A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I last week accepted a part-time position at Northeastern University, teaching a lab section attached to Games & Society, an intro-to-game-studies class taught by Brian Sullivan. I'm so far signed on just to handle the fall semester, but if I'm not terrible at it and I don't hate it, I'll likely do more afterwards.

Teaching this lab involves guiding groups of students through the play of a by-the-syllabus game (which may be a tabletop game or a videogame), and then gathering as a class to discuss it. As with many other games-studies classes in universities, it's only a year or two old, so its structure and content are rather malleable; while I'll have the materials from past semesters, others in the program have made it clear that I can help reshape it this fall, should I wish.

While I fully expect this to represent a significant time investment -- I've also agreed to help grade papers from Brian's class -- the pay doesn't really match, so I've no plans to change my position or workload at Appleseed. I chose to leap at this opportunity because even though doing a good job writing software makes me feel awesome (and puts money in the bank), my real passion is with games, and the study thereof. I have no reservations accepting an adjunct's stipend in order to finally, finally become a paid member of the game-scholar community, even just an entry-level one. I had thought last year that when this moment arrived, it would be via my selling an article or essay to some publication. I have no complaints about the surprising form it ended up taking.

This is also me backing down from my brief fling with iOS game development from a couple of months ago. While that's a topic I remain interested in, there's just no way I can pursue that, Appleseed, and now teaching without doing a bad job at probably all of them. I had to put one of them away, and sadly, the iOS project was the obvious choice: it offers no guaranteed income, and represents a much weaker expression of my passion to work in game studies than the NEU opportunity does.

I feel really happy about this, and hope that it will give me the opportunity, in time, to grant more attention to my own game-studies pursuits. I'd love to return to making mature and intelligent videos about games, for one thing. I have pipe dreams of new video series, but have lacked the backing, both resource-wise and spiritually. This opportunity might help change that, down the road. We'll see.

Hello friends,

I am pleased to announce that the 16th annual Interactive Fiction competition is now underway, and that I have an entry in it: a short work of horror fiction called The Warbler's Nest.

Competition judging is open to all, so if you have an interest in (or a curiosity about) interactive text games, I'd very much appreciate it if you played and rated this years' entrants by the mid-November deadline. Please visit http://ifcomp.org/ to play the games and learn how to judge them. (You don't have to play all the games to rate them, but the rules do hold you to rating at least five games, if you rate any at all.)

This year looks like a pretty solid comp, actually, so if you haven't judged the comp before -- or haven't in several years -- now's probably a good time to get into it.

To give myself reason to pick up this sty a little, am having an off-the-cuff video game exhibition thing at my house starting at 2PM. (Yes, less than two hours from my typing this.) Plan on pawing through recent finds on my Xbox, incl. divers strange Indie titles, and showing them to Zarf while saying "Yeah you should have a look at this".

Will be done by supper. Send phone-ping if you wish to join us!

Work is work. There's stuff worth talking about but nothing I'd want to blog about; so goes working for oneself. The overall status of Appleseed and my relationship with it remains stable.

I want to finish the next Gameshelf before PAX, which affords me another five weeks. I've put a lot of work into it (as have many friends), but my motivation level now is not nearly as strong as it was a couple of months ago. This is in part because of the resurgence my interest in -- wait for it -- gaming, or anyway gaming of a particular nature, and the novel creative paths this activity has been urging me down.

I found my interest in multiplayer online digital games re-ignited last month. This started with my rediscovery of TF2 on Xbox, built itself up with my ensuing seeking out and palling around with certain online communities of mature gamers, and most recently culminated with the surprise re-launch of Planbeast.

I'm not sure what pushed me to actually do it, but at the start of the month I made a post about Planbeast to Geezer Gamers, a web-based community of grown-up Xbox Live fans I'd been hanging around long enough so that I could make a project-pimping post without feeling like a spammer. The next thing I knew, the Planbeast website actually grew a bunch of events from people other than myself. The interest has died down somewhat from its initial spike, but it remains far higher than it was at any earlier point.

Tending to this effectively sopped up all of my attention for an entire week, and made my thoughts wander even further afield. And: I loved every minute of it. I am starting to cultivate a new obsession. Planbeast, after all, is the child of a greater interest: researching the state of multiplayer video games, isolating its faults, and investigating the ways it could be improved. I have a lot of loose notes about this which I'm presently choosing to spare you. You will be informed when I have patted them together into some more concrete shape.

To give you a taste, here are four tweets I made on the topic:

Shooters are the superhero comics of the multiplayer videogame world. The medium's potential is vast, but nobody wants to leave the house.

Spider-Man (the character) and TF2 are best-case scenarios of their respective sub-genres, building on decades of art. I am glad they exist.

But the continued super-ultra focus on gun-fetish games or underwear-crimefighter stories rolls on anyway, as if there's no other path.

Part of what I wanna do with Planbeast is help strengthen the signal of all the other MP games that are unheard in the chattering gunfire.

My guiding light, here, is a piece of self-realization about my relationship with games, come to me a good decade after I got back into the tabletop gameplay hobby: I am far more interested in media that bring people together through play, rather than solitaire play experiences. This is true in both face-to-face games, and the much (much) newer world of online games. As for the latter, for all its good press, its exploration beyond the familiar is so goddamn timid it drives me up a wall. I want to do something about it.

One related whim of particular interest is an untitled web game project, based on a design I scribbled together last fall while I was thinking about Facebook games. It's a web-based multiplayer game of a sort that I've never seen before, and might not actually work, but deem Absolutely Worth Creating just the same. I really want to block out a month or so of free time and make it happen.

( And now, the whinging. )

Howdy y'all. I've been quiet on LJ, even though I've been melting my keyboard under the fury of my frantic typing into Twitter, so feel free to read my recent stuff there. I've been far too deep into the end-of-year gravity well action playset to organize my thoughts into more than 140 characters at a time. (Or, sometimes, more than 280.) I have no doubt that I shall return presently.

However, ahkond recently expressed surprise at my tweeted assertion that I found the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2 more fun to play than the PC version, and I wanted to write up a deeper examination of my reasons in a longer format. So, yes, the rest of this post is video-game neepery, and you will probably want to skip it unless you're into that sort of thing.

Earlier this month, Valve hosted a special TF2 free-play weekend, and I jumped right in, blessing my good fortune that it happened right after I had set up the used PC I'd recently bought from a friend. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that, for one reason or another, the game didn't work very well on my machine. Simply put, my framerate was either rather bad or completely unacceptable, depending upon how many other players were in my immediate vicinity.

Several friends, hearing my dismay over Steam-chat, suggested various fixes: What kind of video card had I installed? Was I running all the latest drivers? Did I google to see if my particular setup need some more patches somewhere? Perhaps I could try playing with some of the game's graphics-quality sliders?

After spending a couple of hours in frantic configuration-wanking abandon, I paused to catch my breath, lift my head, and look down the road. What looked back at me were the dully glimmering eyes of a hundred yaks, all lined up, waiting to be shaved.

Now, I am totally down with people who can get into the sub-hobby / metagame of keeping their PCs up to date with the latest bits n pieces of hardware, drivers, and operating system patches necessary to keep them aloft for another month or two. If that works out for you, then by all means, please pursue it with all due relish.

But, look: A key reason that I enjoy playing video games on consoles (and not PCs) is the same as a key reason I do all my work exclusively on Macs (and not PCs): I don't want to think about any of that stuff. The thought of having to think about any kind of low-level hardware configuration, and the mid-level firmware and software diddling that necessarily comes with it, makes me shudder with dread. I can just feel all the tufts of matted yak-hair scratching against my skin. Ugh.

TF2 is a great game, and it is a shame that I can't currently enjoy its more recent features, since ol' Valve isn't hurrying to add them to the Xbox version. But I am so not into the idea of paying dollar-sign question-mark question-mark question-mark, and burning up gord knows how many hours from my life, just to bring one of my secondary computers the ability to play a game which, er, I already own a perfectly good copy of for my game console. So, yeah. No.

(Also, it happens that I learned to play modern FPSes on the two-stick, two-trigger console controller, and so am quite comfortable with their use, to the perpetual befuddlement of my WASD + mouse-using friends. So be it!)

Wii Fit Plus is a fantastic piece of software, a $20 upgrade to the original that fixes its most annoying flaw. In the original Wii Fit, exercises lack flow. You choose one from a menu, work at it for a minute or two, then have to click through screenfuls of text and a high score list before getting dumped back to the menu where you must choose another exercise. (Sometimes it will suggest a follow-up exercise based on the one you just did, but infuriatingly, leaves it to you to paw through the menus to find it.)

You can still use Wii Fit Plus that way, but you can also instead use it to build up a custom regimen either from individual exercises or thematically linked blocks of three. You can also just say "Gimme N minutes of exercise" and the Wii will oblige you. I find that after working through a Wii-scripted regimen, I actually enjoy spending a few more minutes poking around the full menu in the old style, just to wind down. And then I'm done for the day.

I've been hitting the balance board every other day for a weeks and I feel super duper, working muscles that I ordinarily barely use. Even though some of the yoga poses cause my belly to become twisted or pinched in ways so unfamiliar that my guts misconstrue the context, and then I have to actively resist the urge to retch. Downward-facing BLARRGGHHFFF!

Anyway, if you own Wii Fit and are disappointed with its not-quite-thereness in the way that I was, please go pick up this update. You will like it.

I just got to play in a really-real nationwide game show and blew it within - literally - the first few seconds of my appearance. Details here.

Despite my best all-smiles efforts I can't help but feel upset about this, being driven from "heh I'm doing good at this tonight" to "HOLY SHIT I'M PLAYING FOR REALS" to complete choking flameout defeat, within the span of a minute. I hear the ghost of the laughter of every 7th-grade gym-class tormenter ringing in my ears.

This will be erased by the time I wake up next, so hooray for it being so close to bedtime now. But: ugh.

More hooray to derspatchel for also getting called up to the stage and making a much more impressive show of it!

Update: Fuck you, "contrarycoho". Now is so not the time.

Update:

Some bonus silliness for you.

Or rather, go ahead, but I'll just tell you the same thing I tell everyone else, when they say "Hey, you should make Volity for $SOME_NEW_THING" (most recently, this has been Google Wave). "No," says I, "you should make it. It's an open protocol. Knock yourself out."

My attitude towards Volity today is something like borderline hostility. I consider it an aspect of what William Gibson has called "the great clomping foot of nerdism", the kind that is always more interested in taking things apart and exhaustively cataloguing the components than it is in creating wonderful new stuff. Obsessed with categorization and taxonomies, of finding the common root to all things, and then trying to capture that in code, or at least in sprawling wikis. And then, when it's "done", wondering why nobody except for one's fellow robed adepts show any interest at all in it.

It's the video-game equivalent of spending more time writing and trimming an enormous, detailed "world bible" than in creating any stories set in that world. Or of tabletop-game "systems" like Icehouse or Piecepack, which despite their aspirations never sold to anyone other than hardcore game geeks (hi).

If you want to make a video game, go make it. The tools, community and resources to help you do so are all there for you. And yet, if you're a certain kind of geek, the temptation will exist to instead treat your game idea as the top level of a stack: the real prize, you're sure, lay in generalizing all the lower levels, paring and refactoring them into some sort of Ur-Game technology that will solve gaming, somehow, and lead inevitably to lifelong fortune and glory.

My advice is: don't go there, because I know you have great ideas and you're a ninja and everything, but that is folly. Please just make your game instead. I guarantee that you'll be happier with it, and you'll make more fans that way, too. If you're new to making games, the fans might not come, but you'll be so thrilled at what you made - even though it sucks - that you'll do it again, and again, and it will keep getting better. And eventually you'll really be onto something.

---

I started writing this post with the intent that it'd accompany a release of Webgamut source code to Volity's Sourceforge account. I had a burst of energy to do so earlier today, but it didn't take long to peter out. I am loath to put context-free, commented-but-otherwise-undocumented code out there, because that sounds worse that nothing. I'd instead want to spend a day or so writing some nice farewell documentation for it, first. And I just can't muster the energy right now to re-learn how to get this 18-month-old glop of Perl, Mason and Javascript to run on my laptop.

What do you think? Would it be useful to you or anyone you know were I to just paste a couple of my hard disk's directories into Sourceforge and just put a "Here, you figure it out" README next to them? I don't know, I'm asking. Would the fact that the target for this maneuver would intentionally be obsessed game geeks make it OK?

---

This post also briefly had a concluding thought along the lines of "I wish someone told me all this six years ago, alas," but that's just dumb, and I apologize for the five minutes of wrong-idea-giving it gave.

I don't regret my work on Volity, nor the work that others have put in, and certainly not any interest that others still have in the project. I think that's great, and I wouldn't even be asking about Sourceforge if y'all didn't exist. I just wanted to put my own current attitude about Volity into words. I'm proud of what we did manage to build, and I am wiser - the real kind, not the cynical kind - for the experience.

Notes on a talk I led on game criticism, and a list of links I dropped in the middle of other peoples' talks: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/08/notes-from-my-gameloop-talk-an.html