kip/bot/blog

Love this email I just got from Amazon:

Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:

- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.

- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.

- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.

Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.

Nice concept around Nokia’s (underrated) N-Gage platform. For years, their creative has been trying to humanize games and transform “gaming” (a word that dorkifies and marginalizes the product) into “playing”. This is a fun concept (which has gone viral . . . Or, put another way, was amusing enough to people for them to share it) and the game has some charm and visual surprise to it. Most important, though, it turns video games into things people play and unites N-Gage with Nokia’s larger brand promise of “Connecting people”

Been playing MYST on the iPhone and having fond memories, renewed admiration for the game, and a useful sense of disappointment.

Fond Memories
I loved MYST when it came out. It was a revelation — a rich, lush world that I simply liked looking at, a strong enough (though not great or self-sustaining) story that gave me a sense of urgency and grounding in the game, and puzzles that had a certain logic in the milieu and were genuinely interesting in and of themselves. That last point was a big sticking point in the doomed adventure game genre. All too often in the 90s, game designers would drop in really dumb puzzles (put the broken coffee mug together to see the picture and get the clue!), cliches (the puzzle toy Simon was repurposed in literally dozens of games), or byzantine pixel/scavenger hunts that required you to work but not think in rewarding ways. MYST puzzles were interesting systems that needed to be figured out, or riddles that you could actually think about away from the game, or visual puns that were intrinsically engaging. But that’s just me bemoaning the genre’s demise.

The key for me, though, was how much I wanted to be in the game. There were the crazy brothers, trapped inside a book:

This moment was iconic for several years. The guy is trapped in the blue book (his twin is trapped in a red book), needs you to fill the book with blue pages to free him. As you explore the world of MYST (an island based on Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island), you gather clues about the moral and psychological soundness of the twins. Every time you go to the book, the brothers implore you: “The blue pages, bring me the BLUE pages!”, a line/device which was spoofed in subsequent games.

The game is also beautiful if you enjoy a steampunk/Verne look:

In addition to looking great, this was the first great, and may still be among the best sound designs. Each image and sound gave me flashbacks to the first sense of discovery and wonder at the game (where am I? how cool! how did it get built?), and made wandering around the world fun. I orginally played this with my girlfriend (another gaming landmark: the elusive game your girlfriend will play!) and distinctly remember saying things like “let’s go to Channelwood first, I like it there” or “wait wait, look around a minute”.

Renewed Admiration for the Game

There is much lore around the game’s production. Two brothers with a small number of computers, using Director, 3D Studio Max, home made sounds and a couple computers for rendering, pulled it off. Of course, in those early-WIRED days, when everything wanted to be a movie or would benefit from being more like a movie — rather than being its own form — they were talking to film studios, getting repped by big agents, blah blah blah. But the game was and still is a remarkable thing, proof that tight constraints, even absurdly tight ones like 1990s era PCs, create great designs.

Failure to Immerse

The only disappointment with the iPhone game, and I think it’s instructive, is that MYST just doesn’t pull you in. The screen resolution is fine for the conveyance of information, the screen size is adequate for finding hotspots with a blunt finger-tip, and the sounds still help with gameplay and location cues. But the screen doesn’t take up enough eye-width, or field of vision to be truly immersive.

This was interesting to me, since I actually watched the entire run of Firefly (sf western style TV show that run for fourteen episodes before being unjustly cancelled) on the first generation iPod video, on an elliptical trainer on the gym. Screen size isn’t a general requirement for absorption in a narrative TV show. But a decent screen size is needed for the active suspension of disbelief and immersion. I say active suspension rather than willing, because for a game like MYST, which relies on stills, involves some clunky transitions, and occasional howlers in the dialogue, there is more artifice to overcome — probably more aritifce, even, than reading a book where you don’t have trip-ups that break the flow and risk snapping you out of the undisbelief reverie.

The other artifice that you’re constantly reminded of is the screen itself, which you have to hold and interact with directly. This is an instance where a mouse that is remote from the screen is actually superior to the intuitive touching of the screen. By separating the viewing area from the interface and the hand from the eye (at least physically) you have fewer intrusions into the environment.

Ah well, ten dollars that didn’t result in gaming joy, but did teach me something about narrative, HCI, and immersion.

It also inspired me to dig out the game (or buy it again) and maybe dig out puffy headphones and wander around the Ages again.

Mattel’s electronic football game might be the simplest great game I’ve played.

When I posted this to flickr, someone reminded me that the game had a click that got faster and more menacing the longer you rushed for . . . So simple: three direction keys, one bright led, 5 medium ones.

World of Warcraft’s newest “Echoes of Doom” patch was a big one sizewise. Getting ready for the “Lich King” expansion pack, probably. (This expansion pack will add a new world and the possibility of advancing ten more levels. In general, they’re a big deal, and almost always worth the fuss.) When I loaded this one, there was a new icon which, when clicked, shows a calendar:

Not only does it have a listing of fun events — the Brewfest, a Faire, the Halloween games — this calendar is available to your guild mates for scheduling things such as raids, guild meetings, and resource sharing. This game’s a gas.

Riding to and from Washington on the Acela yesterday, we were only able to find seats in the quiet car. At 5:45 in the morning, I reminded my colleagues to bring their DSes so we could play some head-to-head games (which, sadly, I hadn’t done on the DS before).

For those who haven’t been in a quiet car on Amtrak, it’s a trip. Manna from heaven for people who need to concentrate, want to sleep, or hate the loud cell phone conversations. The self-policing, however, can be over-zealous. Two co-passengers yesterday sat behind a woman who was sitting next to a man who apparently was a loud PC-typist. In reportedly pissy tones, she grilled the percussionist-emailist about how long he planned to type, with heavy sighs, and pointed intonation. It’s a tough crowd.

But three of us are punchy with morning coffee and adrenaline and lack of sleep (It was a 7 AM train, with boarding at 6:30) and need to play Mario Kart, a competitive racing game with all the cute characters from Nintendo. In addition to racing, you pick up power-ups which can give you speed boosts, but which can also be offensive things to lob at your opponents (turtles that you trip, octopus that sprays ink on your windshield so you can’t see, and the classic banana peel). So, while we’re playing, we’re desperately trying to be quiet — whispering trash talk, creating Nintendo-appropriate equivalents of flipping the bird, celebrating wins, taunting when you’ve done something clever — it was awesome.

Better yet, though, on the way back, we played Mario Party, a game where you roll dice and move around collecting points and things, but also where the squares allow you to play mini-games (like whack a mole, connect the dots, tangoes). One of the games required you to blow into the microphone in order to knock down a wall. Hard, fast breaths were advised. I was sitting at a table with three strangers, determined to win, and blowing into the mic as discreetly (and quickly and powerfully) as I could. It was crazy awesome funny. (The scotch from my flask helped, but it was fun under any circumstances.)

Nintendo are geniuses.

From today’s NYT Football for Smarties guide, a description of what quarterbacks are doing during the 3.5 seconds they have after the snap to throw the ball. Addressing the idea that a quarterback is rapidly surveying and weighing his options:

Unfortunately, the theory is wrong. If quarterbacks were forced to contemplate their decisions, they’d get sacked every time, a classic case of paralysis-by-analysis. What recent brain research suggests is that quarterbacks rely on their unconscious; an experienced quarterback picks up defensive details he’s not even aware of. Although he doesn’t consciously perceive the blitzing linebacker, the quarterback’s unconscious monitors his movement. When the QB glances at his receivers, his brain converts these details into fast emotional signals, so that a receiver in tight coverage gets associated with fear, while an open man triggers a burst of positive feeling. It’s these inarticulate emotions, and not an elaborate set of calculations, that tell the best quarterbacks when to let the ball fly. In the pocket, it turns out, it pays not to think.

NYT article today about the last pinball machine manufacturer. One of those articles that makes me love living in NY and love the Times. The article is a reporter’s dream: a small world of pinball fanatics (including a “historian of the sport”), a 62-year old owner who yells at his employees for not playing enough pinball and bruised a rib snowboarding in December, really cool pictures of the craft and the mass of the enterprise, and fun quotes like a bug list which includes the comment “flipper feels soft.”

This article also highlights how well the Times has evolved into its digital presentation of itself. I’ve been getting caught up on my podcasts and just listened to a conversation about Eric Alterman’s New Yorker article on the death of newspapers. Articles like this show that, on the content side at least, that some papers are finding ways to embrace the medium: interactive slideshows that highlight photography and have a slightly different narrative arc, the nice incorporation of sound files into an otherwise conventionally formatted article, the use of thumbnails on the top page to pull people in (the two pics above are intriguing at thumbnail size).

Silly but part of the appeal of the game.  Creating humorous, clever, even downright creative moments with your character and the environs.

“Our guild just moved up to number 20 on our server.”

I’m riding the subway home with a friend, the guy who, among many other contributions to my life, got me hooked on World of Warcraft (WoW). I haven’t played in forever, but the night before I logged onto WoW specifically to talk to him. (We’re at a point where I log on to WoW and we schedule subway rides home to get caught up.)

We talk a little bit longer when I realized what he said. “Wait. How do you know your guild’s rank?” Well . . .

Turns out (how often do I use that phrase? this is the last time) that Aspir from the guild Ludicrous Speed has created a site that taps into the WoW Armory and, using an algorithm all his own, ranks guilds. He’s doing for World of Warcraft what Bill James and the SABERMetricians have done for baseball: created an objective data-driven way of understanding and evaluating a game while at the same time giving fanatics and geeks a whole new way to spend endless hours talking about something they love.
So let’s unpack the sentence for nonWoWers (and make sure I’m getting it right).

One of the best things about Wow is that, while you can in fact play solo, the most crazy over-the-top (or, as the kids say off the hook) fun to have is doing group activities. These include quests, which every player needs to do to efficiently advance and which requires working in concert with 3 - 5 other players. Then there are raids. Raids are special places in the WoW game which are restricted to players of certain levels, contain really nasty hard to beat bad guys, and yield nifty treasures. To beat the nasties, you usually need over a dozen people with the right mix of skills and who work well together. Players create guilds for a variety of reasons, but most guilds are heavily focused on raids.

I’ve only been on raids three or four times. They are time-consuming to actually do, since most raids are complex and require multiple tries. They even take time to coordinate. Raid parties are usually organized by the in-game chat system, then people have to fly to the location, often stopping at a bank to pick up supplies, or going to a store to buy “mats” (materials) so they can make potions, bandages or other items needed for the raid. That’s a prohibitive amount of time for me, but the few times I have done it, it’s been some of the funnest gaming I’ve ever done. For a better feel of a raid, check out youTube for videos that guilds publish of their raids. (There is a whole genre of videos celebrating raid completions or mocking the d-bags who get a little caught up in it. Some of them show quite elaborate planning processes, including spreadsheets, maps, Xes and Os that look like a football playbook.)

So, that’s a raid. The WoW Armory is an API where players can check out other players and guilds. Here’s my main character:

The character name is Vishniak (named after Floyd Wayne Vishniak, from Neal Stephenson’s Interface. most of my characters are named after Stephenson characters and it’s great fun to run into other Stephenson characters — could I be any dorkier? oh yes . . .). Vishniak belongs to the guild “Victory not Vengeance” (I didn’t come up with the name, but I am proud to have been a charter member). Most important, Vish owns the “Destroyer’s Mantle”. If you look at the description, you’ll see that it “Binds when picked up.” That means that once I pick up the object, I can’t give, sell, or trade it to another player. Certain objects which bind on pick up (”BOP”), can only be acquired after the successful completion of a raid. Put another way, I can only own certain objects if I was present at the killing of a particular bad guy.

So, we have a classic web2.0 thing here. An open API that exposes data, a small, fanatical audience with no small amount of technical chops, and a larger, less technical audience that is curious about the data and will engage spiritedly in detailed conversations.

When Bill James began crunching through baseball stats by hand, he said he wanted to find baseball ‘truth’. Aspir describes his beginnings in slightly less exalted, but equally geeky terms:

I’ve been working on this site in my off time for probably going on 2 months now. It started one evening after my guild, Ludicrous Speed from Bloodscalp, downed Gruul for the first time and the other officers and I began to wonder, “Where does this put us in guild rankings on our server?”.

Gruul is a baddie in a raid. Notice, that he says “for the first time” (this becomes significant in debates about his scoring system). What Aspir did to answer this question was create a formula that would measure the strength of a guild. The formula is based on the BOP items possessed by a guild’s members. If you look in Vishniak’s bag above, you can assume that I am carrying around my best gear and you can tell from the BOP items which raids I have participated in (I can only have a Gruul BOP item if I was there at the time he was dropped). You can ladder up from Vishniak to my guild and find the other BOP items owned by other guild members.

So you could create a formula that assigns points to a guild like so:

gather a list of the BOP items owned by individual players in a guild, distill that list (de-dupe) to a list of bad guys beaten, assign values to those bad guys, add up the points and that’s the score of the guild. Rinse, repeat, and rank as needed.

Number geeks, baseball fans, and AD&D players will immediately see the logic of the formula and quickly identify at least four areas for intense theological and dorkily fun debate: how do you assign point values to the raids? how do you handle guilds who have completed a raid several times? shouldn’t you divide the points by the number of members? aren’t there other things that we should factor into a guild’s strength like average level, complete sets of equipment? It’s like asking who is the better baseball player, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? There are so many factors, objective, subjective and somewhere in between, that the arguments can go on forever and be entertaining for almost that long. (The most recent definitive answer to that question can be found in Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s Babe Ruth, btw. Bonds ekes out wins on hitting and fielding, but Ruth’s pitching — which the guys at Baseball Prospectus convert into runs contributed, the only measure that counts — puts him over the top. That discussion is also a good overview of baseball statistics’ current state of evolved geekdom. The exercise of converting pitching — the quintessential run prevention activity — into runs contributed — the atomic unit of baseball stats is — nerdazzling.)

And these debates are already starting. The FAQ on the guild ranking site, called Wowjutsu, is a quick look at the major issues under discussion (the equivalent of on-base percentage explanations, at the beginning of a baseball stats book — it’s important, but there’s so much more). The issues that have bubbled up to the FAQ indicate a rich future for those so inclined: the scoring of multiple kills of a boss, how to handle guild alliances, dealing with guild defections. Dig into the notes and you’ll see updates about tweaks to the formulas.

This is yet another testament to how good a game WoW is. No matter how many hours you’ve played it, no matter how many times you’ve done every single thing there is to do in the game, there is a way to breathe new life into it. Over the last three years, I have grown bored of the game to the point where I have uninstalled it to reclaim disk space, only to hear about something that pulls me back in This time, for players, it’s the Bill Jamesian search for WoW truth.