"Nice civilization you're building for someone else there."
Freeman Hunt forwarded me this (somewhat hard to read) set of notes from the G4C conference. (There's an interesting story about Zynga and real-life donations on that G4C link. I've been studying Zynga for a while and have a post brewing about it.)
As I was reading it, I thought of the above quote, which I read on the Apolyton forums years ago, regarding the game Civilization. Some poor sap had developed this gorgeous civilization powered by art and culture (Civ 3 introduced the ability to conquer cities via culture) and was fretting because the cretins around him—with their pathetic attempts at art—had instead built up massive armies of guys with pointed sticks.
He was dismayed that all his culture and education was threatened by some barely literate clods still in the Stupid Ages.
And what I wondered at that point is whether or not the popularity of the computer strategy game might not have a profound impact on people's philosophies regarding the nature of war.
As noted in the pseudo-transcript above, games are models, and they have some limited value in their real-life application. Civ 3 was very good at emulating historical trends (at least as we perceive them from here, which is very skewed, but that's another story) such that industrialism, nationalism and treaties would almost always lead to massive world wars.
This, by the way, feeds into my prejudice about computer climate models. Civilization does a better job "predicting" the past than climate models do (but an awful job predicting the future).
But whatever the limitations, there is one thing that is true in every strategy game: The surest way to invite war is to not develop militarily.
The motivations are (one would hope) not exactly the same: Strategy games tend to be zero sum. If you conquer the world in Civ with a bunch of rock-wielding cavemen, well, you've still conquered the world. The game ends at that point, with you victoriously ruling the stone ages.
Nonetheless, it only takes one guy—one Attila or Genghis or Napoleon—to convince his people that, yeah, they pretty much should be running the show, to turn a bunch of weakly defended countries into fuel for a war machine.
Peace (for you) is only assured by being substantially stronger than the other guys.
Another interesting evolution in the Civ games is that while you may be hated if you're very powerful, people will act nice to your face. If you're weak, you'll be openly loathed, extorted and eventually conquered.
It's not just Civilization, though: Every 4x game I can think of (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) has the same basic rule. If you want peace, you have to make war an unpleasant prospect for others.
The modern 4X game is only about 15 years old, and Civilization not quite 20, but it's not hard to imagine that the lessons they teach might have an impact in coming years.
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
I Hate Windows
I got The Boy some games for his birthday. I used to be a fairly heavy game player myself but haven't really had the time in years. He's playing on a machine that's about six-years-old, which used to be old for my house. Except I started getting laptops instead of desktop machines (for various reasons) so the desktops are starting to creak a bit.
The three games were Grand Theft Auto IV, Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. (I'll leave you to figure out whether it's mandatory for games to have a numeral in the title these days.) Left 4 Dead worked pretty well and he enjoyed it, though with games it's often not as simple as "I liked it". (Online play versus campaigns versus scenarios versus free-style versus whatever. A game can excel in one area and suck in the rest, but still be worth playing.)
Since I haven't been able to use my work machine—I'm not allowed on the treadmill and it shows up on my tests when I cheat—I let The Boy replace his old one with mine. Fallout 3 looks great, but it locked up. GTA IV wouldn't even start, though.
I'll skip to the ending and say that I got it working, but here's what had to be done:
1. Game installation. This takes about 18 whopping gigs of space. (18 gigs!)
2. Entering a massive serial code. Have you seen these? Here's a sample: 8MEH-RB32G-UPE9U-TRLQR-BLQ9O-CEMBR-ACED. Is that a letter "O" or a zero? You may not know. That, by the way, is assuming you can find the code. It's usually on the back of the manual, or printed on a disk sleeve, or a disk, or maybe a slip of paper included in the box—or maybe it's nowhere at all and you bought yourself a $60 coaster.
3. But wait, there's more! In order to play the game, you have to "activate" it. Sometimes this requires a different code like the one you ended in step 2. The software connects to the developer's studio (Rockstar Games) and that has to work or you're hosed. And a variety of issues can make this even more complicated.
4. You still can't play your game, though, unless the damn DVD is in the drive. The software used to ensure the DVD is actually in the drive can cause all kinds of horrible problems with your system.
5. Almost always, you then have to download a patch and fix the game.
6. Now, when we started the game, it failed. We got a non-helpful error message that led to a bunch of elaborate suggestions on what might need to be done.
7. OK, well, I hadn't upgraded my Windows from SP2 to SP3. SP3 has "Windows Genuine Advantage" in it. "Windows Genuine Advantage" of course provides no advantage to you, the user. It basically allows Microsoft to kill your computer from a distance if its authorization system which—and I know this may shock you—isn't always correct about who it authorizes. I bite the bullet and do it anyway.
8. Windows Update required me to upgrade the Windows Updater. You can't make this kind of thing up.
9. After that, the upgrade failed. The helpful advice from Microsoft? "Try again." I did. I'm not sure where I'm more appalled that this is their advice, or that it worked.
10. Did I mention upgrading the video card driver? Yeah, did that, too. It's always a good idea. (Mine was three years old, even though the machine is only two years old.)
11. OK, so now it's time to try GTA again, right? Brand new error message: "The program failed to start. Check out our support web page." No error number or details, just "It didn't start: F**k you." The only hint was that it was the RGSC.EXE program that failed. That doesn't seem like GTA. That seems more like Rockstar Games Social Club. Which I don't want. I just want to play the freakin' game!
12. The web support page? Not surprisingly, no help for this completely worthless error message.
13. OK, I figure if it's the freakin' Social Club causing the problem, I'll register with the freakin' Social Club. I use my "ilovespam" e-mail and sign up. The form wants my phone number. Address. Unbelievable. I put in fakes or leave blank. There's no way this should actually affect whether or not the game runs.
14. But it does. Now, RGSC doesn't crash and the actual game starts. Yay, right!
15. WRONG! Now you need to update your Windows Live software. Windows Live is yet another freaking "social club"/vehicle for selling crap I don't want. No choice, but at least it's clear what's wrong. I download and install Windows Live.
16. Now Windows Live wants me to join. Just kill me. I skip—but the program starts!! Yay! Now The Boy can boost cars and beat prostitutes!
Back in the DOS and early Windows days, there was all this crap you had to do to get games (like Doom) to run: Memory managers, specific graphics drivers, sound drivers, etc. It was all very technical. You could see why someone might flee to a Nintendo or Jaguar or whatever the kids were playing back then.
I didn't mention it but I ignored 5 different license agreements in order to get this game to play. Crap like this is one reason I don't play any more. It actually can be a lot worse. Like, you can get to the end of the process and discover that the game won't play at all. It might be for a technical limitation—or it might just be that one of the half-dozen security protections failed and decided you were a scum-sucking thief.
The irony being that if you are a scum-sucking thief, you don't have to deal with any of this.
UPDATE: I SPOKE TOO (*#&*(&q# SOON! GTA IV--after letting The Boy play all yesterday and save his games, today it insisted he have a Windows Live Login. Of course, having one, his save games from yesterday are all gone.
I HATE WINDOWS! I also hate freakin' consoles. They think it's cute to put on 5 minutes of copyright/warning/video/uninterruptible crap at the front, and that's freakin' infected PC games. Get over yourselves!
The three games were Grand Theft Auto IV, Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. (I'll leave you to figure out whether it's mandatory for games to have a numeral in the title these days.) Left 4 Dead worked pretty well and he enjoyed it, though with games it's often not as simple as "I liked it". (Online play versus campaigns versus scenarios versus free-style versus whatever. A game can excel in one area and suck in the rest, but still be worth playing.)
Since I haven't been able to use my work machine—I'm not allowed on the treadmill and it shows up on my tests when I cheat—I let The Boy replace his old one with mine. Fallout 3 looks great, but it locked up. GTA IV wouldn't even start, though.
I'll skip to the ending and say that I got it working, but here's what had to be done:
1. Game installation. This takes about 18 whopping gigs of space. (18 gigs!)
2. Entering a massive serial code. Have you seen these? Here's a sample: 8MEH-RB32G-UPE9U-TRLQR-BLQ9O-CEMBR-ACED. Is that a letter "O" or a zero? You may not know. That, by the way, is assuming you can find the code. It's usually on the back of the manual, or printed on a disk sleeve, or a disk, or maybe a slip of paper included in the box—or maybe it's nowhere at all and you bought yourself a $60 coaster.
3. But wait, there's more! In order to play the game, you have to "activate" it. Sometimes this requires a different code like the one you ended in step 2. The software connects to the developer's studio (Rockstar Games) and that has to work or you're hosed. And a variety of issues can make this even more complicated.
4. You still can't play your game, though, unless the damn DVD is in the drive. The software used to ensure the DVD is actually in the drive can cause all kinds of horrible problems with your system.
5. Almost always, you then have to download a patch and fix the game.
6. Now, when we started the game, it failed. We got a non-helpful error message that led to a bunch of elaborate suggestions on what might need to be done.
7. OK, well, I hadn't upgraded my Windows from SP2 to SP3. SP3 has "Windows Genuine Advantage" in it. "Windows Genuine Advantage" of course provides no advantage to you, the user. It basically allows Microsoft to kill your computer from a distance if its authorization system which—and I know this may shock you—isn't always correct about who it authorizes. I bite the bullet and do it anyway.
8. Windows Update required me to upgrade the Windows Updater. You can't make this kind of thing up.
9. After that, the upgrade failed. The helpful advice from Microsoft? "Try again." I did. I'm not sure where I'm more appalled that this is their advice, or that it worked.
10. Did I mention upgrading the video card driver? Yeah, did that, too. It's always a good idea. (Mine was three years old, even though the machine is only two years old.)
11. OK, so now it's time to try GTA again, right? Brand new error message: "The program failed to start. Check out our support web page." No error number or details, just "It didn't start: F**k you." The only hint was that it was the RGSC.EXE program that failed. That doesn't seem like GTA. That seems more like Rockstar Games Social Club. Which I don't want. I just want to play the freakin' game!
12. The web support page? Not surprisingly, no help for this completely worthless error message.
13. OK, I figure if it's the freakin' Social Club causing the problem, I'll register with the freakin' Social Club. I use my "ilovespam" e-mail and sign up. The form wants my phone number. Address. Unbelievable. I put in fakes or leave blank. There's no way this should actually affect whether or not the game runs.
14. But it does. Now, RGSC doesn't crash and the actual game starts. Yay, right!
15. WRONG! Now you need to update your Windows Live software. Windows Live is yet another freaking "social club"/vehicle for selling crap I don't want. No choice, but at least it's clear what's wrong. I download and install Windows Live.
16. Now Windows Live wants me to join. Just kill me. I skip—but the program starts!! Yay! Now The Boy can boost cars and beat prostitutes!
Back in the DOS and early Windows days, there was all this crap you had to do to get games (like Doom) to run: Memory managers, specific graphics drivers, sound drivers, etc. It was all very technical. You could see why someone might flee to a Nintendo or Jaguar or whatever the kids were playing back then.
I didn't mention it but I ignored 5 different license agreements in order to get this game to play. Crap like this is one reason I don't play any more. It actually can be a lot worse. Like, you can get to the end of the process and discover that the game won't play at all. It might be for a technical limitation—or it might just be that one of the half-dozen security protections failed and decided you were a scum-sucking thief.
The irony being that if you are a scum-sucking thief, you don't have to deal with any of this.
UPDATE: I SPOKE TOO (*#&*(&q# SOON! GTA IV--after letting The Boy play all yesterday and save his games, today it insisted he have a Windows Live Login. Of course, having one, his save games from yesterday are all gone.
I HATE WINDOWS! I also hate freakin' consoles. They think it's cute to put on 5 minutes of copyright/warning/video/uninterruptible crap at the front, and that's freakin' infected PC games. Get over yourselves!
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Ouch!
I've continued to do the Wii and, like any other video game, it trains you to play it very well. I've actually gotten to the point where it doesn't insult me most of the time. ("You performed exceptionally poorly on the Don't Stick Your Thumb In Your Eye challenge. Is it because you are a big, clumsy American or are you especially uncoordinated?")
The Wii takes an exceptionally sensitive weight reading, then uses your keyed in height to calculate your BMI. And then helpfully displays your Wii as underweight, normal, fat or obese, based thereon. I honestly can't imagine a large American corporation coming up with an exercise system that called its users obese and clumsy.
This, however, has to be the unkindest cut (from F-- My Life):
So, yeah, I bet it caps out at 300 pounds. Fair warning. (Note: 330# according to various web sources.)
Look, treat as a fun way to get off your ass and you can have a good time. Also, if you use it daily, just to do a "body test": it'll keep track of your weight. It is, of course, a bad idea to focus on weight if you're trying to get in shape and, as I noted, the Wii Fit is very sensitive.
But while the Fit software tends to overreact to weight fluctuations, you know if you're looking at a normal weight shift or a third helping of mashed potatoes. It's programmed to not react to a minor weight shift, and notes that you can swing a couple of pounds in a day, but it's not unusual for me to swing five pounds in a single day. (Something I observed years ago, back in the karate days.)
But it's a lot harder to ignore a general trend. And regardless of how you view the Wii's general approach to fitness, you can do the weight thing every day.
Meanwhile, my personal trainer mother wants to give me a real body fat test at her gym.
Anyway, the only real weakness with the Fit is that there isn't enough content. The Wii Fit Plus should resolve that, for a while.
The Wii takes an exceptionally sensitive weight reading, then uses your keyed in height to calculate your BMI. And then helpfully displays your Wii as underweight, normal, fat or obese, based thereon. I honestly can't imagine a large American corporation coming up with an exercise system that called its users obese and clumsy.
This, however, has to be the unkindest cut (from F-- My Life):
Today, I finally got Wii Fit to lose some weight. Came home and set it all up only to be told that I weigh too much to use the board. FML
Look, treat as a fun way to get off your ass and you can have a good time. Also, if you use it daily, just to do a "body test": it'll keep track of your weight. It is, of course, a bad idea to focus on weight if you're trying to get in shape and, as I noted, the Wii Fit is very sensitive.
But while the Fit software tends to overreact to weight fluctuations, you know if you're looking at a normal weight shift or a third helping of mashed potatoes. It's programmed to not react to a minor weight shift, and notes that you can swing a couple of pounds in a day, but it's not unusual for me to swing five pounds in a single day. (Something I observed years ago, back in the karate days.)
But it's a lot harder to ignore a general trend. And regardless of how you view the Wii's general approach to fitness, you can do the weight thing every day.
Meanwhile, my personal trainer mother wants to give me a real body fat test at her gym.
Anyway, the only real weakness with the Fit is that there isn't enough content. The Wii Fit Plus should resolve that, for a while.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Ears and Links
About two years ago, the Barbarienne jammed her finger in my ear. Because of her age, her finger was just the right size to get into my ear canal; because of her strength, she jammed it in far enough to scratch my eardrum.
The resultant infection was so painful and persistent that I thought I might actually lose some hearing. It took weeks to clear up fully, but I was back hearing noises in that annoying 16-20K frequency range again in no time.
Which is a propos of nothing except that I recognized the problem sooner this time and didn't let the infection go too far before going to the local "urgent care". (Less than $100 and 30 minutes, with almost no paperwork.)
That, and I've been accumulating links from around the web but have been unable to cobble together much in the way of coherent posts. So here's a round-up.
A reprint of a massive 1981 article on Love Canal, and a 2004 follow-up, both at Reason. Massive government screw up plus hysteria equals bad law.
Co-D&D creator Dave Arneson died. It doesn't surprise me that there's some rancor and controversy over who did what. Even if TSR hadn't been dominated by a fairly shady couple, that might've arose. I'm glad the two did what they did. Of course, Gygax died at 69 and Arneson at 61, which might suggest the peril of too much gaming.
Vodkapundit tweeted this cute ad for--hell, I don't even know. Sabre? Saber! Still don't know what that is. One of these new "body products" they're pumping out for men. I'm bad at this stuff. I have no products. (I kind of thought "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was not awful, but I can't imagine personally being more uncomfortable than had I been in that situation myself.)
These body product commercials amaze me, because there seems to be a common thread. In particular, there's some severe exaggeration of the (formerly subtle) trope that women will pursue you if you spray this crap on you. (Pheremones! Science! 60% of the time, it works 100% of the time!) Like the Axe one where hundreds of women chase one guy on a desert island.
So, here they're saying, well, you know this isn't going to happen. What with the shortage of midichlorians on this planet and whatnot. You're too smart to believe this stuff, right? But, you know, maybe it works a little. Can you afford to take that chance?
Reverse-double-secret psychology? If I thought they were aimin' it at me, I'd probably be insulted. But, as noted, I don't buy "product".
Speaking of sexism, a bunch of people were tweeting this Naomi Wolf article on porn and pubic hair, blunting men's appetites for sex. First of all, I swear I read this years ago. Turns out, Althouse was blogging how old it was two years ago. And its was just as dumb then. The only thing that can turn a man off "the real thing" is a woman. And she has to work hard at it. (Womens' studies classes can give a gal all the ammo she needs, tho'.) And then the man is mostly not going to want sex with her in particular. That is, a man has to experience a lot of women like that to really be turned off sex. (I can only assume Naomi Wolf doesn't know very many men.)
Well, okay, in fairness, entire cultures can probably gear down their people's sex drives, by interjecting politics between Man and Woman. That might be what's going on in the developed world. Then again, it might be some other physiological factor.
In any case--with all due apologize to FARK--it ain't guys going, "She's got pointy knees," which is all Wolf's argument boils down to. Guys put Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth up on their lockers 60 years ago, but they still got busy with Betty and Rita next door.
Twitter doesn't allow you to tweet that much, so I just linked this delightful commercial. I almost expected a flame or two, but I'm not really on the radar of the perpetually outraged. (Advanced social studies study group question: Compare & contrast this commercial to the previous one, with special emphasis on how "personal products" are marketed to men versus women.)
Frank J asks the critical question of our day: Who is the more perfect leader? Obama or Kim Jong Il? The answer may surprise you. Then again, it may not.
Somebody I follow on Twitter, probably @thecardioexpert, linked this article on cholesterol. I like these kinds of things because the way our media presents things, it's all "OMG! THIS IS DEADLY! AVOID IT OR DIE!" And it doesn't matter if it's salt or asbestos or alar or what. You don't get a sense of the mechanics. And then you die because they didn't warn you against eating broken glass.
I haven't played with this site yet, but it's about musical instruction and resources. What I really want is to be able to score a piece on the computer--full orchestra--and have it come out with those instruments. I've seen a few things that do this, but the output embarrasses me, it's so bad. Obviously, there's a limit to how good it can be, but there should be moments when it sounds like something other than a fleet of DX7s.
Then there's the freaky bird here. Giant eyes--I mean, really giant eyes--are freaky. Reminds me of this guy who has remade Homer Simpson and Super Mario into their human selves. Also Jessica Rabbit, who doesn't look that freaky. At first I thought, "Huh, typical guy." Then I realized she's not nearly as humanized as the other two, plus her eyes are mostly closed reducing the freak out factor.
Lastly, there's this kinda-SIMS-y, kinda-The Movies-y, kinda-Playskool-y site where you can make your own 3D movies very easily. I haven't tried it. But I've seen worse animation and voice-acting on TV.
Enjoy!
The resultant infection was so painful and persistent that I thought I might actually lose some hearing. It took weeks to clear up fully, but I was back hearing noises in that annoying 16-20K frequency range again in no time.
Which is a propos of nothing except that I recognized the problem sooner this time and didn't let the infection go too far before going to the local "urgent care". (Less than $100 and 30 minutes, with almost no paperwork.)
That, and I've been accumulating links from around the web but have been unable to cobble together much in the way of coherent posts. So here's a round-up.
A reprint of a massive 1981 article on Love Canal, and a 2004 follow-up, both at Reason. Massive government screw up plus hysteria equals bad law.
Co-D&D creator Dave Arneson died. It doesn't surprise me that there's some rancor and controversy over who did what. Even if TSR hadn't been dominated by a fairly shady couple, that might've arose. I'm glad the two did what they did. Of course, Gygax died at 69 and Arneson at 61, which might suggest the peril of too much gaming.
Vodkapundit tweeted this cute ad for--hell, I don't even know. Sabre? Saber! Still don't know what that is. One of these new "body products" they're pumping out for men. I'm bad at this stuff. I have no products. (I kind of thought "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was not awful, but I can't imagine personally being more uncomfortable than had I been in that situation myself.)
These body product commercials amaze me, because there seems to be a common thread. In particular, there's some severe exaggeration of the (formerly subtle) trope that women will pursue you if you spray this crap on you. (Pheremones! Science! 60% of the time, it works 100% of the time!) Like the Axe one where hundreds of women chase one guy on a desert island.
So, here they're saying, well, you know this isn't going to happen. What with the shortage of midichlorians on this planet and whatnot. You're too smart to believe this stuff, right? But, you know, maybe it works a little. Can you afford to take that chance?
Reverse-double-secret psychology? If I thought they were aimin' it at me, I'd probably be insulted. But, as noted, I don't buy "product".
Speaking of sexism, a bunch of people were tweeting this Naomi Wolf article on porn and pubic hair, blunting men's appetites for sex. First of all, I swear I read this years ago. Turns out, Althouse was blogging how old it was two years ago. And its was just as dumb then. The only thing that can turn a man off "the real thing" is a woman. And she has to work hard at it. (Womens' studies classes can give a gal all the ammo she needs, tho'.) And then the man is mostly not going to want sex with her in particular. That is, a man has to experience a lot of women like that to really be turned off sex. (I can only assume Naomi Wolf doesn't know very many men.)
Well, okay, in fairness, entire cultures can probably gear down their people's sex drives, by interjecting politics between Man and Woman. That might be what's going on in the developed world. Then again, it might be some other physiological factor.
In any case--with all due apologize to FARK--it ain't guys going, "She's got pointy knees," which is all Wolf's argument boils down to. Guys put Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth up on their lockers 60 years ago, but they still got busy with Betty and Rita next door.
Twitter doesn't allow you to tweet that much, so I just linked this delightful commercial. I almost expected a flame or two, but I'm not really on the radar of the perpetually outraged. (Advanced social studies study group question: Compare & contrast this commercial to the previous one, with special emphasis on how "personal products" are marketed to men versus women.)
Frank J asks the critical question of our day: Who is the more perfect leader? Obama or Kim Jong Il? The answer may surprise you. Then again, it may not.
Somebody I follow on Twitter, probably @thecardioexpert, linked this article on cholesterol. I like these kinds of things because the way our media presents things, it's all "OMG! THIS IS DEADLY! AVOID IT OR DIE!" And it doesn't matter if it's salt or asbestos or alar or what. You don't get a sense of the mechanics. And then you die because they didn't warn you against eating broken glass.
I haven't played with this site yet, but it's about musical instruction and resources. What I really want is to be able to score a piece on the computer--full orchestra--and have it come out with those instruments. I've seen a few things that do this, but the output embarrasses me, it's so bad. Obviously, there's a limit to how good it can be, but there should be moments when it sounds like something other than a fleet of DX7s.
Then there's the freaky bird here. Giant eyes--I mean, really giant eyes--are freaky. Reminds me of this guy who has remade Homer Simpson and Super Mario into their human selves. Also Jessica Rabbit, who doesn't look that freaky. At first I thought, "Huh, typical guy." Then I realized she's not nearly as humanized as the other two, plus her eyes are mostly closed reducing the freak out factor.
Lastly, there's this kinda-SIMS-y, kinda-The Movies-y, kinda-Playskool-y site where you can make your own 3D movies very easily. I haven't tried it. But I've seen worse animation and voice-acting on TV.
Enjoy!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Check Mate
The Flower and The Boy take a weekly chess lesson. (They're actually the bulk of the class, which I think is down to one other kid.)
Anyway, The Flower beat the teacher yesterday.
Although the teacher said he didn't let her win, I suspect what happened was that he underestimated her at first. Then she launched a very aggressive strategy that put him on the defensive.
Still, not bad for a seven-year-old.
Anyway, The Flower beat the teacher yesterday.
Although the teacher said he didn't let her win, I suspect what happened was that he underestimated her at first. Then she launched a very aggressive strategy that put him on the defensive.
Still, not bad for a seven-year-old.
Channeling My Inner 11-Year-Old
The Beatles had a resurgence when I was a kid--as they seem to every few years since they broke up--and they were the first, em, "serious" pop band I listened to. I never listened to the radio--the cacophonous incidental sounds of radio (from AM/FM noise artifacts to commercials to DJs breaking in) made (and makes) it something I cannot tolerate for very long. I picked up some "Donny and Marie" and "Captain and Tenille", but that didn't really ignite any interest. (Can't imagine why.)
Most of the music I listened to was classical or noodling--whatever I could play. (I never have "gotten" piano, though, sadly.) I had a kind of culture shock when I went from piano to guitar because piano teachers generally tell you what to play and guitar teachers ask you what you want to play. So guitar lessons were not successful at that point. (What were they going to do? Teach me Bach and Beethoven? Not likely.)
Flash forward a few months or a year, and one of my classmates takes on a tour of Capitol Records (where her father worked) and they handed out promotional copies of the latest Beatles compilation album, Love Songs. (One of the advantages of going to school in L.A. Another student's father worked at ABC studios, so we toured there as well.)
Flash forward again, and I've got a few more albums and I teach myself a few chords and score a copy--I'm still not sure how--of the "Beatles Complete", a fairly comprehensive book of typographically convenient piano arrangements of all the Beatles' tunes. With some help from Peter, Paul and Mary for basic fingerings, I taught myself to play "Polythene Pam".
Why that song? Five chords, but four of them aren't bar chords, and when you play it actually sounds like the song on the album. (Because the book had been set up as a sort of fake book for piano--what else?--the music was often transposed into good piano keys, where the Beatles naturally played in good guitar keys. There was a later two-volume work that preserved the scores far better.)
And so I learned to play guitar. Ultimately, I learned fifty or sixty of their tunes, possibly more, though I had more success (as a guy alone with his guitar) emulating Simon & Garfunkel (hold the Garfunkel), ultimately learning all the songs of that duo with the exact or nearly exact fingerings (and quite a few post-breakup songs, too). Then, in the early MTV years, I'd play whatever came on which, to this day, gives me an odd selection of music to recall from that period. (It could've been huge on the radio, but if it wasn't on TV, I didn't hear it. Sounds strange, but MTV let the songs play all the way through without interrupting back then.)
During my Beatles period, I studied the music and learned about the phenomenon and hung out with other Beatles fans (there were about 50 kids altogether in my middle school, divided between Beatles fans and KISS fans, and ne'er the twain shall meet, except in my house where my sister was, predictably, a KISS fan).
This period ended for me when John Lennon was shot; I found it hard to listen to The Beatles after that for some time, and started listening to their solo albums. (Listening to "the latest" music has never been my thing, as you can see.) I cast about for other things to listen to, but I wouldn't get close to anything like my Beatles obsession (at least in "pop" music) for ten years (when I rediscovered Loudon Wainwright III).
My transition from the banging chords of the Beatles to Paul Simon-style fingerpickin' started with this blues song (which before this very moment I had never heard anyone else play 'cept for me and the guy who taught it to me), and ultimately led me back home to Bach and other Baroque and Renaissance music. (There is truly "Classical" music for the guitar but most of it is terribly boring. The late 18th century and the 19th century isn't a font of great guitar music. 20th century music and the guitar go gloriously well together, however.)
Anyway a couple years ago when I splurged and got myself a new classical guitar--and the best one I found was actually pretty old--the shopkeeper (sensing an easy mark, no doubt) also showed me a vintage 12-string Framus which I promptly bought, rationalizing that both old guitars together were cheaper and better sounding than the new ones I had sampled. (Random youtube of this kind of guitar in action, but you can hear it on a ton of the Beatles middle period stuff.)
Plucking out a few Beatles tunes on that thing does send me back--to a time before I was born, even. Heh. The sound is evocative.
But evocative in an entirely different way from this.
Although I've never quite understood the Guitar Hero attraction, I have to admit, this variant awakened my inner 11-year-old.
Most of the music I listened to was classical or noodling--whatever I could play. (I never have "gotten" piano, though, sadly.) I had a kind of culture shock when I went from piano to guitar because piano teachers generally tell you what to play and guitar teachers ask you what you want to play. So guitar lessons were not successful at that point. (What were they going to do? Teach me Bach and Beethoven? Not likely.)
Flash forward a few months or a year, and one of my classmates takes on a tour of Capitol Records (where her father worked) and they handed out promotional copies of the latest Beatles compilation album, Love Songs. (One of the advantages of going to school in L.A. Another student's father worked at ABC studios, so we toured there as well.)
Flash forward again, and I've got a few more albums and I teach myself a few chords and score a copy--I'm still not sure how--of the "Beatles Complete", a fairly comprehensive book of typographically convenient piano arrangements of all the Beatles' tunes. With some help from Peter, Paul and Mary for basic fingerings, I taught myself to play "Polythene Pam".
Why that song? Five chords, but four of them aren't bar chords, and when you play it actually sounds like the song on the album. (Because the book had been set up as a sort of fake book for piano--what else?--the music was often transposed into good piano keys, where the Beatles naturally played in good guitar keys. There was a later two-volume work that preserved the scores far better.)
And so I learned to play guitar. Ultimately, I learned fifty or sixty of their tunes, possibly more, though I had more success (as a guy alone with his guitar) emulating Simon & Garfunkel (hold the Garfunkel), ultimately learning all the songs of that duo with the exact or nearly exact fingerings (and quite a few post-breakup songs, too). Then, in the early MTV years, I'd play whatever came on which, to this day, gives me an odd selection of music to recall from that period. (It could've been huge on the radio, but if it wasn't on TV, I didn't hear it. Sounds strange, but MTV let the songs play all the way through without interrupting back then.)
During my Beatles period, I studied the music and learned about the phenomenon and hung out with other Beatles fans (there were about 50 kids altogether in my middle school, divided between Beatles fans and KISS fans, and ne'er the twain shall meet, except in my house where my sister was, predictably, a KISS fan).
This period ended for me when John Lennon was shot; I found it hard to listen to The Beatles after that for some time, and started listening to their solo albums. (Listening to "the latest" music has never been my thing, as you can see.) I cast about for other things to listen to, but I wouldn't get close to anything like my Beatles obsession (at least in "pop" music) for ten years (when I rediscovered Loudon Wainwright III).
My transition from the banging chords of the Beatles to Paul Simon-style fingerpickin' started with this blues song (which before this very moment I had never heard anyone else play 'cept for me and the guy who taught it to me), and ultimately led me back home to Bach and other Baroque and Renaissance music. (There is truly "Classical" music for the guitar but most of it is terribly boring. The late 18th century and the 19th century isn't a font of great guitar music. 20th century music and the guitar go gloriously well together, however.)
Anyway a couple years ago when I splurged and got myself a new classical guitar--and the best one I found was actually pretty old--the shopkeeper (sensing an easy mark, no doubt) also showed me a vintage 12-string Framus which I promptly bought, rationalizing that both old guitars together were cheaper and better sounding than the new ones I had sampled. (Random youtube of this kind of guitar in action, but you can hear it on a ton of the Beatles middle period stuff.)
Plucking out a few Beatles tunes on that thing does send me back--to a time before I was born, even. Heh. The sound is evocative.
But evocative in an entirely different way from this.
Although I've never quite understood the Guitar Hero attraction, I have to admit, this variant awakened my inner 11-year-old.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Why The Wii Changes Everything
Well, for one thing, there's this.
I remember when the Wii was announced. A great many of the commenters predicted its failure. "It's hardly more powerful than the GameCube!" they complained. But I had a feeling it would be a success.
Because I wanted one.
Now, I'm a gamer. Whether or not I qualify for hardcore anymore is certainly debatable. I don't game as much as I used to, and I'm less willing to invest in the big games any more because I know it'll be a challenge (at least) to get past the learning curve to where I'm actually reasonably good at the game. (And I don't mean good in some Internet competition way, but just good enough to actually enjoy the process. Which is the point, after all.)
But I've been playing with computers since back when they were shared and billing was done by the millisecond. And I played on the first Pong machines. Certainly, I played computer games when doing so meant you had to type in the code yourself. And that was where I left off with video games (as distinct from computer games): When I could program my own.
The last console I owned, therefore (and one of two or three in toto) was the Channel F. I didn't like the action on the Atari 2600 (or the graphics), though the Atari 800 was a cool computer. By the time the NES rolled around in 1983, I had long abandoned the arcades and really couldn't much relate to the kinds of games that ran thereupon. (I was playing strategy, PC-style RPGs which are entirely different from the Japanese style ones.)
I wasn't real thrilled to live through the late '90s and the constant calls of "PC gaming is dying!" For one thing, PC gaming is the wild west of development: Anyone can write a game and try to sell it. There are no licensing fees. I'm not a Microsoft fan but they're smart enough to realize that making their development platform available for free benefits them tremendously. (Of course, they struggle with the other side, which is artificially restricting games from the PC platform to boost their XBox cred.)
What I realized about PC gaming, though, is that I played it when since before it was worthy of the word "niche", through the years where entire stores were devoted to PC games, and now, as their relative market shrinks. So why wouldn't I keep on playing when it goes back to being a niche again?
Which brings us to the Wii. Since I missed out on the NES and all subsequent iterations of consoles (though I bought an N64 and a PS2 for The Boy at various times), I really, really, really hate the controllers. One thing I've never been fond of, gaming-wise, is the tendency of some games to require artificially complex control sequences to do stuff. (Yeah, what I like about fighters is offset by annoyance over having to do these 7-8 sequence combos.)
So, somewhat ironically, consoles are to me, a closed world. I can't bring myself to memorize random codes. I'll do a little finger training for a strategy game, for example, but the basics mechanics have been standardized on those for years. To me, the control interface is a barrier that we should strive to eliminate. (This is one reason I always look at what Molyneux is doing; I know he feels the same way and it's interesting to me how he manifests this drive.)
Even if I did go through the trouble--what is essentially meta-game effort--when it's all done, I'm clicking buttons. If part of the fun of playing a computer game is doing something you can't really do otherwise (slaying a dragon, fighting a god, etc.) then the fact that you're doing it just by pressing buttons removes some of the elemental joy. (A good place to start with any game is to find some action that's pleasurable, and that you can find a pleasurable form of feedback for.)
The action/feedback cycle is the key element of electronic gameplay. There are some games that are little more than that. There are some games which have all the elements of gameplay but miss on that, and they're virtually unplayable. But once you're oriented within a game, there's another element to the cycle:
intention->action->feedback
You mean to do something, you take the steps needed to accomplish that, and the game gives you feedback. The complex key-sequence is an artificial barrier introduced into the action sequence and the learning curve for any game is what it takes to unite intention with action.
The Wii changes that by using your native action to power the game action. So you don't have to train much, and the training you do parallels what you would actually do in real life. It's a weak parallel, of course, a shadow of what's necessary, and in some ways completely wrong from a technical standpoint. (Think Guitar Hero which, while not a Wii game, is the exact same principle.)
Anyway, the introduction of the whole body into the game is an element of immersion completely lacking from traditional gaming, and it's simultaneously both powerful and intuitive.
So I'm not surprised that the Wii sales figures are comparable to those of the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined. And I'm not surprised that the Wii Fit was the #1 selling game on Black Friday. The games are absolutely trivial: On the Wii Fit, there's a game where you hit soccer balls thrown at you with your head by leaning left and right (and returning to center as needed). This is a two button game, or three button at the most, and you'd be bored of it nigh instantly.
Add the body factor, though, and you've got something.
Ski jumping? That's practically a one-button game. But make the actions leaning and flexing like an actual jump, and there you are.
I suppose it's good for you in some ways, but that misses the point. It's the feedback. Eventually, of course, you'll get so good at the the controls that you'll need something subtler and more challenging, which isn't something we've seen a lot of yet.
But this is promising. Hell, the Wii Fit board is fun, but why not have, alternatively, ankle controllers? Cap or ear piece for head motion?
Think not? Well, consider that one of the prime laws of gaming has been that you couldn't get people to buy peripherals. You always had to make your game for the lowest common equipment denominator. What changed that?
Dance Dance Revolution.
Then what?
Guitar hero.
Now, the Wii Fit. And what do they all have in common? A level of physicality that hardcore gamers eschew. Even Guitar Hero: You can just click the buttons, but isn't what makes it attractive that you can ham it up as a guitar god? Hell, I play guitar--but I don't play anything like the archetypal rock star. It doesn't appeal to me much, but I can see the appeal--and it doesn't surprise me that various real-life rock bands play it.
The Wii itself may be a fad. And it may be supplanted by additions to the Xbox and the Playstation, or by another console altogether. (Although Nintendo certainly seems to be using its brand well.)
But the physicality? I think that's here to stay.
I remember when the Wii was announced. A great many of the commenters predicted its failure. "It's hardly more powerful than the GameCube!" they complained. But I had a feeling it would be a success.
Because I wanted one.
Now, I'm a gamer. Whether or not I qualify for hardcore anymore is certainly debatable. I don't game as much as I used to, and I'm less willing to invest in the big games any more because I know it'll be a challenge (at least) to get past the learning curve to where I'm actually reasonably good at the game. (And I don't mean good in some Internet competition way, but just good enough to actually enjoy the process. Which is the point, after all.)
But I've been playing with computers since back when they were shared and billing was done by the millisecond. And I played on the first Pong machines. Certainly, I played computer games when doing so meant you had to type in the code yourself. And that was where I left off with video games (as distinct from computer games): When I could program my own.
The last console I owned, therefore (and one of two or three in toto) was the Channel F. I didn't like the action on the Atari 2600 (or the graphics), though the Atari 800 was a cool computer. By the time the NES rolled around in 1983, I had long abandoned the arcades and really couldn't much relate to the kinds of games that ran thereupon. (I was playing strategy, PC-style RPGs which are entirely different from the Japanese style ones.)
I wasn't real thrilled to live through the late '90s and the constant calls of "PC gaming is dying!" For one thing, PC gaming is the wild west of development: Anyone can write a game and try to sell it. There are no licensing fees. I'm not a Microsoft fan but they're smart enough to realize that making their development platform available for free benefits them tremendously. (Of course, they struggle with the other side, which is artificially restricting games from the PC platform to boost their XBox cred.)
What I realized about PC gaming, though, is that I played it when since before it was worthy of the word "niche", through the years where entire stores were devoted to PC games, and now, as their relative market shrinks. So why wouldn't I keep on playing when it goes back to being a niche again?
Which brings us to the Wii. Since I missed out on the NES and all subsequent iterations of consoles (though I bought an N64 and a PS2 for The Boy at various times), I really, really, really hate the controllers. One thing I've never been fond of, gaming-wise, is the tendency of some games to require artificially complex control sequences to do stuff. (Yeah, what I like about fighters is offset by annoyance over having to do these 7-8 sequence combos.)
So, somewhat ironically, consoles are to me, a closed world. I can't bring myself to memorize random codes. I'll do a little finger training for a strategy game, for example, but the basics mechanics have been standardized on those for years. To me, the control interface is a barrier that we should strive to eliminate. (This is one reason I always look at what Molyneux is doing; I know he feels the same way and it's interesting to me how he manifests this drive.)
Even if I did go through the trouble--what is essentially meta-game effort--when it's all done, I'm clicking buttons. If part of the fun of playing a computer game is doing something you can't really do otherwise (slaying a dragon, fighting a god, etc.) then the fact that you're doing it just by pressing buttons removes some of the elemental joy. (A good place to start with any game is to find some action that's pleasurable, and that you can find a pleasurable form of feedback for.)
The action/feedback cycle is the key element of electronic gameplay. There are some games that are little more than that. There are some games which have all the elements of gameplay but miss on that, and they're virtually unplayable. But once you're oriented within a game, there's another element to the cycle:
intention->action->feedback
You mean to do something, you take the steps needed to accomplish that, and the game gives you feedback. The complex key-sequence is an artificial barrier introduced into the action sequence and the learning curve for any game is what it takes to unite intention with action.
The Wii changes that by using your native action to power the game action. So you don't have to train much, and the training you do parallels what you would actually do in real life. It's a weak parallel, of course, a shadow of what's necessary, and in some ways completely wrong from a technical standpoint. (Think Guitar Hero which, while not a Wii game, is the exact same principle.)
Anyway, the introduction of the whole body into the game is an element of immersion completely lacking from traditional gaming, and it's simultaneously both powerful and intuitive.
So I'm not surprised that the Wii sales figures are comparable to those of the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined. And I'm not surprised that the Wii Fit was the #1 selling game on Black Friday. The games are absolutely trivial: On the Wii Fit, there's a game where you hit soccer balls thrown at you with your head by leaning left and right (and returning to center as needed). This is a two button game, or three button at the most, and you'd be bored of it nigh instantly.
Add the body factor, though, and you've got something.
Ski jumping? That's practically a one-button game. But make the actions leaning and flexing like an actual jump, and there you are.
I suppose it's good for you in some ways, but that misses the point. It's the feedback. Eventually, of course, you'll get so good at the the controls that you'll need something subtler and more challenging, which isn't something we've seen a lot of yet.
But this is promising. Hell, the Wii Fit board is fun, but why not have, alternatively, ankle controllers? Cap or ear piece for head motion?
Think not? Well, consider that one of the prime laws of gaming has been that you couldn't get people to buy peripherals. You always had to make your game for the lowest common equipment denominator. What changed that?
Dance Dance Revolution.
Then what?
Guitar hero.
Now, the Wii Fit. And what do they all have in common? A level of physicality that hardcore gamers eschew. Even Guitar Hero: You can just click the buttons, but isn't what makes it attractive that you can ham it up as a guitar god? Hell, I play guitar--but I don't play anything like the archetypal rock star. It doesn't appeal to me much, but I can see the appeal--and it doesn't surprise me that various real-life rock bands play it.
The Wii itself may be a fad. And it may be supplanted by additions to the Xbox and the Playstation, or by another console altogether. (Although Nintendo certainly seems to be using its brand well.)
But the physicality? I think that's here to stay.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Reasons to pirate software.
My buddy's a big gamer. Mostly sports stuff, which I don't do, but also Command and Conquer. (Check out the link. It's David Hasselhoff!)
A couple of years ago, he tried to get me and another pal into C&C: Generals. (I almost always buy games long after they come out. I don't have time to play them so, you know, why spend a lot of money on them. "But, Blake!" you say, "Why buy them at all if you don't have time to play them?" To which I remind you, "Shut up.")
"Generals", like so many games today, has so much copy protection, it's absurd. First, of course, it copies its entire contents to your hard drive. It still requires you to keep the CD in the drive, naturally. Also, you've got to enter a serial number and product key. Even if you're just playing over your home network, "Generals" will helpfully check those serial numbers so that you can't (say) play with your kid without buying another copy. Some games add to that, require Internet activation. "Generals" didn't, and I'm not sure if "Red Alert 3" does, but (for example) Spore does: A bunch of people devoted themselves to trashing it on Amazon because of that. (I have mixed feelings about that tactic.)
Meanwhile you can download a cracked version of anything that requires no CD and no Internet activation.
Even when these things work, they're supremely annoying. Your cash outlay is rendered worthless if you misplace the game manual or jewel case or in some cases a little slip of paper. Or if you can't connect to the Internet.
The requirement to keep the CD in the drive results in: a) not being able to play the game when you want, since you have to dig up the CD; b) the CD being damaged.
In the case of Red Alert 3, though, we have a situation where the last number of the product key didn't get printed. The registration helpfully aborts after three tries, so I had to initiate the install procedure five times before I discovered "M" was the magic missing letter.
Also: $60.
I'm opposed to piracy. I think people should be able to get paid for their work and set the price they want to receive for said work.
But the pirates deliver a better product.
A couple of years ago, he tried to get me and another pal into C&C: Generals. (I almost always buy games long after they come out. I don't have time to play them so, you know, why spend a lot of money on them. "But, Blake!" you say, "Why buy them at all if you don't have time to play them?" To which I remind you, "Shut up.")
"Generals", like so many games today, has so much copy protection, it's absurd. First, of course, it copies its entire contents to your hard drive. It still requires you to keep the CD in the drive, naturally. Also, you've got to enter a serial number and product key. Even if you're just playing over your home network, "Generals" will helpfully check those serial numbers so that you can't (say) play with your kid without buying another copy. Some games add to that, require Internet activation. "Generals" didn't, and I'm not sure if "Red Alert 3" does, but (for example) Spore does: A bunch of people devoted themselves to trashing it on Amazon because of that. (I have mixed feelings about that tactic.)
Meanwhile you can download a cracked version of anything that requires no CD and no Internet activation.
Even when these things work, they're supremely annoying. Your cash outlay is rendered worthless if you misplace the game manual or jewel case or in some cases a little slip of paper. Or if you can't connect to the Internet.
The requirement to keep the CD in the drive results in: a) not being able to play the game when you want, since you have to dig up the CD; b) the CD being damaged.
In the case of Red Alert 3, though, we have a situation where the last number of the product key didn't get printed. The registration helpfully aborts after three tries, so I had to initiate the install procedure five times before I discovered "M" was the magic missing letter.
Also: $60.
I'm opposed to piracy. I think people should be able to get paid for their work and set the price they want to receive for said work.
But the pirates deliver a better product.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Free Lunch
Via Simply Skimming, CodeWeavers is giving away it's CrossOver software free to celebrate sub-$3/gallon gas. CrossOver allows you to run Windows software from Linux and Mac.
This is a savvy move: We use WINE here but it's been difficult to get going. I've looked at the CodeWeavers software seriously before, but I try to avoid anything that requires administration. (For me, it's not the cost of the software that deters me so much as it is keeping track of licenses.)
That doesn't mean I couldn't get hooked, however. Check it out!
This is a savvy move: We use WINE here but it's been difficult to get going. I've looked at the CodeWeavers software seriously before, but I try to avoid anything that requires administration. (For me, it's not the cost of the software that deters me so much as it is keeping track of licenses.)
That doesn't mean I couldn't get hooked, however. Check it out!
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Spore: First Looks
Education, at least in the formal sense, ground to a halt today as our copy of SPORE arrived from Amazon.
Amusingly, Spore
was first teased when The Boy was nine. He's been waiting for this game approximately a quarter of his life. He definitely had the last-minute jitters about it. Would it be fun? Would it be that fun? I've made him aware--he was shocked that new triple-A title games cost $50--that we only do this rarely, and he was conspicuously grateful.
He's played through two and a portion of games so far, and he's liking what he sees. Of the various levels, he's said the "civilization" level is the least interesting to him. He's compared it to Populous: The Beginning
, but not favorably.
The bloom may come off the rose quickly; we'll see. His judgment at the end of the day was that we could've waited till it was a bit cheaper, but he was glad to have his curiosity satisfied. He's found it entertaining, but he wants more meat--that is, he's expecting expansions or sequels.
This is, of course, a serious problem with computer gaming. A designer will come up with some good mechanics but not quite polish the game enough to make it a masterpiece. And then the sequel either never comes or screws up the mechanics rather than improving them.
More to come....
Amusingly, Spore
was first teased when The Boy was nine. He's been waiting for this game approximately a quarter of his life. He definitely had the last-minute jitters about it. Would it be fun? Would it be that fun? I've made him aware--he was shocked that new triple-A title games cost $50--that we only do this rarely, and he was conspicuously grateful.He's played through two and a portion of games so far, and he's liking what he sees. Of the various levels, he's said the "civilization" level is the least interesting to him. He's compared it to Populous: The Beginning
, but not favorably.The bloom may come off the rose quickly; we'll see. His judgment at the end of the day was that we could've waited till it was a bit cheaper, but he was glad to have his curiosity satisfied. He's found it entertaining, but he wants more meat--that is, he's expecting expansions or sequels.
This is, of course, a serious problem with computer gaming. A designer will come up with some good mechanics but not quite polish the game enough to make it a masterpiece. And then the sequel either never comes or screws up the mechanics rather than improving them.
More to come....
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Spore Launched
Wil Wright's Spore came out today.
The Amazon reviews list it as 2-stars but that seems to be because of the "draconian" DRM. (I'm sympathetic to that but not considering it in this post.)
GameRankings reports an 86%, which is good (but not great) and which is probably not from the most clear-eyed reviewers.
While I have, literally, hundreds of games, I have little time to play. Since it has been ever thus, I'm at least smart enough to wait till the game drops into the $10-$20 range (or less, if I can buy a collection of several games for $20).
Anyway, every now and again, I'll buy a game first day, and Spore is one of them. (Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Heroes of Might and Magic IV, Doom 3, Civilization 3, Civilization 4 and Black & White are the others.) Spore was announced 3 1/2 years ago, which, for perspective, was probably about the last time I held The Boy's hand.
I confess that I have been dubious about the degree to which putting five games into one package can work, and I hear some complaints about that already. The thing about those games I do buy is that I'm not always looking for compelling gameplay, so I'm not necessarily disappointed in the way other hard-core gamers are when the final products don't measure up.
Sometimes I am: Heroes of Might and Magic IV was a disaster that the series never recovered from. Doom 3 on the other hand was a mixture of "good enough" and nostalgia. Civ 3 was my favorite of the series, and Civ 4 is very sold as well.
But the biggest comparison point for Spore is Black & White. B&W was meant to be a revolutionary game. "Be a god," the claims went, "and watch the world change according to your goodness or evilness." (At one point, a $5 price premium--to be donated to charity--was considered for the white box version of B&W, but saner heads prevailed.)
It could've been revolutionary but for a few fatal flaws. The first flaw is that they made it into a game. Entertainment software is usually in the form of games, but some, like SimCity or The Sims, are more correctly called "toys". B&W had the mechanics of a toy with a game superimposed over it. (Developers talked about the game aspect constantly, even nervously.)
But the instant you make something into a game, you end up engaging the hardcore gamers who consider games as things to be beaten. (This personality is quite fascinating: Games are to be beaten, not necessarily enjoyed, even.) And so B&W was beaten quickly as the cracks in the painstakingly developed universe were found and exploited.
The second, more fatal flaw was that the measure of good and evil was--well, practically French. (No comment on the fact that developer Peter Molyneux's studio "Lionhead" is based in France.) In other words, killing, regardless of the purpose it served, tipped the scales to evil. You had to--as a deity--wait on your worshippers hand and foot to be good. (This also made your worshippers worthless.)
It was a virtual embodiment of the welfare state.
I enjoyed it, though, because I enjoyed the polish that went into making it. The interface was fun. The exploration aspects were fun. The sussing out of good and evil would've been more fun had it been done better, but it was still interesting.
Interesting is a good word. (Kevin Smith said that "interesting" is what they say in Hollywood when they don't like something.) But where I liked it, I was careful not to recommend based on that.
Spore, I expect, will also be interesting. Unlike B&W which was very geared toward hardcore gamers, I expect Spore to have broader appeal--so hardcore gamers will dismiss it as simplisticc. (A lot of hardcore gamers don't get the Wii, for example.)
At the same time, I'm not sure how compelling all of the games can be.
The Creature Creator--wherein you create the species that is going to evolve from microorganism to galactic conquerer--seems to be a brilliant and engaging toy, however. And I expect to see that used as a launch pad for more games and further evolutions of the Spore concepts.
I'll post The Boy's opinons once he's had a chance to delve into it.
The Amazon reviews list it as 2-stars but that seems to be because of the "draconian" DRM. (I'm sympathetic to that but not considering it in this post.)
GameRankings reports an 86%, which is good (but not great) and which is probably not from the most clear-eyed reviewers.
While I have, literally, hundreds of games, I have little time to play. Since it has been ever thus, I'm at least smart enough to wait till the game drops into the $10-$20 range (or less, if I can buy a collection of several games for $20).
Althouse had a post up about regretting netflix rentals. I have tons of books I haven't read, a few movies I hadn't watched (before my collection "walked off"), some music CDs I haven't played, and tons of games I haven't played.
I don't regret it, I think of it as a sort of defense against boredom.
Anyway, every now and again, I'll buy a game first day, and Spore is one of them. (Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Heroes of Might and Magic IV, Doom 3, Civilization 3, Civilization 4 and Black & White are the others.) Spore was announced 3 1/2 years ago, which, for perspective, was probably about the last time I held The Boy's hand.
I confess that I have been dubious about the degree to which putting five games into one package can work, and I hear some complaints about that already. The thing about those games I do buy is that I'm not always looking for compelling gameplay, so I'm not necessarily disappointed in the way other hard-core gamers are when the final products don't measure up.
Sometimes I am: Heroes of Might and Magic IV was a disaster that the series never recovered from. Doom 3 on the other hand was a mixture of "good enough" and nostalgia. Civ 3 was my favorite of the series, and Civ 4 is very sold as well.
But the biggest comparison point for Spore is Black & White. B&W was meant to be a revolutionary game. "Be a god," the claims went, "and watch the world change according to your goodness or evilness." (At one point, a $5 price premium--to be donated to charity--was considered for the white box version of B&W, but saner heads prevailed.)
It could've been revolutionary but for a few fatal flaws. The first flaw is that they made it into a game. Entertainment software is usually in the form of games, but some, like SimCity or The Sims, are more correctly called "toys". B&W had the mechanics of a toy with a game superimposed over it. (Developers talked about the game aspect constantly, even nervously.)
But the instant you make something into a game, you end up engaging the hardcore gamers who consider games as things to be beaten. (This personality is quite fascinating: Games are to be beaten, not necessarily enjoyed, even.) And so B&W was beaten quickly as the cracks in the painstakingly developed universe were found and exploited.
The second, more fatal flaw was that the measure of good and evil was--well, practically French. (No comment on the fact that developer Peter Molyneux's studio "Lionhead" is based in France.) In other words, killing, regardless of the purpose it served, tipped the scales to evil. You had to--as a deity--wait on your worshippers hand and foot to be good. (This also made your worshippers worthless.)
It was a virtual embodiment of the welfare state.
I enjoyed it, though, because I enjoyed the polish that went into making it. The interface was fun. The exploration aspects were fun. The sussing out of good and evil would've been more fun had it been done better, but it was still interesting.
Interesting is a good word. (Kevin Smith said that "interesting" is what they say in Hollywood when they don't like something.) But where I liked it, I was careful not to recommend based on that.
Spore, I expect, will also be interesting. Unlike B&W which was very geared toward hardcore gamers, I expect Spore to have broader appeal--so hardcore gamers will dismiss it as simplisticc. (A lot of hardcore gamers don't get the Wii, for example.)
At the same time, I'm not sure how compelling all of the games can be.
The Creature Creator--wherein you create the species that is going to evolve from microorganism to galactic conquerer--seems to be a brilliant and engaging toy, however. And I expect to see that used as a launch pad for more games and further evolutions of the Spore concepts.
I'll post The Boy's opinons once he's had a chance to delve into it.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Manic Monday Apocalypso: Introduction
I thought it would be fun to start every week off with some sort of post-apocalyptic topic.
Nothing like a little doom-and-gloom to cure that "case of the Mondays" you have.
First up, Gamma World. Although I and my friends mostly played D&D, we dabbled in a few other games. The ones GMed by others never lasted long, though I don't know if it was because they weren't very dedicated, because I was so much better at running games, because I was a terrible player, or some combination all of the above. So for some reason I never got into sci-fi, and we flirted briefly with superheroes, but Gamma World was the only one that got much play when I was around.
Gamma World was highly derivative of D&D but had some cool highlights. There were little things--like the set came with a map of the post-Apocalypse USA, which, quite frankly, looks like what pass for global warming maps today.
Another cool thing about GW was that you didn't just rolled your stats, you optionally rolled your mutations. These were, of course, comic-book type mutations, not things like "easily susceptible to cancer" or "unable to aim urine stream". So you could have extra arms or legs or eyes, psychic powers, and I think even wings were an option. You could be a mutant animal, for sure. I think--like the superhero game--you could also pick a bad mutation to offset some good powers you had. (Much like you'd pick "kryptonite" for Superman.)
In retrospect, what GW really needed was a way to let GMs and players work out their own mutations.
Though GW was fairly generic, it also featured "social groups". One group was for expunging mutants while another was for expunging unmutated humans. There was an animal group that was for killing all humans, and a robot group, too, I think. Not all the groups were about killin', some were for trying to restore society or had other bases of organization.
Looking back at it, I think the real problem with the post-apocalyptic movie genre is that it seldom shows a fraction of the imagination GW creators did--and this is probably true of high fantasy and D&D, too, but high fantasy movies are really pretty rare.
When was the last time you saw a post-apocalyptic movie with a three-eyed, four-armed guy? Or a mutant animal? Or a bunch of rival societies, other than generic, purposeless, Road-Warrior-style thugs?
What puts the "pop" in apopalypse? (Work with me, here, I'm on a roll.)
Nothing, that's what. The closest you can get is Futurama, which isn't really post-apocalyptic.
The most recent versions of GW have been desultory enough to go out of print fast, which would be a shame, I guess, if I had time to play it.
Until next Monday, stay radiated, mutants!
Nothing like a little doom-and-gloom to cure that "case of the Mondays" you have.
First up, Gamma World. Although I and my friends mostly played D&D, we dabbled in a few other games. The ones GMed by others never lasted long, though I don't know if it was because they weren't very dedicated, because I was so much better at running games, because I was a terrible player, or some combination all of the above. So for some reason I never got into sci-fi, and we flirted briefly with superheroes, but Gamma World was the only one that got much play when I was around.
It's entirely possible, if not probable, that my friends played without me without telling me, and Lord knows I was consumed by music increasingly as my teens progressed. But I did get a call from a 7th grade pal in 10th or 11th grade saying my Jr. High group hadn't played D&D since I changed schools.
Gamma World was highly derivative of D&D but had some cool highlights. There were little things--like the set came with a map of the post-Apocalypse USA, which, quite frankly, looks like what pass for global warming maps today.
Another cool thing about GW was that you didn't just rolled your stats, you optionally rolled your mutations. These were, of course, comic-book type mutations, not things like "easily susceptible to cancer" or "unable to aim urine stream". So you could have extra arms or legs or eyes, psychic powers, and I think even wings were an option. You could be a mutant animal, for sure. I think--like the superhero game--you could also pick a bad mutation to offset some good powers you had. (Much like you'd pick "kryptonite" for Superman.)
In retrospect, what GW really needed was a way to let GMs and players work out their own mutations.
Though GW was fairly generic, it also featured "social groups". One group was for expunging mutants while another was for expunging unmutated humans. There was an animal group that was for killing all humans, and a robot group, too, I think. Not all the groups were about killin', some were for trying to restore society or had other bases of organization.
Looking back at it, I think the real problem with the post-apocalyptic movie genre is that it seldom shows a fraction of the imagination GW creators did--and this is probably true of high fantasy and D&D, too, but high fantasy movies are really pretty rare.
When was the last time you saw a post-apocalyptic movie with a three-eyed, four-armed guy? Or a mutant animal? Or a bunch of rival societies, other than generic, purposeless, Road-Warrior-style thugs?
What puts the "pop" in apopalypse? (Work with me, here, I'm on a roll.)
Nothing, that's what. The closest you can get is Futurama, which isn't really post-apocalyptic.
The most recent versions of GW have been desultory enough to go out of print fast, which would be a shame, I guess, if I had time to play it.
Until next Monday, stay radiated, mutants!
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Gaming: Computer vs. Pen and Paper
This was a response to a guy (named "ghy") over at Ace who said he didn't get the whole pen-and-paper gaming concept; that computers could handle the rules more fairly and competently, so why aren't all the P&P types giving up their buggy whips for the wonders of the modern age?
I've played both from about the inception (of both). Not only that, I've written more than a few CRPGs. And even though I don't do much of either these days, and it's a way bigger deal to get a group together for a real game of D&D, and there's a huge social aspect to MMOs, there's really no comparing the two experiences.
That's not to say that there couldn't be a remote form of D&D, like Neverwinter Nights tries, and the new 4E D&D's helper program could facilitate. They're both sort of approaching the same idea in different directions. Still, CRPGs are just shallow distillations of mechanics (and I say that as one who has played and loved both "Nethack" and "Planescape: Torment").
As a guy who was a DM (almost exclusively, in fact), I can say that when I write a scenario, I might think of several different ways for the players to handle it, and only hit about 50% of the time the way they do handle it.
I sort of hate the new rules (4ed) precisely because they seek to reduce everything to a computer game.
CRPGs are generally combat-oriented. Go someplace and kill something. Even the most number crunching combat-oriented D&D games are more than that, with a good DM.
A good DM doesn't do "level grind". Good CRPGs--actually, many computer games--live off the level grind. That's their feedback mechanism. RPGs can provide for feedback that's far less mechanical. When I was introducing The Boy to D&D, he and his pals came across a city of ratmen, where he became a heroic figure. (Later, the party ended up undoing the magic that allowed the city to exist, and he was devestated.)
DMing is part performance art, as well: I once had a game where the characters started in the typical tavern, and never left. It wasn't part of my plan. I had planned for them to sally forth and, you know, do stuff but they were completely convinced that there was intrigue going on between them.
So, I rolled with it, and re-used the scenario the next time we got together.
Good DMs don't let the game get boring any more than a musician lets his set get boring.
Although I don't play much any more, I wouldn't trade the past experience for the world. Being a DM helped me think about how the world works. Playing CRPGs, on the other hand, makes me think about how the game works. That's fun, but it's not at all the same.
I've played both from about the inception (of both). Not only that, I've written more than a few CRPGs. And even though I don't do much of either these days, and it's a way bigger deal to get a group together for a real game of D&D, and there's a huge social aspect to MMOs, there's really no comparing the two experiences.
That's not to say that there couldn't be a remote form of D&D, like Neverwinter Nights tries, and the new 4E D&D's helper program could facilitate. They're both sort of approaching the same idea in different directions. Still, CRPGs are just shallow distillations of mechanics (and I say that as one who has played and loved both "Nethack" and "Planescape: Torment").
As a guy who was a DM (almost exclusively, in fact), I can say that when I write a scenario, I might think of several different ways for the players to handle it, and only hit about 50% of the time the way they do handle it.
I sort of hate the new rules (4ed) precisely because they seek to reduce everything to a computer game.
CRPGs are generally combat-oriented. Go someplace and kill something. Even the most number crunching combat-oriented D&D games are more than that, with a good DM.
A good DM doesn't do "level grind". Good CRPGs--actually, many computer games--live off the level grind. That's their feedback mechanism. RPGs can provide for feedback that's far less mechanical. When I was introducing The Boy to D&D, he and his pals came across a city of ratmen, where he became a heroic figure. (Later, the party ended up undoing the magic that allowed the city to exist, and he was devestated.)
DMing is part performance art, as well: I once had a game where the characters started in the typical tavern, and never left. It wasn't part of my plan. I had planned for them to sally forth and, you know, do stuff but they were completely convinced that there was intrigue going on between them.
I wasn't completely innocent here. The rules said that there was a 5% chance of a particular action causing a demon to be summoned, and as they were teen boys, there was always some smartass who thought it would be funny to tempt fate. I rolled, hit the 15%, and so sent a demon to torment them.
But unlike some hacks who would have it appear and attack--something I knew would just result in its death, and I always liked to play monsters with the idea that they wanted to survive, too!--I had it arrive invisibly. And then throw a gem on to the table where they were all sitting.
The resultant paranoia was consuming. But entertaining for all
So, I rolled with it, and re-used the scenario the next time we got together.
Good DMs don't let the game get boring any more than a musician lets his set get boring.
Although I don't play much any more, I wouldn't trade the past experience for the world. Being a DM helped me think about how the world works. Playing CRPGs, on the other hand, makes me think about how the game works. That's fun, but it's not at all the same.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Scaling
I'm still playing Ikariam. I'm not really sure why, except that it doesn't take much time. I'm right around 100 in the ranking of players in my world. I head an alliance, but there's really not much for us to do.
Ikariam is far from unique. (It apparently has better graphics than most similar web games.) But the gameplay is typical 4x RTS stuff, only in realer time than most Real-Time Strategies. That is, it takes hours or days to reach one island from another.
Basically, though, you accumulate resources which allow you to build buildings which help you collect more resources and (of course) build better troops. The MMO (which I guess this qualifies as, though it's obviously simpler than an immersive 3D virtual universe) presents an interesting scaling problem. Namely, how do you keep people who have advanced in the game from kicking the noob's ass?
In a RPG MMO, I believe it's done--no, I've never played an RPG MMO, or any MMO, except Ikariam--by having no-kill zones, by establishing areas where people can go that accords with their level, and so on.
I know there are RTS MMOs out there. Nothing at World of Warcraft level, of course, but I wonder if part of the problem is that it's difficult to scale an RTS and handle this problem.
One thing that the Ikariam guys do is make everything exponentially more expensive. (Well, it's not quite exponential but it sure as hell ain't linear.) As they've continued to add features to the game, they've included a "corruption" feature.
I don't know who originated the "corruption" gag first, but I remember it most prominently from Civilizaiton 3. Basically, what it says is that the more colonies you have, the more corruption you have, resulting in diminishing returns for each new colony. (In earlier versions of Civilization, you could spam cities, and win the game wiith a bunch of crappy, small cities that produced just enough to give you a giant military.)
I'm not 100% sure, because they backed into this mechanic, but a new colony might just be a negative benefit until you get rid of the corruption. You get rid of the corruption by taking the same (nearly exponential) expense it cost to expand and applying it to a governor's residence in every colony you have. So they take the already outrageous amount and multiply it by n where n is the number of colonies.
In other words, expansion is basically out after a few colonies. (I have five colonies plus my capital, but I've spent most of my time in the past month playing catch up with those colonies as corruption kicked in.)
So, you can't expand after a while. What else is there to do? Well, you can attack someone.
Until recently, I went through most of the game without much of a military. Military upkeep is huge. Deploying the military is even huger. Coordinating attacks with allies is nearly impossible.
And the rewards for attacking are dependent on the level of your victim's dock. So all a guy has to do is demolish his dock and he's pretty much impervious to anything you can do to him, and you have no chance of making your money back.
They obviously have something in mind: You're supposed to, eventually, be able to temporarily take over someone else's colony. That could be make attacking more interesting.
Still, it's thin gruel. I'm not inclined to buy into it, and I rather dislike the premise of having to pay for a better interface, and then to only receive it temporarily. It might be more ineresting if there were some RPG-like elements, say chances to perform missions or acquire resources by capturing map points.
I could be wrong, but I'm guessing they're not making much money on it.
Ikariam is far from unique. (It apparently has better graphics than most similar web games.) But the gameplay is typical 4x RTS stuff, only in realer time than most Real-Time Strategies. That is, it takes hours or days to reach one island from another.
Basically, though, you accumulate resources which allow you to build buildings which help you collect more resources and (of course) build better troops. The MMO (which I guess this qualifies as, though it's obviously simpler than an immersive 3D virtual universe) presents an interesting scaling problem. Namely, how do you keep people who have advanced in the game from kicking the noob's ass?
In a RPG MMO, I believe it's done--no, I've never played an RPG MMO, or any MMO, except Ikariam--by having no-kill zones, by establishing areas where people can go that accords with their level, and so on.
I know there are RTS MMOs out there. Nothing at World of Warcraft level, of course, but I wonder if part of the problem is that it's difficult to scale an RTS and handle this problem.
One thing that the Ikariam guys do is make everything exponentially more expensive. (Well, it's not quite exponential but it sure as hell ain't linear.) As they've continued to add features to the game, they've included a "corruption" feature.
I don't know who originated the "corruption" gag first, but I remember it most prominently from Civilizaiton 3. Basically, what it says is that the more colonies you have, the more corruption you have, resulting in diminishing returns for each new colony. (In earlier versions of Civilization, you could spam cities, and win the game wiith a bunch of crappy, small cities that produced just enough to give you a giant military.)
I'm not 100% sure, because they backed into this mechanic, but a new colony might just be a negative benefit until you get rid of the corruption. You get rid of the corruption by taking the same (nearly exponential) expense it cost to expand and applying it to a governor's residence in every colony you have. So they take the already outrageous amount and multiply it by n where n is the number of colonies.
In other words, expansion is basically out after a few colonies. (I have five colonies plus my capital, but I've spent most of my time in the past month playing catch up with those colonies as corruption kicked in.)
So, you can't expand after a while. What else is there to do? Well, you can attack someone.
Until recently, I went through most of the game without much of a military. Military upkeep is huge. Deploying the military is even huger. Coordinating attacks with allies is nearly impossible.
And the rewards for attacking are dependent on the level of your victim's dock. So all a guy has to do is demolish his dock and he's pretty much impervious to anything you can do to him, and you have no chance of making your money back.
They obviously have something in mind: You're supposed to, eventually, be able to temporarily take over someone else's colony. That could be make attacking more interesting.
Still, it's thin gruel. I'm not inclined to buy into it, and I rather dislike the premise of having to pay for a better interface, and then to only receive it temporarily. It might be more ineresting if there were some RPG-like elements, say chances to perform missions or acquire resources by capturing map points.
I could be wrong, but I'm guessing they're not making much money on it.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Gaming vs. Reality
When The Boy was very young, about 13 months, he was wracked with grief over the absence of his mother and I was at a loss as to what to do with him until she returned. Even though he could speak quite well, he was (as all toddlers) a grief terrorist. He'd cry until his demands, however unreasonable, were met. Completely inconsolable.
In frustration, I asked him if he wanted to help me shoot monsters. This captured his attention, and for the rest of the afternoon we played "Doom II". (I steered, he shot.) From that point, our relationship fundamentally changed. All of a sudden, I was Mr. Cool. We probably didn't play again for months (we were moving at the time) but shooting monsters sustained him and fired up his imagination. Also, being with me became an entertaining prospect rather than a dreadful one.
I've never been able to recapture that with his younger sisters, not because they don't want to play, but because they refuse to let me help. They both want to shoot and aim, and they're simply not that coordinated. So other avenues have been necessary there.
The upshot of this is that I've had The Boy as a human lab on which to test the notion that games de-sensitize us to violence, or incline us to violence, or do something or other bad regarding violence that the nattering nannies of negativity previously projected on to D&D, SatAM cartoons, rock muisc, horror comics, flapper music and pulp fiction (to hit the highlights of the 20th century).
Suffice to say that The Boy was the gentlest, most empathic and most kind child I've ever known, and playing games seemed to not affect that at all.
In fact, it was an issue even back in his pre-school days (the late '90s) that he wanted to play boy games, boy games being almost inherently violent. (Though he also excelled in organizing other children, even older ones for more community sandbox engineering projects as well. And he's very, very good at directing younger children to do his bidding. As he says, he's always wanted minions.)
But his clarity between the difference in playing games and living reality was such that I never worried about it. He could go from vigorously competing in some fashion to helping someone in pain or need within a heartbeat.
As a gamer, I tend to look at games in terms of numbers. Now, the best players, the very best players there are for any game, almost always have a clear breakdown of a game's mechanics: The numbers that make it work. As a game designer, I often tried to hide those numbers in order to make the game more immersive. (And as a Dungeon Master, I'm willing to sublimate them complete for a necessary plot turn, which is probably why me and the new D&D don't get along.)
In reality, hardcore gamers don't play games so much as they crunch numbers. That's why they can play something that is absolutely horrifying in the narrative sense. It's also why they really can't be adversely affected by a game, and very often do things like skip cutscenes and narrative text.
But.
Ralph Koster, in his "Theory of Fun for Game Design" talks about a game which has you as a Nazi running a gas chamber. You're given Jews and required to stack them neatly, at which point you can gas them, sweep them out and take more Jews. They're shaped differently and they come faster and faster, and you lose when you run out of room in the chamber before you can gas them.
Horrifying, isn't it?
Mechanically, what Ralph is describing is "Tetris", one of the most innocuous--and popular--video games ever made. He's just given it a back story. The first video game ever banned, I'm told, was "Death Race" back in the early '70s. Inspired by the movie, presumably, but before licensing rituals were established, "Death Race" had you drive your little car around a ring and run into stick figures, which turned into gravestones.
It was about as offensive as "Tetris" to look at, but you could infer some offense from it (and some people did!).
The reason I was thinking about all this is that I play "Civilization" (Civ). Civ began as a board game in the '80s by the legendary Avalon Hill, and was adapted to computers by Sid Meier in the '80s. Sid went on to do a lot of other games, like "Colonization", "Pirates", "Railroad Tycoon" and "Civil War", as well as being at least a figurehead on the various sequels, as he rakes in the cash.
But Civ, currently up to version 4, is the most interesting to me because it's a very, very rough civilization simulation. I mean, it's the "climate model" of civilization simulation, only it sometimes comes out right by sheer luck. It's not uncommon to enter the 20th century and suddenly have massive world wars break out, for example, especially in Civ II and Civ 3.
You research techs which make researching other techs, and accomplishing certain tasks, available to you in historically interesting ways. The wheel leads to you being able to make roads, while you must invent the Printing Press to discover Democracy. (There's a slippery distinction between inventions and discoveries.) And so on.
One of the challenges of the game, however, is picking your government style. In Civ 1 and Civ 2, you wanted to beeline to Democracy. Civ 3 tried to balance the types of gov't a bit more, by making Fascism a very good warmongering style at the cost of reducing your population (as you weeded out undesirables), and Communism just a flat out good warmongering style that was good for running a super-large empire (at the cost of, I think scientific research, happiness, commercial success and/or some other penalties).
In other words, the first three iterations of the game sought to represent historically that certain modes of government were bad unless you had evil design.
Version 4, however, is supremely balanced. (Ugh. There's that word again.) Instead of selecting a government, you have five civics representing your religious attitude (theocracy versus free religion, say), your commercial attitude (mercantilism versus free market, e.g.) and so on.
So, there's no communism per se. (No atheism option either.) There is a "state property" option, and it reduces the maintenance cost of your cities. It's a good option for someone with a large empire.
A fair number of gamers will not use that option. It is, in a small way, like packing Jews into gas chambers--something that repulses even in an abstract, theoretical reduction, without any of the real world consequences that "state property" actually had. "Police state" is a viable option as well.
What the designers did makes perfect sense from a gameplay standpoint. I may have played one game of Civ 3 where I used fascism. (I was Genghis Khan and planning to do nothing but fight from there on out.) Communism I played with a couple of times but it wasn't very fun.
Civ 3 was edgy that way. It also modeled slavery in a very distinct fashion. The Civ games (at least from version 2 on) always had the option for you to "whip" your city's population in order to speed the building of something. Version 3 had it that, in some circumstances, when you defeated enemy troops, the result would not be dead enemies but enslaved ones. Civ 4 goes back to the original model but allows for slave revolts as a cost.
These decisions are entirely amoral, of course. One doesn't concern one's self with the fate of a pawn in a chess game, which is all these things are, only with window dressing. In the same way one doesn't really think about using a monopoly to drive everyone else to bankruptcy (unless one is Bill Gates). Most of us would find it repulsive to actually deeply ponder what games meant.
That said, it's sort of funny to me how many people will avoid using "Communism" or "State Property" in a Civ game.
There are still some taboos, mild though they may be.
In frustration, I asked him if he wanted to help me shoot monsters. This captured his attention, and for the rest of the afternoon we played "Doom II". (I steered, he shot.) From that point, our relationship fundamentally changed. All of a sudden, I was Mr. Cool. We probably didn't play again for months (we were moving at the time) but shooting monsters sustained him and fired up his imagination. Also, being with me became an entertaining prospect rather than a dreadful one.
I've never been able to recapture that with his younger sisters, not because they don't want to play, but because they refuse to let me help. They both want to shoot and aim, and they're simply not that coordinated. So other avenues have been necessary there.
The upshot of this is that I've had The Boy as a human lab on which to test the notion that games de-sensitize us to violence, or incline us to violence, or do something or other bad regarding violence that the nattering nannies of negativity previously projected on to D&D, SatAM cartoons, rock muisc, horror comics, flapper music and pulp fiction (to hit the highlights of the 20th century).
Suffice to say that The Boy was the gentlest, most empathic and most kind child I've ever known, and playing games seemed to not affect that at all.
In fact, it was an issue even back in his pre-school days (the late '90s) that he wanted to play boy games, boy games being almost inherently violent. (Though he also excelled in organizing other children, even older ones for more community sandbox engineering projects as well. And he's very, very good at directing younger children to do his bidding. As he says, he's always wanted minions.)
But his clarity between the difference in playing games and living reality was such that I never worried about it. He could go from vigorously competing in some fashion to helping someone in pain or need within a heartbeat.
As a gamer, I tend to look at games in terms of numbers. Now, the best players, the very best players there are for any game, almost always have a clear breakdown of a game's mechanics: The numbers that make it work. As a game designer, I often tried to hide those numbers in order to make the game more immersive. (And as a Dungeon Master, I'm willing to sublimate them complete for a necessary plot turn, which is probably why me and the new D&D don't get along.)
In reality, hardcore gamers don't play games so much as they crunch numbers. That's why they can play something that is absolutely horrifying in the narrative sense. It's also why they really can't be adversely affected by a game, and very often do things like skip cutscenes and narrative text.
But.
Ralph Koster, in his "Theory of Fun for Game Design" talks about a game which has you as a Nazi running a gas chamber. You're given Jews and required to stack them neatly, at which point you can gas them, sweep them out and take more Jews. They're shaped differently and they come faster and faster, and you lose when you run out of room in the chamber before you can gas them.
Horrifying, isn't it?
Mechanically, what Ralph is describing is "Tetris", one of the most innocuous--and popular--video games ever made. He's just given it a back story. The first video game ever banned, I'm told, was "Death Race" back in the early '70s. Inspired by the movie, presumably, but before licensing rituals were established, "Death Race" had you drive your little car around a ring and run into stick figures, which turned into gravestones.
It was about as offensive as "Tetris" to look at, but you could infer some offense from it (and some people did!).
The reason I was thinking about all this is that I play "Civilization" (Civ). Civ began as a board game in the '80s by the legendary Avalon Hill, and was adapted to computers by Sid Meier in the '80s. Sid went on to do a lot of other games, like "Colonization", "Pirates", "Railroad Tycoon" and "Civil War", as well as being at least a figurehead on the various sequels, as he rakes in the cash.
But Civ, currently up to version 4, is the most interesting to me because it's a very, very rough civilization simulation. I mean, it's the "climate model" of civilization simulation, only it sometimes comes out right by sheer luck. It's not uncommon to enter the 20th century and suddenly have massive world wars break out, for example, especially in Civ II and Civ 3.
You research techs which make researching other techs, and accomplishing certain tasks, available to you in historically interesting ways. The wheel leads to you being able to make roads, while you must invent the Printing Press to discover Democracy. (There's a slippery distinction between inventions and discoveries.) And so on.
One of the challenges of the game, however, is picking your government style. In Civ 1 and Civ 2, you wanted to beeline to Democracy. Civ 3 tried to balance the types of gov't a bit more, by making Fascism a very good warmongering style at the cost of reducing your population (as you weeded out undesirables), and Communism just a flat out good warmongering style that was good for running a super-large empire (at the cost of, I think scientific research, happiness, commercial success and/or some other penalties).
In other words, the first three iterations of the game sought to represent historically that certain modes of government were bad unless you had evil design.
Version 4, however, is supremely balanced. (Ugh. There's that word again.) Instead of selecting a government, you have five civics representing your religious attitude (theocracy versus free religion, say), your commercial attitude (mercantilism versus free market, e.g.) and so on.
So, there's no communism per se. (No atheism option either.) There is a "state property" option, and it reduces the maintenance cost of your cities. It's a good option for someone with a large empire.
A fair number of gamers will not use that option. It is, in a small way, like packing Jews into gas chambers--something that repulses even in an abstract, theoretical reduction, without any of the real world consequences that "state property" actually had. "Police state" is a viable option as well.
What the designers did makes perfect sense from a gameplay standpoint. I may have played one game of Civ 3 where I used fascism. (I was Genghis Khan and planning to do nothing but fight from there on out.) Communism I played with a couple of times but it wasn't very fun.
Civ 3 was edgy that way. It also modeled slavery in a very distinct fashion. The Civ games (at least from version 2 on) always had the option for you to "whip" your city's population in order to speed the building of something. Version 3 had it that, in some circumstances, when you defeated enemy troops, the result would not be dead enemies but enslaved ones. Civ 4 goes back to the original model but allows for slave revolts as a cost.
These decisions are entirely amoral, of course. One doesn't concern one's self with the fate of a pawn in a chess game, which is all these things are, only with window dressing. In the same way one doesn't really think about using a monopoly to drive everyone else to bankruptcy (unless one is Bill Gates). Most of us would find it repulsive to actually deeply ponder what games meant.
That said, it's sort of funny to me how many people will avoid using "Communism" or "State Property" in a Civ game.
There are still some taboos, mild though they may be.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Commentary on 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons
I played D&D as a kid, and my kid and I have played a little 3ed, though obviously, I don't have the time to pore over the volumes of rules like I did decades ago. So, I was really looking forward to 4ed. The idea that you can just pick-up and play without having to decipher lots of fine print and sub-rules and supplements and so on, this seemed like a good idea. (Although, frankly, the mastery of D&D minutiae is most certainly the appeal for some geeks.)
Surprisingly, I've had to literally force my way through the Player's Handbook. It's all so ... boring. Part of the fun of D&D (for me, as a DM) was reading through all the possibilities. 3ed had this in spades: You could do just about anything, and it gave a lot of room to go in interesting and unique directions.
4ed, meanwhile, maps everything out. Everything is classified in terms of how often you can use it, and you add this power or that feat at each level according to a unified formula. It reminds me more of Diablo than anything.
I'm not being dismissive, either. Really, 4ed is an impressive piece of work, streamlining and cleaning up a very messy game. I give it three (of five) stars because it's so easy to read and has big type with every detail clerly spelled out. (I don't like the artwork but that's my own taste.) It will surely be easier for people to casually pick up and play. What I can't figure out is why they--or really, why I would want to play it.
I gather that a lot of issues with 3ed came about because of pickup and competition games. There are such things as "powergamers" and "rules lawyers" and they found ways to drag the game down. And, of course, not all classes in previous editions were equally powerful, if you crunched the numbers. (It never occurred to me that this was a problem, but then I do everything I can to keep my players from focusing on the numbers.)
So, I guess 4ed is good in that regard. Every character boils down to one of four combat roles, and all the features they can acquire are centered around those roles, one of which they'll likely specialize in. (It's probably not as boring as I just made it sound there.)
Now, I run a very DM-centered game, and 4ed diminishes that greatly. The races have a back story which implies a pre-made, common world; Clerics pick from a variety of bland, pre-made deities; The magic items are listed in the PHB and a player can acquire them easily based on level, which implies a world where magic becomes banal at some level.
This is great for a pick-up game, I'm sure. And of course, the DM who doesn't care for all this can do as he pleases. But as you're sitting there thinking, "Well, I can ignore the two gratuitous elf races, drop the half-demon and half-dragon races, bring back the full nine alignments, assume that stuff that I miss, like gnomes, druids and illusionists will be back with the PHB II, bring back real multiclassing and prestige classes..." But at some point, one wonders, "Why 4ed at all?"
Here's a fun fact: In AD&D (what's now referred to as 1ed), you rolled a d20 to attack and checked against a table to see if you hit. Then the monster rolled a d20, etc. Magic-users would use a spell, thieves would try to sneak attack, etc. But that was combat in the original. It was said to represent one minute of fighting, including all the feints, dodges, parries, tumbling, etc. It was detail free, basically, except as the DM described the action. There were no critical hits, there were very tight minimum and maximum ACs. There was no distinction between "touching" and "causing damage" when you hit; it was really very loose aand vague.
Of course, the whole thing was a deliberate simplification. And since D&D's roots were in wargaming, with measures and calculations, you can safely assume the creators weren't afraid of complexity. (I run 3ed like this, despite the absurdly extensive combat rules.)
4ed, on the other hand, is basically a tactical board game. The rules--I mean, all the rules--are pretty much set up to facilitate putting figurines on a grid and having them combat in turn, taking equal amounts of time, doing roughly similarly powered things, and measuring everything in terms of causing damage.
Hell, you could easily put the character's actions into a computer program and let the players use hotkeys to select which power they want--and I'm sure they're working on it.
A lot of people seem to love the new rules, and it's not that I looked at the changes and couldn't see exactly why they changed them and why that was a good thing (except for the elimination of half the alignments). I get it. I really do get it.
It just leaves me cold.
Surprisingly, I've had to literally force my way through the Player's Handbook. It's all so ... boring. Part of the fun of D&D (for me, as a DM) was reading through all the possibilities. 3ed had this in spades: You could do just about anything, and it gave a lot of room to go in interesting and unique directions.
4ed, meanwhile, maps everything out. Everything is classified in terms of how often you can use it, and you add this power or that feat at each level according to a unified formula. It reminds me more of Diablo than anything.
I'm not being dismissive, either. Really, 4ed is an impressive piece of work, streamlining and cleaning up a very messy game. I give it three (of five) stars because it's so easy to read and has big type with every detail clerly spelled out. (I don't like the artwork but that's my own taste.) It will surely be easier for people to casually pick up and play. What I can't figure out is why they--or really, why I would want to play it.
I gather that a lot of issues with 3ed came about because of pickup and competition games. There are such things as "powergamers" and "rules lawyers" and they found ways to drag the game down. And, of course, not all classes in previous editions were equally powerful, if you crunched the numbers. (It never occurred to me that this was a problem, but then I do everything I can to keep my players from focusing on the numbers.)
So, I guess 4ed is good in that regard. Every character boils down to one of four combat roles, and all the features they can acquire are centered around those roles, one of which they'll likely specialize in. (It's probably not as boring as I just made it sound there.)
Now, I run a very DM-centered game, and 4ed diminishes that greatly. The races have a back story which implies a pre-made, common world; Clerics pick from a variety of bland, pre-made deities; The magic items are listed in the PHB and a player can acquire them easily based on level, which implies a world where magic becomes banal at some level.
This is great for a pick-up game, I'm sure. And of course, the DM who doesn't care for all this can do as he pleases. But as you're sitting there thinking, "Well, I can ignore the two gratuitous elf races, drop the half-demon and half-dragon races, bring back the full nine alignments, assume that stuff that I miss, like gnomes, druids and illusionists will be back with the PHB II, bring back real multiclassing and prestige classes..." But at some point, one wonders, "Why 4ed at all?"
Here's a fun fact: In AD&D (what's now referred to as 1ed), you rolled a d20 to attack and checked against a table to see if you hit. Then the monster rolled a d20, etc. Magic-users would use a spell, thieves would try to sneak attack, etc. But that was combat in the original. It was said to represent one minute of fighting, including all the feints, dodges, parries, tumbling, etc. It was detail free, basically, except as the DM described the action. There were no critical hits, there were very tight minimum and maximum ACs. There was no distinction between "touching" and "causing damage" when you hit; it was really very loose aand vague.
Of course, the whole thing was a deliberate simplification. And since D&D's roots were in wargaming, with measures and calculations, you can safely assume the creators weren't afraid of complexity. (I run 3ed like this, despite the absurdly extensive combat rules.)
4ed, on the other hand, is basically a tactical board game. The rules--I mean, all the rules--are pretty much set up to facilitate putting figurines on a grid and having them combat in turn, taking equal amounts of time, doing roughly similarly powered things, and measuring everything in terms of causing damage.
Hell, you could easily put the character's actions into a computer program and let the players use hotkeys to select which power they want--and I'm sure they're working on it.
A lot of people seem to love the new rules, and it's not that I looked at the changes and couldn't see exactly why they changed them and why that was a good thing (except for the elimination of half the alignments). I get it. I really do get it.
It just leaves me cold.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
And I suppose there's no Limbo any more, either.
No, this isn't a religious post. But, content warning: It is highly nerdy. Up there with the rare computer programming post I make. But moreso.
The new rules for Dungeons and Dragons came out. I played D&D during my second decade of life, stopping not really because it wasn't fun but because I was busy and the people I played with all went off to college. For a guy like me, fascinated with mythology, lover of gaming and gaming systems, and a prolific writer and cartographer, D&D was an excellent outlet.
Now, truth be told, the original D&D (or Advanced D&D, as it was called, to distinguish itself both from its roots and its cheaper, less time-intensive, and less parent frightening sibling) was not what you would call a great gaming system. Even calling it good is stretching it a bit.
It was, however, good enough. And it was the first to make a splash (and the only one to really make a splash outside of the gaming nerd circle). So it is that D&D is the gold standard by which role-playing games are compared.
A few years ago, Wizards of the Coast took over from the colossally poorly run TSR, and produced a new set of rules, the third edition. In a fit of nostalgic interest, I picked up those books and examined them for what they changed. (Also, I knew The Boy would take to it. Playing D&D was a prime motivator in getting him to learn to read.)
Now, about eight years after the third edition was released, Wizards has released a fourth edition, even more streamlined from the third.
This is not a bad thing, really. One of the things that makes D&D so impossibly nerdy is the stacks of rules and stats one has to manage. The new set of books is somewhat thinner, with much bigger, clearer print, and lots of boldface type. (Partly reflecting the aging of gamers, perhaps? The Golden Age of D&D was 30 years ago, eyes must certainly be failing.)
But here's what prompted this post: AD&D from the start had the concept of alignment. Alignment was the ethical and moral orientation of the beings in the universe. Good and evil, for example, was along one axis. Law and chaos were along the other. Also, you could be neutral along one or both axes. (If you're counting at home, that makes nine alignments.) These were not abstract concepts in the game: There were gods and forces akin to gravity that were associated with these alignments. Changing alignment was a cataclysmic event that could occur due to misbehavior, treachery or magic. It'd be like changing your blood type.
As I've read commentary over the years, "alignment" was always much maligned. Real people, of course, don't have alignments. They have points-of-view. They have goals in conflict with another.
But, what makes fantasy fun, is that there is evil, you can spot it pretty easily, and you don't have to feel guilty about kicking it's ass. Really: Humanize orcs, and Lord of the Rings becomes impossibly jingoistic.
In D&D the system was highly nuanced without being particularly burdensome, and resulted in a most unusual cosmology: The Outer Planes (like Heaven and Hell, essentially) consisted of sixteen different universes populated by beings of a particular alignment. Besides Heaven and Hell, for good and evil, there were such colorful places as Arcadia, representing Lawful Neutral, and populated by ant-like beings of supreme order, Mechanus (also Lawful Neutral), populated by geometrically-shaped creatures known as Modrons, who lived in an impossibly ordered society, or Limbo, the plane of Chaotic Neutral, so unstable as to be populated only by the insane.
These made good potential plot hooks. An entire fantasy realm based on these Outer Planes was created called "Planescape". One of the great computer RPGs of all time was based on it. That game showed that even in the highly artificial structure of a fantasy "afterlife", you could ask interesting philosophical questions. (After all, you couldn't really be killed. You were already dead! Where would you go? Detroit?)
Startlingly, the fourth edition halves the number of alignments, allowing only Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned (that's the half-alignment--it's not even Neutral), Evil and Chaotic Evil. This is sort of the gaming equivalent to the Catholic Church removing Limbo. In fact, it does perchance remove Limbo, since there is no Chaotic Neutral anymore.
Now, maybe it doesn't remove anything. After all, even in previous versions there were more Outer Planes than official D&D alignments (like Neutral Good, but with Lawful tendencies), so there's no saying for sure that those have been removed from the D&D cosmology, and perhaps the streamlining helps in the gameplay. (I'm not far enough along in the rules to tell.)
I can't believe I actually wrote this and am about to post it publicly. I don't even play D&D any more (except a small message board game at kingdomrpg.com). But it was a compelling idea. Check out the Wiki page, where they list the alignments of other fictional characters (some of which I would disagree with). It's up there with "Who would win in a fight against Superman and Batman?" for nerd discussions.
OK, now back to The Movies....
The new rules for Dungeons and Dragons came out. I played D&D during my second decade of life, stopping not really because it wasn't fun but because I was busy and the people I played with all went off to college. For a guy like me, fascinated with mythology, lover of gaming and gaming systems, and a prolific writer and cartographer, D&D was an excellent outlet.
Now, truth be told, the original D&D (or Advanced D&D, as it was called, to distinguish itself both from its roots and its cheaper, less time-intensive, and less parent frightening sibling) was not what you would call a great gaming system. Even calling it good is stretching it a bit.
It was, however, good enough. And it was the first to make a splash (and the only one to really make a splash outside of the gaming nerd circle). So it is that D&D is the gold standard by which role-playing games are compared.
A few years ago, Wizards of the Coast took over from the colossally poorly run TSR, and produced a new set of rules, the third edition. In a fit of nostalgic interest, I picked up those books and examined them for what they changed. (Also, I knew The Boy would take to it. Playing D&D was a prime motivator in getting him to learn to read.)
Now, about eight years after the third edition was released, Wizards has released a fourth edition, even more streamlined from the third.
This is not a bad thing, really. One of the things that makes D&D so impossibly nerdy is the stacks of rules and stats one has to manage. The new set of books is somewhat thinner, with much bigger, clearer print, and lots of boldface type. (Partly reflecting the aging of gamers, perhaps? The Golden Age of D&D was 30 years ago, eyes must certainly be failing.)
But here's what prompted this post: AD&D from the start had the concept of alignment. Alignment was the ethical and moral orientation of the beings in the universe. Good and evil, for example, was along one axis. Law and chaos were along the other. Also, you could be neutral along one or both axes. (If you're counting at home, that makes nine alignments.) These were not abstract concepts in the game: There were gods and forces akin to gravity that were associated with these alignments. Changing alignment was a cataclysmic event that could occur due to misbehavior, treachery or magic. It'd be like changing your blood type.
As I've read commentary over the years, "alignment" was always much maligned. Real people, of course, don't have alignments. They have points-of-view. They have goals in conflict with another.
But, what makes fantasy fun, is that there is evil, you can spot it pretty easily, and you don't have to feel guilty about kicking it's ass. Really: Humanize orcs, and Lord of the Rings becomes impossibly jingoistic.
In D&D the system was highly nuanced without being particularly burdensome, and resulted in a most unusual cosmology: The Outer Planes (like Heaven and Hell, essentially) consisted of sixteen different universes populated by beings of a particular alignment. Besides Heaven and Hell, for good and evil, there were such colorful places as Arcadia, representing Lawful Neutral, and populated by ant-like beings of supreme order, Mechanus (also Lawful Neutral), populated by geometrically-shaped creatures known as Modrons, who lived in an impossibly ordered society, or Limbo, the plane of Chaotic Neutral, so unstable as to be populated only by the insane.
These made good potential plot hooks. An entire fantasy realm based on these Outer Planes was created called "Planescape". One of the great computer RPGs of all time was based on it. That game showed that even in the highly artificial structure of a fantasy "afterlife", you could ask interesting philosophical questions. (After all, you couldn't really be killed. You were already dead! Where would you go? Detroit?)
Startlingly, the fourth edition halves the number of alignments, allowing only Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned (that's the half-alignment--it's not even Neutral), Evil and Chaotic Evil. This is sort of the gaming equivalent to the Catholic Church removing Limbo. In fact, it does perchance remove Limbo, since there is no Chaotic Neutral anymore.
Now, maybe it doesn't remove anything. After all, even in previous versions there were more Outer Planes than official D&D alignments (like Neutral Good, but with Lawful tendencies), so there's no saying for sure that those have been removed from the D&D cosmology, and perhaps the streamlining helps in the gameplay. (I'm not far enough along in the rules to tell.)
I can't believe I actually wrote this and am about to post it publicly. I don't even play D&D any more (except a small message board game at kingdomrpg.com). But it was a compelling idea. Check out the Wiki page, where they list the alignments of other fictional characters (some of which I would disagree with). It's up there with "Who would win in a fight against Superman and Batman?" for nerd discussions.
OK, now back to The Movies....
Friday, June 13, 2008
Wii Boy
The Boy is diabetic. The doctors insist, but have no tests to prove, that it's type I. We think he's type II, because he's had the symptoms all his life. (Nobody ever connected the symptoms to Diabetes until he nearly went into a coma but he had them as an infant, even.)
In the weeks prior to setting out the Wii Fit board, he was having trouble controlling his blood sugar. It was consistently hitting the 200s (when normal is in the 70-150 range).
A few days of doing the Wii Fit and it dropped down below 70. He's had to lower his insulin. The only problem I see is that it won't last. The games are fun--and he's highly competitive--but he'll lose interest once he's mastered them.
We have a pool coming, too--the Boy loves to swim--and with luck he'll stay engaged with a physical activity and be able to get off the insulin altogether.
In the weeks prior to setting out the Wii Fit board, he was having trouble controlling his blood sugar. It was consistently hitting the 200s (when normal is in the 70-150 range).
A few days of doing the Wii Fit and it dropped down below 70. He's had to lower his insulin. The only problem I see is that it won't last. The games are fun--and he's highly competitive--but he'll lose interest once he's mastered them.
We have a pool coming, too--the Boy loves to swim--and with luck he'll stay engaged with a physical activity and be able to get off the insulin altogether.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Wii Fits, or "Hey, you, fat, ugly American, eat some rice once in a while."
Back in the Atari 800 days--prior to the smash hit console 2600--there was a game called "Star Raiders". It was essentially a real-time version of the old "Star Trek" game invented back in the '60s, and it pitted you (in first person view) against some blocky "Zylon" warriors. What was interesting was that when people played it, they tended to lean left or lean right along with jiggling the joystick the way they wanted to move.
It was, in its own way, a uniquely immersive game.
I never owned an Atari 800; we went with Apple ][s. In fact, the last time I owned a console, it was a Channel F. I lost a lot of interest in owning gaming consoles when I found I could make my own games. Also, computer gaming, while it converges with console gaming in many respects, mostly appeals to me in the areas where the two are disparate. (Adventure and strategy games and quirky little classics like Nethack.)
Generally, when I pick up a console controller (I gifted The Boy with an N64 and PS2 over the years), I find it foreign. Lots of buttons. And for a lot of games, if you want to be good at them, you're mastering some arbitrary set of control sequences. But the Wii appealed to me instantly.
Now, I'm really what's known as a "hardcore gamer", even though I don't have much time these days to play. I've got over 300 games, easily, mostly acquired in last 15 years, but with a few from going back to the early '80s. Except for sports simulations, of which I own very few, you can find just about every major game made in the past decade on my shelves. I've even played some of them!
Despite all this, the Wii appealed to me instantly. Even though the games are trivial, it's a million times more fun to mimic all the goofy activities than just smashing buttons. (And there are some wonderfully goofy activities in, say, Wario Smooth Moves.) Also, it drives a lot of the hardcore gamers completely nuts to have this device--this non-gamer's device!--absolutely crush the XBox 360 and PS3. (That produces a special smile for someone who's had to listen to the "Are computer games dying?" nonsense for the past 20 years.)
So, we acquired a Wii Fit a few weeks ago and finally had the chance to put it out yesterday and give it a try.
Fun. Guaranteed to drive the poor hardcore console folk nuts. "It's a gimmick!" they cry. "People will buy it and forget about it!" "You should go outside to be active!" The last being particularly amusing coming from someone who probably hasn't seen the sun since it actually was heating up the earth untowardly.
However, this simple device plays on the same simple premise that the wiimote exploits: Mimicking the action of what you're doing is far more entertaining than button mashing. As such, simple games like "Hula Hoop", "Ski Jump", hell, "Running" becomes entertaining.
And unlike the wiimote, some pretty demanding requirements are made. As friendly as Wii Sports and other early games were, Wii Fit does not hesitate in calling you fat, clumsy and, probably, funny looking.
It's a little shocking to have a game call you "obese" or even "overweight". It's using the highly flawed BMI standard, of course, but I imagine more than a few folks walking (or not walking) around with a few more pounds than they'd like to admit were offended by the news. (If you're actually in shape, you're unlikely to care what the machine says.)
If you fail its balance test, it asks if you fall down a lot while walking.
It gives you a "Wii Fitness Age", probably much older than you actually are.
Now, if you're familiar with the Nintendo DS "Brain Age" product--or just think about it for a moment--you'll realize that the first time through (or first several times), you're learning how to make the board respond. This tends to give you a nice apparent improvement spike at the front.
I didn't really "get" the balance test, so I tested at 55 one day and 35 the next. I'm not even sure why I did so much better on day 2. I actually gained 3 pounds according to the scale (though some of that might have been clothes and time of day). Eventually, though, it all settles down and becomes a reasonably interesting and amusing metric.
You do have to put up with your Wii looking all fat and sweaty, though, especially if you are fat sweaty.
I've heard some parents worry about the Wii's effect on their kids' self-esteem. My kids (all in the "normal" range) just looked at the machine like it was crazy when it said something stupid. But they had fun playing the games--even The Boy, who has a hardcore gamer's disdain for the Wii in general.
When he got on the board, he pretty much killed in every event. Apparently his balance is near perfect. Who knew? He even worked up a sweat. He did maintain that he preferred to make a jackass out of himself in private. Yeah, one does look as though one is having fits during some of the activities. Heh. It's good to lighten up.
Anyway, to my mind, the board underscores how much there is still to be done with the whole concept of getting gamers up. For example, on a tightrope game, I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity to the old Crazy Climber game which, itself, was kind of a blast because of the way the controls mimicked the hand movements of the climber.
Tell me that wouldn't be awesome to act out.
Hell, a lot of classic games would be more fun. Say, Pacman! The running game in Wii Fit has you stick the wiimote in your pocket and not even use the board. Running around a maze, eating pellets, alternately running from and chasing ghosts: That'd have to be more fun. And it'd doubtless change the PacMan championships. The tightrope game also had a kind of Mario feel. I never played Mario, but I would if I could be Mario.
By the way, that's why I don't do many sports games or Tomb Raider. Watching a bunch of characters (even animated characters) run around makes me want to do the same. (We've always wanted to put a Lara Croft-style obstacle course in the back yard.) I'd rather play football, however badly, then watch it. (I also don't watch much TV sports for similar reasons.)
So, keep it coming, I say. Nintendo--at least partly responsible for turning the world into couch potatoes in the first place--could turn us all away from the couch potato lifestyle.
It was, in its own way, a uniquely immersive game.
I never owned an Atari 800; we went with Apple ][s. In fact, the last time I owned a console, it was a Channel F. I lost a lot of interest in owning gaming consoles when I found I could make my own games. Also, computer gaming, while it converges with console gaming in many respects, mostly appeals to me in the areas where the two are disparate. (Adventure and strategy games and quirky little classics like Nethack.)
Generally, when I pick up a console controller (I gifted The Boy with an N64 and PS2 over the years), I find it foreign. Lots of buttons. And for a lot of games, if you want to be good at them, you're mastering some arbitrary set of control sequences. But the Wii appealed to me instantly.
Now, I'm really what's known as a "hardcore gamer", even though I don't have much time these days to play. I've got over 300 games, easily, mostly acquired in last 15 years, but with a few from going back to the early '80s. Except for sports simulations, of which I own very few, you can find just about every major game made in the past decade on my shelves. I've even played some of them!
Despite all this, the Wii appealed to me instantly. Even though the games are trivial, it's a million times more fun to mimic all the goofy activities than just smashing buttons. (And there are some wonderfully goofy activities in, say, Wario Smooth Moves.) Also, it drives a lot of the hardcore gamers completely nuts to have this device--this non-gamer's device!--absolutely crush the XBox 360 and PS3. (That produces a special smile for someone who's had to listen to the "Are computer games dying?" nonsense for the past 20 years.)
So, we acquired a Wii Fit a few weeks ago and finally had the chance to put it out yesterday and give it a try.
Fun. Guaranteed to drive the poor hardcore console folk nuts. "It's a gimmick!" they cry. "People will buy it and forget about it!" "You should go outside to be active!" The last being particularly amusing coming from someone who probably hasn't seen the sun since it actually was heating up the earth untowardly.
However, this simple device plays on the same simple premise that the wiimote exploits: Mimicking the action of what you're doing is far more entertaining than button mashing. As such, simple games like "Hula Hoop", "Ski Jump", hell, "Running" becomes entertaining.
And unlike the wiimote, some pretty demanding requirements are made. As friendly as Wii Sports and other early games were, Wii Fit does not hesitate in calling you fat, clumsy and, probably, funny looking.
It's a little shocking to have a game call you "obese" or even "overweight". It's using the highly flawed BMI standard, of course, but I imagine more than a few folks walking (or not walking) around with a few more pounds than they'd like to admit were offended by the news. (If you're actually in shape, you're unlikely to care what the machine says.)
If you fail its balance test, it asks if you fall down a lot while walking.
It gives you a "Wii Fitness Age", probably much older than you actually are.
Now, if you're familiar with the Nintendo DS "Brain Age" product--or just think about it for a moment--you'll realize that the first time through (or first several times), you're learning how to make the board respond. This tends to give you a nice apparent improvement spike at the front.
I didn't really "get" the balance test, so I tested at 55 one day and 35 the next. I'm not even sure why I did so much better on day 2. I actually gained 3 pounds according to the scale (though some of that might have been clothes and time of day). Eventually, though, it all settles down and becomes a reasonably interesting and amusing metric.
You do have to put up with your Wii looking all fat and sweaty, though, especially if you are fat sweaty.
I've heard some parents worry about the Wii's effect on their kids' self-esteem. My kids (all in the "normal" range) just looked at the machine like it was crazy when it said something stupid. But they had fun playing the games--even The Boy, who has a hardcore gamer's disdain for the Wii in general.
When he got on the board, he pretty much killed in every event. Apparently his balance is near perfect. Who knew? He even worked up a sweat. He did maintain that he preferred to make a jackass out of himself in private. Yeah, one does look as though one is having fits during some of the activities. Heh. It's good to lighten up.
Anyway, to my mind, the board underscores how much there is still to be done with the whole concept of getting gamers up. For example, on a tightrope game, I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity to the old Crazy Climber game which, itself, was kind of a blast because of the way the controls mimicked the hand movements of the climber.
Tell me that wouldn't be awesome to act out.
Hell, a lot of classic games would be more fun. Say, Pacman! The running game in Wii Fit has you stick the wiimote in your pocket and not even use the board. Running around a maze, eating pellets, alternately running from and chasing ghosts: That'd have to be more fun. And it'd doubtless change the PacMan championships. The tightrope game also had a kind of Mario feel. I never played Mario, but I would if I could be Mario.
By the way, that's why I don't do many sports games or Tomb Raider. Watching a bunch of characters (even animated characters) run around makes me want to do the same. (We've always wanted to put a Lara Croft-style obstacle course in the back yard.) I'd rather play football, however badly, then watch it. (I also don't watch much TV sports for similar reasons.)
So, keep it coming, I say. Nintendo--at least partly responsible for turning the world into couch potatoes in the first place--could turn us all away from the couch potato lifestyle.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
In Which I Reveal My (and Others'!) Qualifications For Presidents
The Flower, who likes things to be grand, chose to go bowling for her birthday (because we had last year, and she wanted to double-up and go bowling and do miniature golf this year but the mild rain thwarted her plans to tilt at windmills).
The Flower just turned seven. But she, The Boy and I all beat Barack Obama's 37 score before the 7th frame (in which he quit).
Full disclosure: We had the gutter bumpers up.
It was actually our purchase of a Wii last year that inspired The Flower to go bowling in the first place. I was rather astonished that, right off the bat, I rolled a turkey. I'd never done that before in my life, and I even followed it up with a spare or two, but then my game went to hell and I started bouncing off the bumpers.
This year I opened with just one strike, and then went to hell.
The thing is, bowling is really easy. Not to excel at, of course. It's an endurance test and, at least in my case, a sort of meditative challenge as (for me) the best way to bowl is just to walk up and roll the damn ball. If I think, or plan, or do anything else, bad things happen.
Even so, a reasonably fit person should be able to bowl around 100, even if they've never seen a bowling ball before. It has the virtue of being instantly grasp-able.
So, 37 is a pretty bad score, but I think what struck me the most was that he quit in the 7th frame. I've heard that offered as a defense, as if he were going to strike out the rest of the game and finish with 120.
But he didn't finish, of course, and why not?
My theory is that, like other candidates, he has no humility. He's expected to be a perfect person--an idea that he encourages--with perfect solutions to all the world's problems. Therefore, he couldn't bear to show his mortality with something as prosaic as bowling.
I find this troubling.
Obama, in particular, has yet to show any genuine self-deprecation. Or any self-deprecation, come to think of it, that I've seen.
I wondered, as I watched The Flower struggle with the bowling ball--she can't swing even a lightest ball with just one arm--how I would react if she decided she wasn't having any fun and wanted to quit.
I'd probably let her, but I'd be disappointed.
The Flower just turned seven. But she, The Boy and I all beat Barack Obama's 37 score before the 7th frame (in which he quit).
Full disclosure: We had the gutter bumpers up.
It was actually our purchase of a Wii last year that inspired The Flower to go bowling in the first place. I was rather astonished that, right off the bat, I rolled a turkey. I'd never done that before in my life, and I even followed it up with a spare or two, but then my game went to hell and I started bouncing off the bumpers.
This year I opened with just one strike, and then went to hell.
The thing is, bowling is really easy. Not to excel at, of course. It's an endurance test and, at least in my case, a sort of meditative challenge as (for me) the best way to bowl is just to walk up and roll the damn ball. If I think, or plan, or do anything else, bad things happen.
Even so, a reasonably fit person should be able to bowl around 100, even if they've never seen a bowling ball before. It has the virtue of being instantly grasp-able.
So, 37 is a pretty bad score, but I think what struck me the most was that he quit in the 7th frame. I've heard that offered as a defense, as if he were going to strike out the rest of the game and finish with 120.
But he didn't finish, of course, and why not?
My theory is that, like other candidates, he has no humility. He's expected to be a perfect person--an idea that he encourages--with perfect solutions to all the world's problems. Therefore, he couldn't bear to show his mortality with something as prosaic as bowling.
I find this troubling.
Obama, in particular, has yet to show any genuine self-deprecation. Or any self-deprecation, come to think of it, that I've seen.
I wondered, as I watched The Flower struggle with the bowling ball--she can't swing even a lightest ball with just one arm--how I would react if she decided she wasn't having any fun and wanted to quit.
I'd probably let her, but I'd be disappointed.
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