kip/bot/blog

Thanks to 3QD for the video pairing below. The Kasparov-Karpov rally was a big part of my teens. As a 7 year old, when Bobby Fischer was goofily charming, the best chess player in history, and sane, he was my hero. Then, like many chess fans and one-step-up-from-horrible players, there was a decade of bitter disappointment and loathing watching Anatoly Karpov draw and edge his way to victory, retaining a championship that he never earned. (Fischer flaked over some rules and forfeited it to Karpov)

Of course, Fischer never completely came back. His 1992 re-match against Spassky showed strong (and innovative) play and his madness was still in check (or at least it wasn’t the raving anti-semitism of his last years), and that was enough for a glorious month of chessic hope.

Garry Kasparov, however, finally unseated Karpov and turned out to be strong enough, swashbuckling enough, and have enough charm and non-chess intelligence to be a new hero. Anyway, it’s nice to see Kasparov dominate the weenie even at BT’s big think site.

The New Yorker of December 20 has a profile of Shigero Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario Brothers and Zelda universes and a key player in the creation of the Wii (and Wii Sport and, if I had to guess from the crazy fun play, Wii Resort).

The profile talks about how surprised people were at what a success the early Mario games were and, in trying to figure out the unlikely magic, talks about a theme near and dear to me: emergence:

Again, the object was the rescue of a maiden, who has been kidnapped by Bowser, or King Koopa, an evil turtle. Mario, now a plumber, and joined by a lanky brother named Luigi, bounced through the Mushroom Kingdom, dodging or bopping enemies in the form of turtles, beetles, and squid, while seeking out magic mushrooms, coins, and hidden stars. When you set down these elements in ink, they sound ridiculous, but there is something in this scenario that is utterly and peerlessly captivating. There were eight worlds, with four levels each, which meant that you had to pass through thirty-two stages to get to the princess. You travelled through these worlds left to right, on what’s called a side-scrolling screen. It wasn’t the first side-scroll game, but it was the most charming and complex. What’s more, the complexity was subtle. Yokoi, Miyamoto’s mentor, and the inventor of the Game Boy device, had urged him to simplify his approach. The game had just fifteen or twenty dynamics in it—how the mushrooms work, how the blocks react when you hit them—yet they combined in such a way to produce a seemingly limitless array of experiences and moves, and to provide opportunities for an alternative, idiosyncratic style of play, which brings to mind nothing so much as chess. Will Wright cited the theory of emergence—the idea that complex systems arise out of the interaction of several simple things. “The hardware wasn’t much better than Atari’s,” he said. “The polish and the depth of the games were. Super Mario was so approachable, so simple, so addictive, and yet so deep.”

Emergent systems, complex systems from simple things, brings to mind “nothing so much as chess.” Embrace complexity, avoid complications.

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In general, I think most game players don’t follow stories closely, but there are some for whom the game story is their main dose of fiction:

/via Getner

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.