Polymath

Hi there!

I was hoping to upgrade my blog to Movable Type 4.1, and potentially allowing comments to the site once again, but my web host only has a perl installation of 5.0 and MT 4.1 requires 5.6. So I guess I'll have to postpone the site facelift a little longer. I know things are pretty dull on the site right now, I haven't posted any art for ages, all I do is generate lists of books I've read and even those have become short and brief.

I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy and I have 119 stars. I'm still trying to get through Luigi's Purple Coins, which is just way too difficult.

Where's the Manifesto?

Two years ago I wrote some 5000 words discussing rules for creating computer games [An Economy of Rules]. I left off with some statements about the volatile nature of computer games, and a promise to continue the series with something called The New Forms Manifesto.

Clearly I haven't written it yet.

Looking at White Chamber

I first played Crimson Room around February, 2004, hearing about it through Nick's GrandTextAuto post. Viridian Room came out in June of 2004, and Blue Chamber later in 2004.

It has been over a year since we have seen a new locked room puzzle from Takagism/FASCO-CS. Interestingly, the news on the site, dated August 4, 2004, claims the next room is going to be "Pink Prison", followed by "Tangerine Room".

(update 26 Jan)

weblog usability

I thought I would do a self-evaluation of my blog, as per Jakob Nielsen's Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, or as I like to call it: "blusability" (pron. blue-za-bill-it-ee)

1. Author biography: Hm, nope, don't have one. This is pretty much a personal blog, though I do use it for self-promotion. I probably should provide some kind of bio.

2. Author photo: Don't have one of those either. My bad.

influence

I recently came across the Internet Book List, a community driven book database which aspires to be as comprehensive for books as IMDB is for movies.

Picking a book at random, I did not find Dickey's Deliverance in the database. I was hoping for a useful research tool for my 20th Century handicapping project, but it is not quite there yet.

proper audience

Indulge me as I muse about the value of criticism and its conflict with popular culture.

In the news: Hobbiest programmers -- known as "modders" -- have discovered hidden sex scenes in the popular game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and have published code which will allow players to access the mature content. Harry Potter fans are anxiously awaiting the Friday release of the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is a computer game; Harry Potter is a popular book series. They both have their champions, and their critics.

The GTA champions are those who defend the game's hyper violence and mature themes. When you buy GTA, they claim, you know what kind of game you are buying. The critics claim that the game in unsuitable for children and that, in the extreme, should have never been made in the first place.

exposition

I recently read the first two books in the Dune series, Dune (1965) and Dune Messiah (1969). An interesting feature of the Dune story is that the books only cover key events in the adventures of Paul Muad'dib -- in the first book: Paul's adolescent exposure to Dune, the attack by the Harkonnens, Paul's transformation into the Kwisatz Haderach, the spectacular defeat of the Emperor. Then the story jumps forward twelve years, years which are presumably full of exciting action sequences that we never get to see, because they only serve as exposition to get to the next interesting part of the story.

There is also a rich backstory for the characters and the story universe. Through the story we get hints at how Paul was trained as a child, of the actions of the Bene Gesserits, of a long distant galactic colonization. This backstory is both detailed and vague, providing room for new elements to be pulled into the story as needed. For example, the Bene Tleilax (or Tleilaxu) have little importance in the first novel (which was originally a serial), but become central to the plot of the second novel (also originally a serial).

Game Studies

This afternoon my attention was caught by an exchange between Julian Raul Kücklich [particle stream] and Markku Eskelinen. The verbal sniping is amusing, though it pales in comparison to a netnews-era flamewar. What I find interesting about this discussion -- and I have made oblique comments about this on grandtextauto -- is that most of the posturing has an implicit assumption: that game studies has a coherent object and is worth pursuit.

Now certainly there are games, and there are people who study games, and so there is something called game studies. The more polemical of the game studies crew have even coined a Latin-esqe term for the field: Ludology. In the sortie above, Eskelinen argues for a game studies/ludology concerned with rules, goals, and more-than-passive player effort, a hard science positioning which may [or may not] be opposed to the soft science approach of narrative and social science. And this is where the debate perpetually lingers: should we discuss games the soft way (story) or the hard way (rules)?

And I am perpetually wondering why we should talk about games at all.

sitting on the floor at SIGGRAPH

So I'm sitting on the floor near the Emerging Technologies booth at SIGGRAPH, wirelessly connected to the web. Getting wireless working takes a little perseverance, there are plenty of hotspots set up but something, perhaps sunspots or people with Intel laptops or cars with loud stereos, tend to send network connections askew. The most amazing thing about wireless tehcnology is that people are willing to put up with such low reliability with these things -- rather than admit that wired connections are simply a better way to live.

Algorithm for constructing locked room puzzles

Just thinking out loud here, with no real context.

The player is confronted by a locked door. How does he open it?

A common construction for this puzzle is the paper-under-the-door skeleton key setup: the key is in the opposite side of the lock, and can be pushed out of the lock with a small pointed object, to land on a sheet of paper which can then be pulled back under the door. This is a slightly sophisticated puzzle, because it requires the interaction of three objects: the door, the small pointed object, and the flat object. (The key is not part of the interaction, it is the reward for solving the puzzle.)

Step 1: operate the flat object on the door
Step 2: operate the pointed object on the door
Step 3 (obvious): retrieve the flat object

An Economy of Rules (part 6)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Games and form. What is the form of a computer game? Should the form be restricted by certain requirements, so that one form of computer games requires a "PC" system with a certain level of video and audio support, and a certain operating system? That would make things easy in many ways, so that "computer game" would be shorthand for a PC-based game with certain requirements. Normally the PC part is referred to as a platform, so you have the PC platform, the Mac platform, the Gameboy platform, and many others.

Some computer games exist on multiple platforms. Are they the same games? Sometimes. Are they the same form? No, I think they are different forms. The title, or brand, of a game may be the same, but the PC version of Diablo is different from the Playstation version of Diablo.

Fear and Loathing at the UCLA Hammer Museum

i.

April 22-23 I attended Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling, a UC Digital Cultures Graduate Conference at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Everyone was so nice. Too nice. Too damn nice.

The University of California system has a solid graduate program and provides excellent resources for cross-campus events. By excellent resources I mean that they are exceedingly generous in picking up the tab when the conference heads en masse to the local pub.

The organizers were likewise generous with their time, in that they spread out 19 presentations, two keynotes, and one roundtable over two days. (Two days on chairs I wouldn't put in even the most despised Sim household. This chair provides: comfort 0.) Two days which could have accommodated another dozen presentations, the addition of which would perhaps have offered some high points to an otherwise middling assembly.

There are two ways to design a conference: leave everyone yearning for more, so that they furiously exchange business cards before catching a taxi to the airport, or give everyone a solid 20-30 minutes so they can practice their public speaking skills. If you choose the latter design, a good way to spice things up is to run concurrent sessions, so that attendees are forced to choose between "Diegetics and the Other: Uncovering Narrative in Hypermedia" and "Narrative and the Other: Dude, where's my diegetic?" But that didn't happen here. As I said, everything was nice.

An Economy of Rules (part 5)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

some considerations

The rules of surface are motivated by considerations on the lower levels. Craft puts pressure on surface through the mastery of tools; a master of craft will be seen as someone who uses the "correct" tools, and so their surface will be defined by the tools of craft. Structure determines the relative importance of certain relationships, so it determines which of the elements would best be served in the surface presentation. Idiom affects surface through its influences on structure and craft, and also, as I discussed with the anime RPG, idiom often pulls in certain rules of surface by referring to idioms which are specific to certain elements.

An Economy of Rules (part 4)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Rules of idiom

The rules of idiom are rules about the genre of a game. A game falls into a genre when it satisfies the idiomatic characteristics of that genre.

A Real Time Strategy (RTS) game might be described idiomatically in this way:

Looking at "Grow"

Michael posted a link to the Grow Flash game. [grandtextauto.org: Grow]

It is an interesting game that essentially boils down to a logic puzzle. You have twelve elements that need to be selected in the correct order, though there are certain incorrect subsequences that produce interesting results.

Detailed spoilers inside.

RTS musings

I've been thinking about RTS games recently, in part as the idiom of choice for my next rules essay. Although I haven't played any of the latest generation of RTS games (the ones which require a monster system with a 3D video card, i.e. the ones that won't run on my 4 year old laptop) I get the sense that they're still the same beast, half resource management, half balance between offensive and defensive strategy.

One of the shortcomings of the genre is the shallowness of the [in-game] production infrastructure. The construction of units is simply a matter of consuming resources. Some games incorporate some kind of maintenance cost, some small amount of resource consumption per time unit or an overall limit on the number of active units. But changes to the battlefield don't really have any effect on active units -- if, in Starcraft, the enemy destroys my barracks, I don't lose any active marines, I only lose the ability to produce more marines.

Ultra Rare Holo Foils

I recently bought a full set of Neopets cards on eBay for $85. It's a collectable card game, like Magic: The Gathering, only the monsters in Neopets are cute and colorful fantasy animals.

A full set of Neopets cards consists of 234 cards, of which 30 are ultra rare holo foil cards, 66 rares, 60 uncommons, and 78 commons. The difference between the rarities comes from the fact that you get a different number of each type in a package of cards, so that you get around 1 rare card for every 2 uncommon cards, and 2 uncommon cards for every 4-5 common cards. Cards come in booster packs, each of which contains 8 cards, and the boosters have a suggested retail price of $3.49.

(updated)

An Economy of Rules (part 3)

Part 1
Part 2

Rules of structure

Proposed structure rule: Nonlinear plots are better.

In the old Scott Adams Adventure game, there was a dragon sleeping in the woods. If you wanted to get rid of the dragon, one possible solution was to take the wine bladder and fill it with swamp gas, then use the bladder as a bomb to blow up the dragon.

It turns out that you don't want to do this, because the resulting explosion will also destroy the dragon eggs, a treasure you want to collect. But the game lets you do it anyway, with the result that you can't win the game.

An Economy of Rules (part 2)

Part 1

I'd like to take a look at some specific rules and see where I end up.

Rules of surface

A proposed surface rule: Games should always have screenshots on the box.

At first glance, this appears to be a reasonable rule. In order to know if I want to play a game, I should be able to see what it looks like. Of course it would always be better if I could watch the game in motion, or perhaps play a demo of the game, but the screenshot is an adequate substitute. The screenshot can also serve to verify that the game is in fact the game you are looking for, "Yes, I saw a demo of this game and here it is." The screenshot of a sequel game can help you decide that the game looks better (or worse) than the previous game.

Collusion Detection

There are many reasons to go to a symposium: to hear new ideas, to share your ideas with others, to learn about a topic of interest, to see the faces of people you have only corresponded with. I go to symposiums to argue.

It usually takes half a day or more for me to work up a good head of steam, however, and so I didn't reach that point this past Friday while attending the Story Engines symposium at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In retrospect, if I had boiled over, it would have been to accuse the gathering of a certain amount of complicity. This wasn't a symposium to draw out the conflicts which surround games as cultural objects, it was pulse check conference to make sure everyone was talking about the same thing, and using the correct terms.

Collision Detection

Notes on Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California.

"[This exhibition] has been put together neither in a spirit of adoration nor vilification, the two most common forms for taking games seriously."

(Revised: February 7, 2004 8:30 PM)

An Economy of Rules (part 1)

My last entry about design rules was neither deep nor thorough, but judging by the comments it seems to have found some resonance.

There are rules, and there are rules, and there are laws, and principles, and constraints, and axioms, and maxims, and on and on. Why, we have more words for rules than an Eskimo has words for snow. :) What I'm interested in is not so much what the rules are or how they can be classified (I don't believe there can ever be a satisfactory classification scheme), but where rules operate and how they come to be.

I'm interested in not a taxonomy of rules, but an economy of rules.

Another Half-Baked Design Principle

It started with a comment from "Brian" on Grand Text Auto. When dealing with players who intentionally misbehave -- swearing, flirting excessively, attempting to torture -- while interacting with virtual characters, Brian stated this design maxim: "The user is always right."

Next, Walter on Ludonauts mentioned The God Concept, a design principle advocated by Scott Miller at Game Matters. The God Concept (a rather inappropriate name) is for people who dislike the effects of chance and luck.

I would like to propose my own design principle. I'll call it Brandon's Half-Baked Law of Game Design Principles: "People who make up game design principles secretly hate games."

The Anti-Modalist Manifesto (ca. 1998)

Modalists: perpetrators of modal [inter]activity. In Modalist design, the user is a black box for input and output. Modalists train their users to obediently shift their attention towards a preselected target. Modalists encourage serial actions and schizophrenic behavior.

Anti-Modalists: corrupt and pervert the constructions of Modalist design. Anti-Modalists are concerned with the dismantling of Modalist classifications: art versus science, actual or virtual, mind and body, man against machine, trees versus rhizomes. Anti-Modalists do things right the wrong way (or wrong the right way). We embrasse the inappropriate.

The Wet Paint Manifesto

I've been sorting through some files (real, paper files) and I came across something that I wrote some time around 1996-1997. This was before I wrote the Anti-Modal Manifesto (the location of which is currently unknown).

Wet Paint

i.

A sign on a pole reads: "Wet Paint" and it is not true. The paint has dried.

Driving down the freeway, orange signs declare: "Under Construction" but no work is being performed. The act of construction is not at all visible.

Do these signs actually mean their opposites? Under Construction means: there is no construction. Wet Paint means: the paint is dry. Well, there is that small window of time when the signs are correct. But why do the signs remain?

Putting up signs and taking them down again when they have served their purpose is a human activity, it requires a human being present to do the thing. When we see a Wet Paint sign, we understand that it might be old, it may have expired. But we also know (infer) that someone was there to put up the sign.

After having seen the same Wet Paint sign on a pole for three days, one might be inclined to take it down. If not, it might stay there for weeks, becoming dust-blown and wind-ragged, falling to the ground and drifting to the gutter, its sans-serif letters fading and unreadable until some final catastrophic event, a seasonal rainstorm or a street sweeper, removes the final traces.