Adam MacDonald

Interpreting the Indeterminate (Ray Dalio)

Adam — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:03:33 +0000

Below is a video from the Bloomberg Markets 50 conference this past week in NY of Bridgewater Assoc. LP founder, Ray Dalio. Mr. Dalio was featured recently in the New Yorker,, and his hermeneutics of global markets is interesting. I need to re-visit this at least. (...)

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The Start of Filming of “The Hobbit” — Happy Friday!

Adam — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:39:58 +0000

Perfect timing and perfect antidote to a long miserable PNW Spring, videoblog of the start of the production of the Hobbit by Peter Jackson. Replete with Sir Ian sporting a playful cap. I hadn’t noticed but the cast also includes Bret McKenzie of the Flight of the Conchords, Brian Blessed as King Dain Ironfoot (typecasting a Dwarf King), and David Tennant as King Thranduil (typecasting again as an Elven King). It was a great Friday morning.(...)

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How an Economy (and a Culture) Fails

Adam — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 05:45:04 +0000

Loss of confidence coincides with a general loss of hope. It means there is no trust in a better tomorrow, or at least the chance for progress. As it escalates, one can feel like there’s an increasing certainty that one’s children and grandchildren will not be better off or even more secure. These are old and authentic feelings that all people have encountered, particularly when it comes to their governments/rulers.

When you look at history cursorily — what happened to Rome, Central America pre-Columbus, the Dark Ages in Ancient Greece — whatever epoch changing moment you can identify when there was wholesale dislocation and people abandoned their cities and economies, there was a loss of faith involved. The economies stopped working because people no longer believed there was anything worth trading, and consequently, there was no stability. People stopped trusting institutions and didn’t care and/or didn’t have the resources to support anything but themselves until their infrastructure — military, sanitary, agriculture, trade — was completely unsustainable and could no longer support itself. The so-called barbarian invasions in Rome were actually more incremental, and were really the last straw that broke everything. The decline had been going on for much longer.

That malaise is definitely now in America. Mixed with anxiety and anger, there’s an increasing worry that things not only are not getting better, but in fact the signs of economic progress that do exist are fraudulent.(...)

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Economic Ideologies

Adam — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:21:49 +0000

Nice summary article on the maybe obvious point of interpretation, economics starts with ideology. I liked this post because it’s by an economist, stating what economics is really about and what the actual starting place of its practice must be: the stating of one’s bias and beliefs. (...)

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Games as Models, Society as Gameplay?

Adam — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 02:41:02 +0000

The day began innocently enough. I was making breakfast for my son when on the radio an interview with the peripatetic Jane McGonigal played: “How To Save The World, One Video Game At A Time”: McGonigal has a book that I’ve not yet read, but from second hand knowledge she is from the serious games side of games. ARG‘s and the like. She claims that the pedagogic and timesink aspects of games can be exploited for real-world success. This seems to be mostly about consoles and MMO’s, but I expect McGonigal is including PDA and handhelds etc.(...)

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Post tags: economics, hermeneutics, Jane McGonigal, models, video games

On My Son’s First Birthday

Adam — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:43:45 +0000

Since I like to try and note things that I at least find noteworthy, here is a broadcast that will last as long as we have computers, inexpensive gasoline and open networks. Happy birthday sweetheart. Love, your Mum and Dad.

A Truth Foretold, A Funny Model?

Adam — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 03:36:17 +0000

Sad news today of a disgraced economics professor giving his last words to a young student via email. Luckily, it’s an April Fool’s joke. Maybe unluckily the “Academic Choice” theory seems a logical extension of both social construction and public choice theory giving maybe a realistic approach for how to treat economists. Via Naked Capitalism.(...)

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Of Beauty and Consolation: Interview with Richard Rorty

Adam — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 04:11:24 +0000

Discovered this interesting interview with Richard Rorty from the Dutch TV series, “Van de Schoonheid en de Troost” on VPRO, first broadcast in June 2000. It’s interesting that they have a portion with him bird watching. Rorty was an avid amateur ornithologist, and spoke very directly about his appreciation for the wild.(...)

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End of public libraries in the UK?

Adam — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:17:37 +0000

I listened to a BBC podcast the other day and I found it depressing: Local public libraries to be run by volunteers. Because of the UK’s financial constraints there’s an austerity budget that’s been introduced. But the tactic of handing over services to volunteer groups is a very worrying model that I can see being taken up elsewhere. It’s worrying because at least in the UK there doesn’t seem to be any commitment to ensure success in the transfer.(...)

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The “Financialisation” of History

Adam — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 05:32:18 +0000

I listened to a recent podcast from the BBC’s Radio 4 Analysis program on the ubiquitous and insidious growth of ~~credit~~ debt in our world: Radical Economics: escaping credit serfdom. Interesting that debt has become a matter of everydayness when so many of our ancestors worked to free themselves from unhealthy obligation. (...)

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Counting Words, Accounting Meaning

Adam — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 20:30:36 +0000

There’s a cottage industry that seems to grow with every new generation of scholars with the capture, tagging and release of canonical texts. From the first hermeneutics to narratology to New Historicism to the great unknown of Google Scholar and its agenda, there’s an insistent sour desire to make the “outputs” of interpreters determinate. There’s an insistent faith that as each new strata of complexity is identified as texts are burrowed into, the goods scholars produce will yield an ordered surplus to make the work of the next generation easier. Or more realistically, to render it impossible, since what’s at faith is the goal to standardize meaning in a text.(...)

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Post tags: hermeneutics, interpretation, John Allen Paulos, Kennedy Apeiron, Plato, Stichometry

The Myth of the Given — US Thanksgiving 2010

Adam — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 20:46:03 +0000

This will be the first American Thanksgiving my family celebrates. Although having lived in the US now for four years, 2010 will be the first year we attempt to formally celebrate whatever it is we are meant to commemorate. In an ongoing series of missives with my friend the author Paul Marlowe, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the holiday.

(...)

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Post tags: canada, citizenship, culture, Paul Marlowe, Thanksgiving, United States

Taleb on “Anti-Fragility” and “Instability”

Adam — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 05:21:31 +0000

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the The Black Swan, former options trader, and someone who may end up this generation’s Dr.Johnson, if only for his ability to virulently and consistently upend the disingenuous, has a new book of aphorisms I’m keen to examine: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms. Taleb is often credited with the common sense warning of not trusting narrative complexity or naively believing in determinateness. He sometimes seems a buoyant Cassandra, with the training and the articulation of someone who knows how financial analysis and trading is really done; namely, by instinct and public choice. Here he is on the Economist speaking a little more fluidly on “anti-fragility” and later on Bloomberg TV is full defiance.

(...)

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“Spoilerism”: the New Normal?

Adam — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 03:24:31 +0000

It may be that we’re living at the start of a new phenomena where the wealth of a modern State is dependent upon the amount of irony it has on hand. Having a surplus of cheaters may dictate the amount of real competitiveness a country can rely upon. It’s maybe the ludic-logical extension of mercantilism.(...)

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Post tags: business, cheat, competition, game, Richard Quinn, risk, spoiler

Recycling Your Privacy — Google War Driving

Adam — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:38:18 +0000

Imagine for a second if you found one day several photos of your family misaligned on your bureau or in an album. Now imagine further if these shadow changes were small ‘clicks of sound of quick recordings of your phone calls. Someone has been rifling through your belongings, your memories and private exchanges. Unsurprisingly, last week it was revealed Google had done much of the same through a series of war-driving exercises as it drove-by on its Street View services of world cities. As its cars would pass, Google would “sniff” the local unsecured wireless LAN’s of people and capture brief copies of their transactions.(...)

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Post tags: Google, Michael Zimmer, online identity, privacy

Concept of the Times — the Risk of Irrationality

Adam — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:59:34 +0000

If anything is more pervasive in our cultures today than the concept of technology to explain, legitimate and predict or enforce visions for the future I think it is the concept of risk. Risk is a modern concept, but it can be found in the ideas of dread, threat, uncertainty… What is new today is that understanding risk is felt to be determinate. As people think they can predict their own understanding of risk — e.g. how people react, how systems develop, how forces may counter each other — so too the idea of risk somehow becomes more tame. It’s very odd. The more we try to reconcile ourselves to indeterminacy, to the irrationality of nature, the more we want to humanize risk. We can’t accept risk so we need to buffer it’s equivocalness by rationalizing our reactions.

There is a growing frustration among some people who are aware of this perhaps innate inclination to soften and frame risk in finance. Alfred North Whitehead said once that science was fundamentally an activity predicated on faith — a faith in the rational, “that there is an underlying order to the universe” that can be discovered. In our times, that faith might similarly and perversely be felt by financiers who need to convince clients and the general public that the faith in the market can likewise be rational. It’s not true.

A Lack of Integrity, Facebook Inconsistent With Its Own Policies

Adam — Sat, 22 May 2010 03:21:49 +0000

It looks like the spine tingling sense of dread between Facebook members after they see an ad appear about a keyword they may have just mentioned has merit:

“Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers’ names and other personal details, despite promises they don’t share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. … Several large advertising companies … including Google Inc.’s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.’s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social networking sites, and said they haven’t made use of it. … The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards. … Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation.” [WSJ 5/21/10]

(...)

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Wondering about the History of the History of Philosophy

Adam — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:39:42 +0000

It seems there are a large number of people with a wide variety of opinions about what is Philosophy even today. Simon Critchley of Dead Philosopher’s fame has started an opinion column in the NYT with the heavy title of the Stone where the opening topic is “What Is a Philosopher?” It’s a fine overview that hits the regular ideas minus the vocation. One of the conditions of possibility for Philosophy it seems are to proceed as if Time is not a commodity. In effect, it’s the old theoria vs praxis proposition something I’m interested in exploring. Basically, I want to know more about how Philosophy becomes Philosophy as a discipline.(...)

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Online Privacy — Equivocal Identity, Predictable History

Adam — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:16:54 +0000

Ironically, there seems to be a consistent reaction to impresario Mark Zuckerberg’s bon mots that enabling widely distributed details about yourself outside of Facebook is an example of a “lack of integrity.”

“You have one identity,”… “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

“Quit Facebook Day” is gaining ground and the problem over Facebook’s tactics is becoming more well understood in the maintstream media. Maybe there is not a disparate, equivocal set of feelings among people about how they feel about privacy and their identity and that of their families and friends?(...)

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Post tags: Facebook, Google, Jaron Lanier, Mark Zuckerberg, online identity, privacy

Ubiquity, Privacy, Integrity: Your 2 Choices Online

Adam — Sat, 15 May 2010 04:23:33 +0000

Old media genuflects to the new. Twitter and Facebook get mentioned and appealed to for news regularly by TV and magazines. So it’s not surprising when mainstream media outlets overlook Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings on privacy. It’s not in the interest of old media to criticize an important source of advertising. But the failures and contradictions and self-interested actions Facebook has taken lately to stem criticism over privacy concerns are slowly becoming harder to ignore by the public. When the New York Times can spot that Facebook’s privacy policy has more words than the US Constitution something is developing.(...)

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Post tags: Facebook, online identity, privacy, web publishing

New Edition of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ Ahoy!

Adam — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:23:35 +0000

There’s only one time so far in my life when I’ve torn pages out from a book. It was a fit of pique, an unreasonable response to an unreadable, unreliable and bizarre decision. It was the introduction to the abridged and edited version of Finnegan’s Wake by Anthony Burgess. It was a glib, unnecessary, and as I remember, idiosyncratic read. Burgess “edited” the Wake, which makes as much sense as cutting out pieces of the Mona Lisa or halving the run time of Beethoven’s Fifth. Pick your analogy, it didn’t make sense, and while I had read the Wake 1.5 times before that — not counting the genuine times I had skimmed or attempted and failed to complete the book — I still couldn’t reason the logic of some of his edits.(...)

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Universities in Crisis?

Adam — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:40:23 +0000

The slow moving death of liberal post-secondary education in the West is starting to seem a regular topic. What’s happened since 1968? Was it the explosive growth of new institutions? Was the bar lowered for entrance criteria and for graduating? Was it the introduction of unions to faculties? Was it the politics of endowments and a collusion with industry and governments?(...)

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2009 List of Lists

Adam — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:47:26 +0000

Amongst a few things, 2009 for me will be the year of the lists. Becoming familiar with any community of interest requires information, and the best way to “inscribe oneself” into a narrative is first of all through the opinion of others. Over time we can question those bias and change ourselves, but for now these opinions are a basic and useful starting point. Here are a few reading lists for 2009. I may add some more eventually. For now they contain enough recommendations to keep me busy for the upcoming year.

The Millions: A Year in Reading 2009
Blake Butler’s list on : 25 Important Books of the 00s
Online Degrees: 50 Best Literature Blogs
Emerging Writers Network: 2009 Holiday Gift Suggestions
Anna Clark’s list on Isak: Choose Books: Complete Gift Guide
Daily Beast’s: Our Favorite Books of 2009
Blake Butler’s 2009 Reading Summary: 106.2 Books in 2009

Minarets in Switzerland

Adam — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:26:36 +0000

It’s difficult to find anything humorous or ironic in Switzerland’s decision to change their constitution to ban the construction of new minarets in any of their cantons. Crooked Timber has an intelligent insight. But overall it’s an appalling and worrying precedent. It’s targeted discrimination against a religious minority. As Doug Saunders in the Globe & Mail observes, “Even as European human-rights courts began attempts to block the Swiss amendment Monday, extremist politicians across Europe were examining their countries’ laws to see if a similar referendum could be accomplished.” Emboldening bigots and re-writing the facts of religious behaviour (there are only 4 minarets now in Switzerland, and none of the communities espouse sharia law) is worrisome. Using laws for your own insecurity is shown historically to never work.

More Heidegger Controversy

Adam — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:19:34 +0000

Interesting turn of events. I mentioned recently a post about eBook anxiety, which ended with the author Adam Robinson saying tongue-in-cheek he wanted to seclude himself in the Heimat of Heidegger somewhere online. As sometimes happens, he had a drive-by shot of lulz in the comments when someone asked why bother reading such a Nazi et al. This prompted an other post where the reasonable question was asked, should we read writers we find objectionable? How do you separate artist from their creations and influence? It’s the old problem of authorial intent, but the length and detail of the comments on that post are noteworthy.(...)

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Helpless for Attention?

Adam — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 01:16:30 +0000

It’s all around us this market changing world of ours. Or is it?

A couple of hundred years ago our dear forebears of English went ice cold thick banana-whips (to quote Douglas Adams) when Parliament forgot to renew the monopoly of the Stationer’s Company and people were able to print whatever they jolly well liked. We imagine our own times are unique for upturns in publishing output, but that’s misleading. Instead, we keep recycling the same business models — it’s only the tactics and technologies that change.(...)

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Post tags: Adam Robinson, e-Readers, Paul Constant, publishing, Raph Koster

Pasternak’s Refusal

Adam — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:35:19 +0000

Yesterday the Guardian reprinted from its archives an original note from 1958 about Pasternak’s refusal to leave the Soviet Union to receive his Nobel Prize. It’s terrific newspapers take the time to sometimes show their historicity (even if a lot of it is pre-conceived).(...)

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Post tags: Boris Pasternak, Nobel, Russia, Soviet Union

Webster’s Dictionary Awareness

Adam — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:38:42 +0000

It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Heidegger

Well, it’s that magical time of the year again when English receives one of its few officiated, marketed births. The Webster’s Dictionary team has brought up into Anglo consciousness their 2009 word-O-the-year. Unveiled all over the floor and some. As good critics we can see what is noteworthy by what was overlooked: cloud computing, wrap rage, wallet biopsy, go viral, and netbook . These aren’t words, but rather expressions — the kind of growths Dr.Johnson would have enjoyed having a good shout about. Yes, that is an preposition. (...)

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The (Un)surprising Social Construction of Publication

Adam — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:25:24 +0000

As a student — maybe at any age — it’s really hard to determine the end point of an historical movement to understand what followed. This is a concern because ultimately one wants to know what is going on “now”, and what will be next. An example most young writers have to negotiate is Modernism. While “Post-Modernism” seems largely over as an historical theme, understanding the join, as it were, to the so-called Moderns at the end of the 19th and early 20th century is key to at least understanding how Post-Modernism began. And again, what might be next. The logic being if we can never catch up fully to the now we can at least see where things started and project what might follow. But those origins I think are largely illusory, because like most things they were the product of someone and did not evolve spontaneously. History is a long sequence of people interfering with one another.(...)

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Post tags: Modernism, Post-Modernism, publishing, web publishing

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1909-2009)

Adam — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:18:59 +0000

Historical note today with the passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1909-2009). A detailed obit in the NYT helps summarize his impact on Western culture as an academic. Le Fig has a better review en francais with some video interviews. The SLOG is more succint.(...)

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Narratology For Your Wall

Adam — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:23:03 +0000

Today’s XKCD reminds us all of the legacy of scientific interpretation. Hermeneutics has finally come full circle into everydayness.

Munro must have spent some time obsessing over those films. I wonder which axis gave him the most trouble. Maybe choosing the legend, and thus the vocabulary, was the hardest exercise. Another famous height creation of his and a well made depth episode. The Enlightenment progression has the stick figures mounted the same way as Attic vases.

In the same plane, at an other extreme, artist Stephen Wiltshire draws by hand the skyline of Manhattan and New Jersey from memory.

the hand moves while the memory rests (Stephen Wiltshire)

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Post tags: narrative theory, Stephen Wiltshire, XKCD

New HHGTTG Book?

Adam — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:17:19 +0000

Is it true? Is it necessary? There’s a new book for the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy written by YA author Eion Colfer? I can’t imagine what he will do with the franchise, since Adams seemed to have exhausted any other possible plot developments. The series is quite uneven. The original trilogy is well paced, but mostly because it was workshopped for BBC Radio. When Adams left that structure, like with the Dirk Gently series, he seemed to have lost steam. It will be interesting if Colfer can re-invent/re-boot the crew, morose androids et al.

Jung’s Red Book Published

Adam — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:49:12 +0000

News from the other worlds of academic psychiatry and myth: Carl Jung’s unpublished Liber Novus (The New Book), a large heavy work bound in red leather binding and filled with esoteric illuminations and scripts is being published. Commonly known as The Red Book it was the result of an internal travelogue Jung took over several years, charting his anxieties and desires through mythic imagery. His heirs never allowed it to be published or viewed by scholars. The NYT has a long, interesting and detailed article describing the journey to publication this odd impressive work has taken.
(...)

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No Trees in Canada?

Adam — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:25:31 +0000

It’s hard to imagine, but I’m still struck by the incredible lack of trees in most Canadian major cities. I say most since I’ve visited most, and recently, Vancouver and Victoria, both really surprise me by their lack of urban greenery. There are spots, like the UBC campus, which abut parks and have green belts, but otherwise from downtown Vancouver to Langley and its casinos there’s not a lot trees. It’s bizarre and disappointing. For example, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax have nothing and Vancouver, which is two and a half hours north of Seattle, which is suffused with trees and parks, has an incongruous forest of condos next to Stanley Park. In Halifax our urban forest was mostly destroyed a few years back from a hurricane and I haven’t heard if it’s being renewed or redeveloped. This is hard to understand, particularly for a country whose national symbol is a leaf. In contrast, New York has committed to plant 1 million trees in the next seven years. Surely Canada can match this?

Faulks’ Concern, What is the Web Worth?

Adam — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:59:08 +0000

I don’t think Sebastian Faulks was trying to create controversy when he stated he was ambivalent about the Web recently in an interview in the Telegraph, but the response from the Internet Literati didn’t believe him. To be fair, he says he is worried by an increasing popular dependence on attention technology, and for a writer it’s a difficult problem. But the broader issues that touch publishing may escape him, or more accurately, may not interest him.(...)

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Post tags: publishing, Sebastian Faulks, web publishing, writing

Apology to Rushdie

Adam — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:36:42 +0000

Interesting denouement to the so-called Rushdie Affair. Salman Rushdie, well known Indian/British author, most famous for the Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children, earned an apology today from writers of a tell-all spy book. The writers had included or manufactured anecdotes about Rushdie’s period of protection while he was under fatwah from clerics in Iran. One of the contested facts included, “That Rushdie sought to profit from the fatwa inviting Muslims to kill him for insulting the prophet Muhammad.” That’s hard to imagine when Rushide was principally hoping just to stay alive.

It’s 20 years ago this year that the Satanic Verses were condemned in Iran, and sparked the “culture war” that we are still trying to understand.

I remember my Dad was on a business trip to Ottawa when the news broke. He came home with a copy of the book. He said he was the only person that morning who had reached over and purchased a copy at a downtown bookstore. The cashier asked him, “Are you making a statement?” to which he confidently said, “Yes. Yes I am.” It’s good to remember these kinds of facts and history, particularly when it comes to censorship or just self-interested defamation.

Andy Goldsworthy’s Travels

Adam — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:15:40 +0000

Sometimes I am really surprised by Art. I can capitalize the concept in this case, since these are experiences I really esteem and they are infrequent. Falling into an exhibit of Christopher Pratt at the AGNS, his massive paintings underground… that was memorable. Another happy discovery was Andy Goldsworthy.(...)

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eBook Worries

Adam — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:16:14 +0000

A recent error in copyright has had an unfortunate impact on a few of Amazon Kindle’s customers. Without more detail I think it’s safe to say this won’t be the norm, and particularly where the text in question was 1984… well, I expect this wasn’t planned.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian the other day has put up his hand to ask questions about what this means for eBook readers in general. If the trend in publishing is to move to the Web, with or without DRM (queue Cory Doctorow) then how can customers be assured that their purchases are safe? Or more importantly, how will they know their privacy will be respected, their habits protected (e.g. lending books to family and friends), and most importantly, that their texts will not be censored or interfered with in any way (e.g. abridged and edited versions, and preferred translations over others)? These in my mind are some of the vital questions for the future of publishing.

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Post tags: cory doctorow, e-Readers, eBook, Kindle, publishing

“Prisoner” Re-Make Underway

Adam — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:22:54 +0000

I recently learned there’s a re-make of The Prisoner in the works. Patrick McGoohan passed in January of this year, so sadly he will not be involved. No idea if he had any input. Apparently, Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen are both working on the 6-episode TV mini-series for the AMC channel in the US. That gives one hope. The Prisoner is both an iconic piece of television, but also absurdly hard to summarize, since it directly used the absurd to help enforce the terror and moments of dislocation the drama is supposed to bring. It will be interesting to see how it’s re-written and updated for our times.

In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)

Adam — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:00:45 +0000

A radio program that’s been running for a few years off of BBC Radio 4 I think is worth highlighting. It’s “In Our Time”, hosted by writer and British peer, Melvyn Bragg. I know Bragg from the South Bank Show, the Adventure of English TV series and book, and he is a well published novelist and British commentator. Bragg and the program seem unique to me — incredibly informed, erudite, civilized sources of discussion.

The format of the weekly program is three different academics who assemble to discuss and summarize a particular topic. The themes range from Science, Religion, Philosophy, History and Culture. Some examples include programs about Infinity, Zoroastrianism, the life of Albert Camus, the Abbasid Caliphs, and Renaissance Astrology. The academics take turn in presenting a basic overview of the topic moderated by Bragg who has to keep the discussions from falling into too much detail. A podcast is available and wonderfully there’s an Archive where past programs can be streamed. It’s a great resource and very informative.

Audio Interview with Nam Le

Adam — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:44:12 +0000

I found an audio interview with Nam Le off of Bookninja that I will try and listen to someday. Le was a celebrated newcomer in 2008 with his short story collection, The Boat. I’ve read it and indeed a couple of the stories are noteworthy, particularly the first, the hallmark story “Love and Honor”. Here are some references.

References:

On Privacy — Conclusion

Adam — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:43:22 +0000

Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Claiming that privacy is about transactions and that being private is the recess of information is not immediately clear. Yet, the common logic that something is private so long as it is not published means that what we value and retain as confidential must concern what we can potentially divulge and obtain. The right to privacy and its conflicts are within this order. But to encourage another view – where being private is not tied to any one thing — allows us to consider another way of conceiving how privacy should be respected.(...)

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Business Devotion

Adam — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:59:10 +0000

Recent controversy over Warhammer Online, the MMO based on the Warhammer franchise, saw the one of the founders and CEO, Mark Jacobs, ejected from the business. He and others sold the operating company (Mythic Entertainment) to Electronic Arts for $70 odd million I believe in 2006. Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings has penned a thoughtful and frankly, conciliatory essay on Jacobs by trying to describe partly the need for “outsized personalities” in small companies and partly his own personal reflections on working at Mythic. I’ve read Scott’s blog in its many forms for years, and having listened to him in person at an AGDC panel in 2006 he’s struck me as a credible guy who genuinely enjoys video games. He esteems community, design, play, and the business seems secondary to him. But in this brief essay I think he’s wrong.(...)

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Post tags: business, game, ideology, Scott Jennings, video games

On Privacy — the Concept of Privacy

Adam — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:54:45 +0000

Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Outside of the important work to legally refine privacy and our freedoms for information, it is important to improve the sense of what privacy is in itself. If we have a good working notion of what is private and whose expectations are the most important in protecting and sharing private information, we should be able to rehabilitate privacy from its confrontational sense. Legal work needs this domain of privacy-as-discord to develop the concept publicly, but we can also improve the private sense of privacy. If what we regard as fundamentally private is information on our states of being, then describing it outside of any conflict is worthwhile pursuing.(...)

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Coming Undone (the banned book, “The Coming Insurrection”)

Adam — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:55:21 +0000

The other day French radical thought came to Barnes & Noble. Scores of students at Union Square in NY, apparently replete with all the trappings of Continental thought, held an ersatz flash mob to celebrate the translation of an anarchist book. It’s “The Coming Insurrection” or “L’insurrection Qui Vient”.
I haven’t read it, and if there was anyone I know there that day I would be surprised. Helpfully, here’s an Amazon link. Add it to your Wishlist.(...)

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Post tags: censorship, ideology, Orwell, Terry Eagleton

Le Carre Contra Mundum

Adam — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:47:54 +0000

In tandem with his latest book there have been some articles circulating about John LeCarre. This time they’re a little more retrospective and focusing on his history. This should suit us well, as we all wonder anxiously what awaits us in the Googleverse of CCTV and indexed text.(...)

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Bloomsday 2009

Adam — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:51:01 +0000

We’ll, I guess I’ll start this. Let’s see if I can make it a tradition.(...)

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On Privacy — the Right to Privacy (3)

Adam — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:33:29 +0000

Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2)

It seems there are two kinds of particular private details that we value: Information on our movements and information on our states of being. Since the end game is a legal definition, there doesn’t need to be a lot of nuance as to how we understand the enactment of a right to privacy. But we should see that data on our public movements ought to be differentiated from how we feel, and from information that signifies our mental states and histories.(...)

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Publishing in Transition

Adam — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:08:36 +0000

Paul Constant in this week’s The Stranger has a wonderful summary of the recent BookExpo America (BEA) he attended. It goes a little like this:

This year’s BEA felt less like a convention and more like a funeral: Last fall’s recession triggered perhaps the most dismal year in the history of publishing in America. Book sales are down across the board, layoffs have plagued the industry like a virulent STD, and retailers—including Borders… —lost money with astonishing speed. The publishers who put any energy into BEA bought smaller booths … Larger publishers like Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and smaller presses like McSweeney’s and Small Beer didn’t even bother to set up booths this year.¹

In short, and to be polite, publishing is an industry in transition.(...)

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Post tags: community, cory doctorow, e-Readers, Paul Constant, publishing, Ursula K. Le Guin

You Can’t Pick Your Readers – Copyright and Authorial Rights on the Web

Adam — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:50:05 +0000

Last week I had an interesting conversation with a Director at work. It ended something like this (with not that much abbreviation):

Him: What is the most important thing to an Author?
Me: Getting published?
Him: No.
Me: Getting paid?
Him: No — that’s the last thing they can expect. No, the most important thing to an Author is being read.

I was stumped, mostly because my answers included my own personal logic for what being published and being paid actually means to an individual producer. Satisfaction, safety, insecurity over the next installment. I like to think that I meant being read is the most important thing to a writer, but the Director was indeed correct if only because he was more direct. And the issue deserves to be that explicit.(...)

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Post tags: authorial rights, copyright, Pirate Bay, Ursula K. Le Guin, web publishing

On Privacy — the Right to Privacy (2)

Adam — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:32:00 +0000

Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1)

Confidential information can be generalized into isolated judgments or datum instead of long-term opinions or presumptions. The distinction is dependant upon how we highlight individual data points of people to be representative of themselves versus a private analysis of their behaviors or histories to predict their future decisions. We regard specific facts as confidential information that is kept by the individual to help form and abbreviate their identity. The analysis and further generalization of these facts is most often produced by organizations, which collect and predict the reactions people will have in their efforts to affirm some self-worth. Both types of confidential information contain judgments, but the point of interest for a right to privacy is that the proprietary studies of organizations who rely on the collection of private data of individuals maintain this information only for themselves. People always share, or can share their opinions and decisions, but the forecasted trends made from the confidential information of these judgments by organizations is disturbing when they are not accessible for inspection and corroboration.(...)

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Authentic Forever (New Salinger Lawsuit)

Adam — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:52:39 +0000

While some writers over time might change their style or intent, few actually make the transition into entirely different forms of expression. But J.D. Salinger, former New Yorker short-story writer and most famous for The Catcher in the Rye, pioneered a new example when he stopped writing fiction more than thirty years ago to focus only on crafting restraining orders. (...)

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Post tags: authenticity, copyright, death of the author, J.D. Salinger

On Privacy — the Right to Privacy

Adam — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:30:15 +0000

Introduction to Essay

Privacy, if it is a human right, is legally difficult to identify. There are ongoing efforts to develop the arguments for its limits and protections, but there is a strong assumption in the U.S. and Canada that generally citizens have some right to privacy. Neither the Canadian Bill of Rights nor the Charter of Rights and Freedoms mention privacy directly, but it may be inferred through the right to substantive liberty (charter s. 7).¹ The main legal justifications are the current privacy acts at the Federal and Provincial levels. Where the provinces have authority over property and civil rights (s.92, constitution act (1867)) they have the central responsibility for privacy. Yet, when the issues are national, for example, in broadcasting or security, then the Federal government can regulate privacy. (...)

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Creative Writing, Creative Engineering

Adam — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:30:23 +0000

Louis Menand in this week’s New Yorker has an interesting article about the rise and success of creative writing programs. First introduced in the US, creative writing curricula now offer Ph.D’s in their study of workshopping fiction and poetry. Menand is reviewing a new book (Mark McGurl’s, The Program Era) that traces the inception of these courses and asks about their uncomfortable, unsystematic presence in academia. It also focuses on their success and the interplay between well known writers and poets who have taught, or been instructed in creative writing programs, and the subsequent effect these people have had on publishing and the academic world.

McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.

(...)

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Post tags: business, culture, ideology, Louis Menand, New Yorker, poetry, university, writing

Alice Munro Wins Again

Adam — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:55:47 +0000

It could be the time of year, which for my team is unfortunately the busiest, or it may have been the sourness this week of the Oxford Poetry scandal, but I was completely caught unawares when the world media announced that Alice Munro had won the 2009 Man Booker International. The reaction of the pundits seems to be a happy, calm unanimity. Or not (hello Canada!).(...)

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That Last Infirmity of Noble Mind

Adam — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:38:38 +0000

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

– John Milton, Lycidas

I guess it must have been my Dad who once told me that one of the problems with academics is that they have no outlets for normal, human politics — no budget, no staff, no real paths for promotion or channels for their conflict. Consequently, you see them scrap over substitute prizes: Corner offices, seminar courses, sabbaticals. The chance to introduce some celebrity at a dinner, the ability to travel in the Summer months and unwind. Too much of that seems true from my own experiences, but I sort of thought that by now — as far as I am from Undergrad as my Dad is from teaching — that things might have changed. Students, of course, get exposed to a lot of poor behaviors from people who are paid — or should be paid primarily — to teach, but again I figured with the rise of the management culture and the death of collegiality we would’ve seen a lot less of the high table chicanery. Not so. (...)

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Post tags: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Derek Walcott, Olympics, poetry, Ruth Padel

On Privacy — Introduction

Adam — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:31:28 +0000

In October of 2003, Canada had the inconvenient fun of having to compare two competing indulgences. On the one hand, there was the right of Parliamentary committees to summon and investigate all Federal organizations, whether they reported to Parliament directly or not. And on the other, the right of the then Privacy Commissioner to keep his discretionary spending of public funds private. Absurdity won. But curiously, it was the Commissioner’s perverse spending that rankled Canadians. His chicanery to deny the public the right to review the office of their own privacy ombudsman seemed overlooked.

This reaction nicely typifies the confusion surrounding the concept of privacy, but it also damages the case that it ought to be esteemed as a fundamental freedom. The scandal encourages the prejudice that privacy is something more synonymous with guile than personal freedom; namely, if there’s nothing to hide, why not provide? Unfortunately, there seems to be few alternatives, since the dominant opposing argument can be found in the rebuttal of the ersatz Commissioner to Parliament; that is, there’s nothing to provide, since it’s the individual’s right to hide. (...)

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“Higher in Canada”

Adam — Sat, 23 May 2009 04:35:39 +0000

About three years ago I had a bad moment in one of Canada’s largest book chains. I was trying to find a Graham Greene novel, and the price of the only copy available was almost two and a half times that of the listed US sales price. Even more expensive after the probable conversion from Euros, which was also listed. To be clear, this was the price on the text itself, printed on the back, not the sticker price. The publisher printed this amount. The book wasn’t a special edition, or particularly unique, it was just a new reprint of an old paperback and I wanted to read it. But I couldn’t afford it. In retrospect I should’ve tried to find the work at a used book store. But I think it’s important to note that it wouldn’t have mattered if I tried an independent bookseller — the cost of this new book would’ve still been the same.(...)

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Popular vs. Substantial

Adam — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:55:08 +0000

Many years ago when I was an undergraduate, in a townie bar that was so small and spare it could have fitted easily into any airport lounge, I had an argument that I could not win. The friend I was chatting with enjoyed tugging on my academic roots, and although his father was a GP and he himself has become a family lawyer near his Dad’s former practice, my drinking pal had a “working class” streak he liked to pull out occasionally. It was a terrible conversation and I only remember the following: “There is no difference,” my friend avowed, “between Dickens and Stephen King. Refute!” (...)

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LeCarre back on the BBC (new radio plays)

Adam — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:44:21 +0000

Auspicious news — BBC Radio 4 is producing all of John LeCarre’s Smiley books.

For those unaware, John LeCarre‘s early books centred on the retiring British spy George Smiley and are essentially responsible for bringing realism into what was otherwise a rigid genre (the Mary-Sue Superspy). Influenced by Graham Greene and a destroyed professional career as an MI6 intelligence office, LeCarre (born David John Cornwell) documented the anxiety filled world of the British intelligence services surviving a Cold War as their cultural identity imploded after the Second World War. Personally, I think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is superb as a novel in structure and pace and character. It ranks now as an historical novel and I think it was Martin Amis who taught LeCarre biographical novel, A Perfect Spy, somewhere for awhile.

At any rate, there’s a great list of radio plays to look forward to with the renowned Simon Russell Beale playing Smiley. The last time the BBC produced some of LeCarre’s Smiley books it was the monumental performances by Alex Guiness. I just hope these are available from outside the UK.

On Vocation — Ironies, Doubt and Delay

Adam — Fri, 15 May 2009 06:08:02 +0000

“And I especially puzzled and wondered when I remembered how long a time had passed since my nineteenth year, in which I had first fallen in love with wisdom and had determined as soon as I could find her to abandon the empty hopes and mad delusions of vain desires. Behold, I was now getting close to thirty, still stuck fast in the same mire, still greedy of enjoying present goods which fly away and distract me; and I was still saying, “Tomorrow I shall discover it; behold, it will become plain, and I shall see it; behold, Faustus will come and explain everything.” St.Augustine, The Confessions

One of the ironies I’ve noticed about vocations in creative people is that they are only really admired when their activity becomes completely indescribable from what it once was. A vocation to something is only broadly esteemed when its products change how we understand and then pursue an activity in the future. We admire the radicals who innovate and change how we understand their profession. We like the steady producers, but we only revere the artist who changes our entire understanding of what their art form might be. I think this happens when a person with dedication and mastery exhausts the original understanding of how they regarded themselves and their profession, and then needs to both remake themselves and their craft’s entire domain. (...)

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The Inspiring Stephen Fry

Adam — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:38:45 +0000

I had the chance this past weekend to listen in to Simon Mayo’s show, featuring Stephen Fry for that one day. What a wonderful discovery. I’ve always liked the actor/writer, and I was taken by a few things he said. Enough to transcribe some of them here (all rights to Mr.Fry and/or BBC radio 5):(...)

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On Vocation — The Admirable Obsession

Adam — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:23:35 +0000

The idea of a vocation is now defunct in an age of specialization and broad material risk. When this decline started, I’m not sure, but probably we can trace it merrily to the end of popular religion in Western, industrial countries. Although, curiously, having a vocation is not an event you see many people in any era espousing. Regardless and back to today, in cultures where one can pursue anything one wants (theoretically) it’s interesting that there seems to be so few people wanting to pursue one single activity at the expense of all others. I’m not talking about the wage slaves and salarymen who inhabit everywhere and pay for everything with their taxes. Those people, with myself among them, work at one job, but rarely you could call their choices a passion. They are dedicated to making a living and paying off their student loans, or hoarding for their children’s future education. It’s all about the thing-at-hand.(...)

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The Bar Raiser

Adam — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:11:49 +0000

Your specific role and responsibility is to “raise the bar.” It’s not sufficient to meet the goals with quality or to create sustainable results, to not leave bodies in the road and completely alienate your peers. You are judged on exceeding all expectations all the time. This is a performance culture.

It’s also the goal of arete. A concept the Victorians translated and transliterated as “virtue” or “excellence.” So often arete is indexed to morality, which for the sexuality of some Ancient Greeks was a deliberate conflation by the translators. As arete was virtue and virtue was a moral prerogative, so too we must judge what’s best in society as moral impediments to overcome to strictures to always meet. What happens when this is translocated to business?

“What did you do to drive this result? What did you do to deserve this success?” These are the kinds of questions we were getting asked in our training seminar.

One interesting item I discovered only later about Bar Raisers — people chosen and trained to scrutinize applicants during job interviews — is that they are never vetted again. I’m curious and sceptical about how they are chosen, since they are then able to judge superior value so long as they are employed with the company. Anyone with a veto makes me uncomfortable, particularly when it’s granted for life.

Dealing with Ambiguity

Adam — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:01:24 +0000

Of what we know of our origins one recurring theme we want to discover is improvement. Either an increase in complexity or perceived value. It’s a modern bias that the telos once applied to the natural world is now embedded in an everyday notion of progress. But without worrying about historiography I like to remember that a great deal of this desire to identify determinate improvement is from money. The expansion possibility of wealth, the opportunity for ill defined competition. The influence of cash and risk in our lives is only a relatively recent discovery for me. It’s a basic admission of the political, the ideological in our lives. Hopefully I can record this well and explain how some of these ideas came before the recent economic unrest. Not because I can claim better foresight than some professionals, but only to review why I’ve been interested, worried and perplexed by these ideas longer than the last few months. And how I think any economic changes will return to a better, settled pattern for some because of political desires. Charting these arguments will also hopefully help me in future projects that I may detail here.(...)

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Blog Change of Focus, Personal Change of Intent

Adam — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:02:19 +0000

As a brief programming note I wanted to highlight that I’m no longer working towards either a career position in gaming or a position about writing on gaming and game design on the Web. The focus of this blog will now change. I had a choice to either take a position with Amazon in Seattle or to take an onsite interview with Bioware. I elected for the former and ultimately I believe it will be the better choice. Although, it will be a demanding one and probably not as fun in the short-term.

Games I think are overlooked for their influence and intellectual appeal. One does learn by playing, games are epistemological, and games also bring the full range of human emotion, positively and negatively. Personally, however, the degree of commitment one has to have to stay current with the industry and the general zeitgeist is too much for me. Or more accurately, it’s demanding a kind of mindfulness I’m no longer happy to accept. Games are intellectual, but their industry and popular commentary largely is not. This judgment can equally apply to any part of the Culture Industry, say the music recording industry. But the topics I find worth discussing and thinking about with games are not really that well esteemed. And finally, gaming largely suffers from a competitive ethic that is anti-intellectual; namely, what matters is winning and self-promotion. That’s not a healthy mix for reflection, and again it demands a kind of thinking and being that’s just not who I am.

In this light, I’m putting my blog on hiatus to give myself enough time to move it to a new permanent host, and to strip out the endless spam comments. At a glance, it looks like Blogger will or has also eliminated some of the genuine comments as well. That’s unfortunate. But I expect I won’t attract the same kind of attention anymore principally because I’m no longer intending to create it.

The Most Important Event in Video Gaming in 2007 (OLPC)

Adam — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 22:12:00 +0000

So, it is a close tie (for me at least) with the EA acquisition of Bioware/Pandemic, but the biggest news for video games in 2007 is the start of shipments of the XO Laptop — the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

The OLPC is an education program wrapped in the engineering challenge of building, deploying and supporting a laptop that can handle ownership by children often in developing countries (and often in more rural areas than regular laptop owners) and costs only $100.

OLPC espouses five core principles:

1. Child ownership
2. Low ages. The hardware and software are designed for elementary school children aged 6-12.
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and open source

The first XO’s started arriving at work this past week from the “give one, get one” program, and has elicited a lot of excitement. Why I think this is game worthy is to highlight 1) the effect large numbers of new entrants has had already on video games, and 2) the libraries already being developed for games for the XO.

Firstly, it’s important to remember how MMO’s changed, let alone video consoles in the late 80′s, when games developed in Asia started being ported to the West. As the games moved, so did the players’ interests and attitudes. In more recent years, the effect of Asian based players on MMO’s like GuildWars and WoW has had a important stamp on the way MMO’s are launched and developed. The semi-niche status of MMO’s and even video games in the early 90′s has long been over. Partly I think because of the success of cultures mixing and sharing a common interest.

So enter the XO, which is being sent to Haiti, Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Mongolia. Mexico. Peru and the US are also being planned to have large numbers released. I like to speculate on what will happen with formerly uninterested or disadvantaged children and teens getting into computing. It will not solve all the world’s ills, but it will hopefully help with education and community economic development long term. As far as games go, there are several initiatives underway to port games to the XO or to develop little apps specifically on the device.

If you reflect on this or if you were even around for the move from the Commodore 64 to the Apple ][ to the Mac and Win 3.2 you will realize how big this could be for gaming. Huge numbers of new players, developing for themselves and by other people games on a unique, ubiquitous platform should have some effect somewhere on the video game ecosystem. If you disagree, consider the novelty and popularity of the Nintendo DS and how many titles it has and how they have outsold so many generic PC titles. Just because it’s an odd platform does not mean there can’t be originality or innovation.

I think OLPC is a great education program, and I hope it will help the children and teens who receive the device. And while it may not seem an immediate commercial opportunity, I can see some companies developing titles or portals accessible by the OLPC (e.g. Dwarf Fortress). And maybe more realistically, I can see the kids building and sharing games for themselves. And that will an effect on gaming.

The XO Laptop. The new place to be.

Player Created Designs

Adam — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 01:41:00 +0000

I’m a very big fan of games of all types that take an atomic-like design, or what you might call a “mini game”, and develop it into something more persistent and complex. In MMO’s the classic example is quests, which started as small, simple tasks, like deliveries and bounties, and eventually have lead to more involved and dramatic story arcs, like in LotRO’s hallmark quests. Quests still have that basic vending machine style of acting and fulfillment, but they created a bigger demand in players who pretty much now expect a deeper level to the content they are spoon fed. An other now classic example of developing a game design from experimentation or a small feature is Valve’s Portal. I haven’t played anything so fun and gripping in a long time, and it was developed originally by students in a freeware game called “Narbuncular Drop”. These folks took the gravity gun from Half-Life 2, saw what they could do with it and modded HL2 to essentially prototype Portal (now an 89 on Metacritic). Le Brilliant.

I think the lesson is finding in your games small features which are cognitively simple to use, that are limited in power and effect, but are surprisingly popular and maybe are even used in an innovated way by players — these are the things you want to seize on for future development. Those are in effect, player created designs. Your user base is frantically telling you to develop something with those small mini-games or features they are wasting time on. And if the feature is small and already supported you possibly have a much technically easier way of integrating it into your existing service or developing it into a new game on its own. You at the very least have a much easier way of introducing and teaching it to players, who already will be familiar with the intention, function, and context of the feature design. But woe to you if you screw it up, since you will be disappointing players in a double way.

This kind of iterative approach of experimenting in games is something really worth thinking about, but there’s a bad side as well. The other side is the danger of exhaustion. You can take what was once a cherished, unique player created design and drive it into the ground. Sadly, I have to use SWG as an example. I say that with regret, because I don’t think it’s fair to kick that title any more than it has received already. However, it’s made one mistake more or less recently worth noting.

I resubbed to SWG in June (along with UO) and I enjoyed a lot of of the expansions and fundamental changes. One problem I noticed immediately, however, was lack of inventory space. It’s a funny design — players need a capacity to collect things, and they accrue in power and complexity as player avatars the more stuff they hoard. In WoW and newer MMO’s you can only unlock more inventory by progressing in level, but not so in the sandboxy SWG. The dilemma is that the game has increased in inventory challenge as much as it has simplified in character class and other mini-game (e.g. most sadly, the nerfing of crafting).

The collection mini-game in SWG is suffering from inflation both in virtual and in game design terms. The game could be argued to now be solely about collection. What was once a neat side game of collecting pieces to fit a final objective (just like WoW or EQ2 etc.). has now lead to an inflation such that the bonuses themselves are just inventory space. Let’s recap. In SWG, the first example of collecting objects to make a rare item was the Firespray KSE blueprints (Boba Fett’s starship) that Shipwrights could create. Then “crafting kits” were devised, which were rare drops that players ached for. These were ultimately only new pieces of furniture, but they were new, rare and so highly prized. With the NGE and the Trials of Obi-Wan, the whole expansion was designed around collection. Players could earn small items for buffing or furniture, while with end bosses in difficult instances they could gain great items. At any rate, this design has continued to now include socket crafting — I think first introduced in DAoC circa 2000? post-Darkness Falls. So we now have in SWG the following item sets:

Firespray KSE
crafting kits
Mustafar items
socketing/bonus ability items (“Reverse Engineering”)
Treasure chests
New chapter 7/8 items

This may not seem a big deal, but essentially every item in this game is either a part of a collection or something left over from a previous attempt at a collection (e.g. the items from Jabba’s themepark). And it is interesting all the themeparks have been revamped to keep up with thise design. I think you can see the point: anything you pick up in SWG has a good chance of being worthless in itself.

I think the thesis at SOE was even if new, lowbie players pick up junk, the carrot of giving them a better item if they keep collecting would be an other motivator for them to keep playing. The problem is the game is overwhelming suffering from inflation. It’s a very bad overuse of a neat and I think temporary design.

Games that evolve, that present small and unique designs which players cherish or react against badly often lead to very interesting options. Let’s not forget, that is how PvP began. But when you take a good idea and repeat it without a thought of the impact and long term effect… well it’s like open PvP — there are things that have a tipping point which designers should respect. It may not be immediately evident, but it will come. Exhausting your designs, exhausts your players’ goodwill. And no game needs to do that.

/out

I really wish I was on a treadmill now.

Video Game Symphony on Tour

Adam — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 04:12:00 +0000

For those of us who like some of the music in video games the “PLAY!” program of a “video game symphony” is noteworthy.

PLAY! A Video Game Symphony is a Symphony world-tour featuring music from blockbuster video games. The music is performed by some of the finest, world-class orchestras and choirs. All concerts take place in classy, prestigious venues. Graphics on large screens suspended above the orchestra accompany the scores, highlighting memorable moments from the video games.

The concert tour started off in North America on May 27, 2006 in Chicago, followed by a sold out show in Europe. PLAY! is embarking on a world tour.

Unimpressed? Well Jeremy Soule will be in attendance at the Seattle concert (Jan.24). That would be interesting, inasmuch as I’ve enjoyed a lot of his tracks and it might be worthwhile to hear him speak. Pieces from several of his scores will be played. Regardless, this is not your average, run-O-the-mill Holiday Pops and Brass programming. I might attend. Here are the games they’ll be playing selections from:

FINAL FANTASY^®
SUPER MARIO BROS.^®
CASTLEVANIA^®
SUPER MARIO WORLD^®
METAL GEAR SOLID^®
BLUE DRAGON^®
LOST ODYSSEY^TM
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG^TM
ACTRAISER^TM
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS^TM
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA^®
HALO^®
PREY^TM
CHRONO TRIGGER^TM
CHRONO CROSS^TM
WORLD OF WARCRAFT^®
APIDYA^TM
KINGDOM HEARTS^TM
SHENMUE^TM
SILENT HILL^®
BATTLEFIELD 1942^TM
THE ELDER SCROLLS^® III: MORROWIND^TM
STELLA DEUS^TM
BLACK^TM
DAYTONA USA^TM
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK^TM
THE ELDER SCROLLS^® IV: OBLIVION^TM

The Hellgate Affair

Adam — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:18:00 +0000

/play Muppet_Show_theme

I haven’t been following any of the hype or expectations around Hellgate: London. But enough people who seem to know something about gaming were looking forward to it, so I gave it a try. Apparently, I tried day of launch. Well, here we go with my results. No background, just user experience. Don’t care I couldn’t subscribe to multi-player day of launch, or it was locked down etc. This is mostly from solo play and then a few hours from online play last night.

Memory Leaks
It seems to have 3 problems. See screenie below. This is after around 5 mins of solo non-online play with 2 zonings, some combat, log in/out, etc. Imagine after an hour. Well, you can do the math from the possible results below.

This is a silly freeware tool, but I don’t have access any more to a real workbench to inspect how Hellgate runs. At any rate, three modules didn’t free memory after a graceful exit. Which was a “well-duh” moment, since the app runs very very poorly on my rig, which stood up well to LotRO and a few others like the fun of OrangeBox. On all lowest of low settings there’s terrible lag for me in solo non-online play.

UI
For some strange reason, there’s no documentation on how to group, how to look for groups, or even how to chat. Mostly because I still have not found how to unhide the chat log box. However, a brief forum search showed I wasn’t alone. There’s strange graphic lag in inventory, with vendors, poor rendering in the skills window… I can forgive graphics if it’s my fault (which was my first impression), but when there’s no chat bar… Come on.

Borked Linear Quests
So an other final discovery has ended my HG:L play. Like a lot of new MMO’s, there’s an over-arching background narrative, hallmark-like quest which delivers characters between zones and introduces them to the world. In my case, and a few others, we got stopped at this point. After completing the fight with the boss, there was a new quest giver that was needed to be met to complete that task. Normal herald-quest like stuff. Unfortunately, when the guy is not available you are stuck. Normal fix procedure, and recommended, is to abandon the quest. Logic dictates you can repeat the whole boss encounter again, or just that herald task, to avoid sploiting on boss loot etc. Imagine. Reboot, relog. Nothing happened.

Thus, myself and other folks are left with no way to advance. The hallmark quests unlock the next zones, and the quest needs to be reset and probably complete redone. The issue here is HOW CAN YOU RELEASE A GAME WITH A ONE WAY DOOR? How can a company release a title with an effective doorway which locks behind gamers once they leave? It’s not as if we did something even wrong — it just broke. Regardless, we literally can not continue the title in multiplayer until it’s fixed. Or unless we reroll. I mean, COME ON!

The only player invented recommendation is to group with someone else who has not done the quest and hope it works. Unfortunately, the lack of a chat window, and known mechanic to group makes that also rather difficult. So, I went off to watch a rerun of the Muppets and was more entertained.

Flagship’s crack deployment project management

“I thought you outsourced the QA.”

“No you did, you old fool.”

Oh, and “Tiggs” of SWG fame is in charge of the community. So, yeah. Enjoy. Yeesh.

Dirk Gently now Live on BBC Radio 4

Adam — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:31:00 +0000

For all my Douglas Adams peeps out there — harken!

BBC Radio 4 has just launched the first in a new radio series dramatizing the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency books. They have the producers from the last HHGTTG team and a Hobbit from the LotR movies. Ok it’s only Pippin (Billy Boyd). From the site:

Featuring a star-studded cast with Harry Enfield in the lead role, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency will be produced by the same award-winning team that made the conclusion to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Harry is joined by Lord of the Rings actor Billy Boyd, Fawlty Towers‘ Andrew Sachs [Manuel!], The Golden Compass‘ Jim Carter and Peepshow‘s Olivia Colman.

So, um yeah.

Harry Enfield as Svlad Cjelli AKA Dirk Gently, Detective of the Absurd.

Weirdness Abounds.

10,000 Hours to Ding!

Adam — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:05:00 +0000

Now, I know this has been copied all over the place, and will probably become the new Dunbar’s Number meme, but I’m coming to it late and this is my own take on it in games.

Dr. Daniel Levitin a cognitive psychologist, neurologist, music producer and no doubt all round good sport, has collated a lot of the current research on music therapy and effects of music on neural development in his book, Your Brain on Music. Amidst other things he proposes democratically that what’s most important is not perhaps an innate talent, but a disciplined and regimented practice routine.

… ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. (courtesy of Tertiary Education)

There you have it. Maybe regardless of domain, if you want to “master” something it takes a dedication lasting no less than 10,000 hours. That’s sort of comforting. Inasmuch as it lets me know if I am truly serious about accomplishing something, I ought to spend more time on it. It gives me a limit, but no guarantee.

But turn to games and the old usability chestnut: How long should a level or zone take to master? How long should someone — particularly with consoles — be given to complete and “win” the game. I know I never got far into God of War, mostly because I gave up looking for cheats (yes, for that ridiculous first crates puzzle). Should I have got in-game assistance? Should there have been a number of turns the game monitors I’ve tried this challenge and then offers me a break, for a lesser reward, or a harder penalty later? Otherwise the game becomes a coaster for me.

And similarly, how about MMORPG’s? How long should designers give users to reach the cap? There’s lots of evidence for how people pace themselves, but sometimes I sense it gets lost. For example, we hear more about racers in the Burning Crusade reaching level 70 within 28 hours and some wag finishing all of DDO in the same time, but dismiss the lone whiner who may still be stuck at the start (on some crates…). Reaching a level cap is not a mastery, but it does respond to the same desire. And maybe the same built-in bio-cognitive need. Dedicating time, often alone, to reach a limit for self-reward and public acclaim may be a real human drive. But likewise when the challenge does not meet the realistic effort required, then most people who can’t succeed turn to other things to help their advancement. In MMO’s, the obvious ones are RMT, cheats, hacks, powerlevelling services. In music or athletics, it might just be a better coach. Or drugs.

David Seah on Levitin has a nice break down, and so a critique, on how mastery could be reasonably seen. The point, as every game designer knows, is to offer a carrot and an encouragement (ding!) through ones’ advancement. It’s not about 10,000 hours or bust — it’s about maybe 100 hours and a pat on the back.

at 1 hour … you know some basics

at 10 hours … you have a pretty good grasp of the basics

at 100 hours … you are fairly expert

at 1000 hours … you are an experienced expert

at 10000 hours … you are a master

If you know your limit — in this case, the almost mythical 10k of investment — you can offer a realizable training program for people. And that circuit of gradual achievement and self-esteem reinforcement is maybe vital for someone to continue.

While 10,000 hours over 10 years is a daunting proposition, consider this:

1000 hours is pretty doable. That’s a little less than a year of full-time work.

100 hours is even more achievable…you could do that over a few months on the side, or just slam through it in a very intense couple of weeks.

Even spending 10 hours practicing something is going to make you significantly better at it. If you spent 10 hours practicing one song, or learning how to juggle, or learning how to bowl strikes…you’re going to learn something.

One hour? That’s worthwhile too. You could spend an hour writing your signature over and over again to make it cooler. I’ve done that at least a couple of times in my life.

I bet understanding and planning the least and mean time for a user to finish your game (or a part of it) is actually in the back of every designer’s mind. After all, it’s how we got “levels” and intro tutorials in the first place. And it affects how they introduce new content as well. I remember, for instance, very clearly in the first few months of SWG a poll on the forums asking how much time people spent playing. It came out near the same week as official survey results on the number and types of classes people were picking. Why that was important is that SOE was trying to see how to shoehorn in the Jedi class. Once they could show users where they were spending their time already, they might have a better sense of how long the class might take to unlock and then master. And then reconcile players to that required grind. Needless to say, it wasn’t 10,000 hours, but after 28 professions for me it felt bloody close.

So much of play testing is functional tire kicking. However, the tuning which happens with character stats and abilities and their mean-time-to-success, whatever the genre or platform, I bet is also carefully scrutinized. Or it should be. We don’t need 10,000 hours on any game, and certainly my time on Jedi I know now was not healthy. I knew there was a carrot, but I didn’t know how long the stick was to reach it. If I knew then what I know now… I would not have tried. I think it would be healthier (and would help overall retention) if players had a better sense of the kind of investment they’re going to be required to make. The kicker is if they know, they probably won’t bother. But conversely when I play Scrabble online with my girlfriend, I know there’s a limited number of tiles that gradually get used, and part of the key to that game is knowing how much time is left via their diminishing number. If users knew what might be required of them hypothetically, the grind might have more appeal. Ultimately though, I really wish designers would just give us more of an opportunity for challenges that scale. Gameplay that didn’t assume infinite time and didn’t reward the racers. That’s ultimately why people hate the DIKU MUD model. And there ought to be by now some opportunity for improving play in a game the more you learn, other than just leveling to cap or finishing off some crates.

NYT article on Your Brain on Music

Almost there… just need a chestplate to finish the set…

How Not to Make a Game for the Web

Adam — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:03:00 +0000

If you remember that the next best thing to playing a compelling and challenging game of drama and inventiveness is creating a game with yourself and your closest thousand friends with drama and inventiveness, you may have caught the spirit that is the Web. You also thereby are a great candidate for games on the Web. And games, which are designed only with the Web and a peculiar set of behaviors in mind, all seem to follow the same designs. Here are some example features:

1. Turn Based – wait for a player, wait for a content server or more likely, a Microsoft SQL server to go before committing play.
2. Synchronous Advancement – everybody is rewarded at the same time.
3. Linear Power Curves – everybody has an unlimited advancement theoretically available based on time in the game.
4. Unlimited Resources – no constraint on the availability of play or the issuing of resources to advance.

Now, I’m not generalizing that all games on the Web are like this. Instead, I’m generalizing that only the most appalling ones are like this. Fun games like DiceWars or DinerDash or BookWorm etc. all have constraints. They lead to a finish. That’s not necessarily because they may be board games or card games ported to the Web. I think this is as applicable for more traditional narrative games as well. But when is there no apparent win condition, when you graft on the openness of an MMORPG and lack of a governing narrative or a similar mechanic to carry and limit play then you have trouble. The innocuous designs mentioned above can lead to the following results, in order.

1. Unresponsive or Inflated Play – players on the Web can either suffer from poor availability and time-out’s, and can’t commit a play when they wish, or they exploit the game logic being controlled on a web server by cron jobs bombing the host or worse kinds of intrusion. Turn based play works best when time is controlled by the action of a competing player. When there is no other player to wait on, when you are competing against an unknown number of other players, then you have to have good technical governance to guarantee your players equity of turn play. You have to actually ensure that when someone wants to “move”, they can, and move only as many times as the rules permit.

2. Anonymous or Mass Play – when there is no known competitor, when the game is open mass play, the sheer anonymity of drive-by interactions I don’t think endears a player to a game. Anonymity doesn’t allow for player reputation creation, doesn’t allow for meaningful interaction. If the only way to meet people is to challenge them and then drive-on, I think necessarily this creates a more hostile culture than when a challenge has to be voluntarily accepted or at least, recognized after the fact. But this is a product of rewarding everyone always at the same time. When you adopt an open, mass kind of play, the only way you can manage advancement and keep people in the game is to issue progress at the same time for all players. That gives the poorer players something to live on. Weak players advance or receive rewards at the same time as strong players, no matter what happens. So, from the start all players are the same and in one way are supposed to remain the same. The problem is, however, there’s no way or incentive for people in their play to distinguish themselves than to hurry up and get on with it. Advancement will come regardless of what they do. Strong players will be rewarded at the same time as weaker players, and unless there is a throttle against bottomfeeding, weaker players are farmed on schedule. There’s no staggering of play in mass play. There’s no cost for success. And because of that interactions are quicker and poorer as people sprint to survive making a more shallow game culture.

3. Godmode – Likewise, if you adopt the open concept of an MMORPG for your web game and don’t have a level or resource cap, if your power curves are not limited, because you want to retain players on your site for advertising $, you don’t allow for a win condition. No one can win, because the game never ends. But thereby a huge imbalance is created. Veteran players will have advanced far beyond anything new players can achieve, necessarily, since the advancement always occurs on schedule. Players who have been in the game longer will be fewer in number and far more powerful and will never be unseated. In fact, the only constraint that’s assumed by the designers on the power curve for veteran players is popularity. The provider assumes that popularity or just exposure will be a sufficient asymptote for veteran players’ advancement, because less powerful players will organize against them. But that’s naïve because it assumes that collusion or organization doesn’t occur at the highest levels. So realistically there’s incommensurability between differing sets of players depending on when they joined the game. This last state of affairs is the central problem for Eve Online. And like in #2 above, it reinforces a particularly hostile game culture.

4. Inflation, Real and Virtual — And finally, if you design a game that is turn based, synchronous, with time based power curves you necessarily have to supply endless resources. Since there’s no end state for anyone, resources have to be infinite. Well, if there’s an economy in this game, then there’s inflation and the other usual problems that occur. But for me the other issue is that infinite resources assume an infinite supply of time on the side of the player. When there is no constraint on “moving” in your game, on committing play, and when there is no throttle on advancement, and when there are no costs at all, then the only real constraint is on the abilities and circumstances of the player themselves. People who have more free time, for instance, will progress faster. Sure. But the opportunity for exploiting weaker or less available players becomes popular. Bottomfeeding, mass bombings, even cheats like duping etc. become maybe necessary for survival.

What I’ve described above is largely from my observations of the new Web game “Warbook”, which is a Facebook plug-in. It’s essentially a multiplayer version of Go: you put down some resources, and a number of other players can arrive and take those resources if you fail in their challenge. And you do the same to them. People run around stealing from each other, trying to build up their own homes before they are completely looted by other players. Whatever its outcome, as a game to me Warbook is a cautionary tale to remember. Even though it still seems popular.

Everything I’ve said could be considered just bad game design. But I think the point is that it’s bad design that mimics a lot of behavior people on the Web expect. For instance, always-on, always-turn-available-moves, access to anyone, infinite progress… After all, is not the most popular game on the Web the Forum Game, whatever the topic? The problem I think is that the culture of the Web is not good game culture. The characteristics of the Web don’t translate wholesale into fun games. You have to have boundaries of play. And I wonder how people will deal with that as new kinds of MMO’s are ported to the Web.

"Metaplace", re-read

Adam — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:06:00 +0000

More insights:
Cuppycake of FoH is the Community Manager. She certainly will be used to the forum game hailing from that happy land.

So actually reading more clearly the FAQ this time, I think I begin to understand. It’s an API they are going to offer, borrowing heavily from LUA. It will feature paid hosting services, which I caught. It will have some IDE or basic editor to help users. It will probably also feature a small template library to start, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t try to offer more free or paid object libraries down the road.

Raph is a big fan of BlitzBasic, and I think this is his inspiration. The appeal is to offer people the ability to create online games as easily as creating blogs, which most toolkits, other than the eponymous Torque, can’t do easily. And certainly not do well. Ergo, the money is in a games version of Blogger. It’s not a bad idea. But it won’t be Neverwinter Nights or SL for the kids who are still hoping for an easier way to build their own MMO. It will be probably much closer to the world of creating mods in WoW.

Raph’s Place, "Metaplace"

Adam — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:03:00 +0000

Apparently, this has been announced? BBC Link Tons of news and coverage on the provider site. Habbo Hotel I guess meets Ning, meets Yahoo Groups.

It’s smart, of course. The kicker will be delivering a basic framework — ludic and world and UI — that users can grasp and enjoy quickly. Then, roll out more features in small games, content, user created content, etc. over time. And charge for some of them. Although, I’m convinced that anything that avoids the bottom-feeding of Warbook will be a hit. Good luck to him. I hope it scales gracefully.

Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

/Aside
One interesting sub note. I see m3mnoch may be there. Interesting, since he had proposed much the same approach a year+ ago ( my cf.). Wonder how they hooked up.

Facebook MMO ("Warbook")

Adam — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:32:00 +0000

I’d be surprised if no one else hasn’t mentioned this yet, but Facebook, the aftershock of MySpace, is supporting several games (e.g. Scrabulous, JedivsSith) all of which are there to improve the community and help retention. Usual stuff. Warbook is the first I’ve seen that tries for a sort of old-school email tactics like game that kind of acts like a very minimalist MMO.

It basically is a PvP version of Kingdom of Loathing (without the humour or stories or pictures), where players pick a class of Hero and each hour they improve in gold and can buy new land or soldiers to grow their kingdoms. They also can progress by attacking other players, which is really the whole point. It’s a straight out PvP game that so far does not seem very balanced. Players can increase in level, but AFAIK they can only do so by attacking others or successfully repelling attacks. There’s no honour in just being good at making gold. And while all you have to do to make gold is wait an hour and hope no one attacks in the meanwhile, you can make trading packs with other players as well send gold and troops friends. And they also allow to create alliances (think guilds) which is basically just a group in Facebook world.

Having been attacked by some people 10 or more levels higher than me, there’s not a lot of balance so far. Also, there is no game board. There’s only a search function whereby you have to find players in a range of level or land or gold that you want to target. You can employ spells to spy on them to learn their stats and present inventories before you attack. There’s not much of a profile otherwise, and really it’s a game that feels still in Beta. Certainly, its database is not robust, so be prepared to wait several seconds for any updates.

However, crap infrastructure aside, there seems to be a fair amount of attention and it’s worth noting as another webby game example. Certainly it’s a good example of what you can do to capture a lot of players quickly. Although, I’m only guessing there’s a few thousand just because of Facebook memberships and the poor availability. It’s very minimalist but also very mainstream.

A Professional Services Future for MMO’s?

Adam — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:18:00 +0000

It wasn’t so much that I was surprised to see Lewis H. Lapham of all people chuckling it up about his time in WoW in this month’s Harper’s, but it was the anxiety that came over me with the near simultaneously hit of the Economist reporting praise for the big-pixel world as a locus for future epidemiological research. What is going on?

Lapham — editor, raconteur, actor, and general bon vivant — goes at length in his article to explain that if leaders in America had better access and insight and memory for what what war is really like, and not what their stony ancestors might want them to believe, Iraq and other poor adventures might be better planned. WoW comes in at the end of the editorial as a light hearted hope that it might provide a better conduit for certain power brokers to exercise off their competitive edge than what’s happening now overseas.

Lost for an hour in the Elwynn Forest among the Murloc Oracles of Crystal Lake, I began to hope for rescue by Kissinger or Brzezinski, operating as the online avatars of Bismark and Maximus, sending reinforcements (in the personae of dwarves and shadow priests) from their computers in Washington… Here at last was the world in which they could do what the Romans could do… drifting in the same orbit as the one imagined by Carl von Clausewitz, Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr…

The Economist today, on the other hand, puts a more serious light on the only game any non-player in the West has heard about. Two epidemiologists at Rutgers (of course) proposed in this week’s Lancet Infectious Diseases that “games such ‘World of Warcraft’ might be used to work out how people will react when faced with situations no researcher can ethically introduce into the real world.” They are referring to, of course, the griefing episode of players who had their pets infected in Zul’Gurub. Once corrupted, the griefers would then happily call out their pets in newbie zones and auction houses across the world, killing pretty quickly any players less than level 50. Good times. The researches are hoping that introducing similar simulated diseases might give them some insight into how real world infections might be spread or coped with. Who knows? With the customary addendum by Nick Yee, the Economist leaves off wondering if this is at all realistic or worthwhile, but does note that only permadeath might have a real appeal to participants (“…only real plagues kill real people, though the permanent loss of a character can be a traumatic experience for an experienced [read, 'obsessive'] player, and one he will try hard to avoid.”). Funny how everything always comes back to permadeath, isn’t it?

What is also interesting is that in two cases two prominent magazines think it’s completely rational to propose that large scale virtual worlds might be put to better use than grinding. That a “serious games” angle might be worth pursuing, where player behaviors and transactions could be tracked and modeled outside the game world. That’s what is unstated — that there’s a professional service other than the game and its support companies can sell; namely, the game life of its customers.

It’s not impossible to see some companies eventually marketing their worlds therapeutically, as places to relax or burn off aggression. But it’s hard to imagine credible games being built around them. More realistically, I could see the large providers easily agreeing — at a cost — to have parts of their worlds modeled by the big data mining companies (LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, DoubleClick/Google). I just wonder if my behavior and gameplay in a virtual world was not my own to keep. Should the record of your recreation not be private, or least kept with the provider? We’ll see.

Everyone? We have a new Raid leader tonight.

Great Game Designer Merv Griffin Dies

Adam — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:21:00 +0000

Merv Griffin died sadly today. It’s worth noting how incredible the success of his games have been. I haven’t looked hard for any data on the massive success of those shows or his own biography in detail, but it may be from what I’ve heard that Griffin himself was highly involved in the game design of both Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. He was quoted as “loving words and puzzles.” As head of the production company that created and syndicated both shows and other, he very probably oversaw a lot of the game play and helped tune features based on responses from the audience. Maybe he can be considered a quasi- or full game designer and producer. Regardless, this is something I think for myself worth remembering. Video games so often dismiss their forebears. They love to imagine they have sprung fully formed from the desires of the PC/console industres and Net culture. And even when there’s a reluctant acknowledgment of the importance of board games — where every “world” or “level” or “Class/profession” players encounter can be represented on a simpler 2d model — I wonder if we often ignore TV/radio too much as well.

Last post I made so long ago now, I invoked the world of old TV serials and started to wonder about their metaphors and why designers keep recycling them. Or not wondering, that is. Game shows (e.g. Survivor, Big Brother), Beauty Pageants, Talent Competitions (e.g. American Idol) — anything where the rules require the contestant to work as game piece and player themselves in competition with other players *and* the audience themselves for reputation and popularity are more open to virtual worlds than virtual worlds are open to popular media. It’s easier to see how a talent competition (anything with election) could move to the web for re-invention than an MMO or FPS could move to TV. Although, maybe popular TV serials like
24 are more inspired by level FPS’s. For me at least, it was interesting to see Griffin’s contributions via game design than just as a TV producer.

Rethinking Fantasy

Adam — Tue, 29 May 2007 01:48:00 +0000

Well, it’s been two months and change, and I’m back from a break for a bit. I successfully lobbied for a package from the Mothership and am now onto other things. So far, non-game related. But all’s good and all’s well.

I’ve been playing LotRO (ya, finally), and having a healthy time on Elendimir. The whole back and forth on canon and player’s expectations — both pro and contra Tolkien — that’s happened with that game has been interesting. Reminds me of the first few months of SWG; although honestly, it seems more sedate. But it’s made me rethink or learn more about the genre of fantasy.

To start with, one of the few things that caught my eye in the last while was this provocative gem on Gamasutra Rethinking the MMO. I’m not going to review it, because Moorguard has a better reply. Long article short, MMO’s are themselves too long and too boring, and essentially, reinforce Western values of consumption and individualness. Problem is, however, so do Monopoly and Chess. And while I’ve never seen a pawn pwn a rook wholesale, I wonder if the something that is bugging the author is really the dominance of the fantasy genre in MMO’s.

As others have argued, it seems that fantasy is the only vehicle for a game. Or more accurately, fantasy creates the best conditions for a successful MMO. However, there’s a lot of dev going on and people are spending a lot of money to try and capture any portion of the market. And they are looking at different franchises to propel their projects. It’s pretty much the Adventure game and the RTS craze we saw in the 80′s and 90′s (cf. a famous post by Dan Cook). Players are sounding off with their credit cards enough that they are pushing investment into non-fantasy themed projects, and the novel webby and sandbox-creation games. The only thing that strikes me is this justification for fantasy.

A friend of mine has written a book that’s popular with academics these days on the whole history of fantasy literature (Quests and Kingdoms by K.V. Johansen). I always knew there’s a common set of motifs and themes in things like myths and folktales that have been catalogued, but I didn’t know the progression that’s happened in contemporary literature. Naturally, it made me think about games. How fantasy has been relied on and how designers keep rehashing it.

Not your average wandering monster, this.

This idea that there is only one sure framework or formula to a title is really a self-crippling move. The history of video gaming shows that it ain’t a safe bet . And in fact, I think there’s broader media that shows it as well.

For instance, how do we think about the fantasy idea of “magic”? Magic has more to do with fireballs and clouds and lights, because that is how we expect them to be shown first in illustrations and then on the screen. Early fantasy descriptions of magic were always about polymorphing people into creatures, or charming/hypnotising people, or using small tricks to mislead etc. Merlin AFAIK in Parsifal never threw a fireball. In fact, the first time I ever knew of a wizard throwing fire was Tim in the Holy Grail. And Gandalf certainly didn’t (behold, LotRO controversies over canon).

J.W.WATERHOUSE “Circe lnvidiosa” 1892

Another example. The early science fiction serials never had beams of light or glowing effects because they weren’t possible with the video/film technology at the time. And of course, radio was the dominant media for most serials. Today, however, everyone expects every weapon to be a “laser” of some kind, because we are used to Star Wars and early attempts at CGI. In fact, we won’t accept Science Fiction without lasers or good CG because they don’t match what we now expect SF to be. People who are in combat in a dramatized SF story better have a version of the ole six shooter that shoots rays of light, because otherwise the audience won’t accept it.

Bounty Armor T4 set, circa 1940′s (courtesy Coady’s Commandos)

I think MMO developers are depending too much on the same metaphors of fantasy, and since a metaphor is fundamentally a model for how we conceptualize an object, they are reproducing the same kinds of games with the same kinds of tropes for the same kinds of effects. That’s not a new insight for MMO bloggers or players. But I think what’s worth emphasizing is that relying on one kind of fantasy and deliberately reusing the same tropes within it (e.g. elves, wizards who cast fireballs) wholesale, game companies are very badly limiting the lifetime value of their offerings. The main argument for one kind of a genre is popularity and acceptance. I don’t think that’s going to last, until we see new kinds of ideas of fantasy (e.g. Mirrormask and Pan’s Labyrinth) being offered. The reason being is that if games are really about players creating their own narratives, then very obviously everyone has the same biography. And while that doesn’t really bother a lot of games companies, the other obvious problem of every game being as good a substitute for the other on some level ought to give them pause. If they are banking on subscriptions for several years.

Cirque de Soleil jester, i.e. the whole Blue Ocean Strategy thing. Nuff said.

Houdini Murdered?

Adam — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:28:00 +0000

I don’t usually post news, but this caught my eye today on AOL (note the unintentional pun in the headline, /sigh): Houdini May Be Exhumed to Solve Mystery. Long and short of it is that apparently Houdini was being threatened for a long time by members of the so-called Spiritualist movement, because he was an avid debunker of a lot of their frauds. Spiritualists were the happy go-lucky folk that charged for seances with dead relatives, and curiously, would always kick the table when it became revealed that in fact your Pa really wanted the farm to go to the Medium’s holding company. They in fact have a very long tradition, which you could argue started in the Renaissance with the whole Hermetic craze (later creating the Masons etc.) But this kind of belief or entrepreneurialism has made its way deep into Western culture. Yeats was directly influence by the so-called, Order of the Golden Dawn, Conan Doyle of course was an active proponent of Spiritualism, and today, we have Oprah.

At any rate, Houdini knew all their tricks, and later in life he gave lecture tours in a Ralph Nader-like way for people to avoid wasting their money and becoming distressed, and generally contributing to the delusion that the dead really don’t stay buried. Which was fine with all the conservative religions of the time as well. But Spiritualism was a huge craze, and as mentioned, it still is deeply around with us today. Here’s parts of the article:

The generally accepted version was that Houdini, 52, suffered a ruptured appendix from a punch in the stomach, leading to a fatal case of peritonitis. But no autopsy was performed.

When the death certificate was filed on Nov. 20, 1926, Houdini’s body – brought by train from Detroit to Manhattan – had already been buried in Queens, along with any evidence of a possible death plot.

Within days, a newspaper headline wondered, “Was Houdini Murdered?”

A 2006 biography, “The Secret Life of Houdini,” raised the issue again and convinced some that he might have been poisoned, including George Hardeen, who lives in Arizona and is the chief spokesman for the president of the Navajo Nation.

The likeliest murder suspects were members of a group known as the Spiritualists. The magician devoted large portions of his stage show to exposing the group’s fraudulent seances. The movement’s devotees included Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle.

In the Houdini biography, authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman detail a November 1924 letter in which Doyle said Houdini would “get his just desserts very exactly meted out … I think there is a general payday coming soon.”

Two years later, Houdini – by all accounts a man in extraordinary physical shape _ was dead. Kalush and Sloman say that “the Spiritualist underworld’s modus operandi in cases like this was often poisoning” – possibly arsenic, which could be detected decades later.

Intelligence in MMO’s (or Why I Can’t Have My "House MD" MMO)

Adam — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:59:00 +0000

Among the many things that must drive MMO designers nuts is the repetition of already well known, or well worn ideas and problems that players some times justcomeupwith. But all of which designers are supposed to be fixing. Or expected to fix in next-gen-MMO Teh Quickening! or whatever. Problems like permadeath. Another gem is mob AI.

On Quarter to Three there’s a discussion about why AI sucks in MMO’s. A lot of it is wondering about why most mobs don’t run away, don’t beg for their lives, don’t negotiate, don’t come back in the next gaming session with their cousins and their cousins’ friends to whup yer ass, or really do anything ever “intelligent”. Predictably, most followup’s have been anecdotes about how WoW is better, or how things were really better way back when in UO or EQ. All sarcasm aside, there is a real problem here. But dumb mob AI is just the symptom and not the cause. In games we don’t expect, for instance, the shoe in Monopoly to act “intelligently”. So why should MMO’s be any different?

Which of these is the more intelligent competitor?

Lum makes an entrance and points out the following:

Gamers say they want better AI in MMOs. Data mined statistics show that the most popular monsters in any MMO are the ones with the most brain dead AI, preferably bugged into virtual unconsciousness. CPU load is another issue, but not as much. Many MMOs have very intricate AI encounters – but players tend to hate them because good AI adds a concurrent risk. While saying “hey, it’d be cool if guards responded when their buddies are attacked” while discussing the subject, it’s entirely different when you attack a monster and are suddenly fighting off 10.

It’s a classic game design challenge – make the player *feel* as though they have completed a difficult challenge, while keeping it easy enough for them to actually accomplish.

This is important — MMO gamers want more of an interesting challenge, but they only stick to the uninteresting and predictable challenges. Why the contradiction?

A lot of what I end up saying about MMO’s always comes back to what kind of advancement model there is, and mob AI isn’t a problem that’s any different, unfortunately. What Lum is credibly pointing out indirectly is that MMO players always approach tasks and encounters with an ROI model in their minds; namely, “Is this encounter worth my time?” and that’s because every single mob in an MMO is (to quote Lum) “a mobile bag of improvement”. Since every popular MMO has an advancement model that’s based on consumption (“killing”) there is a need to have “mobile bags of improvement” instead of unpredictable or even dramatic opponents. The reason is because the game design has a progression metric that is predicated on players consuming content and being graded on the amount they consume. Levels are based on the quantity of dumb-AI driven models that are “killed”. This is not going to change while consumers expect it.

You can’t have “intelligent” AI in an MMO until you have an MMO that requires intelligent play. Repetitive, “devotional” play styles don’t need deep creativity or real analysis, because they are reactions to designs that are just timed end-game pathing puzzles. That is, “How fast can I get to the cap to play the end game and access all the content in the game?” The time to the final return on my investment (time, subscription and license fees, any spoilers I’ve written, etc.) is what counts, and any constraints that delay that or diminish it or even risk my ROI goals won’t be accepted. That includes mobs that act in an unpredictable way.

It’s fine to propose interesting or somewhat novel AI whereby the models “act” differently (and this was brought up in the thread with SWG in mind), but they’re only ever going to be different kinds of motion capture. The AI can’t change in a regular MMO that’s consumption driven. Whatever twists are devised for how to do aggro or chaining (social mobs) they are still all for the same vector of delivering content to the player quickly and efficiently for them to consume.

FWIW, the ultimate thing for me with MMO’s is to wonder about how to change advancement. A good debate about this occurred last year over on Raph’s blog whereby he went through “why levels suck”. But a great rejoinder by HRose to a post Raph made about a medical MMO illustrates the problem really well.

Raph proposed a game where you had to “heal” patients; HRose argued it was the same old, same old. There was a difference in interpretation, but HRose was correct in that whether it was healing or killing dumb AI models, the game design seemed the same of consuming your way through the content. In Raph’s defense, he was interested in the style of the healing and the “how” of the consuming, while HRose was (like me) concerned about the “why” of the need to level up through how many patients you can heal.

Why this is interesting is that you can’t have a “House MD MMO” until the problem of how to accrue advancement points in a way that doesn’t depend on consuming “mobile bags of improvement” is resolved. In this example, House is a detective story driven program where medicine is the “how” of the show, but diagnosis and investigation is the “why”. (The main character even lives at a “221B” address.) His staff always worries about the genetic background and habits of their clients (patients), often going so far as to break into their homes to look for evidence and clues to the patient’s illness. How can you build an MMO on that very popular formula when your advancement model is consumption? The main character hates dealing with patients, and they only have one “client” per show… how can you level-up?

This problem isn’t going to be solved soon, and it won’t be innovated probably by the big MMO providers. Or even the webby virtual world services. But there is a compelling need to do so, because so many of the great franchises people love (e.g. Sherlock Holmes, Dr.Who, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, etc.) don’t depend on consumption. They aren’t all pie-eating contests, and certainly there’s no killing in them. You can’t make a Harry Potter or a Lost or a CSI or a House MMO until someone makes a progression metric and method that’s not based on consumption. Each of those franchises are about investigation and puzzle solving.

Advancement by intelligence is way more sticky than advancement by repetition. It’s also way more personal, and so, compelling. And because the game can appeal personally it also can be commercialized more deeply. As I keep saying repeatedly, the people who solve this problem will probably own the next generation of MMO’s.

“I’d rather be smart than dead.”

[Mar 16 Update:]
There were several worthwhile posts around these core mechanics by Ubiq (Damion Schubert) following his rountables at this year’s GDC. See below. I should’ve also referenced his Sept.’06 AGC presentation where he discusses the weird problem of people wanting new MMO’s, but having still a general reluctance to also try anything new.

I’m not sure exactly in all this where Ubiq’s mind is, because on the one hand he’s a great supporter of innovation, but on the other he’s now had at least 3 presentations where he defends the combat/fantasy/DIKU model of MMO. I think at the end of the day he’s really trying to emphasize craftsmanship over half-ass title launches. And kudos to him for that. But I still wonder how much the combat/fantasy/DIKU model and trope is popular because it’s “popular”, and/or because it’s easier to produce and manage. I suspect it’s about 50/50.

More Eve Employee Drama?

Adam — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:43:00 +0000

This is probably not worthwhile news to discuss, because the sources may not be true. Or the events might not be a big deal in the final analysis. But it is interesting and disappointing that more revelations of employee conflicts in Eve Online keep coming to light. It’s sad that more examples keep coming to the fore and disappointing that players keep seizing on them (let alone ferreting them out). It’s only interesting insofar as a game which basically has no boundaries for play, and thus behavior, has players that have turned the meta-game of attacking/defending the provider to a new level of tension. A very small minority of people seem intent on attacking the credibility of CCP. But what’s startling is that they keep discovering evidence that shows CCP employee malfeasance. Or at least collusion and TOS violations. It’s very, very strange.

The two new examples are loosely described here and elsewhere I won’t link to:

It’s lengthy and tricky to follow, but it seems to boil down to CCP’s head of the event GMs being in Evolution; their membership knowing for the last 3 years that he was a GM (after he dramaposted about leaving the events team for a while); him arranging to get them privileged access to events (test event on server: 48 out of 50 invites went to Evolution members, which is SirMolle’s Bob corp) with early access to new techs and gameplay; substantial EULA-breaking account sharing (one was passed between about 6 people on their forums and so on….

Last year, ISD ran an event involving a Serpentis invasion of BoB-space. The NPC dreads, when killed, dropped officer loot. (This was also when CCP added NPC stations into BoB regions…for no apparent reason). Other, similar events run elsewhere have the NPC ships dropping T1 or named T1 at best. So:

Head of the GM staff in BoB, & BoB know about it.
BoB get to play around with POS warfare on Test ahead of everyone else and discover quirks/exploits (e.g. the “shooting through POS shields with no password” thing) which remain a mystery to the rest of the playerbase for years.
Lead GM all-but-spawning top-end loot for BoB.
Account sharing involving CCP staff & volunteer accounts, in direct contravention of their own EULA.

Make of this what you will.

Many years ago there was a similar meme with people claiming that SOE employees where creating and/or winning highly prized items and selling them on eBay. This rumor lasted for years, and was never ever proved. In fact, SOE demonstrated enough organization and consistency in their own policy against RMT that it made the claims ridiculous. CCP on the other hand suffers from running a game that has a laissez faire attitude towards player actions within and outside its game, and this is coming back to really damage them.

I already made my peace with Eve when evidence and confessions of paid employee cheating had occurred, and while I don’t play anymore it’s not for those reasons. The issue of online providers needing their customer’s trust is not trivial. And while you can distinguish various levels of customer expectations with an online service, there’s just no way you can excuse or cover up employee misconduct. I doubt there are many more examples of this within CCP, but I guess what leaves me disappointed is that maybe — and this only speculation — CCP’s internal culture is so aggressive or unprofessional that these kinds of things 1) could’ve happened at all, and 2) keep popping up. We need to be fair, like in the SOE example, and allow some time to pass to see if more examples come to light. But unlike with SOE, the original allegations were sadly true. In any final consideration, this kind of stuff doesn’t help anyone, let alone CCP or the majority of its customers.

More Game Design Proposal Samples

Adam — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:19:00 +0000

This time from MMO veteran Damion Schubert, currently at Bioware Austin, from his recent GDC07 talk, “How to Write Great Game Design Documents“ (download).

Previous entry on this, with examples from David Jaffe and Chris Bateman.

Sadly, while it would be an interesting comparison, I can’t share anything I’m doing or what the Mothership might have going. AIM is as AIM does. /out

MMO Community management from the Inside

Adam — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:42:00 +0000

There’s an old thread about UO on f13 that a couple of rednames (MMO professionals) have recently commented within on community management. Check it out. It’s very interesting to see so many experienced and active professionals bringing to light how they regard working with players — on a 3rd party player forum. Great stuff. Calandryll, Dundee, Moorguard… even Lum makes an appearance. It’s like the Cannonball Run of threads!

Official forums are good. Moderation is good. Both for the developers and for the players. And I say that having been on all sides of the fence, community, developer, and player… (Calandryll)

Oh, unofficial forums are not unmoderated. The question is why players feel they are better served being moderated by the company, rather than by themselves. But maybe the answer is just that simple: In spite of how little they trust us, they trust each other even less… (Dundee)

I understand Sigil’s desire to allow fansites to blossom and drive the community. In a perfect world, that would be the ultimate foundation for a healthy player-dev interaction. But the world isn’t perfect, and more often than not you need to cut through a ton of noise to help the majority of players get the info they need. While you could do that without official forums, it becomes much harder (needlessly so, in my opinion) to provide the focus needed to pull it off. (Moorguard)

I think the providers that are successful with community management realize it’s as much a responsibility to manage a forum etc. as in-game activities. They know there is a unique meta-game going on, and the main losers are the provider and the uncommitted player when irrational members gain attention. That is, it’s easier to put a casual player off a game permanently with negativity than it is to moderate a hard core player, who can be at any time either pro or con the development team. FWIW, the sense of community I got from the EQ2 forum was one of the reasons I kept resubbing, and in the exact reverse, why I’m done with Eve.

This stuff matters — how communities are managed become an indication to players for how the provider regards their customers and in short, how they might develop the game. Those inferences aren’t always correct, but players still take how the providers care & feed their community as an overall signal for how a player’s time and money investment is regarded. It’s all pretty visceral, but the savvy providers know that.

They frigging killed Lord British??
Dude, these guys are just Racers. Chill. We’ll just up the timers on their specials. And Booya!

Leaving the Island — (A Tale in the Desert Intro Tutorial)

Adam — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:36:00 +0000

The intro area of ATitD is a newbie island in the style of EQ2, where you learn the skills and basic elements of crafting. As a tutorial it’s Ok, but you have to follow a checklist to ensure you make every component and harvest the right goods to meet the criteria to move on. The way you move on is interesting: you have to build a raft to escape the newbie island. As a hint or warning I can tell you *not* to bother building a loom (they give you a sail once you qualify to learn “raft making”). I have to also check the dates, but I think ATitD was the first possibly to use this idea of an instanced tutorial. If so, kudos to them on good design, since it’s something everyone else has now copied.

The UI is challenging. It’s mouse based movement like in Shadowbane, and I can’t yet find a way to play out of window (full screen). That said, you can get the hang of quickly enough and explore and craft. There are some buildings to visit optionally to see the kinds of housing you can have eventually. And there are “universities” you have to visit to learn the skills to make the next qualifying component you need to progress. There’s a series of statues on the road from where you first spawn that helps explains what to do and where to go.

Some things worth noting: you get to farm. Yes you could “farm” sort of via harvesters in SWG, and now you can actually throw seed and farm in LotRO, but ATitD was probably the first to use deformable terrain and timed growth. In the tutorial you have to grow flax. A small bed of flax spawns near where you “plant”, and graphics of flowers appear. Now, what’s cool is that you have to “weed” the plant once the graphics change (yellow flowers appear on the stalks). If you don’t do that, the flax goes to seed and won’t bloom. But then you can harvest seeds. You have to weed 3 times in order to eventually be able to harvest the flax. Likewise, you can harvest seeds 3 times, and at the end the flax-bed dries up and leaves another seed for you to gather. It’s all time dependant. So the challenge is to weed in time before the flax changes — otherwise you are stuck just with seed. And you have to harvest the seed also in time to gain the benefit of the plant producing three times. The models changes to indicate that timer, and it’s a modest challenge. Nice hook is all. This style of interdependent renewable resources I think is common in ATitD, and I want to see more.

All the resources in ATitD are timed, like in SWG, but not random. So a “node” of a certain kind of tree or plant is always there for players to harvest, but there’s a configurable timer for it to be re-harvested (allowing rares to be harder to get I bet). Another cool thing is that every plant model has a name and probably a use: every bush, tree, flower, even grass you can pick up. As you level and learn new skills you can use them in crafting. A nice design element — everything has a purpose, you just have to learn it.

A last thing I liked was there was always a mentor or GM around. There was always during the 3hrs and change it took to me to complete “level 1″ and become a “citizen of Egypt” some senior players zoning in asking if anyone needed help (usually just to find tar). It’s not a heavily populated game, but there was always at 5-6 people around while I played. More to come.

Polar Bears? I am so off this Island.

Escape Pod Audio

Adam — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:17:00 +0000

While I’m not at the GDC this year, I have some friends who are and are worthwhile chatting with. Laura Peterson and Chris Guirreri form Escape Pod Audio, a gaming audio and music scoring startup. They have a good portfolio with some public samples available on their portal (escapepodaudio.com. Chris is heading to the Serious Games Summit and Laura is on the floor at the GDC this week. They have a blog up recording the audio events. Check it out.

When bugs go bad (VG Anecdote)

Adam — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:44:00 +0000

Via my gf, from her friends in IRC this morning. Don’t know if this is true, but with all the collateral bad PR and anecdotes about VG I can believe it.

…Like you cross a zone line, which is seamless like WoW, but suddenly you lose half your current level’s XP because that server is out of sync with the one you were just on, etc.
…Yeah
…It gets better…
…If you go back to the OTHER server, sometimes you get your XP back.
…BUT that flags your character for cheating because you got a huge bump in XP so quickly.
…So people were getting harrassed by DMs/characters canned for a bit apparently until they figured out what was going on.
…They apparently haven’t fixed it yet but at least stopped banning.

Was this in the launch plan?

Why I’m Sick of WoW?

Adam — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:12:00 +0000

Because stuff like this is popular and realizable, and frankly, useful and maybe necessary: WoW Gold Blog.

The best source for making gold in World of Warcraft. ALL LEGAL! NO BREACHES WITH BLIZZARD’S GUIDELINES!

An entire blog devoted to farming. Legit farming mind you. Like wow — a large mound of sugar. Let’s eat it.

Back in the Desert (starting "A Tale in the Desert III")

Adam — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:09:00 +0000

Since I’ve been rowing hard over here on my small corner of the Mothership, I haven’t had the usual amount of game time I’d like. So, no great essays on what’s new in WoW, how to design “r33l PvP!1″ or how the world needs more rogues with “authentic” stealth. Etc.

What I have been playing is Oblivion and A Tale in the Desert. Oblivion doesn’t need any PR, although it is overwhelming and could use some better intro documentation. A Tale in the Desert (ATitD) though isn’t well known enough, and it really is a gem. VC’s take note.

To be upfront, I haven’t played enough of ATitD yet to do it justice or to really offer any kind of a good overview. What I can do is relate some of my previous experiences and recent re-entry into the game. I played it casually maybe less than two years ago, and never got that far. I’m going to try and explore it some more and sub to it.

ATitD is run by a small company called eGenesis and has only a few thousand players. It takes place in Ancient Egypt and uses lots of historical material to keep the game coherent. It has a very MUD-like feel to it, and while the game is very stable content and service-wise, it uses older graphic libraries that at least on my machine aren’t running that smoothly. Lowering resolution probably will help. The reason I think ATitD is worth reviewing and playing for a bit (and subscribing to folks) is that eGenesis is able to offer a very mature, stable, and very complex game that puts some larger providers very much to shame. This is the power of niche: focus, quality, depth and customer service. There’s lots of people building small games and online services, but there are few who manage it with quality. Or actually finish. Or can sustain themselves once live. eGenesis is obviously doing something correct.

Game map and zones

ATitD is unique in its game design because it emphasizes cooperation and individual accomplishment through community response. It’s a deep crafting game. There is none of the customary DIKU-descendant fantasy combat themes or mechanisms. Players can compete in challenges and “tests” to earn new skills with which they can create free-form art pieces that other players can judge. This community feedback is unique I think in any MMO. There’s examples of player-run governance with managing griefers and conflicts and even new feature suggestions. There was even for the second telling a card game-like test between players that was a good style of PvP. But fighting is not the central design.

There is, however, still some competition in the game. There is a uniue advancement model, which I still need to learn, that does incorporate some levelling, but mostly it’s a progression by gaining skills or “disciplines”. They are (from the wiki):

Architecture (Building Stuff bigger and better)
Art and Music (The finer things in life)
Harmony (How well you know your fellow Egyptian)
Human Body (Self-improvement and exploration)
Leadership (Getting others to follow you)
Thought (Designing puzzles)
Worship (Honoring the gods, usually by large quantities of stuff)

Within each Discipline there are seven (eight sort of, Initiate doesn’t really count) ranks. You achieve a rank in that discipline when you pass another test in that discipline. You can pass the tests in any order, it is the total number that matters for the rank. The ranks are:

Initiate
Student – Pass One Test
Prentice – Pass Two Tests
Journeyman – Pass Three Tests
Scribe – Pass Four Tests
Master – Pass Five Tests
Sage – Pass Six Tests
Pharaoh’s Oracle – Pass all Seven Tests, you have achieved “perfection” in that discipline”

There is a “level cap” where successful players (very few) can attain the level of Pharaoh, but it’s rare. And what’s more, the game resets once a “telling” is complete.

The game is structured with an overarching narrative that describes how a “stranger” once arrived in Egypt with knowledge and challenges for players (Egyptians) to attempt. The service is now in it’s third telling. Once a specific period has passed (second Tale was 627 days, 1775 gamedays) the game world resets. Everything is wiped. All players start again. This allows eGenesis to change/add new content, change/add new rules, and most importantly, delete all the player created content so there is a level playing field on restart. I’m not sure about the economy, but I don’t believe there is any auction-like service. The point being this kind of wipe I think keeps the game fresh, reduces the threat of mudflation, and most importantly for a crafting game, eliminates the ability of advanced players to out-compete others by economies of scale. Something, for example, SWG could never do effectively (particularly after they removed decay).

This kind of a periodic content change, versus episodic or patchtastic changes, I think is an under explored design idea in MMO’s. The need to retain data and player accomplishments ought not to disable the ability for players to reroll wholesale. Current MMO’s only allow players to create alts or to hop to new servers in order to start again.

More to come.

This isn’t the road to Zanzibar? Where’d Bing go?

I remember now why I never do Beta’s

Adam — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 14:50:00 +0000

Because I never get in.

Here’s my /boggle and /whine to Heartless this morning.

In the last three years I’ve bought, played and applied for Beta’s for the following:

LotRO — nothing
DDO — nothing
Pirates of the Burning Sea — nothing yet
Dark and Light — nothing
WoW — got an invite last 1-3 weeks before GM, Open Beta
EQ2 — dont think I ever heard back
GW – got an invite last 1-3 weeks before GM, Open Beta
CoV — nothing
CoH — nothing
SWG — think I got an invite in last 1-3 weeks before GM, Open Beta

This isn’t a complete list over the years, but it is weird, frustrating, bad luck. Obviously I need to blog more or hire someone for SEO and PR.

Game Design and Producer Job Openings (feb.16)

Adam — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:35:00 +0000

Hmm. Looks like one amongst the fleet (Turner Broadcasting) has openings in gaming: Game Designer and Game Producer. I won’t be applying, just wanted to pass this on. And no, I have no info on what they’re up to. Turner owns GameTap though, which is the bomb for most people in the U.S., but sadly for the rest of us who have to suffer the lack of international licensing, the menu is not up to snuff yet.

Update: the URL’s above may not work, so anyone really interested will need to go via following and search on “game” to apply: http://www.timewarner.com/corp/careers/jobtools_us/index.html

Here are the qualifications for the Designer. They seem pretty reasonable to me, so take note guys. Entry level position for getting into game design. Job’s in Atlanta I presume. Producer is more a typical PjM job by the sound of it.

Posting Job Title Game Designer
TimeWarner Division Turner Broadcasting
Location United States – Georgia – Atlanta
Requisition # 70112BR
Position Type Full Time
Posting Job Description Qualifications: – Experience developing small-scale web games.
- Must have portfolio of game design project – academic, professional and/or personal.
- Associates Degree in programming, art, design, or a related field.
- Written communication skills.
- Attention to detail.
- Must demonstrate a wide knowledge of the game industry and a passion for gaming.

Duties: – Do research for game projects, edit and update game design documents, assist in creating game levels, playtest games in various stages of development, and generally work under the daily direction of the Lead Game Designer.
- Assisting the Lead Game Designer with Game design tasks – maintaining Game design documentation, working on Game levels, creating concept sketches or prototypes to support the Game design process.
- Researching games in progress – researching show properties, analyzing existing benchmark and competitor games.
- Playtesting games – test games at project milestones to verify they meet game design requirements and/or to provide internal quality assurance.

Posting Job Title Game Producer
TimeWarner Division Turner Broadcasting
Location United States – Georgia – Atlanta
Requisition # 55332BR
Position Type Full Time
Posting Job Description Qualifications: Ten plus years Project Management
Seven plus years experience MMO or Console Game Management
Five plus years experience in Kids Media.

Duties: The Game Producer will work closely with the Executive Producer to manage the overall product development effort over the course of the seven years. This person is responsible for directing the efforts of the Art Director, Lead Game Designer, Associate Producer, and possibly the Technology Director. S/he will also maintain the overall project schedule and approve all creative and technical designs and development.

House of Knives, House of Cloudsongs

Adam — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:15:00 +0000

Update to this note last week — Sword-Swinger Terrorizes Shoppers.

The gentleman is now in court, facing several charges today.

Still no word if he’s Horde or Alliance. However, the 6-7 cops pile on at the end is very reminiscent of my last days in WSG. In the full amateur video there’s two mall cops that walk up to the pile. I’m sure if I listen again I can hear them say something (“keke”).

I wonder if I should start a regular feature (cf. my plumber)– the “WoW people in my neighbourhood”.

LotRO: MERP Maps 2

Adam — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 03:16:00 +0000

See my last post for maps Angmar and NW Eriador proper. They have a better DPI than what’s below.

Important Note: These are not from Turbine, but they are the former IP of Iron Crown Entreprises who created them for MERP and are now the property of Tolkien Entreprises. They are not in the LotRO game.

These are available from a Photobucket album I have started. Sadly, I can only get 1024 x 768 max there. Click the title link in each to get the image in full. I will try to secure some better webspace and put these and some others up in the future at a better resolution. I have some other useful gaming materials that will be helpful and interesting for LotRO.

3. East Shire

This area probably covers a lot of the starting zones — Archet, Hobbiton, Midgewater, Old Forest, etc. — as well as parts of the old human kingdoms of Cardolan in the South and Arthedain in the North. The barrow mounds are from the old pre-Numenorean men. Wiki link.

4. North Misty Mtns

This is an extension to the earlier map I gave of Angmar — it’s the area directly to the East. It features Mt Gundabad (enemy stronghold, previously populated by dwarves) as well parts of the Grey Mtns. The Grey Mtns (Ered Mithrin), BTW were supposed to house many dragons.

5. Forochel

Forochel is actually part of the Northern Wastes (Rammas Formen). This is the northern edge of the old human kingdom of Arthedain. I believe it was partly in Forochel and the farther Icy Wastes that the palantir of Arthedain was lost. Several of the orc tribes that live there were handwritten in there by me, way long ago (a MERP module).

6. Arthedain

The human kindgom of Arthedain was the last post-Arnor land to fall to the Enemy from Angmar in the third age (after Cardolan and Rhudaur). Before this the Dunedain kings granted the area that became the Shire to hobbit refugees, fleeing I think the Enemy just West of the Misty Mtns (where Smeagol grew up). Fornost Emain was the capital that was later destroyed and Aragorn is descended from its last king. Annuminas was the center that held the palantiri of Arnor.

7. North Ered Luin

The Blue Mountains are home I believe to the starting areas of the dwarves and some of the Elves. The dwarf cities of Belegost and Nogrod are in this area. It is from them that Gimli arrived, and earlier, the dwarves of The Hobbit.

8. South Ered Luin

This area is home to the elven kingdom of Lindon and the famous Grey Havens (Mithlond). Cirdan the Shipwright was one of the Elf Lords to receive a ring of power (along with Elrond and Galadriel).

9. Rivendell and East Rhudaur

Rivendell is on the far bottom left corner of this map. This map matches well the earlier one I gave of NW Eriador, being just to the east of it. This one feature a lot of NE Rhudaur. The area crossed by Bilbo in the Hobbit. The town of Mithaelburg from MERP was a human settlement, but farther down the Anduin and off this map were original hobbit settlements, before the Shire was founded.

That’s it for now. More later. Remember to support Wikipedia and to buy the original books.

David Jaffe on Design Docs

Adam — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:23:00 +0000

Worth reading and saving, from the mind of God War. The iteration and fragility of design docs in games. All I can say – I pity his QA team :D

[Feb.19 Update: Gamasutra article today on Chris Bateman's "Play with Fire" design doc. Worth also a read for professional insight on documenting game design]

LotRO Beta NDA’s Lifted — expectations growing

Adam — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:23:00 +0000

And the buzz is good.

“Most Stable Beta I have Ever Seen ”

(all below via f13)

“A short shocking review now follows. LOTRO is a game made by Turbine and it doesn’t totally suck.”

“Seriously, this is a solid game. But unlike WoW, it’s not a surprise. And unlike VG, it doesn’t come with years of pent-up fanboism.”

“The PVP is also fairly good but it’s just not very complicated, think DAoC keep capture with less annoying magic.”

“I felt I should have liked it more than I did. It was pleasant but nothing grabbed me or even stood out other than the starting areas, which I found very clever and good fun.”

“A cozy feeling of security” (ok video review)

I think having a solid launch with a moderate end of closed beta buzz is a successful strategy — add more compelling content and more complex features as you learn what the players want from being in the world for awhile. But for Christ sake, have a solid launch first. Great to see this may be so. At end of DDO there was enough disappointed and critical buzz that I should have listened more carefully. This time things seem positive. Good for Turbine.

Given all the drama going on in other games, or the feeling of playing on ground already well and truly salted by spoilers, LotRO looks like a greenfield experience worth checking out. Let’s see if I can stay objective.

CCP announces new MMO, players wonder what is so shiny

Adam — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 15:45:00 +0000

Via f13 thread yesterday (oh teh ironee).

link

The Icelandic game developer CCP will be developing a new massively multiplayer online computer game called World of Darkness. The game will be developed along with White Wolf, the board game company CCP merged with last year.

The setting of the game will be World of Darkness, a world inhabited by vampires and werewolves. White Wolf created said world and has written stories and books that take place there.

Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, one of CCP’s programmers, couldn’t give any more details on the game, but said its development will begin in the next few months.

CCP owns an operates the Icelandic massively multiplayer online game EVE Online which currently has over 180.000 subscribers.

And now, for some early player reactions:

What a wonderful distraction from CCP’s current woes….

I’m looking forward to this. I’ll hold off picking a side, though, until I see who the devs are going to be playing for. No point making it hard for myself.

Yup. Time for people to grow up all around. But I only have patience with players being immature. Pass.

Eve Online: Forming, Storming, Norming

Adam — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:00:00 +0000

I’ve waited all week to finish this post, and in fact I’ve had to rewrite it in large parts more than once. I’m pretty conflicted. I’m torn between a very innovative and polished game, what its community is like, how the provider acts and responds, and my own personal experiences over 6 or so months of play. It unfortunately doesn’t add up to a very clear feeling of pro or con. Just a real lingering malaise.

A lot of the drama over the revelations of CCP employee cheating in Eve this past week have involved the usual forum-gaming, and the more usual PvP of players raging against their game’s critics. The last time I wrote anything critical about Eve I got a ton (for me) of negative feedback. But this is worth asking and writing about. I think the issue is very straightforward and boils down to the question, “Do you play a game where you know employees can play unfairly against you?” It doesn’t say Eve sucks, or CCP sucks, or that Eve is unsustainable (quite the opposite IMO, see end), but it articulates an issue I think at least MMO professionals have missed this week. I’ll get to that point.

What Happened

For context: CCP employees have long played their own game, like a lot of online gaming professionals. And most of the player base knew this instinctively or actually for a very, very long time. However, all the innuendo aside, one player unscrupulously got evidence from third party sites that “T20″ — a veteran CCP employee (and probably equity holder) — gave in-game resources to his corp for them to benefit from. Unfortunately, these chums are a part of the largest alliance in the game, and the feelings of inequity about CCP employees helping their game’s superpower didn’t sit well with non-superpower players. This kind of collusion was long suspected, and a lot of conspiracists and complainers had a field day. But a lot of other players were left holding their stomachs and scratching their heads. As the dust settles, and the head of community relations responded and then the CEO made a statement saying effectively, “it’s over — deal with it”, T20 himself blogged a confession and an apology. Not a full confession, but enough for some of the essential claims of cheating to be confirmed. So that leaves Eve players either 1) complaining about the situation, and 2) quitting or 3) just getting on with things.

Tide Contra Eve

My take on the whole thing is that the CCP people involved used their free time to help the game, in their own minds. By giving stuff to BoB (the corp alliance) they were helping the game to have a real enemy, which would spur the growth of other corps to oppose them. In other words, they used their spare time to assist in game design and world development. IMO this is stupid and shouldn’t be allowed. Particularly in an open PvP sandboxy game.

I have to admit, for my all praising of Eve’s design, I did quit it back in late Nov when my subscription ran out. And I am still left really uncomfortable with a lot that goes on there. Both in-game and out. I’ve already sounded off on a few well known blogs, and I won’t crap on a game I no longer play. But I think now that this one case has been is exposed it’s as bad for MMO’s as the NGE.

MMO Professionals Wishing They Were Still Players

A lot of non-CCP MMO professionals who blogged on this issue this week have been I think deliberately polite and missed the real vital point: paid employees are competing with players. Some players are on the receiving end of this PvP twinking. Which by any measure is not fair. And can’t be written off as “testing”.

Yes, philosophically play your game, but not at the expense of some customers. And particularly in this gross case, for the benefit of some other players. It’s fine to highlight the need to have a good consumer awareness — to understand your users’ experience — but isn’t there a professional tipping point when employees should realize they’re competing with their own customers? And step back? Otherwise, isn’t that just commercially pathological or perverse? And downright “unprofessional”?

Tide Pro Eve

The problem I think with Eve is not completely what goes in the game world. Although, Ethic has made two very reasonable and thoughtful posts on that. The Eve universe can be wholly vindictive and unfriendly, such that even when you align yourself to a casual or just a mature corp, you can either find yourself acting as an ore slave; or in the case of the corp I was in, we had our alliance fees balloon to over 200% such that we couldn’t afford it and so we got kicked out. Making our small corp open fodder in any of the 0.4 and lower zones just for normal game play (e.g. mining). This does not mean bad things will happen to you if you play Eve. But you better be prepared for the worse. And that anxiety or edge is why it still is popular. And will continue to be. Commitment is everything in Eve. Eve is unequivocally the new hard core in online games.

This lean and unforgiving nature of the game has really attracted a hard core and dedicated player base. And good for CCP, since they are one of the few providers that are really growing. But the nature of the community, the fact that players are taking these behaviors outside the game into the official forums, corp forums, other services… these are really pushing some players too far. In other words, the level of tension you get playing Eve does not relent. Where ever you go, you can end up digesting some inter-corp drama. Let alone the normal forum game pro/con the provider CCP.

The design problem with Eve is that there is no half-way, nowhere’s to rest. The safe zones (empire space) aren’t enough to keep the casuals playing, and being honest, they aren’t built out enough to be interesting enough for anyone. Like rushing to 70 in WoW, the only game is the end-game of PvP, inter-alliance war. And that’s going to keep enough people satisfied for a good while. But the gotcha is that corps and alliances have to push their members hard to ensure loyalty AND to ensure honesty just by being demanding. There’s no DKP in Eve – there’s just making your bones in PvP and re-proving that street cred all the time. That fact and the need for everyone to always look over their shoulder is what propels Eve along. No other game has that intellectual and visceral edge.

Sound and Fury

But I do think, while a hell of lot smaller, this is as bad for MMO’s in principle as the NGE. It’s open corruption. And it confirms for me a real feeling of sleaziness. The problem with CCP is that in order to allow the game to grow and maintain its visceral edge they adopted a “laissez-faire” policy to the game world they’ve used to justify their internal corporate culture and their own internal policy making towards the community. Saying “anything goes” in the game and “anything goes” outside the game, on their own forums and now with employee accounts, and not admitting any responsibility I think is really sleazy. And FWIW, I would’ve thought it breaks their own TOS.

Yes, Eve is the most innovative MMO out there right now, unquestionably. But there’s no reason why the provider has to allow the kinds of bad behaviors we as players know from within the game to happen on their official forums and elsewhere. I think Eve started to become really over-aggressive as a game and community in the last 2 Quarters, as we saw more and more sleazy player actions being condoned by CCP through a policy of non-interference. And an apparent unwillingness to enforce their TOS. Clearly, that corporate decision is being instilled in employees as well in the T20 case.

The problem as I see it is that you have a game and an RL playing community ratcheting up the h8 with each outrage. The end result being that CCP sees it has no responsibility to even act on TOS breaking actions for its own employees. And the crucial thing is that as time goes on and more and more examples of poor behavior and TOS violations happen, they *can’t* change. They realistically won’t be able to overhaul what’s going on on their forums and what happening in game. Players know they’ve crossed a line with certain behaviors the provider won’t curb. And likewise they know how unlikely it is there’s similarly any new curbing or corrective action going on internally at CCP. So, it’s open season.

Signifying Nothing

At the very end of the day, having a continuing anxiety and doubt that there are CCP employees involved in your destruction — which in Eve is very hard to return from, insurance or not – won’t mean a lot to players. .I don’t think this employee cheating and collusion is going to phase a lot of dedicated Eve players. What it will do is push out a lot of the more casual players, or just those people uncomfortable with the whole situation. But I bet a lot of the hardcore will like the fact CCP has been competing with them directly in some way. Exposing the cheating like this without any seeming resolution — other than saying it’s resolved — leaves most of the player base that relish real, tough conflict with an open ticket to ride. If CCP won’t seemingly moderate or act on TOS breaking issues like this with their own employees, what’s to stop other people? I’m not being entirely negative. Maybe just realistic. It brings the escalation of certain kinds of behavior in Eve to a new level. And it’s going to maintain a really aggressive and hard to play game for quite a while. CCP is not going to be hurt by this revelation and Eve will continue to grow.

lest we forget…

LotRO: MERP Maps of Angmar and NW Eriador

Adam — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:49:00 +0000

I posted these on my guild’s site. They are not from Turbine, but they are the former IP of Iron Crown Entreprises who created them for MERP and now Tolkien Entreprises. They are also gorgeous.

Note: these are all reduced on the page here to save space. Downloaded at full res they appear much better.

The NW Eriador one covers some of the area of the former human kingdoms of Cardolan, Rhudhaur and Arthedain, roughly where I think LotRO takes place. Also, included is the East part of the Shire and Rivendell, West of the Misty Mountains. The Ettenmoors are in the farthest NE, where LotRO has it’s PvMP monster zone.

1. NW Eriador (300dpi, reduced to 400×200, actual size 3272 x 2511)

The one of Angmar covers the Ettenmoors (in the far SE), Angmar and Carn Dum proper (the Witch King’s fortress). North Rhudaur is also there below the Ettenmoors, where the Dark Mage of Herubar Gular dwells and the hillmen in Cameth Brin. The maps link up roughly right-top corner of Eriador to the left-bottom corner of Angmar. Great stuff. More to come.

2. Angmar (300dpi, reduced to 400×200, actual size 3194 x 2315)

Jeff Freeman is big. Really big.

Adam — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:02:00 +0000

And people who do not susbcribe or page-view regularly are truly missing the most popular things in the world, which are Jeff Freeman. I’m doing my part! Linking action!! Cf. Nerfbat.

Very funneh, very true. Great stuff and very well written. Kudos. The question truly strains my sanity as well.

Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning (graphic)

Adam — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 19:25:00 +0000

Non-gaming related, but very impressive and worth distributing. Apologies for any mess of it on this site. Check out the original link.