to wonder in the back of my head if, when I think I want to do something gamier, it's because I want to help avoid this crapsack world where every action you take is numerified badly against a platonic ideal total set by time-burning min-maxers working against their own happiness.
On the other hand, most reductively, games are applied interaction design. Maybe I just want to do some of that. Either way, it sounds like fun.
To torch a village
I picked up Torchlight in Steam's holiday sale, and it's interesting, especially since I haven't played Diablo II or a modern MMORPG. (Apparently Torchlight is going to become one.) It's especially interesting in that it's written with Ogre, which is one of the game engine libraries I was considering for Village.
For a long while I've wanted to make kind of a visual chat thing, almost like Comic Chat but more like an online Animal Crossing. (Since it's kind of an MMO without the game, you could also say it's a chibi Second Life.) So that's Village, and I had started trying to write it. However I'd started with probably the part I'm least familiar with, the client, and since it's a side project I wanted it to be fun, so I was trying to build a 3D rendering app in Python.
I tried using Python-Ogre but it was hard to build on the Mac (and even when someone fixed it so it did, I still don't understand how you're supposed to build it into a redistributable application). Over the course of evaluating libraries I also looked at PySoy, which is under the GPL, and Pygame, which is a wrapper for SDL and so it doesn't have any 3D support of its own. My current version (such as it is) uses straight-up PyOpenGL, which is easy to build and use as a Python library, but of course doesn't provide any support for game programming (models, audio, a scene graph abstraction). I was able to wrap some nice Python 2.6-era utility around it, but other than drawing snowmen from a tutorial it would take me forever to get anything done.
Meanwhile the other day some folks were lolzing about Lunix crazies in this thread where Jonathan Blow asks about using Linux as a primary platform for game development. I only skimmed it for Blow's messages, which was funny enough, but then this message struck me as important advice about development tools:
However, the development tools [on Linux] are just not very good, and it turns out to be too big a sacrifice. As I was telling someone in a conversation the other week, it was hard enough (and very expensive) to make Braid on Windows, where the tools were a lot better. Braid could easily have failed and never been completed. If I had had to develop Braid on Linux, where it is so much harder to build software, it probably would have failed. You wouldn't have gotten to play the game, ever.
So, that is too big a price to pay. I was willing to suffer some friction, to have to patch the source of whatever tools I was using in order to get them to do what I wanted. But the friction is just too great; the development tools are just too poor. I can't take that much of a hit, because I would never get anything done.
It's not like I hadn't noticed I hadn't gotten anything done because I had to screw around with libraries and engines, but this snapped that into focus. Of course even Jonathan Blow has to deal with this trade off, but to be a professional game developer he has to be ruthless, where as an amateur I've been at liberty to shuffle the deck chairs at the cost of getting anything done. (For that matter, it analogizes perfectly with a lot of stuff Merlin Mann says that I expect/hope will be the real point of Inbox Zero about what a complete waste of time you can make tooling into.)
And since Torchlight is built with Ogre, I can see right in front of me what this flagellation has cost me. Instead of dicking around with half-assed game libraries that fit my bad initial parameters, I could have actually gotten into the slog of hard work that for the Torchlight folks I've helped remunerate.
Metadvent
After seeing a few advent calendars posted the last couple days, I had the bad idea last night of doing an advent calendar of advent calendars... and now I'm committed. Check out my Advent Calendar of 2009 Advent Calendars 2009.
An idea from Another Castle
I've been enjoying Charles Pratt's Another Castle podcast, and episode 3 with Greg Trefry is also great. Among all the general chatter on game making, the bit in the middle about how they designed a "Family Feud meets Flickr" heuristic for a fashion based matching mechanic in Jojo's Fashion Show is a great technical idea.
Antisocial bookmarking
Every time I want to save or share a link these days, I run headlong into a wall of frustration. There are so many options but none of them are right; they're barely even close. I haven't built bookmarking into giraffe yet, so I'm stuck between these options:
"Readability" is Readability, but every other link there is for saving bookmarks. If I want to save a plain web bookmark, I have a few options. If I click "delicious":
The important things to note here are (a) it completely ignored the text I'd selected to quote, (b) half the window is crap I don't use (like Send, or the visible tag list), (c) it's 2009 but these tags are space delimited, and (d) this is the service I have to use if I want anyone to see links I save.
I still have a soft spot for Gnolia, but when I click its link (I use the mini-marker):
This is a much more compact view, which is nice. After getting used to Gnolia providing star ratings, I added ratings to Delicious and got really used to them. Since I first saw them on Gnolia, I'm not sure why the mini-marker doesn't have ratings. On the other hand, Gnolia uses a four-star rating system, and though I tried a couple times I can't adjust mentally from the Netflix five-star system—so maybe it doesn't matter that they're there anyway.
Also no one will see anything I post to Gnolia.
Here's Pinboard:
Not pleasing aesthetically, but that doesn't really matter. It doesn't have ratings, though. I hadn't noticed the nice touch that it preselects the tags field. The "tldr" link is also Pinboard, since it has the unread list feature, which I totally use. That link doesn't even prompt, it just pops up, saves the link, and closes itself. Handy.
But no one will see anything I post to Pinboard. (Handily that doesn't matter for tldr links.)
You might notice it's not in my link bar, but I had tried briefly to switch to a TypePad linkblog using the great new bookmarklet:
This is a pretty nice bookmarklet, but for the purpose of bookmarking it's not only missing ratings but tags, altogether. However, it's the one option that realizes the quote I wanted to quote is a quote, instead of leaving it in the description field for me to quote myself. Also this makes blog posts instead of bookmarks—not even link assets in my TypePad library—so it's ultimately not that useful for this, I think.
I would find it funny that none of these services are quite correct, but since I only remember that when trying to share a bookmark, it's really a moment of burning frustration that immediately collapses into a disappointed malaise. I guess I might just have to do it myself.
A clearly marked exit
On Sunday I went up to the mall to see some movies. I saw The Informant! and Inglourious Basterds, which were both pretty good.
I managed to avoid the mistake I made last time, which was to try to exit through the labeled exit instead of through the entrance. Through the hall past all the actual theaters are the double doors for emergency or high-traffic exit. I was there to see Moon last time, which was also pretty good, and which I also saw by myself. When I left, I decided to use the exit instead of the entrance I came in through.
Beyond the doors was a room that was under construction. The walls were unfinished board, and I saw some incomplete wire sticking out and other general signs of construction-ness. The doors were a clearly labeled exit, though, and there was another doorway with a clearly lit "Exit" sign above it... leading into a dark alcove. This was the point at which leaving became an educational adventure: it was a clearly marked exit, so I decided to keep going.
Through the little dark hall and the door was the top floor of a multi-story room with a big metal staircase, a red steel scaffold filling the whole room with broad, steep stairs. There were exits on each floor on both sides of the room, so entwined with the one staircase was another identical staircase, serving the opposite sides of each floor as the stairs wend down to street level. The previous time I'd been there, to see that new Indiana Jones movie with folks from work, we had gone down a similar stairway—so I didn't think a lot of it, other than noting again the weirdness of it not being a real stairway like in every other building I recall being in. I like to be quiet in quiet places, so I started carefully down.
A couple floors down is when I saw the homeless guy lying on a bed of newspaper on one of the landings. I forget if he actually noticed me, but I fled back up the stairs as quietly as I could. As I said, it was essentially a big steel scaffold, so as much as I wanted to be quiet, I doubt I did it that well. As noisy as I might have been, though, I didn't want to barge past this guy trying to rest on a Sunday afternoon—he'd obviously made himself at home, and I wouldn't want someone barging through my home just because it was a clearly marked exit—so I tried some of the doors. I found that (not without reason, I suppose) they were locked, only opening out into the stairway. Even the door at the top I came through was locked.
At some point the thought might have occurred to call mall security or someone for assistance, but either I'd let my phone battery run down or I couldn't get any signal in this enclosed stairway. Eventually I decided I'd try going down the other, entwined staircase. Since these were not really part of the internal architecture of the building, the two staircases weren't actually joined in any way. To switch stairs, I had to go halfway down one of the stories, to where the stairs' mutual downward crossing met, and flip over the rails. It was especially scary given the fully utilitarian incline of the stairs; while there wasn't enough room to fall between the rails, falling down the opposite staircase would still be more of a fall than a roll. Taken carefully, though, it was fine.
I checked a couple of the doors on the other side, but while the top one had more of an alcove than the other doors, it was still locked. I started down on the other side, and though there was a moment of panic when I found more newspaper strewn on a landing, apparently only the one guy was there. I made it to the ground floor where the door to the mall's side street let me right out.
So Moon was pretty good, but I wasn't able to give it the reflection I might otherwise have.
Rainy season
I should agree with Andrew that it's suddenly winter, but that only makes the past couple days unseasonably warm. Back east I remember it happening at the end of October, making Halloween not only a scary night when people are out in the dark, but the first time to notice how cold it's getting. At least we'd have a transition, though; given Chattanooga's at roughly the same latitude, I guess it's the moderating effect of the ocean and the bay.
I'll be as sick of the rain as anyone come spring, but the next morning after the big rain this week, I was trying to think of the opposite of "Rain, rain, go away." Maybe it's Rain, rain, come again, interfere in works of men.
Getting cool
The weather is starting to get cool. Friday night it was great for walking home: cold and breezy and dark. Walking past the train station, it reminded me of dark evenings commuting home, trying to stay awake while wrapped in the warmth of the train, playing Animal Crossing on the DS as night settled into my town same as outside.
Until the police dog barked at me.
Some recent TV shows
Consider this a disservice: after my marathon viewing of the last 30 discs of The West Wing, I think I've tamped down my TV habit for a while, so I thought I'd share what kept me from doing anything rewarding with my free time.
Friday Night Lights: Season 2 ➤
The team's future hangs in the balance in the second season of this hard-hitting NBC sports drama as coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) prepares to leave Dillon for a college-level coaching job at Texas Methodist University. Unchanged in her thinking, his pregnant wife, Tami (Connie Britton), holds firm to her decision to stay behind with their daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden) to raise the new baby, forcing Eric to move to Austin alone.
John from Cincinnati ➤
In the quiet community of Imperial Beach, a tormented family of pro surfers is thrown into conflict by the sudden arrival of two strangers, a young Midwesterner (Austin Nichols) who wants to learn how to surf, and a man with a hidden agenda and dark motives. Created by David Milch, the man behind HBO's "Deadwood," this moody oceanfront drama also stars Rebecca De Mornay, Luke Perry and Bruce Greenwood.
The IT Crowd: Series 2 ➤
The inaction continues in the second round of this BAFTA-nominated British comedy that follows the desperate lives of three miserable members of an IT support team employed at Reynholm Industires. The show's sophomore season finds a new boss (portrayed by Matt Berry) shaking things up, Moss (Richard Ayoade) signing up for a course in German cuisine and Jen (Katherine Parkinson) landing a promotion.
Lost: Season 4 ➤
The diverse band of castaways continues to fight for survival on an island replete with mystery in this critically acclaimed TV series. As more information about the characters' lives surfaces, the dangers on the island relentlessly challenge them. The ensemble cast of this Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning drama includes Michael Emerson, Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monaghan, Daniel Dae Kim and Terry O'Quinn.
Wonderfalls: The Complete Series ➤
In a small gift shop adjacent to the magnificent Niagara Falls toils Jaye Tyler (Caroline Dhavernas), a highly intelligent Ivy League grad whose parents have invested all their hopes and dreams in her. Much to their chagrin, all Jaye wants is to work as a clerk at the store, until unexplainable events -- such as lifeless objects speaking to her in secret -- remind her that she may actually be destined for an offbeat kind of greatness.
Boomtown ➤
This acclaimed series about a group of L.A. detectives (Donnie Wahlberg, Neal McDonough and Mykelti Williamson) puts a unique spin on the typical police drama. Each crime story is told from several points of view -- the victim's, the perpetrator's, the rescue team's, the district attorney's and the media's -- all presented out of sequence, leaving viewers guessing about the facts of the crime until the very end. Includes all Season 1 episodes.
Leverage: Season 2 ➤
Follow the high-stakes exploits of former insurance agent Nathan Ford (Timothy Hutton) and his team of thieves, hackers and grifters as they use their talents to help innocent victims win justice against ruthless corporations and faceless government agencies. In this sharp drama's second season, con artist Sophie (Gina Bellman), gadget geek Alec (Aldis Hodge) and the others must push their skills to the next level in a new round of cases.
Check for new episodes every week to watch instantly on Netflix!
30 Rock: Season 1 ➤
Tina Fey stars as Liz Lemon, the lead writer on a television variety series à la "Saturday Night Live," in this Emmy-winning workplace sitcom co-starring Jane Krakowski, Tracy Morgan and the scene-stealing Alec Baldwin
. When brash network executive Jack Donaghy (Baldwin) arrives on the scene to pep up the show, he unnerves the cast and crew with his meddlesome ways -- among them, hiring a whacked-out movie star (Morgan).
The treachery of APIs
Well, I had wanted to make all the posts get mirrored to my TypePad profile, but there are no APIs for doing that and I'm not going to do it manually. So I guess I'm not going to do that yet.
