I randomly decided to play GTAIV again. Started the mission where you have to taxi Little Jacob around, ignoring his incomprehensible babbling and relying on mission markers and tutorial text boxes to know where to go. I got shot up pretty bad in the first encounter, then had to waste time finding a burger joint to get my health back. So basically, major skill-oriented games are all going the route of pussified health auto-regen, yet a game that prides itself in gangster-tough immersion finds the need to force the player to drive out of the way in the middle of a mission to eat a burger instead of letting their health regen on the drive to the next mission point so they can keep the action going. Brilliant.
Got to the second mission spot, followed the instructions for taking cover, then my AI partner got shot after just a few seconds of entering the house, failing the mission for me. Awesome. I was going to force my way through the game so I can at least say that I've beaten it in case the need arises to defend my experience in a debate about the title. Sadly, this has become the main reason I complete most games nowadays instead of joy. Don't want to be that guy at a game development company that hasn't completed Halo 3.
I was going to beat GTAIV this week or next, but fuck it. I need to take another several month break from this overrated piece of mediocrity.
As I type this, a hotdog vender barks repeatedly every ten seconds, repeating the same line at least once a minute. High frequency bark repeating. In a 2008 title. Not a point I would normally drill on, especiailly in a world as large and asset-filled as Liberty City, but this game is full of such flaws and nuisances and yet still has a 98 on metacritic. And objectively-backed flaws aside, I will argue with my subjective liberties that it just doesn't provide an entertaining experience. I don't care if your world is so detailed I can watch TV in it - in fact, if you choose to implement this unnecessary functionality, chances are these are manhours that could have gone into fixing some of the questionable missions. No, I don't want a world where I can do many boring things - I want a world where the things I can do are fun.
This game is not much fun. Whatever enjoyment I started to have when I first played it has quickly gone out the window from the linear, frustrating missions whose failure conditions never cause me to think that I messed up. Driving between missions, a task quite central to the theme of the game (and implied in the title), has become a chore. There is a huge city to explore, and no compelling reason to do so. The difficulty, while not obscene, is a hindrance to the immersion, and forcing the player to chow down on fast food to regain health feels like a waste of time. Yes, I usually lament health regen in challenge-oriented games, but GTA has always been more about the experience than overcoming difficulty, so this design decision (or lack of real design thoughtfulness?) is painfully tragic.
To put things into perspective for anyone that thinks I'm just an artsy game designer belittling yet another high profile mass appeal sequel, I will go on record as saying that Halo 3 was a good game. It was enjoyable. It wasn't particularly special, but the action was streamlined. I hate its success in light of the failures of better titles, but I enjoyed completing it. GTAIV, not so much. Not nearly so much.
Can someone please tell me why this game has a 98/100 on metacritic? Or why I have bothered studying the craft of better game design via subtraction and pitching interesting and innovative gameplay ideas when groupthink shit riddled with high level and low level flaws wrapped in a controversial sandbox package with unnecessary simulation (TV shows???) thrown in to fill the void where good pacing should have been implemented sells millions and woos critics??
Okay, in a less bitter note, can anyone who enjoys this game tell me if/why you think it deserves a near perfect score, much more than SotC, Bioshock, or Braid?
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The World Begins With Us
I was going to write a post sometime soon about The World Ends With You. It was going to be a high brow review, rejecting numerical summaries and hype-driven prose, for I felt this game deserved more. And of course I'm too good for such drivel. No, I was going to take the "game as arts" approach and herald it as a rare jewel. I was going to mention the brilliant manner in which Jupiter has captured the theme of loneliness en masse and held true to that vision in every pixel, the grin-inducing moment when I realized that the regional "trend" system that guided my choice in equipment could in turn be affected by me and what kind of a wonderful message this was, delivered via gameplay mechanics as only an interactive medium could. I was going to write some paragraphs, dust them off, and feel good about myself for commenting intelligently on a topic dear to me and adding another post to my blog.
Then I made the mistake of beating the game.
I have dreamt of making video games since I was five years old. I was even drawing them on paper back then, a hobby that would turn into making levels in Wrecking Crew on the NES, then into making more complicated levels in games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, then into programming. All along, video games were produced by people, not people like me, for if they were like me I would understand them. No, people with talents and visions far beyond what I was capable of grasping or imagining. Imagine my shock two years ago when I entered the industry and realized that these people did not exist.
Well they did, except they weren't unattainable gods of the interactive arts. They were people like me. It has been relieving and disappointing, and above all else disorienting, to come to terms with what the industry has become. Every asset carefully calculated in a middle manager's spread sheet, every in-company rumor carefully filtered through a bloated pyramid. But that's how it is, and that's how games are made, and I don't deserve to expect more when I have a job and so many don't right now.
And I understood this, and things were simple, until I beat the game. And again and again, three weeks of what should have been groan-inducing plot twists when the game "wasn't actually over" instead drew out smiles as I realized with relief that I did not have to stop playing yet.
I was going to write an artistic review about the artistic merits of an artistic game, but The World Ends With You deserves far more than that. Far more than I can contort my fingers to type. For it is far more than art, and it is unfortunate that I do not have a word to describe what it is.
When I was fourteen, I read an article in an innocuous encyclopedia describing the mating habits of humans, and it has torn a hole in my soul so deep that I can never feel romantic love. I watch my friends date, have sex, get married, and a voice louder than a thousand ends of the world wants to yell, to tell them that they are just doing it because of hormones, that they don't really love each other, that we are just meat machines, that we all live in our own little worlds and can only appear to come out and connect when there is something we need, and that we are selfish in such a way and, worse, deterministically so, so we can't be blamed nor can we ever change, and don't they even realize this? And why am I the only one that finds himself suffocating in this toxic air of causal psychology and nihilism? Am I a super intelligence painfully evolved to recognize the illusions of morality and justice, or am I so far behind the cognitive development of the average human for letting such emotional desires as sincerity cause me to think that this world was ever something more? Just a strange mix of emotional and insightful?
Why am I alone?
Art has become like this romantic love, perverted beyond the reach of sincerity. Art has become snarky toilets in snobby museums, an antithesis to the desires of the uneducated masses, a battle between the interpreter and the creator, and all manner of semantic faux debating, and to reduce TWEWY to this realm of ivory tower treadmilling is a sin far greater than I care to commit. It is unfortunate, then, that I have no rhetorical training to describe what I am trying to get at, but I must still try.
I purchased this game a couple of weeks ago. I had heard good things, but I had never been in a hurry to get it. Looked like a slightly innovative game for anime fans and Japanophiles in general, enough to pique my curiosity but not enough for me to purchase with a first priority mindset. I enjoyed it right away, glad that I purchased it as the fresh aesthetic and quality were immediately apparent. It took a little bit longer to appreciate the purposefulness, the manner in which the heroic journey from self-isolation to ally dependency was expressed not only in the characters and story but in the gameplay mechanics, through and through. A little bit later, and I realized that this game was at least as good as Chrono Trigger, an amazing thing to realize as I have not felt that way about an RPG in years. Forcing myself to play through a few every now and then, I thought I had just outgrown them. Now I realize that we have just quit making them good.
Skip forward to tonight, and I have just completed a game so emotionally moving, by its own merits as well as by what it means for our craft, that I immediately had to take a walk through the local park and collect my blended thoughts. At 4 in the morning.
Yes, I'm scared. I'm scared that this isn't really as good a game as I gush about and that I am overreacting because it happened to resonate with me, for whatever reason. Seeing a verdict of 89 on metacritic last week, I nodded in agreement. Felt right. Now, I am wondering how numbers are even the right way to measure such a title, when GTAIV about tops out the max at 98. I would suggest you get this game, but what if you don't enjoy it? What does that say about my abilities as a designer, a skill in which the accurate assessments of other titles is a necessity? I thought I was mature enough to understand and accept the innate subjective limitations of views on the quality of art, but now I'm not sure I can afford emotionally to be wrong. That's what this game has done to me.
I described earlier the feeling of separation between my childhood self and the gods that made video games. At some point growing up and entering their circle, that feeling vanished. Until now. The feelings that TWEWY have evoked in me, night after night as if to assure they aren't accidental, have proven that there are gods of game development far beyond my comprehension yet again, and in a bittersweet way I wonder if I have made any progress whatsoever toward mastering the art, choking back tears with laughter as I realize that it is out there, the star that I have been reaching for but have become blind to after decades of struggle, that there is a right direction, and I need to take it.
I'm disappointed in myself. What have I done? With my life. What the fuck have I accomplished? If I die tomorrow, who will remember me? Who will I have changed? What has my purpose been? I graduated from college, run through the factory of higher education. I won the state math competition one year when I had an odd infatuation with math, and my parents assure me that I still have a plaque at my high school for the highest cumulative SAT score. But how many people's lives have I enriched with an SAT score? I have shipped two commercial video game titles, one ranking in the fifties and one in the sixties on metacritic, and neither deserving of much more. Every week or so, I blog cynically about the state of the industry, never changing it but patting myself on the back nonetheless for constructing such "insightful" declarations in such edgy tones. I am kept up at night with internal dialogs.
And on and on, until I somehow fall asleep.
I have accomplished absolutely nothing, and it pains me more than I can bear. I wake up every day, marching to work like a toy soldier, because I have to pay the bills, the very expensive bills that I have amassed moving out here to work in the industry in the first place. And if I die tomorrow, no one will remember me. No one will remember me, because I don't deserve remembrance. Sure, the people that matter to me will, and maybe a few of them will cry. But I don't see them anymore. I talk to them on the phone, if I talk to them at all, their digitized voices trying but failing to mask the 2,000+ mile gap that I have put between us. I fail to see them at Christmas, because I am too tired from crunch on a project that will soon be lost in the middle of the game ranking bell curve to even fly home.
I tell myself this is okay, because at least I have a job, and... you know, "the economy" and all that. But a job is nothing without happiness. Life is nothing without happiness. I am not happy with my life. I have hope, but that is a painful kind of happiness, because it can easily be taken away or spoiled before fruition.
The World Ends With You has shown me that I was wrong to believe that it was my jaded attitude keeping me from enjoying games, for how else could I enjoy it as much as any of my childhood favorites at my current age? Most games today are developed by incapable, uncaring individuals with far too much power over the individuals that do care. And really, in my long winded way, that is what I am trying to praise Jupiter and Square Enix for; they care. They have to care. The localization team cares, the voice actors care, the writers care. They all care. This game exists because people enjoyed making it, and wanted to share that joy with an audience that is precious to them. I have no other reason to believe this than the game itself; that it is capable of communicating this is a testament to their talent as well as their sincerity. I must seek such a position, I must be a part of this. Could you imagine if every game developer put innovation above finance, quality above innovation, art above quality, and sincerity above art? What a wonderful world such would be!
I can't do this alone. I can't even continue tricking myself when I wake up each morning into believing that I can be a savior of the craft someday, that today is going to be different from yesterday somehow. I have no clout. I have not been in the industry 'x years' for any impressive value of 'x'. I dream, I desire, but I don't see the answers. If you have any answers, any answers at all, whether you are an industry veteran or a college student trying to get in, or if you are simply a fan of games interested in a healthier future where the discourse between developers and purchasers is more meaningful than the current back and forth of "you give us money, we give you product", please let me know.
Then I made the mistake of beating the game.
I have dreamt of making video games since I was five years old. I was even drawing them on paper back then, a hobby that would turn into making levels in Wrecking Crew on the NES, then into making more complicated levels in games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, then into programming. All along, video games were produced by people, not people like me, for if they were like me I would understand them. No, people with talents and visions far beyond what I was capable of grasping or imagining. Imagine my shock two years ago when I entered the industry and realized that these people did not exist.
Well they did, except they weren't unattainable gods of the interactive arts. They were people like me. It has been relieving and disappointing, and above all else disorienting, to come to terms with what the industry has become. Every asset carefully calculated in a middle manager's spread sheet, every in-company rumor carefully filtered through a bloated pyramid. But that's how it is, and that's how games are made, and I don't deserve to expect more when I have a job and so many don't right now.
And I understood this, and things were simple, until I beat the game. And again and again, three weeks of what should have been groan-inducing plot twists when the game "wasn't actually over" instead drew out smiles as I realized with relief that I did not have to stop playing yet.
I was going to write an artistic review about the artistic merits of an artistic game, but The World Ends With You deserves far more than that. Far more than I can contort my fingers to type. For it is far more than art, and it is unfortunate that I do not have a word to describe what it is.
When I was fourteen, I read an article in an innocuous encyclopedia describing the mating habits of humans, and it has torn a hole in my soul so deep that I can never feel romantic love. I watch my friends date, have sex, get married, and a voice louder than a thousand ends of the world wants to yell, to tell them that they are just doing it because of hormones, that they don't really love each other, that we are just meat machines, that we all live in our own little worlds and can only appear to come out and connect when there is something we need, and that we are selfish in such a way and, worse, deterministically so, so we can't be blamed nor can we ever change, and don't they even realize this? And why am I the only one that finds himself suffocating in this toxic air of causal psychology and nihilism? Am I a super intelligence painfully evolved to recognize the illusions of morality and justice, or am I so far behind the cognitive development of the average human for letting such emotional desires as sincerity cause me to think that this world was ever something more? Just a strange mix of emotional and insightful?
Why am I alone?
Art has become like this romantic love, perverted beyond the reach of sincerity. Art has become snarky toilets in snobby museums, an antithesis to the desires of the uneducated masses, a battle between the interpreter and the creator, and all manner of semantic faux debating, and to reduce TWEWY to this realm of ivory tower treadmilling is a sin far greater than I care to commit. It is unfortunate, then, that I have no rhetorical training to describe what I am trying to get at, but I must still try.
An Explanation, as best I can
I purchased this game a couple of weeks ago. I had heard good things, but I had never been in a hurry to get it. Looked like a slightly innovative game for anime fans and Japanophiles in general, enough to pique my curiosity but not enough for me to purchase with a first priority mindset. I enjoyed it right away, glad that I purchased it as the fresh aesthetic and quality were immediately apparent. It took a little bit longer to appreciate the purposefulness, the manner in which the heroic journey from self-isolation to ally dependency was expressed not only in the characters and story but in the gameplay mechanics, through and through. A little bit later, and I realized that this game was at least as good as Chrono Trigger, an amazing thing to realize as I have not felt that way about an RPG in years. Forcing myself to play through a few every now and then, I thought I had just outgrown them. Now I realize that we have just quit making them good.
Skip forward to tonight, and I have just completed a game so emotionally moving, by its own merits as well as by what it means for our craft, that I immediately had to take a walk through the local park and collect my blended thoughts. At 4 in the morning.
Yes, I'm scared. I'm scared that this isn't really as good a game as I gush about and that I am overreacting because it happened to resonate with me, for whatever reason. Seeing a verdict of 89 on metacritic last week, I nodded in agreement. Felt right. Now, I am wondering how numbers are even the right way to measure such a title, when GTAIV about tops out the max at 98. I would suggest you get this game, but what if you don't enjoy it? What does that say about my abilities as a designer, a skill in which the accurate assessments of other titles is a necessity? I thought I was mature enough to understand and accept the innate subjective limitations of views on the quality of art, but now I'm not sure I can afford emotionally to be wrong. That's what this game has done to me.
I described earlier the feeling of separation between my childhood self and the gods that made video games. At some point growing up and entering their circle, that feeling vanished. Until now. The feelings that TWEWY have evoked in me, night after night as if to assure they aren't accidental, have proven that there are gods of game development far beyond my comprehension yet again, and in a bittersweet way I wonder if I have made any progress whatsoever toward mastering the art, choking back tears with laughter as I realize that it is out there, the star that I have been reaching for but have become blind to after decades of struggle, that there is a right direction, and I need to take it.
I'm disappointed in myself. What have I done? With my life. What the fuck have I accomplished? If I die tomorrow, who will remember me? Who will I have changed? What has my purpose been? I graduated from college, run through the factory of higher education. I won the state math competition one year when I had an odd infatuation with math, and my parents assure me that I still have a plaque at my high school for the highest cumulative SAT score. But how many people's lives have I enriched with an SAT score? I have shipped two commercial video game titles, one ranking in the fifties and one in the sixties on metacritic, and neither deserving of much more. Every week or so, I blog cynically about the state of the industry, never changing it but patting myself on the back nonetheless for constructing such "insightful" declarations in such edgy tones. I am kept up at night with internal dialogs.
I should quit my job and try to start my own video game company where customers are friends, not sources of income to manipulate through marketing.
But I don't know how to start a company, and I don't have the money, and if I borrow money from an investor then I am stuck in the art-disruptive cycle of financial responsibility yet again
But if I don't take that risk then I may go through my life without ever truly doing what makes me happy
And why am I not happy now, now that I am in the wonderful industry that I dreamed of entering since I was five?
And what will my parents think if I fail, run away, and need to leech off of them again?
And will I ever really be happy, or is satisfaction just a bubble under some infinite wall paper that I can chase around but never capture?
And on and on, until I somehow fall asleep.
I have accomplished absolutely nothing, and it pains me more than I can bear. I wake up every day, marching to work like a toy soldier, because I have to pay the bills, the very expensive bills that I have amassed moving out here to work in the industry in the first place. And if I die tomorrow, no one will remember me. No one will remember me, because I don't deserve remembrance. Sure, the people that matter to me will, and maybe a few of them will cry. But I don't see them anymore. I talk to them on the phone, if I talk to them at all, their digitized voices trying but failing to mask the 2,000+ mile gap that I have put between us. I fail to see them at Christmas, because I am too tired from crunch on a project that will soon be lost in the middle of the game ranking bell curve to even fly home.
I tell myself this is okay, because at least I have a job, and... you know, "the economy" and all that. But a job is nothing without happiness. Life is nothing without happiness. I am not happy with my life. I have hope, but that is a painful kind of happiness, because it can easily be taken away or spoiled before fruition.
The World Ends With You has shown me that I was wrong to believe that it was my jaded attitude keeping me from enjoying games, for how else could I enjoy it as much as any of my childhood favorites at my current age? Most games today are developed by incapable, uncaring individuals with far too much power over the individuals that do care. And really, in my long winded way, that is what I am trying to praise Jupiter and Square Enix for; they care. They have to care. The localization team cares, the voice actors care, the writers care. They all care. This game exists because people enjoyed making it, and wanted to share that joy with an audience that is precious to them. I have no other reason to believe this than the game itself; that it is capable of communicating this is a testament to their talent as well as their sincerity. I must seek such a position, I must be a part of this. Could you imagine if every game developer put innovation above finance, quality above innovation, art above quality, and sincerity above art? What a wonderful world such would be!
Please
I can't do this alone. I can't even continue tricking myself when I wake up each morning into believing that I can be a savior of the craft someday, that today is going to be different from yesterday somehow. I have no clout. I have not been in the industry 'x years' for any impressive value of 'x'. I dream, I desire, but I don't see the answers. If you have any answers, any answers at all, whether you are an industry veteran or a college student trying to get in, or if you are simply a fan of games interested in a healthier future where the discourse between developers and purchasers is more meaningful than the current back and forth of "you give us money, we give you product", please let me know.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
A Randomly Inspired, Belated Answer
It has become nigh memetic to ask, “When will we have our Citizen Kane” of games?
Not before we have our “Y'all Want a Single”, I can guarantee that much.
Not before we have our “Y'all Want a Single”, I can guarantee that much.
“We wanted to add 3 or 4 more songs, so we came back to record them. Then our record company was like 'Hey, we'd really love to have a single' and our management, The Firm said 'We would really like to have a smash hit single, man, can you dig it?'. We were really appalled by that scene. They wanted 'Got the Life' or 'Freak on a Leash', and that shit wasn't flying with us at all! For the first time in our lives we were dissecting our music, and try to analyze the structure of those songs, trying to figure out what made them huge hits. But Korn never works like that, and while we're all were wondering, Jonathan came up with a line: "Y'all want a single? Say: FUCK THAT" and we wrote Y'All Want a Single as a big 'fuck you' to them.”
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Before I forget...
This.
"The traditional game industry model ... is not really set up to make games, per se.
It's more set up to make game companies. Each game is just a vehicle for the company. We're really talking more about game company development here than game development."
And it does need to change.
"The traditional game industry model ... is not really set up to make games, per se.
It's more set up to make game companies. Each game is just a vehicle for the company. We're really talking more about game company development here than game development."
And it does need to change.
My, Haven't We Come a Long Way?
I just beat Eternal Sonata, and now the credits are rolling and all the characters are judging and patronizing me :(. AND OH GOD NOW THERE IS A FUCKING SNAIL TALKING TO A CATERPILLAR AFTER THE CREDITS ROLLED.
Without spoiling too much, an important character turned on the rest of my party, becoming the final boss for no believable reason. Then another character kills them self for no believable reason (though it is foreshadowed), then the credits roll with random party characters telling me I shouldn't give up until the end or something. This is after a good 24 hours of typical RPG narrative nonsense where for some reason I end up with a dozen characters in my party that decided they had no lives and desired to follow my group around. Cait Sith Syndrome, if you will. In the basest sense, I feel I can explain "why" characters chose to do what they did and why the story followed the path that it did, but I just didn't "feel" it. I didn't "feel" that my party would so readily turn on a long time ally just because he said "lol Let's Fight!" I didn't "feel" sorrow that one character commits suicide while another one lets her monologue for several minutes, asking afterwards what he could have done to save her. I am getting a similar feeling that I got at the end of Braid, a game which, for some reason unsatisfied with being an exemplar of the interactive arts via its mechanics, had to pull a narrative switcheroo by "not really being about what you think it's about" in the end. I know I know, "art" and all that jazz, but art is allowed to be critiqued, and, feeling as if I've somehow "missed" something in Eternal Sonata (ugh), I can't say that the ending is all that satisfying to me. I suppose that an ambiguous ending, or an ending where there is a deeper meaning to "get" can cause some water cooler/forum discussions that extend the life of your game past its ending, but is that really the best way to extend the life of an interactive experience? Via tricks of the linear narrative trade?
Eternal Sonata is a fantastically beautiful game visually and aurally, and it even has an innovative combat system and faster-than-usual progression for those of us who don't want to commit 50-70 hours to beat an RPG. Thus I am a little disappointed that, while captivating enough for me to put over 20 hours into beating (which is more than I can say for many video games nowadays), I found myself lacking emotions, empathy, and understanding of the characters' motives for most of the game.
I guess games have matured? I mean, I'm thankful that modern games give me a narrative drive extending beyond being a bad enough dude to save the president from ninjas, but... do I need that same pseudo-intellectual pretension, that coy "this is our story but this isn't really our story" attitude that filled many a poetry explication in high school Literature classes? Are cheap shots like this taken from old linear forms of media the best way to expand our interactive arts?
If High School Lit is any indication, then soon all of our narrative games will "really" be about masturbation or something. Or has this already happened and I'm not "educated" enough to have noticed?? @_@
Without spoiling too much, an important character turned on the rest of my party, becoming the final boss for no believable reason. Then another character kills them self for no believable reason (though it is foreshadowed), then the credits roll with random party characters telling me I shouldn't give up until the end or something. This is after a good 24 hours of typical RPG narrative nonsense where for some reason I end up with a dozen characters in my party that decided they had no lives and desired to follow my group around. Cait Sith Syndrome, if you will. In the basest sense, I feel I can explain "why" characters chose to do what they did and why the story followed the path that it did, but I just didn't "feel" it. I didn't "feel" that my party would so readily turn on a long time ally just because he said "lol Let's Fight!" I didn't "feel" sorrow that one character commits suicide while another one lets her monologue for several minutes, asking afterwards what he could have done to save her. I am getting a similar feeling that I got at the end of Braid, a game which, for some reason unsatisfied with being an exemplar of the interactive arts via its mechanics, had to pull a narrative switcheroo by "not really being about what you think it's about" in the end. I know I know, "art" and all that jazz, but art is allowed to be critiqued, and, feeling as if I've somehow "missed" something in Eternal Sonata (ugh), I can't say that the ending is all that satisfying to me. I suppose that an ambiguous ending, or an ending where there is a deeper meaning to "get" can cause some water cooler/forum discussions that extend the life of your game past its ending, but is that really the best way to extend the life of an interactive experience? Via tricks of the linear narrative trade?
Eternal Sonata is a fantastically beautiful game visually and aurally, and it even has an innovative combat system and faster-than-usual progression for those of us who don't want to commit 50-70 hours to beat an RPG. Thus I am a little disappointed that, while captivating enough for me to put over 20 hours into beating (which is more than I can say for many video games nowadays), I found myself lacking emotions, empathy, and understanding of the characters' motives for most of the game.
I guess games have matured? I mean, I'm thankful that modern games give me a narrative drive extending beyond being a bad enough dude to save the president from ninjas, but... do I need that same pseudo-intellectual pretension, that coy "this is our story but this isn't really our story" attitude that filled many a poetry explication in high school Literature classes? Are cheap shots like this taken from old linear forms of media the best way to expand our interactive arts?
If High School Lit is any indication, then soon all of our narrative games will "really" be about masturbation or something. Or has this already happened and I'm not "educated" enough to have noticed?? @_@
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Advertising Blues
So I got home around 9 tonight, not because I just finished a late night at the office, but because I haven't finished my work yet and just decided to get some food and finish it at home. I could rant about that, but it's more of a mild annoyance than a topic worthy of a full blog post. That is, assuming that it stops occurring so frequently, an assumption I hold onto like a battered wife holding her black eye and smiling as she reminisces about the golden days and tells herself they're coming back, just around the corner. I'm not sure what my "golden" days are in this metaphor since I have been crunching constantly from the day I entered the industry, an unfortunate side effect of being put on a game being rushed to completion in less time than it should really be given, laid off, then being hired and put on another game being rushed to completion in less time than it should really be given.
This post is about what was waiting for me when I got home. An apple software update. An innocuous yet pesky blue-iconed window that I usually close out of habit while I'm trying to get work done. Since I am waiting for a build to finish, I decided to go ahead and accept the updates to get it out of my way. After telling it that I don't want to reboot my computer now (have we still not found a way to ubiquitously update software without bringing the user's system to a full halt?), I was greeted with a followup window advertising some new software that I might want to download.
So next I decided to play some PC games. I opened my Steam client, which took a while to load as always, possibly because it's loading these ads in the background of this software suite that I paid for. That I paid a lot for, as Steam games, despite digital distribution, are just as expensive as boxed games. And yet they still feel the need to open a second window of ads and further peck away at my dwindling economy of attention when I just want to enjoy some games that I have paid for in a short break period sandwiched by long hours at work. They don't call them ads; no, they call it "Update News". Closing that window, I see an animation in my main steam client (which defaults to the "store" tab instead of the more useful "my games" tab upon opening, to guarantee diverting your attention to their advertising) that cycles through a list of huge budget games that everyone knows exist anyway. Particularly interesting is the ad for Fallout 3, boasting a "100/100" score on Gamespy, a site that uses a 5 star rating system. Yes, there is a huge difference between 5/5 and 100/100, but who am I to judge marketing spin. Even more remarkable is that I purchased the PC version of Fallout 3 from Steam on the day it came out! And they're still advertising it to me??? They know what games I purchased from them! Not only are they wasting my time and attention, they aren't even doing it efficiently!
It would be interesting to see a study of our modern economy of attention and how much advertising and constant update reminders cost us in this economy. How many times a day do you find yourself updating something? Do you even know what you're getting when you update it? Is it improving your use of the software, or just moving some GUI components around so you have to relearn where things are? I recently had a stressful time trying to put together hospital bills and insurance statements after heart surgery due to the piles of junk mail that would pile up when I got home from 12+ hour shifts at work. Do you ever have these problems? spam, pop unders, telemarketers? Seconds of your life, robbed from you by a faceless corporation's childish need for attention. A shame really, as time is the most nonrenewable resource.
This post is about what was waiting for me when I got home. An apple software update. An innocuous yet pesky blue-iconed window that I usually close out of habit while I'm trying to get work done. Since I am waiting for a build to finish, I decided to go ahead and accept the updates to get it out of my way. After telling it that I don't want to reboot my computer now (have we still not found a way to ubiquitously update software without bringing the user's system to a full halt?), I was greeted with a followup window advertising some new software that I might want to download.
So next I decided to play some PC games. I opened my Steam client, which took a while to load as always, possibly because it's loading these ads in the background of this software suite that I paid for. That I paid a lot for, as Steam games, despite digital distribution, are just as expensive as boxed games. And yet they still feel the need to open a second window of ads and further peck away at my dwindling economy of attention when I just want to enjoy some games that I have paid for in a short break period sandwiched by long hours at work. They don't call them ads; no, they call it "Update News". Closing that window, I see an animation in my main steam client (which defaults to the "store" tab instead of the more useful "my games" tab upon opening, to guarantee diverting your attention to their advertising) that cycles through a list of huge budget games that everyone knows exist anyway. Particularly interesting is the ad for Fallout 3, boasting a "100/100" score on Gamespy, a site that uses a 5 star rating system. Yes, there is a huge difference between 5/5 and 100/100, but who am I to judge marketing spin. Even more remarkable is that I purchased the PC version of Fallout 3 from Steam on the day it came out! And they're still advertising it to me??? They know what games I purchased from them! Not only are they wasting my time and attention, they aren't even doing it efficiently!
It would be interesting to see a study of our modern economy of attention and how much advertising and constant update reminders cost us in this economy. How many times a day do you find yourself updating something? Do you even know what you're getting when you update it? Is it improving your use of the software, or just moving some GUI components around so you have to relearn where things are? I recently had a stressful time trying to put together hospital bills and insurance statements after heart surgery due to the piles of junk mail that would pile up when I got home from 12+ hour shifts at work. Do you ever have these problems? spam, pop unders, telemarketers? Seconds of your life, robbed from you by a faceless corporation's childish need for attention. A shame really, as time is the most nonrenewable resource.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Patent Fending
From wikipedia:
"At present, the (US patent) files, are so extraordinarily complex and the items so multitudinous that a veritable army of governmental servants is required to attend them and sort them into some order of distinguishable categories to which reference may be made when corresponding with patent applicants for the purposes of examiner citation of "prior art" disclosure. This complexity makes it inevitable that the human-equation involved in government servants relative to carelessness or mechanical limitations should occasion the granting of multitudes of "probably" invalid patent claims."
Funny thing? That is a quote from 1938.
"At present, the (US patent) files, are so extraordinarily complex and the items so multitudinous that a veritable army of governmental servants is required to attend them and sort them into some order of distinguishable categories to which reference may be made when corresponding with patent applicants for the purposes of examiner citation of "prior art" disclosure. This complexity makes it inevitable that the human-equation involved in government servants relative to carelessness or mechanical limitations should occasion the granting of multitudes of "probably" invalid patent claims."
Funny thing? That is a quote from 1938.
WWWTP
I like games. You probably like games as well if you are reading this blog.
Let's play a game! I call it “What's Wrong With This Picture?”
Let's play a game! I call it “What's Wrong With This Picture?”
Friday, January 9, 2009
Bad ACS, no Twinkie
So I've gotten back into Doom modding again, and during the process I have had to pick up ACS again. After spending over an hour trying to print a single sentence to screen (I'll get to that in a second) and having Doom Builder crash Yet Again, losing all of my progress, I figured I needed a break to blow off steam.
So why did it take me so long to print a message to the screen? Modularity. The mod I am making is going to have a lot of text printed to the screen, and in realizing this up front I decided to go ahead and write a function that would center it and compute the duration (how long the text should be displayed) based on string length to save me some typing. There is a rant in here alright, but there are also some interesting programming issues that I want to touch on lightly. For example, how do we balance planning ahead and building foundations with actually getting shit done? There, that was lightly, wasn't it?
Basically, I wanted to go from typing this:
hudMessage(s:"mah message"; HUDMSG_PLAIN | HUDMSG_LOG, 0, CR_GRAY, 0.5, 0.5, duration);
to typing this:
pcThink("mah message", duration)
and have the 'duration' variable be intelligently calculated (with the option to explicitly set it in cases where the default algorithm generates suboptimal results). Thus I set out to write the pcThink function. After several iterations, I ended up with the following:
function int pcThink(str thought, int duration)
{
// a value of 0 for the duration means the caller wants
// us to figure it out for ourselves
if (duration == 0.0)
{
duration = strLen(thought) * 65536;
duration = duration / 10.0 + 1.0;
}
hudMessage(s:thought; HUDMSG_PLAIN | HUDMSG_LOG, 0,
CR_GRAY, 0.5, 0.5, duration);
// return our duration in tics so it can be used in
// delay() calls
return duration * 35 / 65536;
}
If you can spot the mistake, then maybe you deserve a twinkie. ACS does not. I'll give you a hint: the symptom of the bug was that my messages were not lasting long enough. And no, there were no compile errors.
Okay, maybe you noticed my liberal mix of floats (they're actually fixed point values in ACS) and ints. duration is, after all, declared as an int, and I am multiplying it by 65536 in one place then diving it by 10.0 in another. Am I crazy? Have my rugged good looks finally gotten the best of my mental facilities? Perhaps - nay, likely. But that is not the cause of my problems in this instance, though you would be looking in the right direction.
hudMessage takes a fixed point value for its last parameter, which represents how long the message is supposed to be displayed to the screen. I am passing in duration here, which was declared as an int, but like any good language ACS coerces ints to floats (fixeds?) and vice versa, which all sounds keen and gives one a warm fuzzy feeling, right? Except that this coercion is done in a manner described most accurately as despicable. ints in ACS are 4 byte storage containers, pretty typical. Fixed point values do not technically exist in that there is no fixed keyword like there is an "int" keyword, though there are fixed point literals which can be illustrated by the following declaration:
int wolfInSheepsClothing = 50.0;
The way this is stored is that the upper 2 bytes represent the decimal value (things to the right of the period) while the lower 2 bytes represent the integral value (things to the left of the period). This is atrocious! 1.0 does not equal 1 in this system, and not just because it actually equals 1.0000001. No, because 1.0 actually equals 65536! In Soviet ACS, 1.0 + 1 equals 65537! I'm not even kidding! Who the hell thought this was a good idea?! The error in my above code is where I am dividing by 10.0, intending to increase the duration by one second for every ten characters in the message, but I instead increase the duration by one second for every 6554 characters!
Other gripes with ACS include dividing time into units of 35 tics per second (I'm sure there's a good reason...) and converting strings to ints when using the plus operator instead of concatenating or generating a compile error. ACS is actually a pretty good language for what it's meant to do and provides script parallelization that is easy to rationalize.
I am getting sick of goofy language design decisions pandering to low-level needs slowing down my high-level development. We need better abstractions that fit with our taught domain knowledge of mathematics and text so we can write "x = 1 + 2.0" without worrying about coercion tricks while "x = "foo" + 7" or "if (someIntegerValue)" will not compile. And don't get me started about pointer arithmetic. Also, why on earth have units not become more prevalent? I might not remember if delay(int) expects tics or seconds, but if I am allowed to type "delay(70 tics)" or "delay(2 seconds)" at my whim, I don't have to remember. And having static unit analysis at compile time could avoid certain embarassing blunders.
Oh, and indexing starting at zero! Dijkstra be damned, I still find this to be a counter intuitive (and thus incorrect) language design decision after over a decade of programming with it, though for the sake of brevity I will save the details for another post.
The problem as I see it is that programming language decisions were originally made based on memory limitations and thinking too closely to the machine. We have not evolved enough past these tarpits. We don't have enough, or any, "High Enough Level" languages. You've probably heard the cobbler's children analogy applied to programming, particularly to language design. If we were shoe makers, we would be hammering horseshoes on our kids' feet if nails were cheaper than stitches. Swear to God.
So why did it take me so long to print a message to the screen? Modularity. The mod I am making is going to have a lot of text printed to the screen, and in realizing this up front I decided to go ahead and write a function that would center it and compute the duration (how long the text should be displayed) based on string length to save me some typing. There is a rant in here alright, but there are also some interesting programming issues that I want to touch on lightly. For example, how do we balance planning ahead and building foundations with actually getting shit done? There, that was lightly, wasn't it?
Basically, I wanted to go from typing this:
hudMessage(s:"mah message"; HUDMSG_PLAIN | HUDMSG_LOG, 0, CR_GRAY, 0.5, 0.5, duration);
to typing this:
pcThink("mah message", duration)
and have the 'duration' variable be intelligently calculated (with the option to explicitly set it in cases where the default algorithm generates suboptimal results). Thus I set out to write the pcThink function. After several iterations, I ended up with the following:
function int pcThink(str thought, int duration)
{
// a value of 0 for the duration means the caller wants
// us to figure it out for ourselves
if (duration == 0.0)
{
duration = strLen(thought) * 65536;
duration = duration / 10.0 + 1.0;
}
hudMessage(s:thought; HUDMSG_PLAIN | HUDMSG_LOG, 0,
CR_GRAY, 0.5, 0.5, duration);
// return our duration in tics so it can be used in
// delay() calls
return duration * 35 / 65536;
}
If you can spot the mistake, then maybe you deserve a twinkie. ACS does not. I'll give you a hint: the symptom of the bug was that my messages were not lasting long enough. And no, there were no compile errors.
Okay, maybe you noticed my liberal mix of floats (they're actually fixed point values in ACS) and ints. duration is, after all, declared as an int, and I am multiplying it by 65536 in one place then diving it by 10.0 in another. Am I crazy? Have my rugged good looks finally gotten the best of my mental facilities? Perhaps - nay, likely. But that is not the cause of my problems in this instance, though you would be looking in the right direction.
hudMessage takes a fixed point value for its last parameter, which represents how long the message is supposed to be displayed to the screen. I am passing in duration here, which was declared as an int, but like any good language ACS coerces ints to floats (fixeds?) and vice versa, which all sounds keen and gives one a warm fuzzy feeling, right? Except that this coercion is done in a manner described most accurately as despicable. ints in ACS are 4 byte storage containers, pretty typical. Fixed point values do not technically exist in that there is no fixed keyword like there is an "int" keyword, though there are fixed point literals which can be illustrated by the following declaration:
int wolfInSheepsClothing = 50.0;
The way this is stored is that the upper 2 bytes represent the decimal value (things to the right of the period) while the lower 2 bytes represent the integral value (things to the left of the period). This is atrocious! 1.0 does not equal 1 in this system, and not just because it actually equals 1.0000001. No, because 1.0 actually equals 65536! In Soviet ACS, 1.0 + 1 equals 65537! I'm not even kidding! Who the hell thought this was a good idea?! The error in my above code is where I am dividing by 10.0, intending to increase the duration by one second for every ten characters in the message, but I instead increase the duration by one second for every 6554 characters!
Other gripes with ACS include dividing time into units of 35 tics per second (I'm sure there's a good reason...) and converting strings to ints when using the plus operator instead of concatenating or generating a compile error. ACS is actually a pretty good language for what it's meant to do and provides script parallelization that is easy to rationalize.
I am getting sick of goofy language design decisions pandering to low-level needs slowing down my high-level development. We need better abstractions that fit with our taught domain knowledge of mathematics and text so we can write "x = 1 + 2.0" without worrying about coercion tricks while "x = "foo" + 7" or "if (someIntegerValue)" will not compile. And don't get me started about pointer arithmetic. Also, why on earth have units not become more prevalent? I might not remember if delay(int) expects tics or seconds, but if I am allowed to type "delay(70 tics)" or "delay(2 seconds)" at my whim, I don't have to remember. And having static unit analysis at compile time could avoid certain embarassing blunders.
Oh, and indexing starting at zero! Dijkstra be damned, I still find this to be a counter intuitive (and thus incorrect) language design decision after over a decade of programming with it, though for the sake of brevity I will save the details for another post.
The problem as I see it is that programming language decisions were originally made based on memory limitations and thinking too closely to the machine. We have not evolved enough past these tarpits. We don't have enough, or any, "High Enough Level" languages. You've probably heard the cobbler's children analogy applied to programming, particularly to language design. If we were shoe makers, we would be hammering horseshoes on our kids' feet if nails were cheaper than stitches. Swear to God.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Appreciation of Music in Games
It happened again at lunch today. I was talking about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night with a coworker, and, unprompted, one of the first things they brought up was how good they remembered the music being. A couple of other people have said the same thing, and I have even read a preview comparing the music in our game to the music in SotN (in quality, definitely not in style). Unlike me, these people played the game when it came out (XBLA gave me a second chance to redeem myself), and they still find the music memorable. Trouble is, I can't for the life of me remember a single track from beginning to end, and I have just recently beaten the game a second time to get 200.6% and once more with Richter to get the full 200 achievement points. And then some to get 99 of everything the librarian sells including duplicators (I used the sword familiar glitch, but it still took a while). And then some more to grind up some levels. Fantastic control scheme, brilliant use of gameplay mechanics to implicitly branch the story, and support for a variety of play styles make this game one of the best of the PSX era. But wait, there was music playing in the background? I do remember some area had music that sounded like it would be better on an elevator than in a Castlevania, and the ending theme was far more emotional than the rest of the game tried to evoke, but the remainder of the tracks have not managed to stick in my memory.
I have begun to wonder if I am not giving enough attention to the aural aspect of game consumption. If ten years from now someone was to bring up SotN in a conversation, the first things I would laud would be the castle design and the risky decision to put so much effort into implementing and not advertising the second half of the game. The background tracks, while fitting and mostly just as polished as the game, would not even come to mind. But my experience has shown me that Symphony's music is in fact one of the first things people remember about the game. If you have played this title, what do you think? Is the music memorable to you? Is it as good as the gameplay or better?
That out of the way, there are a few titles that show me that I can notice and appreciate music in games. Eternal Sonata immediately comes to mind, as do many older JRPGs (almost any FF, Chrono Trigger, Lunar, Xenogears - pretty much anything done by Uematsu, Mitsuda, or Iwadare). I recently started playing Banjo Kazooie and marvelled at how the music changes dynamically from an ominous version to a softer version of the same tune when you approach the door to a world, or when you transition underwater. I even found myself relaxing recently to the title screen theme to the XBLA port of Uno when I left it running in the background. Conversely, when I played the original Castlevania again recently, I was cringing at how grating the three-channel NES tracks were. We put up with a lot back in the day...
How about you? What games have soundtracks that you remember years later (or will likely remember years from now if they are recent)? I would have to give mad props to the original Nights for having some of the most original, uplifting music in video game history (the sequel does a good job in this area as well) and to Doom64 for trading pop melody for darker atmospheric tracks (best in the series, imo). Another interesting question: is it possible for game music to be "too good" - that is, to be so outstanding that you are pulled out of the immersion and start appreciating it for its own merits? If this occurs, is it a good thing for the game as a whole?
I have begun to wonder if I am not giving enough attention to the aural aspect of game consumption. If ten years from now someone was to bring up SotN in a conversation, the first things I would laud would be the castle design and the risky decision to put so much effort into implementing and not advertising the second half of the game. The background tracks, while fitting and mostly just as polished as the game, would not even come to mind. But my experience has shown me that Symphony's music is in fact one of the first things people remember about the game. If you have played this title, what do you think? Is the music memorable to you? Is it as good as the gameplay or better?
That out of the way, there are a few titles that show me that I can notice and appreciate music in games. Eternal Sonata immediately comes to mind, as do many older JRPGs (almost any FF, Chrono Trigger, Lunar, Xenogears - pretty much anything done by Uematsu, Mitsuda, or Iwadare). I recently started playing Banjo Kazooie and marvelled at how the music changes dynamically from an ominous version to a softer version of the same tune when you approach the door to a world, or when you transition underwater. I even found myself relaxing recently to the title screen theme to the XBLA port of Uno when I left it running in the background. Conversely, when I played the original Castlevania again recently, I was cringing at how grating the three-channel NES tracks were. We put up with a lot back in the day...
How about you? What games have soundtracks that you remember years later (or will likely remember years from now if they are recent)? I would have to give mad props to the original Nights for having some of the most original, uplifting music in video game history (the sequel does a good job in this area as well) and to Doom64 for trading pop melody for darker atmospheric tracks (best in the series, imo). Another interesting question: is it possible for game music to be "too good" - that is, to be so outstanding that you are pulled out of the immersion and start appreciating it for its own merits? If this occurs, is it a good thing for the game as a whole?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Just a Theory
I'm no insider, but if I had to envision Microsoft's checklist by which they evaluated Vista's success I imagine it would look something like this:
1.) Implement unnecessary pseudo 3d alternative to alt+tab to satiate stockholder anticipation and give marketing something to play with
2.) Prevent Explorer from being able to handle more than 10 or so windows no matter how much RAM/virtual memory the user has available
3.) Do everything in our power to deprecate the creation and editing of Doom levels
If I am right, then bravo Microsoft; you are the very apex of accomplishment.
1.) Implement unnecessary pseudo 3d alternative to alt+tab to satiate stockholder anticipation and give marketing something to play with
2.) Prevent Explorer from being able to handle more than 10 or so windows no matter how much RAM/virtual memory the user has available
3.) Do everything in our power to deprecate the creation and editing of Doom levels
If I am right, then bravo Microsoft; you are the very apex of accomplishment.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Games Aren't Elevator Pitches
So I had a dream last night, about a video game. Specifically, I was going through a crazy sequence of events and realized (felt), during the dream and immediately upon waking up, that these events and the setting around them would make for a cool game. The last time I had a game-dream so visceral and structured was about a Doom level that I ended up making into a Doom level the next day with satisfying similarity.
In the beginning of the dream/game, I am a young journalist who is called, via connections through my father, to fill in for a local news anchor that recently took his own life (or simply vanished, I can't remember). In this context, “local” refers to a submerged city located directly off the coast. Yeah yeah, like Bioshock. I never said my dream was original, just that it was “cool”.
During the prologue, I am walking around throughout the city and finding my way to my new living quarters. While doing so, I end up taking a written test for my new anchor job. One of the questions asks how I would lie to make an example news story more interesting, and I try to figure out how to write that I wouldn't though such an option seems left out of the multiple choice answer suite. I meet some girl in the living quarters, I think she is a typical “childhood friend” character that I haven't seen in a while because there is some unspecified, positive familiarity that I feel toward her. In other words, she is there to give emotional validity when shit eventually goes down.
And down does the shit go. The dream skips ahead in time, during which I am somehow aware that there is more to the original anchor's death/disappearance than the news station lets on (when is there not?). Before I know it, the girl and I are running through the city, which is filled with Rapturesque glass tubes connecting buildings at the bottom of the sea as well as mammoth caverns carved by man into the coast. Predictably, there are monsters, and we are shooting at them, myself in the first person. I don't really know where these monsters came from, but that's okay because neither does my character.
We come to a particularly large cavern, about the breadth of a city block and high enough to store a handful of two story buildings. We are walking down a road when suddenly a huge mechanical scorpion climbs out of its resting place. Think the first boss in FF7, but ten times as big. We run around a building while the scorpion mech shoots at us with a rapid-fire gun. We manage to find the entrance to the building, which consists of two large metal doors that slide left and right. We run inside and close the doors, finding ourselves in a single room warehouse with a catwalk running around the edge.
The scorpion mech is not through with us. It walks around the building, shooting through glass windows on the first floor. We need to maneuver out of its sight to avoid getting hit. At some point, the scorpion brings its excavator-shaped tail down through the roof, hitting part of the catwalk and knocking it down to create a ramp to the second floor. The gamer inside me knows that I must go up this ramp to progress, and the designer inside me appreciates this pace-keeping hint.
From the second floor, we manage to get some better shots and better hiding angles, but it looks like the scorpion mech isn't going down from pistol fire alone. At one point, it brings its tail down through the roof again and gets it stuck in some large metal casing on the catwalk. Pulling the casing off reveals four large green cubes which I recognize as explosive mines. I tell the girl to get back, throw a mine out the second story window at the scorpion, then run back myself. The mine explodes, clearly damaging the scorpion, but not destroying it. I position myself and throw another mine, dealing more damage but failing to destroy my opponent.
Tired of this stalemate, the scorpion wants in. It uses its large claws to try and pry open the door. The girl and I each grab a side of the door and push back (explicit teamwork mechanics), somehow managing to force it closed. I assume the door's hydraulics are working with us. The scorpion backs up, and I somehow know that it is about to jump through the roof. Not taking the time to explain this clairvoyance, I lead the girl back up to the catwalk for an escape (I guess the door is broken and the first floor windows are barred or something?). Sure enough, the giant mech crashes through the feeble roof into the center of the warehouse. The girl and I jump out the hole that it created with its tail earlier.
While the scorpion is stuck inside the warehouse, we run in the direction we were heading before it interrupted us. We run down hill and enter a small cave that the scorpion could probably fit in, but not comfortably. There is a trailor up a hill, but it is in direct line of sight with the scorpion were it to find its way out of the warehouse. Instead of exploring the trailor (which probably has some interesting items due to its vulnerable location), we veer off to the left and run down hill and out of sight of the large cavern. We meet a woman who we both know somehow, a scientist of some sort. She presses some buttons on a terminal and we watch through a window as the warehouse explodes, an explosion much larger than those of the previous green mines. The warehouse itself is vaporized, but the scorpion still stands. While the machine charges up for another blast (however that works, I didn't question it at the time), the girl and I fight off some weaker monsters that inhabit the cavern.
Despite only getting five or six hours of sleep, I couldn't fall back asleep after waking from this dream. I kept thinking about it, how for a sequence of random neurons firing in my head, it had so much cohesion to it. I wanted to make this game. I don't now, now that the magic of having just experienced it in true first person has worn off, but at the time I did. I was thinking about how I would go about convincing my company to make it, how I would differentiate it from Bioshock, how I could add colors to avoid the typical gray/brown criticism that most FPSes deservedly receive, how the companion AI could operate to be an asset instead of a liability. I started thinking about the boss fight, what would happen if the catwalk fell on me or the girl after the tail came through the roof for the first time. Would that be a game over? Or, more interestingly, would one of us be pinned down while the other tried to find a way to save them? In the dream, I knew when the scorpion was going to jump through the roof simply because it was my dream. If the player was caught off guard by this and got crushed, it would be an unfair death. How would we communicate this to the player? I pictured a huge array of lights resting against the cavern wall just outside the warehouse, perhaps to brighten the cavern. If the scorpion could not jump but had to climb up the wall, and subsequently the array of lights, then the scorpion's shadow through the windows and roof (if the roof was glass) would serve as a fair and frightening indicator of what it was trying to do.
Or at least, what I think you think.
You think this is a generic FPS that I have an inflated opinion of because it came from a dream that I had, right? Of course you do. I feel that way too, now that the post-dream magic has worn off. But that is because you did not experience it, you merely read about it on a blog. What you experienced was a linear story, what I experienced was a dynamic world that responded to my actions, a unique challenge that was life-threatening yet fair. Perhaps because my subconscious was specifically tailoring the excitement for me, I dare say the pacing was perfect.
This brings me to the main point of this post: games aren't elevator pitches. You can not, Can Not fully appreciate a game without playing it. This is the inherent flaw in text reviews and image/movie based previews. It is also the flaw with the elevator pitch mentality that publishers have with game proposals. The strong point of any game is not the visuals, though unfortunately that is what gets marketed too often. Nor is the strong point how well the hindsight story reads when written on a blog. It is the interaction, of course. No, it is the full experience; interaction, immersion, and all. This is game design 101 here. Or 1001, if your college numbers their courses like mine did.
It's kind of odd that we are creatures that spend 1/3 of our lives vulnerable, unconscious, and hallucinating, amirite? Being an introspective person, I often wonder where my dreams come from. Consider this an addendum, if blog posts must be so formal in structure.
Obviously, I have played Bioshock and Fallout 3, both of which appear to have influenced the design of my dream-game. There is also a bit of Half-life 2 influence, as the girl can be compared aesthetically and mechanically to Alyx Vance. And interestingly enough, my friend was playing Final Fantasy 7 while on the phone with me and describing nostalgically his encounter with the first boss, just a couple of weeks ago. Finally, I was reading another person's blog last night where they described a dream they had. Finally (for real), I have been working on pitching a game design at my company, which may have primed the mentality needed for that dream to flourish.
Have any cool dreams where you are playing a new game or new levels for a game that exists? Is it ever as cool after waking up as it was while you were experiencing it?
The “Plot”
In the beginning of the dream/game, I am a young journalist who is called, via connections through my father, to fill in for a local news anchor that recently took his own life (or simply vanished, I can't remember). In this context, “local” refers to a submerged city located directly off the coast. Yeah yeah, like Bioshock. I never said my dream was original, just that it was “cool”.
During the prologue, I am walking around throughout the city and finding my way to my new living quarters. While doing so, I end up taking a written test for my new anchor job. One of the questions asks how I would lie to make an example news story more interesting, and I try to figure out how to write that I wouldn't though such an option seems left out of the multiple choice answer suite. I meet some girl in the living quarters, I think she is a typical “childhood friend” character that I haven't seen in a while because there is some unspecified, positive familiarity that I feel toward her. In other words, she is there to give emotional validity when shit eventually goes down.
And down does the shit go. The dream skips ahead in time, during which I am somehow aware that there is more to the original anchor's death/disappearance than the news station lets on (when is there not?). Before I know it, the girl and I are running through the city, which is filled with Rapturesque glass tubes connecting buildings at the bottom of the sea as well as mammoth caverns carved by man into the coast. Predictably, there are monsters, and we are shooting at them, myself in the first person. I don't really know where these monsters came from, but that's okay because neither does my character.
We come to a particularly large cavern, about the breadth of a city block and high enough to store a handful of two story buildings. We are walking down a road when suddenly a huge mechanical scorpion climbs out of its resting place. Think the first boss in FF7, but ten times as big. We run around a building while the scorpion mech shoots at us with a rapid-fire gun. We manage to find the entrance to the building, which consists of two large metal doors that slide left and right. We run inside and close the doors, finding ourselves in a single room warehouse with a catwalk running around the edge.
The scorpion mech is not through with us. It walks around the building, shooting through glass windows on the first floor. We need to maneuver out of its sight to avoid getting hit. At some point, the scorpion brings its excavator-shaped tail down through the roof, hitting part of the catwalk and knocking it down to create a ramp to the second floor. The gamer inside me knows that I must go up this ramp to progress, and the designer inside me appreciates this pace-keeping hint.
From the second floor, we manage to get some better shots and better hiding angles, but it looks like the scorpion mech isn't going down from pistol fire alone. At one point, it brings its tail down through the roof again and gets it stuck in some large metal casing on the catwalk. Pulling the casing off reveals four large green cubes which I recognize as explosive mines. I tell the girl to get back, throw a mine out the second story window at the scorpion, then run back myself. The mine explodes, clearly damaging the scorpion, but not destroying it. I position myself and throw another mine, dealing more damage but failing to destroy my opponent.
Tired of this stalemate, the scorpion wants in. It uses its large claws to try and pry open the door. The girl and I each grab a side of the door and push back (explicit teamwork mechanics), somehow managing to force it closed. I assume the door's hydraulics are working with us. The scorpion backs up, and I somehow know that it is about to jump through the roof. Not taking the time to explain this clairvoyance, I lead the girl back up to the catwalk for an escape (I guess the door is broken and the first floor windows are barred or something?). Sure enough, the giant mech crashes through the feeble roof into the center of the warehouse. The girl and I jump out the hole that it created with its tail earlier.
While the scorpion is stuck inside the warehouse, we run in the direction we were heading before it interrupted us. We run down hill and enter a small cave that the scorpion could probably fit in, but not comfortably. There is a trailor up a hill, but it is in direct line of sight with the scorpion were it to find its way out of the warehouse. Instead of exploring the trailor (which probably has some interesting items due to its vulnerable location), we veer off to the left and run down hill and out of sight of the large cavern. We meet a woman who we both know somehow, a scientist of some sort. She presses some buttons on a terminal and we watch through a window as the warehouse explodes, an explosion much larger than those of the previous green mines. The warehouse itself is vaporized, but the scorpion still stands. While the machine charges up for another blast (however that works, I didn't question it at the time), the girl and I fight off some weaker monsters that inhabit the cavern.
Waking Reception
Despite only getting five or six hours of sleep, I couldn't fall back asleep after waking from this dream. I kept thinking about it, how for a sequence of random neurons firing in my head, it had so much cohesion to it. I wanted to make this game. I don't now, now that the magic of having just experienced it in true first person has worn off, but at the time I did. I was thinking about how I would go about convincing my company to make it, how I would differentiate it from Bioshock, how I could add colors to avoid the typical gray/brown criticism that most FPSes deservedly receive, how the companion AI could operate to be an asset instead of a liability. I started thinking about the boss fight, what would happen if the catwalk fell on me or the girl after the tail came through the roof for the first time. Would that be a game over? Or, more interestingly, would one of us be pinned down while the other tried to find a way to save them? In the dream, I knew when the scorpion was going to jump through the roof simply because it was my dream. If the player was caught off guard by this and got crushed, it would be an unfair death. How would we communicate this to the player? I pictured a huge array of lights resting against the cavern wall just outside the warehouse, perhaps to brighten the cavern. If the scorpion could not jump but had to climb up the wall, and subsequently the array of lights, then the scorpion's shadow through the windows and roof (if the roof was glass) would serve as a fair and frightening indicator of what it was trying to do.
Let Me Tell You What You Think About That
Or at least, what I think you think.
You think this is a generic FPS that I have an inflated opinion of because it came from a dream that I had, right? Of course you do. I feel that way too, now that the post-dream magic has worn off. But that is because you did not experience it, you merely read about it on a blog. What you experienced was a linear story, what I experienced was a dynamic world that responded to my actions, a unique challenge that was life-threatening yet fair. Perhaps because my subconscious was specifically tailoring the excitement for me, I dare say the pacing was perfect.
This brings me to the main point of this post: games aren't elevator pitches. You can not, Can Not fully appreciate a game without playing it. This is the inherent flaw in text reviews and image/movie based previews. It is also the flaw with the elevator pitch mentality that publishers have with game proposals. The strong point of any game is not the visuals, though unfortunately that is what gets marketed too often. Nor is the strong point how well the hindsight story reads when written on a blog. It is the interaction, of course. No, it is the full experience; interaction, immersion, and all. This is game design 101 here. Or 1001, if your college numbers their courses like mine did.
The Catalysts?
It's kind of odd that we are creatures that spend 1/3 of our lives vulnerable, unconscious, and hallucinating, amirite? Being an introspective person, I often wonder where my dreams come from. Consider this an addendum, if blog posts must be so formal in structure.
Obviously, I have played Bioshock and Fallout 3, both of which appear to have influenced the design of my dream-game. There is also a bit of Half-life 2 influence, as the girl can be compared aesthetically and mechanically to Alyx Vance. And interestingly enough, my friend was playing Final Fantasy 7 while on the phone with me and describing nostalgically his encounter with the first boss, just a couple of weeks ago. Finally, I was reading another person's blog last night where they described a dream they had. Finally (for real), I have been working on pitching a game design at my company, which may have primed the mentality needed for that dream to flourish.
How About You?
Have any cool dreams where you are playing a new game or new levels for a game that exists? Is it ever as cool after waking up as it was while you were experiencing it?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
There Are No More Holy Days
That I have mustered any small amount of faith in general humanity can likely be attributed to time spent with friendly colleagues and a reclusive home life. I find it hard to maintain such faith right now.
The short of it, if you don't feel like reading the article, is that an employee was trampled to death by a large group of customers when their store opened on Black Friday. You can find the store name and location from the above link if it really matters to you.
I am not purchasing any gifts this year. I will not accept any holiday gifts. I will accept and read cards, and may or may not send some of my own (I'm not good at that sort of thing, so probably not). Please do not include money in any of these cards if you send one, as that is a gray area that I would rather avoid. I will be coming home for Christmas, unless we miss our deadline and need to work through the holidays - and even then, I will give bountiful weight to a family that has always been there for me over an industry of amateurish practice and poor scheduling that abandoned me during a crisis.
If you know of someone considering purchasing a gift for me, please send them a link to this blog post or describe it to them so they can comply. I promise you I will not accept material gifts. If you end up presenting me with one, I will reimburse you for the cost and give it to charity or a friend, or throw it away if it is perishable. I am insisting on this as a means of communicating my belief that love, when I can believe in it, is non-seasonal, not tide-locked to the rhythm of excessive capitalism.
I will think no less of anyone who decides to exchange gifts among themselves. I do encourage you to ask yourselves the following questions, or at least to skim through them.
1.) Why am I getting gifts for people around me? What am I trying to communicate, if anything, to those people (your intended "message")?
2.) Why am I doing so at this time of year, as opposed to other times of the year?
3.) Is my message any less true at other times of the year?
4.) If you are religious, how does giving gifts in an annual manner coincide with your beliefs (if at all)? Would giving gifts at another time of the year lessen this connection? Does giving gifts now muddy any spiritual aspects of the season?
If nothing else, perhaps holding off on gifts will prove relieving in our current economy. May you have better Holidays than the family of Jdimytai Damour...
The short of it, if you don't feel like reading the article, is that an employee was trampled to death by a large group of customers when their store opened on Black Friday. You can find the store name and location from the above link if it really matters to you.
I am not purchasing any gifts this year. I will not accept any holiday gifts. I will accept and read cards, and may or may not send some of my own (I'm not good at that sort of thing, so probably not). Please do not include money in any of these cards if you send one, as that is a gray area that I would rather avoid. I will be coming home for Christmas, unless we miss our deadline and need to work through the holidays - and even then, I will give bountiful weight to a family that has always been there for me over an industry of amateurish practice and poor scheduling that abandoned me during a crisis.
If you know of someone considering purchasing a gift for me, please send them a link to this blog post or describe it to them so they can comply. I promise you I will not accept material gifts. If you end up presenting me with one, I will reimburse you for the cost and give it to charity or a friend, or throw it away if it is perishable. I am insisting on this as a means of communicating my belief that love, when I can believe in it, is non-seasonal, not tide-locked to the rhythm of excessive capitalism.
I will think no less of anyone who decides to exchange gifts among themselves. I do encourage you to ask yourselves the following questions, or at least to skim through them.
1.) Why am I getting gifts for people around me? What am I trying to communicate, if anything, to those people (your intended "message")?
2.) Why am I doing so at this time of year, as opposed to other times of the year?
3.) Is my message any less true at other times of the year?
4.) If you are religious, how does giving gifts in an annual manner coincide with your beliefs (if at all)? Would giving gifts at another time of the year lessen this connection? Does giving gifts now muddy any spiritual aspects of the season?
If nothing else, perhaps holding off on gifts will prove relieving in our current economy. May you have better Holidays than the family of Jdimytai Damour...
Friday, October 31, 2008
Systemic Stability dressed in Statistical Sensationalism
While playing Fallout 3, I found myself marveling once again that we have not totally annihilated ourselves as a species. In fact, I am still amazed that nothing came of the cold war. The fact that a nuclear attack on any country would result in an equally devastating counterstrike seems like an easily dismissed concern in the eyes of a psychopath with determination, no sense of self preservation, and the right connections - or so mass fiction would seem to hint.
But it hasn't happened yet. I live in what is undoubtedly the most hated country in the world, and the largest aggression-based atrocity we have had to weather lately involved a four digit death toll at the receiving end of some planes, or possibly some explosives, because those steel beams in the wreckage looked shopped and I've seen quite a few pixels in my days.
A coworker presented me with an interesting probabilistic thought experiment in the field of reliability. Let's say you have a somewhat complex system of 100 parts, and any given part is 95% reliable (it will work appropriately 95% of the time and fail the other 5%). Let's say this is a touchy system; if one component fails, then the entire system fails. The probability of the system working is 0.95 raised to the 100th power, which is 0.00592, a little over half of a percent. There is over a 99% chance that such a system would fail. Though each part is almost completely reliable, the fact that each part is necessary toward our goal of success makes the system holistically unreliable. If we can increase the reliability of every component to 99%, there is only about a 37% chance the system would work. We need to ensure about a 99.3% reliability rate on each component to even get the odds of a coin flip.
There are approximately 6.7 billion people on this planet. If we consider each person to be a component of the system we call humanity (or if we want to be a little less egocentric, the system we call planet Earth), I wonder what we can estimate our component reliability to be. If there was "only" a 5% chance, per person, of that person launching a nuke and instigating our final hours (95% chance against), the odds of us surviving another day are too low for my windows calculator to display. The same can be said if the odds of pacifism are 99% per person. Same for 99.99%.
Assuming we can't have 100% odds against a nuclear holocaust, what percentage would you feel comfortable with? Would you feel comfortable if the odds of such an Armageddon happening tomorrow were only 1%? Let's see what level of component reliability we have to have to obtain that goal. If the odds of every human being behaving and not finding some way to trick a few nations into playing fallout volleyball was 99.999999% per person, would you feel safe? I wouldn't, as 99.999999% raised to the 6.7 billionth power is 7.98e-30, or 1 in 125,236,359,038,394,908,283,678,232,890. Playing poker with a new hand played every minute, you're just as likely to be dealt a royal flush each hand for 366,720,740,041,699,000 years (about 26 million times the established age of the universe) as you are to avoid witnessing a nuclear winter tomorrow if that's the only per-person reliability we can expect.
Tacking on another couple of 9's, giving us a per-person reliability of 99.99999999%, puts us at the halfway mark. Heads and you can sigh in relief, tails and you should be signing up for lodging in a vault, preparing to drink gallons of Nuka Cola to replenish health with relatively low radiation poisoning, and practicing your melee skills since post-Armageddon low-levels have to be so close to raiders and mutants to use their guns effectively that they just as well utilize the extra damage that a readily available sledge hammer offers. Also, only music from the 1930's will survive the explosions, and don't expect anyone to find time over the next two centuries to write new songs.
If we want to reach our original goal of a 99% chance of avoiding a nuclear war tomorrow, we have to up the odds in our favor slightly more - to about a 99.99999999985% pacifism rate per person. That's quite a high component reliability that we must maintain for our system to work isn't it?
The above figures will only get us through the next day, remember? I don't know about you, but I would like the world as we know it to last a little bit longer, at least another year. If we assume that a 99.99999999985% pacifism rate per person guarantees us a 99% chance of surviving for the next 24 hours, we can calculate that the odds of surviving for another week are about 93.2% (99% raised to the 7th power). Still pretty favorable, though perhaps not as much as we would like as we are talking about the largest death toll of our species in like, ever. But raise that 99% to the 365th power (366th if it's a leap year, but we'll aim a little lower for now) and the odds of the human race lasting the next year become 2.5%. Let's spoil ourselves a little and aim for successfully surviving a half a century of such risk; that puts us at the abysmally low survival odds of 2.2e-80%, even ignoring an inevitably increasing population (to be fair, I have been including infants in the 6.7 billion population estimate - the fun of sensationalism!). If we can assume an even stricter 99.99999999999999% cooperation rate per person, then we can almost guarantee a 99% chance of surviving the next half a century (assuming we make it through 2012). We've already made it over half a century since Hiroshima, so perhaps we are getting close with our presumed per-person cooperation rate.
Voodoo math aside, it just seems amazing to me that no properly motivated terrorist or corrupt/bored government has decided to end it all for our species. Perhaps we are a more tranquil species than I thought?
But it hasn't happened yet. I live in what is undoubtedly the most hated country in the world, and the largest aggression-based atrocity we have had to weather lately involved a four digit death toll at the receiving end of some planes, or possibly some explosives, because those steel beams in the wreckage looked shopped and I've seen quite a few pixels in my days.
A coworker presented me with an interesting probabilistic thought experiment in the field of reliability. Let's say you have a somewhat complex system of 100 parts, and any given part is 95% reliable (it will work appropriately 95% of the time and fail the other 5%). Let's say this is a touchy system; if one component fails, then the entire system fails. The probability of the system working is 0.95 raised to the 100th power, which is 0.00592, a little over half of a percent. There is over a 99% chance that such a system would fail. Though each part is almost completely reliable, the fact that each part is necessary toward our goal of success makes the system holistically unreliable. If we can increase the reliability of every component to 99%, there is only about a 37% chance the system would work. We need to ensure about a 99.3% reliability rate on each component to even get the odds of a coin flip.
There are approximately 6.7 billion people on this planet. If we consider each person to be a component of the system we call humanity (or if we want to be a little less egocentric, the system we call planet Earth), I wonder what we can estimate our component reliability to be. If there was "only" a 5% chance, per person, of that person launching a nuke and instigating our final hours (95% chance against), the odds of us surviving another day are too low for my windows calculator to display. The same can be said if the odds of pacifism are 99% per person. Same for 99.99%.
Assuming we can't have 100% odds against a nuclear holocaust, what percentage would you feel comfortable with? Would you feel comfortable if the odds of such an Armageddon happening tomorrow were only 1%? Let's see what level of component reliability we have to have to obtain that goal. If the odds of every human being behaving and not finding some way to trick a few nations into playing fallout volleyball was 99.999999% per person, would you feel safe? I wouldn't, as 99.999999% raised to the 6.7 billionth power is 7.98e-30, or 1 in 125,236,359,038,394,908,283,678,232,890. Playing poker with a new hand played every minute, you're just as likely to be dealt a royal flush each hand for 366,720,740,041,699,000 years (about 26 million times the established age of the universe) as you are to avoid witnessing a nuclear winter tomorrow if that's the only per-person reliability we can expect.
Tacking on another couple of 9's, giving us a per-person reliability of 99.99999999%, puts us at the halfway mark. Heads and you can sigh in relief, tails and you should be signing up for lodging in a vault, preparing to drink gallons of Nuka Cola to replenish health with relatively low radiation poisoning, and practicing your melee skills since post-Armageddon low-levels have to be so close to raiders and mutants to use their guns effectively that they just as well utilize the extra damage that a readily available sledge hammer offers. Also, only music from the 1930's will survive the explosions, and don't expect anyone to find time over the next two centuries to write new songs.
If we want to reach our original goal of a 99% chance of avoiding a nuclear war tomorrow, we have to up the odds in our favor slightly more - to about a 99.99999999985% pacifism rate per person. That's quite a high component reliability that we must maintain for our system to work isn't it?
But wait, there's more!
The above figures will only get us through the next day, remember? I don't know about you, but I would like the world as we know it to last a little bit longer, at least another year. If we assume that a 99.99999999985% pacifism rate per person guarantees us a 99% chance of surviving for the next 24 hours, we can calculate that the odds of surviving for another week are about 93.2% (99% raised to the 7th power). Still pretty favorable, though perhaps not as much as we would like as we are talking about the largest death toll of our species in like, ever. But raise that 99% to the 365th power (366th if it's a leap year, but we'll aim a little lower for now) and the odds of the human race lasting the next year become 2.5%. Let's spoil ourselves a little and aim for successfully surviving a half a century of such risk; that puts us at the abysmally low survival odds of 2.2e-80%, even ignoring an inevitably increasing population (to be fair, I have been including infants in the 6.7 billion population estimate - the fun of sensationalism!). If we can assume an even stricter 99.99999999999999% cooperation rate per person, then we can almost guarantee a 99% chance of surviving the next half a century (assuming we make it through 2012). We've already made it over half a century since Hiroshima, so perhaps we are getting close with our presumed per-person cooperation rate.
Voodoo math aside, it just seems amazing to me that no properly motivated terrorist or corrupt/bored government has decided to end it all for our species. Perhaps we are a more tranquil species than I thought?
Friday, October 24, 2008
The Cost and Benefit of Introspection
One of the interests that I have developed over the years is understanding the differences and similarities between computers and the human mind. Finding many flaws in modern programming, and being too stubborn to admit that they may just be flaws in my own habits, I have steered this interest toward creating a development environment that is more “natural” to use. I have been operating under the assumption that it will be easier to change the near entirety of modern programming as we know it instead of changing my own instincts. I've never worked so hard to maintain my laziness.
As the years have passed and I find myself forced into more mundane programming tasks through college projects and work assignments, I find myself wondering if I am not chasing yet another pipe dream. The ideals that I chase include elevating most programmers beyond viewing their code as a set of files and directories that turn text into arbitrary memory addresses, yet I myself keep stumbling into other abstractions, equally arbitrary and unnatural. The fact that I can't even define what I mean here by “natural” and “unnatural” is perhaps the cementing alarm that what I seek is unattainable. My habit of chasing the unattainable leaves me yet fruitless in my side-project endeavors — but man have I been having fun these past few months just trying to revolutionize programming, even if it is an impossible goal.
I called this project “Rational Thoughts” when I first devised it, as my goal was to create a development environment (back then a mere language) that was more “Rational”, closer to how the human mind perceives things, and thus hypothetically easier to work with. This was a mistaken direction. Human beings are, by and large, hardly “rational” thinkers; we are actually quite emotional*. Even at my most philosophical, when the voices in my head are reminding me that I can't prove my own volition and that there is no faithless evidence for a god or an afterlife, there is an even louder voice causing me to feel sorrow, and a yearning for when I was younger and kept happy by my own naivety about such matters. Likewise, it is perceived happiness that drives us to flourish intellectually, more so than it is our intellect that drives us to be happy. Modern computers, and thus I argue the programming languages designed to interface to them, are already much more rational than we have ever been, and I sure as hell don't want to try and implement emotions in my programming language**.
In case it has not been made obvious, this is not an admittance of defeat. This is an attempt to organize my thoughts and get some feedback on a project that has become so large I can not perceive its entirety at any given moment. Specks of it drift past my eyes, goals from the past, yet I can no longer keep track of which of these goals are compatible and which are mutually exclusive. I have a particular goal on my mind, which I will present soon. But first, I want to talk about introspection.
* ever find yourself cursing at your compiler for generating a compile error, as if your unrestrained outburst would intimidate it into compiling?
** I am perhaps operating under another false assumption, that rational thinking and emotional thinking are somehow opposite each other. Perhaps a topic worthy of another article? Until then, or until it comes up in a comment, I shall continue operating under that assumption…<_< >_>
It has been my greatest tool in designing this project. How can I fathom something that operates analogously to the human mind if I can not fathom the human mind? So I desire to study the human mind, and it just so happens that I have one with me at all times.
The first problem with introspection is the observer effect. By using mental processing to consciously look at your — uh — mental processing, you are limiting the amount of mental resources you have to do the observed processing, similar to the framerate drop you get when debugging a game. It is because of this phenomenon I have started to wonder about the direction I am heading. I was once a person who believed that self-introspection, or doing more things consciously and less things subconsciously (or at least being more aware of what the subconscious is doing), was the path to “enlightenment” (a cliched word, but I can't think of any better) and free will. Now I am beginning to think that many things are done subconsciously for optimization reasons, as if the subconscious was running assembly commands through the low level bus that drives our processors. If we started taking more and more mental processes out of our subconscious and doing them “ourselves”, wouldn't we slow down in the same way that an assembly program rewritten in unoptimized Java wouldn't perform well?
The second problem with introspection is avoiding a corrupt memory state, which I believe we humans are still calling “insanity”. If you are not used to it, constantly asking questions such as “why am I straight instead of gay?” or “would I be as evil as Hitler if I was born into his exact world state?” can cause discomfort. It seems from my experience that doing this enough can cause less discomfort via emotional “callouses” that form in your brain, which I can only assume operate by allowing the “rational” part of your mind to continue processing ego-threatening thoughts while the “emotional” guy sits on the sidelines believing that love is about romance and not hormones, or whatever it is that keeps him happy***. I believe that taking this process too far will result in a psychopathic mindset, so handle with care.
It is my obsession with introspection that gives me guidance when working on Rational Thoughts, but it is also what holds me back at times. I desire a programming environment where any question the user asks may be answered easily: “What was the value of this variable seventeen frames ago?” “Why is this variable negative here?” “What will the value of this thing be in two years?" Of course, these questions can be answered through multiple invocations of a program and debugging, but I want an environment that is able to look into its own “mind” and help out on a level closer to how the human mind views things. A development environment that is not so much rational as it is “clever”. But after so many years, I am beginning to wonder if I am any closer to understanding how my own mind works. After all, mightn't it take more processing than a mind has to understand itself, an inescapable paradoxical property of intelligence?
***I like that guy, he comes up with witty asides to lighten blog posts that reek of technicality and emo-philosophical hogwash
As the years have passed and I find myself forced into more mundane programming tasks through college projects and work assignments, I find myself wondering if I am not chasing yet another pipe dream. The ideals that I chase include elevating most programmers beyond viewing their code as a set of files and directories that turn text into arbitrary memory addresses, yet I myself keep stumbling into other abstractions, equally arbitrary and unnatural. The fact that I can't even define what I mean here by “natural” and “unnatural” is perhaps the cementing alarm that what I seek is unattainable. My habit of chasing the unattainable leaves me yet fruitless in my side-project endeavors — but man have I been having fun these past few months just trying to revolutionize programming, even if it is an impossible goal.
The Dealio
I called this project “Rational Thoughts” when I first devised it, as my goal was to create a development environment (back then a mere language) that was more “Rational”, closer to how the human mind perceives things, and thus hypothetically easier to work with. This was a mistaken direction. Human beings are, by and large, hardly “rational” thinkers; we are actually quite emotional*. Even at my most philosophical, when the voices in my head are reminding me that I can't prove my own volition and that there is no faithless evidence for a god or an afterlife, there is an even louder voice causing me to feel sorrow, and a yearning for when I was younger and kept happy by my own naivety about such matters. Likewise, it is perceived happiness that drives us to flourish intellectually, more so than it is our intellect that drives us to be happy. Modern computers, and thus I argue the programming languages designed to interface to them, are already much more rational than we have ever been, and I sure as hell don't want to try and implement emotions in my programming language**.
In case it has not been made obvious, this is not an admittance of defeat. This is an attempt to organize my thoughts and get some feedback on a project that has become so large I can not perceive its entirety at any given moment. Specks of it drift past my eyes, goals from the past, yet I can no longer keep track of which of these goals are compatible and which are mutually exclusive. I have a particular goal on my mind, which I will present soon. But first, I want to talk about introspection.
* ever find yourself cursing at your compiler for generating a compile error, as if your unrestrained outburst would intimidate it into compiling?
** I am perhaps operating under another false assumption, that rational thinking and emotional thinking are somehow opposite each other. Perhaps a topic worthy of another article? Until then, or until it comes up in a comment, I shall continue operating under that assumption…<_< >_>
Introspection
It has been my greatest tool in designing this project. How can I fathom something that operates analogously to the human mind if I can not fathom the human mind? So I desire to study the human mind, and it just so happens that I have one with me at all times.
The first problem with introspection is the observer effect. By using mental processing to consciously look at your — uh — mental processing, you are limiting the amount of mental resources you have to do the observed processing, similar to the framerate drop you get when debugging a game. It is because of this phenomenon I have started to wonder about the direction I am heading. I was once a person who believed that self-introspection, or doing more things consciously and less things subconsciously (or at least being more aware of what the subconscious is doing), was the path to “enlightenment” (a cliched word, but I can't think of any better) and free will. Now I am beginning to think that many things are done subconsciously for optimization reasons, as if the subconscious was running assembly commands through the low level bus that drives our processors. If we started taking more and more mental processes out of our subconscious and doing them “ourselves”, wouldn't we slow down in the same way that an assembly program rewritten in unoptimized Java wouldn't perform well?
The second problem with introspection is avoiding a corrupt memory state, which I believe we humans are still calling “insanity”. If you are not used to it, constantly asking questions such as “why am I straight instead of gay?” or “would I be as evil as Hitler if I was born into his exact world state?” can cause discomfort. It seems from my experience that doing this enough can cause less discomfort via emotional “callouses” that form in your brain, which I can only assume operate by allowing the “rational” part of your mind to continue processing ego-threatening thoughts while the “emotional” guy sits on the sidelines believing that love is about romance and not hormones, or whatever it is that keeps him happy***. I believe that taking this process too far will result in a psychopathic mindset, so handle with care.
It is my obsession with introspection that gives me guidance when working on Rational Thoughts, but it is also what holds me back at times. I desire a programming environment where any question the user asks may be answered easily: “What was the value of this variable seventeen frames ago?” “Why is this variable negative here?” “What will the value of this thing be in two years?" Of course, these questions can be answered through multiple invocations of a program and debugging, but I want an environment that is able to look into its own “mind” and help out on a level closer to how the human mind views things. A development environment that is not so much rational as it is “clever”. But after so many years, I am beginning to wonder if I am any closer to understanding how my own mind works. After all, mightn't it take more processing than a mind has to understand itself, an inescapable paradoxical property of intelligence?
***I like that guy, he comes up with witty asides to lighten blog posts that reek of technicality and emo-philosophical hogwash
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Of Baptist Funerals
So my grandmother is dying. She could be taking her last breath as I type this. It is not a complete surprise; she has been a heavy smoker since long before I was born and has been told several times by medical professionals that she should quit or face death. She has been in the hospital before with the medical staff not expecting her to survive much longer. This is one of those times. They have placed her in what is known as a "hospice", which as I have learned is a rather nice extension of the hospital for those that do not have long to live. Interestingly enough, my mom told me recently that she has not asked for any more cigarettes, and seems to be at peace.
My dad called tonight, a few hours ago, to tell me the news that this is probably her last night. It was a moment I expected for at least a couple of months, a moment I dreaded, a moment I rehearsed, keeping myself up at night - but not for the reason you probably think. I dreaded it because he is a religious person, and I am not.
I am currently living in Santa Clara, California, a technology hub in a liberal state. Silicon Valley. I grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a modest sized city with a strong Baptist community. The Bible Belt. When I was a kid, I was a "Christian" - meaning, that was what I said my religion was if anyone asked, and that was my religion because it was my parent's religion and thus I "inherited" it. This was before I realized what Christianity was. Heck, I still don't really know what Christianity is, it seems to be some composition of beliefs centered around the base idea that God had a physical son who can bring us salvation, though the denominations seem to differ significantly on the exact implications and details of this base belief. Since these beliefs are contradictory among denominations, Christianity as a whole comes off as a confusing mess.
When I was young, I did not go to church sermons, but I did attend day care at a church. Through that and my parents and perhaps television, I learned that God lets good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell, and he can do this because his awesome son died by crucifixion, the details of which are (censored for such young children). And since I was a "good" person (I knew this because I made good grades in school and generally did what my parents told, and I was not a murderer or a thief or what have you), I was going to get to go to Heaven. Yay! Lucky me! I even have memories arguing with my friends what Heaven was like. One of my friends agreed with me that Heaven would become like whatever you want it to, our logic being that living in Heaven is supposed to be the happiest experience you've ever felt, so whatever you fathom that would make you happier would already be true. My other two friends said that that was silly, that Heaven was what it was and we could not change it, believing that nothing we could imagine would make us as happy as Heaven already is.
Time passed, stuff happened, I turned fourteen and my parents started taking me to church for the first time. Turns out now that the whole "salvation by good deeds" bit that I blindly believed wasn't "really" how it works - although why they expected me to start blindly believing a new unproven system when the one they had been feeding me for fourteen years was a lie is beyond me. Hitler could be in Heaven if he accepted Christ, while an atheist who gives her life to save a school bus of burning children could be in Hell if she never did. Christianity sickened me, and Christians disappointed me for believing such garbage. I started to realize that there never was proof for anything religious I believed, and though I can talk with relative clarity about the topic now, the transition was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Much worse than the recent layoff, heart surgery, and loss of my grandmother that I have had to deal with this summer - and trust me, this hasn't been easy.
Not knowing how to handle this newfound information (misinformation?), I started getting grumpy at church. My parents did nothing to try and figure out why I was grumpy (honestly because I didn't know what to say or do, but felt that I must try something); instead, they got mad at me and scolded me, making me feel even worse. I was a rational outcast in a land of fools, and no one - not even my own parents - would listen.
It was with these horrendous memories that I have spent the weeks thinking about how I would tell something to my dad when the time came. At my other grandmother's funeral last year, the pastor took time toward the end of the service to ask everyone to hang their heads in prayer and, if they hadn't already, ask Jesus Christ into their hearts. I was not expecting this, and my anger reached about as high as it had ever been. Here is a guy whose profession depends on the belief of others using my grandmother's funeral as a commercial slot for his religion, trying to nab people at their weakest moment for conversion. It was outright disgusting, lower than I ever expected he would sink, and I spent the rest of the funeral in paralyzing rage.
I wanted to tell my dad that I would not go to another funeral if it was going to be held by a Baptist pastor. I feared doing so, as my dad is a Baptist, and has never shown much patience toward my feelings on the matter. But he seems to have mellowed as he aged, so I was hoping for a somewhat calm reception of my statement. Tonight I was tested; I got the news that there will be a funeral soon, and after several minutes of hesitating, making small talk with him about how I could fly out and back without missing my first day at my new job, I finally told him how I felt. Know how long it took before he made an angry retort? If you guessed right after I finished explaining things, you give him too much credit. He actually started before I had finished stuttering my ideas out, as if he knew where I was going after just a few words. I won't repeat what he said here, as he later apologized for saying it and explained that he was just stressed out (an apology that I appreciate, but which may not be enough for forgiveness - I haven't decided yet). I just needed to vent, and I wanted to lead into something very important to me.
In case it hasn't been made clear, I am not a Christian. I am not religious. I don't know if I am an Atheist or an Agnostic, and I don't understand why I have to blanket myself under one of those labels - do you call yourself a particular phrase because you do not believe in Santa Claus? I am not sure why, but I feel pain that my father has always shown such indirect anger toward me for this. I thought by now I would be strong enough to not care what he thinks, and it honestly baffles me that I apparently still do.
I want to have a "believe and let believe" attitude toward Christianity, under the assumption that they have a right to their beliefs and are not causing me harm. But how can I have such an attitude when I feel such pain, when I have been told that I deserve the worst punishment possible no less than history's worst villains by those I love at a fragile age? How can I feel complacent when Christians vote, yet their beliefs are bound to and constructed from an unproven, unscientific, unethical, self-contradictory book that was written hundreds of years ago by a far less educated society?
How can I feel calm when I can not escape this hell on earth, even at the funeral of my relatives?
My dad called tonight, a few hours ago, to tell me the news that this is probably her last night. It was a moment I expected for at least a couple of months, a moment I dreaded, a moment I rehearsed, keeping myself up at night - but not for the reason you probably think. I dreaded it because he is a religious person, and I am not.
A Little Background
I am currently living in Santa Clara, California, a technology hub in a liberal state. Silicon Valley. I grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a modest sized city with a strong Baptist community. The Bible Belt. When I was a kid, I was a "Christian" - meaning, that was what I said my religion was if anyone asked, and that was my religion because it was my parent's religion and thus I "inherited" it. This was before I realized what Christianity was. Heck, I still don't really know what Christianity is, it seems to be some composition of beliefs centered around the base idea that God had a physical son who can bring us salvation, though the denominations seem to differ significantly on the exact implications and details of this base belief. Since these beliefs are contradictory among denominations, Christianity as a whole comes off as a confusing mess.
When I was young, I did not go to church sermons, but I did attend day care at a church. Through that and my parents and perhaps television, I learned that God lets good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell, and he can do this because his awesome son died by crucifixion, the details of which are (censored for such young children). And since I was a "good" person (I knew this because I made good grades in school and generally did what my parents told, and I was not a murderer or a thief or what have you), I was going to get to go to Heaven. Yay! Lucky me! I even have memories arguing with my friends what Heaven was like. One of my friends agreed with me that Heaven would become like whatever you want it to, our logic being that living in Heaven is supposed to be the happiest experience you've ever felt, so whatever you fathom that would make you happier would already be true. My other two friends said that that was silly, that Heaven was what it was and we could not change it, believing that nothing we could imagine would make us as happy as Heaven already is.
Time passed, stuff happened, I turned fourteen and my parents started taking me to church for the first time. Turns out now that the whole "salvation by good deeds" bit that I blindly believed wasn't "really" how it works - although why they expected me to start blindly believing a new unproven system when the one they had been feeding me for fourteen years was a lie is beyond me. Hitler could be in Heaven if he accepted Christ, while an atheist who gives her life to save a school bus of burning children could be in Hell if she never did. Christianity sickened me, and Christians disappointed me for believing such garbage. I started to realize that there never was proof for anything religious I believed, and though I can talk with relative clarity about the topic now, the transition was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Much worse than the recent layoff, heart surgery, and loss of my grandmother that I have had to deal with this summer - and trust me, this hasn't been easy.
Not knowing how to handle this newfound information (misinformation?), I started getting grumpy at church. My parents did nothing to try and figure out why I was grumpy (honestly because I didn't know what to say or do, but felt that I must try something); instead, they got mad at me and scolded me, making me feel even worse. I was a rational outcast in a land of fools, and no one - not even my own parents - would listen.
What Happened Tonight
It was with these horrendous memories that I have spent the weeks thinking about how I would tell something to my dad when the time came. At my other grandmother's funeral last year, the pastor took time toward the end of the service to ask everyone to hang their heads in prayer and, if they hadn't already, ask Jesus Christ into their hearts. I was not expecting this, and my anger reached about as high as it had ever been. Here is a guy whose profession depends on the belief of others using my grandmother's funeral as a commercial slot for his religion, trying to nab people at their weakest moment for conversion. It was outright disgusting, lower than I ever expected he would sink, and I spent the rest of the funeral in paralyzing rage.
I wanted to tell my dad that I would not go to another funeral if it was going to be held by a Baptist pastor. I feared doing so, as my dad is a Baptist, and has never shown much patience toward my feelings on the matter. But he seems to have mellowed as he aged, so I was hoping for a somewhat calm reception of my statement. Tonight I was tested; I got the news that there will be a funeral soon, and after several minutes of hesitating, making small talk with him about how I could fly out and back without missing my first day at my new job, I finally told him how I felt. Know how long it took before he made an angry retort? If you guessed right after I finished explaining things, you give him too much credit. He actually started before I had finished stuttering my ideas out, as if he knew where I was going after just a few words. I won't repeat what he said here, as he later apologized for saying it and explained that he was just stressed out (an apology that I appreciate, but which may not be enough for forgiveness - I haven't decided yet). I just needed to vent, and I wanted to lead into something very important to me.
The point
In case it hasn't been made clear, I am not a Christian. I am not religious. I don't know if I am an Atheist or an Agnostic, and I don't understand why I have to blanket myself under one of those labels - do you call yourself a particular phrase because you do not believe in Santa Claus? I am not sure why, but I feel pain that my father has always shown such indirect anger toward me for this. I thought by now I would be strong enough to not care what he thinks, and it honestly baffles me that I apparently still do.
I want to have a "believe and let believe" attitude toward Christianity, under the assumption that they have a right to their beliefs and are not causing me harm. But how can I have such an attitude when I feel such pain, when I have been told that I deserve the worst punishment possible no less than history's worst villains by those I love at a fragile age? How can I feel complacent when Christians vote, yet their beliefs are bound to and constructed from an unproven, unscientific, unethical, self-contradictory book that was written hundreds of years ago by a far less educated society?
How can I feel calm when I can not escape this hell on earth, even at the funeral of my relatives?
Monday, August 11, 2008
Blogging Atrophy
I've been away for a while, and it's always hard in these situations to get back to updating a blog. For me, the problem is always exacerbated by the indecision about how to write that initial return post; I can't just act like nothing has happened, but I don't want to come across as too much of a forgiveness beggar. I don't owe anyone constant updates, but I do want to keep those that find interest in my musings well fed. I also hate blog meta-talk, common in all first blog posts and most return posts, and I hate even more how I can only communicate that hatred through blog meta-talk.
The obligatory set of friends that read this blog already know this, but in the event that someone I don't personally know has stumbled across this blog in the backwoods of the internet, I should explain that I have had a lot piled on me lately. Bluntly, I got laid off the exact same day I found out I would soon have to have open heart surgery (I turned 25 this April and got good performance reviews, wasn't really expecting either). Every time I pictured writing a post to describe these events, it sounded too whiny or too angry, so I backed off. Don't feel sorry for me or anything, the surgery is over and went fantastically, and I have an offer for a new job (still in the game industry) that I have accepted. Barring the unexpected, I will begin work soon, postponed only by a few formalities.
The topic of the layoff could be put into its own post if I feel like it. I most certainly will have several posts describing the heart surgery. Both have done an incredible amount to strengthen my character, despite my initial complaints. I guess. I dunno, that just sounds like the keen thing to say. At the very least, both events should provide excellent anecdotal ammo for future discussions.
Back to blogging.
The Ol' One-Two.
The obligatory set of friends that read this blog already know this, but in the event that someone I don't personally know has stumbled across this blog in the backwoods of the internet, I should explain that I have had a lot piled on me lately. Bluntly, I got laid off the exact same day I found out I would soon have to have open heart surgery (I turned 25 this April and got good performance reviews, wasn't really expecting either). Every time I pictured writing a post to describe these events, it sounded too whiny or too angry, so I backed off. Don't feel sorry for me or anything, the surgery is over and went fantastically, and I have an offer for a new job (still in the game industry) that I have accepted. Barring the unexpected, I will begin work soon, postponed only by a few formalities.
The topic of the layoff could be put into its own post if I feel like it. I most certainly will have several posts describing the heart surgery. Both have done an incredible amount to strengthen my character, despite my initial complaints. I guess. I dunno, that just sounds like the keen thing to say. At the very least, both events should provide excellent anecdotal ammo for future discussions.
Back to blogging.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Grand Theft Agency
"Open World", "Sandbox", "Playground" - these are all words that we hear thrown around in gaming parlance to describe a design trend that only increases in popularity. The promise is that players will be put in a fully simulated world, guided into plot-specific missions but generally free to do whatever they want. Time and time again, we fail to fully deliver this promise.
I had rather high expectations for GTA IV, I really did. In fact, I am enjoying the game a great deal - it's not quite as fun as Mario Kart Wii or Brawl, and I have even been putting more time into the under-appreciated Professor Layton, but GTA IV is a much more immersive experience. Yet despite the perfect atmosphere and engaging side-quests, I am really disappointed that the latest torchbearer in the series that defined the open world experience, a title that has even become the fiscal leader in launch success, earning more than any launch event in any medium of entertainment in history, still drags me around on a very short leash through the main quest.
I'm not very good at GTA IV. I've never been good at the series. As such, I have failed quite a few of the early missions. I don't really mind this, as all of the failures seemed fair - but I am extremely disappointed in how they are handled. From my experience, if you fail a mission for any reason, you are forced to do it again until you get it right - even if you didn't die. This has happened to me several times in just a few hours, and each time I feel my immersion crash faster and harder than Niko in that embarrassing little incident when I handbraked into a cop car stopped at a red light.
The latest incident, the one that caused me to shake my head in disappointment and add another crufty entry to my blog o' complaints, occurred in an early mission where Vladimir ordered me to spook up a laundromat owner for "insurance" money. When I arrived, he got scared and took off out the back, hopping in a van and fleeing. I hot wired a car and sped after him; a pretty fun experience. I managed to knock the sucker off the road into some trees. He wouldn't get out of his car, and kept trying to escape, halted by my t-boning him into more trees. After a couple of minutes of this, I got tired of his antics (and unsure of what to do to trigger the mission progression) so I got out of my car and shot him in the head. He fell onto his horn; that and the gunshot must have been heard by the police, for the area was immediately bathed in blue lights dancing to the tune of sirens. I hauled it out of there and gave Vlady a call.
He was not happy, claiming there was no way to get insurance money from a dead guy. Okay, so I blew it, I figured I would do a better job with the next "client" - and perhaps word of the laundromat owner's uninsured death would make future clients more compliant. I returned to the discrete bar to talk to Vladimir once more, and as I entered I was faced with an all too familiar cutscene.
I had to start the mission over again. I had "failed" it.
Feeling my frustration wax and my immersion wane, I headed back for the laundromat - only this time, to speed things up, I thought I would be clever. I knew the owner was scripted to run for it, and I knew which car he would use. I was using my foreknowledge from a previous mission attempt to game the game. My immersion already spent, I decided to break the forth wall myself, a wall that Rockstar apparently built out of hay and elmer's glue. I went around back and tried to break into the van to drive it far away. The door was locked, but Niko has street smarts and knows how to break a window with his elbow. To my surprise, when I do this I see a message saying that the laundromat owner got scared and escaped out the front. Niko pulls out his cell phone to tell Vladimir the bad news.
I had failed the mission again.
Similarly, in an earlier mission, I let a loan shark get away. My cousin complained at me and told me that now we would be up to our necks in loan sharks trying to get revenge. I was excited, naively thinking that my failure had thrown me down an exhilerating narrative branch. But it didn't; Rockstar took the weakest copout they could and forced me to play the mission again. I'm not asking for an exponential branching tree at every mission to give me a game with 1024 unique endings, but I also don't think it would be terribly hard to allow the player to "half-pass" missions by performing suboptimally, giving them less of a financial reward but letting them continue the game. This mentality of "you can play however you want as long as it is the one way I thought of" is still holding back modern game design. Time and time again, developers promise everything in the kitchen but the sink, and when we accept we find ourselves in a room with dust-covered counters, bare cupboards, and a fridge with a spoiled smell so nauseating that we are loathe to open it.
There is a phrase called "next gen" gaming. It is basically a horrible marketing ploy/misnomer used by Microsoft and Sony to make you think you are getting more out of your games than you really are. Firstly, this is not the "next generation" of gaming, it is the "current generation". The "next generation" will be the, well, "next" generation of consoles (or equivalent "large" step forward). It hasn't arrived yet. Secondly, I would argue that we haven't really left the generation of games that we've been in for about a decade now. Sure, the graphics have improved, and we have begun to realize that not every gamer wants to die five times per missions, but, well... we still have missions and death and failures leading to retries structuring almost all of our commercial titles.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a fun game. Really. It currently has a score of 99/100 on metacritic formed from several dozen reviews, which is simply phenomenal. It saw launch week success surpassing that of Halo 3. In many ways, GTA IV is the pinnacle of current gaming, if not in quality alone then in the attention that it will hold for years to come. Unfortunately, I can't help but feel as if Rockstar has given me a mic and a stage to say whatever I want to say without them listening, only hearing what they want to hear. The sandbox is large, but the sand itself is low quality, too dry, and all my castles fall to dust within moments of divination.
I'm through venting. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go tear up Liberty City in my stolen taxi, save my cousin's debt-drowned ass, and take Michelle to the bowling alley while contemplating solutions to this treadmill the industry walks perpetually.
I had rather high expectations for GTA IV, I really did. In fact, I am enjoying the game a great deal - it's not quite as fun as Mario Kart Wii or Brawl, and I have even been putting more time into the under-appreciated Professor Layton, but GTA IV is a much more immersive experience. Yet despite the perfect atmosphere and engaging side-quests, I am really disappointed that the latest torchbearer in the series that defined the open world experience, a title that has even become the fiscal leader in launch success, earning more than any launch event in any medium of entertainment in history, still drags me around on a very short leash through the main quest.
I'm not very good at GTA IV. I've never been good at the series. As such, I have failed quite a few of the early missions. I don't really mind this, as all of the failures seemed fair - but I am extremely disappointed in how they are handled. From my experience, if you fail a mission for any reason, you are forced to do it again until you get it right - even if you didn't die. This has happened to me several times in just a few hours, and each time I feel my immersion crash faster and harder than Niko in that embarrassing little incident when I handbraked into a cop car stopped at a red light.
The latest incident, the one that caused me to shake my head in disappointment and add another crufty entry to my blog o' complaints, occurred in an early mission where Vladimir ordered me to spook up a laundromat owner for "insurance" money. When I arrived, he got scared and took off out the back, hopping in a van and fleeing. I hot wired a car and sped after him; a pretty fun experience. I managed to knock the sucker off the road into some trees. He wouldn't get out of his car, and kept trying to escape, halted by my t-boning him into more trees. After a couple of minutes of this, I got tired of his antics (and unsure of what to do to trigger the mission progression) so I got out of my car and shot him in the head. He fell onto his horn; that and the gunshot must have been heard by the police, for the area was immediately bathed in blue lights dancing to the tune of sirens. I hauled it out of there and gave Vlady a call.
He was not happy, claiming there was no way to get insurance money from a dead guy. Okay, so I blew it, I figured I would do a better job with the next "client" - and perhaps word of the laundromat owner's uninsured death would make future clients more compliant. I returned to the discrete bar to talk to Vladimir once more, and as I entered I was faced with an all too familiar cutscene.
I had to start the mission over again. I had "failed" it.
Feeling my frustration wax and my immersion wane, I headed back for the laundromat - only this time, to speed things up, I thought I would be clever. I knew the owner was scripted to run for it, and I knew which car he would use. I was using my foreknowledge from a previous mission attempt to game the game. My immersion already spent, I decided to break the forth wall myself, a wall that Rockstar apparently built out of hay and elmer's glue. I went around back and tried to break into the van to drive it far away. The door was locked, but Niko has street smarts and knows how to break a window with his elbow. To my surprise, when I do this I see a message saying that the laundromat owner got scared and escaped out the front. Niko pulls out his cell phone to tell Vladimir the bad news.
I had failed the mission again.
Similarly, in an earlier mission, I let a loan shark get away. My cousin complained at me and told me that now we would be up to our necks in loan sharks trying to get revenge. I was excited, naively thinking that my failure had thrown me down an exhilerating narrative branch. But it didn't; Rockstar took the weakest copout they could and forced me to play the mission again. I'm not asking for an exponential branching tree at every mission to give me a game with 1024 unique endings, but I also don't think it would be terribly hard to allow the player to "half-pass" missions by performing suboptimally, giving them less of a financial reward but letting them continue the game. This mentality of "you can play however you want as long as it is the one way I thought of" is still holding back modern game design. Time and time again, developers promise everything in the kitchen but the sink, and when we accept we find ourselves in a room with dust-covered counters, bare cupboards, and a fridge with a spoiled smell so nauseating that we are loathe to open it.
There is a phrase called "next gen" gaming. It is basically a horrible marketing ploy/misnomer used by Microsoft and Sony to make you think you are getting more out of your games than you really are. Firstly, this is not the "next generation" of gaming, it is the "current generation". The "next generation" will be the, well, "next" generation of consoles (or equivalent "large" step forward). It hasn't arrived yet. Secondly, I would argue that we haven't really left the generation of games that we've been in for about a decade now. Sure, the graphics have improved, and we have begun to realize that not every gamer wants to die five times per missions, but, well... we still have missions and death and failures leading to retries structuring almost all of our commercial titles.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a fun game. Really. It currently has a score of 99/100 on metacritic formed from several dozen reviews, which is simply phenomenal. It saw launch week success surpassing that of Halo 3. In many ways, GTA IV is the pinnacle of current gaming, if not in quality alone then in the attention that it will hold for years to come. Unfortunately, I can't help but feel as if Rockstar has given me a mic and a stage to say whatever I want to say without them listening, only hearing what they want to hear. The sandbox is large, but the sand itself is low quality, too dry, and all my castles fall to dust within moments of divination.
I'm through venting. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go tear up Liberty City in my stolen taxi, save my cousin's debt-drowned ass, and take Michelle to the bowling alley while contemplating solutions to this treadmill the industry walks perpetually.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
They Don't Teach This at MIT
If you are a game designer, you owe it to yourself to read this blog. It is a journalistic recording of a "non-gamer"'s first time playing the original Half Life. I find it illuminating that one of our medium's pinnacle titles fails in many ways to communicate itself to players who haven't developed a subconscious appreciation of, or blindness to, common tropes. In defense of Valve's masterpiece, it could be said that the confusion that the player must feel when evacuating an underground research facility suddenly infested with alien creatures is in phase with Gordon Freeman's own disorientation. It could also be said that a majority of the human race would not think to look for conveniently placed air vents just large enough for a full grown man in a hazard suit to crawl through at every dead end.
I found myself in a big elevator, got the message that I was entering the "office complex" and entered that area. I found a medical pack on the ground, at least I thought it was this as my health went up a little bit. A laser type thing came down from the ceiling and immediately zapped me.
I stopped here because no matter how I tried to get around that laser I kept dying. Crouching and running, running fast, jumping ... nothing worked. So I stopped.
I'm not grasping the big picture of where exactly I'm going in this game but I hope I'm not backtracking. Wasn't the office complex where this all started? We'll see if I can figure my way around this next time and figure out where exactly I'm going.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Rant: Speeding
I was driving back from McDonald's earlier today when it happened; someone else turned onto the road behind me, driving in the same direction as me, in the same lane. Okay, this is a pretty common and innocuous event, but I always feel a bit of angst in this situation. Angst over what, you ask? That this person will get in the other lane to pass me.
I know, I know, it's a pretty silly thing to get angsty about. It's just something I've been noticing lately, something that I've been consciously looking at, because I am a self-conscious guy. Whenever I see a vehicle take up a certain portion of my rear view mirror, I suddenly focus enough mental effort on said vehicle to bring it up into my conscious awareness. I play a game with them. The game is called, “Are you going to pass me?” What I do is I check my speedometer, and make sure I'm going precisely the speed limit. If these people get in the other lane and travel faster than me for an extended duration, then they are speeding and they lose the game. That they don't realize they are participating in this “game” is beside the point; it is just a rhetorical device anyway.
More people lose this game than win it. I play it on small streets where there is little other traffic to affect the outcome, not on large highways or interstates. I have even started upping my speed to five miles per hour over the limit in an attempt to lessen the temptation and possibly get more winners. As far as I can tell, this has had very little effect. In my utterly unprofessional, poorly defined, unrecorded samples of this “game”, it seems that people are about as likely to pass me when I am going five miles per hour over the speed limit as when I am going the speed limit. And this pisses me the fuck off.
I'm not sure why it does, it just does. Somehow, every time a vehicles passes me, it's like they are saying that their time is more valuable than my time. That increasing my own speed seems to have no effect on this bizarre conspiracy only worsens the emotional impact by implanting a sense of helplessness into my mind. This is utterly irrational on my part, it's more of a reflex emotion than a rational response. After all, it is up to me to decide how valuable my time is, and spend less time driving (by driving faster) if I feel it is worth the ticket and safety risk. That others have a slightly different evaluation function for their driving habits should not bother me, except that it somehow does, on a subconscious level that I can't seem to breach without sufficient effort (effort that my own evaluation functions have yet to justify).
Of course, it did not take too long for me to realize a certain bias in this “experiment”, namely that for these people to pull up so close behind me in the first place they must already be going faster than me, so of course they are likely to want to pass me, finding my current speed insufficient. The people who wouldn't be likely to pass me (because they are going at or below my current speed limit) will never catch up with me to even begin playing the game. So unfortunately, I have developed a little game that is a bit inclined to attract the type of people who would lose it. Perfect for casinos, but a little unsatisfying for my causes.
To account for this, I began playing an advanced version of the game. I go the speed limit, and when I notice someone pulling up behind me I speed up somewhat gradually to about five miles per hour over the speed limit. Thus I have enticed a larger variety of drivers into this game while adjusting the difficulty in their favor. And still, still, still they fucking pass me, so very often. I began to wonder if they even realize that I am speeding up for them, or if they already got it into their head that they are going to pass me and have gone into autopilot, have reached the point of no return, unaware that I am going a little faster, perhaps even as fast as they were before they caught up with me. I wonder how much faster I have to go before the majority of drivers will notice what's going on and stop auto-drafting me. Might be worth experimenting with, except that I fear this level won't be reached without flirting with dangerous speeds.
Eh, I would be stretching things to say that there is. There really isn't a point to any of this, at least not a good point; that's why I labeled it a rant. But I am curious; if anyone reading this habitually speeds, may I ask why?
Why do you speed?
I know, I know, it's a pretty silly thing to get angsty about. It's just something I've been noticing lately, something that I've been consciously looking at, because I am a self-conscious guy. Whenever I see a vehicle take up a certain portion of my rear view mirror, I suddenly focus enough mental effort on said vehicle to bring it up into my conscious awareness. I play a game with them. The game is called, “Are you going to pass me?” What I do is I check my speedometer, and make sure I'm going precisely the speed limit. If these people get in the other lane and travel faster than me for an extended duration, then they are speeding and they lose the game. That they don't realize they are participating in this “game” is beside the point; it is just a rhetorical device anyway.
More people lose this game than win it. I play it on small streets where there is little other traffic to affect the outcome, not on large highways or interstates. I have even started upping my speed to five miles per hour over the limit in an attempt to lessen the temptation and possibly get more winners. As far as I can tell, this has had very little effect. In my utterly unprofessional, poorly defined, unrecorded samples of this “game”, it seems that people are about as likely to pass me when I am going five miles per hour over the speed limit as when I am going the speed limit. And this pisses me the fuck off.
I'm not sure why it does, it just does. Somehow, every time a vehicles passes me, it's like they are saying that their time is more valuable than my time. That increasing my own speed seems to have no effect on this bizarre conspiracy only worsens the emotional impact by implanting a sense of helplessness into my mind. This is utterly irrational on my part, it's more of a reflex emotion than a rational response. After all, it is up to me to decide how valuable my time is, and spend less time driving (by driving faster) if I feel it is worth the ticket and safety risk. That others have a slightly different evaluation function for their driving habits should not bother me, except that it somehow does, on a subconscious level that I can't seem to breach without sufficient effort (effort that my own evaluation functions have yet to justify).
A surprising development!
Of course, it did not take too long for me to realize a certain bias in this “experiment”, namely that for these people to pull up so close behind me in the first place they must already be going faster than me, so of course they are likely to want to pass me, finding my current speed insufficient. The people who wouldn't be likely to pass me (because they are going at or below my current speed limit) will never catch up with me to even begin playing the game. So unfortunately, I have developed a little game that is a bit inclined to attract the type of people who would lose it. Perfect for casinos, but a little unsatisfying for my causes.
To account for this, I began playing an advanced version of the game. I go the speed limit, and when I notice someone pulling up behind me I speed up somewhat gradually to about five miles per hour over the speed limit. Thus I have enticed a larger variety of drivers into this game while adjusting the difficulty in their favor. And still, still, still they fucking pass me, so very often. I began to wonder if they even realize that I am speeding up for them, or if they already got it into their head that they are going to pass me and have gone into autopilot, have reached the point of no return, unaware that I am going a little faster, perhaps even as fast as they were before they caught up with me. I wonder how much faster I have to go before the majority of drivers will notice what's going on and stop auto-drafting me. Might be worth experimenting with, except that I fear this level won't be reached without flirting with dangerous speeds.
There's a point to this?
Eh, I would be stretching things to say that there is. There really isn't a point to any of this, at least not a good point; that's why I labeled it a rant. But I am curious; if anyone reading this habitually speeds, may I ask why?
Why do you speed?
- Is it because you feel the posted speed limit is actually lower than the logistical "safe" speed limit?
- Is it because you feel that you are a better driver than the average person, and thus "deserve" to go a little faster than the average driver since your skills and reflexes will make up for the lost safety?
- Is it because you live nearby and know these roads better than the average person, so driving a little faster is reasonable?
- Is it because you notice that most other people speed? If so:
- Do you speed because it feels "more dangerous" to go slower than everyone around you?
- Do you speed because you are scared you will anger people behind you who want to go faster?
- Do you speed because you want to anyway, and seeing others do it means you are less likely to be singled out and ticketed?
- Is it to save time? Or because you often find yourself running late (somewhat related to saving time)?
- Is it because you don't think you'll get caught?
- Is it mostly just because you went this speed yesterday, and the day before, and it's just easier to keep doing it as long as it works?
- Safety?
- To avoid getting ticketed?
- To avoid negative social reaction from your peers or those around you?
- Moral objectivism (it's just the Right Thing To Do)?
- Is it mostly just because you went this speed yesterday, and the day before, and it's just easier to keep doing it as long as it works?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)