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

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.

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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?

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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.

The drive back from Maine on Monday was uneventful, but for a nice discovery. I listened via iPod to the entirety of Hard 'N Phirm's Horses and Grasses, which I bought last year after falling in love with the video for their "Pi" song, but didn't really give a full listen to. I mean, it's a novelty album, and I haven't been in the mood to sit and listen to 40.3 minutes of yuk-yuk since the days when getting up early on Sunday for the Dr. Demento show was the high point of my week. But I'll make an exception for drive-time entertainment.

The album is a mix of nerdy-cool catchiness ("Pi", "The Carbon Cycle"), style-parodies of various non-nerdy American music genres (including "Rodeohead", a grand-ole-opryized medley of Radiohead lyrics), and at least three songs that spend 95 percent of their time setting up for the last-two-seconds punchline. (One song is entirely in Spanish and I'm too lazy to Google a translation but I bet it falls into this category.) The latter group's a little weak but the whole is actually a gem of a novelty album and I'm glad I finally listened to the whole thing.

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Tuesday evening I found myself playing board games with pheromone and company. I've actually been running into Ms. P somewhat often lately, but I have not seen much of (what I think of as) the "Elboids" social circle since, eh, around the time I moved into my current apt in 2003, really. It was nice to see some familiar faces and catch up, even a little.

I won a game of Target, taught Metro and the Icehouse game Pikemen to people, and got re-aquianted with Cities & Knights of Catan. I did pretty well at it and I like it OK, but I can now confirm like vanilla Settlers betterer.

(Hm, I wonder pheromone may be among the few all-around gamer's gamers I know, good at the whole field, a la temvald and Shmike...)

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Shadow's doing better. Last night classicaljunkie visited and Shadow became very happy, actually. She twirled around and was very social and talkative the whole time. I think she may like girls more'n dudes.

No guests tonight, though, and the cat's been curled up on my bed all evening, barely acknowledging me. At least she's not squirrelly and hostile like she was two nights ago. I guess she's done with that.

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Oh, also saw The Departed. Enjoyed it, for all its veering between thuggishness and cornballery. The sympathetic character was actually the worst psychologist I've ever seen (I think she was supposed to be at least pretty good at it), and I swear that at least one of the many splatterhappy scenes was a Monty Python homage, somehow.

The movie's been playing as a second-run feature at the Somerville Theater for weeks and it still filled the cinema on a Thursday night. I guess everyone likes to see Jack Nicholson riding the Red Line. But dude, you can't use a cell phone under Park Street. I mean, duh.

* Met with doctor_atomic at the Diesel to playtest a game that dougo hopes to enter in the next Icehouse design contest. (We liked it.) There ran into tahnan, who added some additional observations about the game, and also cnoocy, who I said ruh-ruh to about some thingamabobs.

(Speaking of Icehouse: The big feature story in the new issue of Games is all about Looney Labs, the Big Experiment and the Mad Lab Rabbits. Woo, congrats y'all. (I have not read the article and assume it's actually positive.))

* Then we saw Batman Begins at the Somerville (with two more of the doctor's friends, who we bumped into at the door). An enjoyable and tightly constructed little action/adventure movie. Even though he's only a second-string villain in the canon, the Scarecrow as the Big Obvious Supervillain meshed in very nicely with the whole plot. I found the film's latter half to not be over-explosiony (with the exception of one somewhat eye-rolling scene near the end) despite criticism I had heard before. Really, it's just a well-built piece of work.

Then to the Burren for my daily trough. Nomf, nomf. I have a secret: I'm not sure I like Guinness. Once you get past the head, it's kind of... watery? You know? It tastes thin, or anyway thinner than it looks. I dunno. Still, Guinness is what I order when I go to a place like that that is trying so hard to be Irishy. I just feel obligated.

* Hearing back from the big network salvo I launched earlier this week, at an average rate of one new person's response per day. This is acceptable and I hope it keeps up.

* Naughty me, sort of: used eMule for the first time ever, in order to locate and download a copy of A Clash of Kings. Now I can pick up where I left off when my own paperback of it was ripped off by someone at South Station three weeks ago. ("But jmac, you could have borrowed my copy." Yeah, well.) Was surprised how easy it was. And as one with a history of a more-than-casual relationship with the print media, I mean the more complicated sort of "surprise", here.

Still: off to read myself to sleep over this printout.

Zarf ponders pyramids

Mail to Jon, re: the luncheon today:

OK... I'm going to seriously break character and go to this thing with
the intent of cornering people. Wish me luck. (I haven't
forced myself to be this socially outward since my days as a
journalist. Wacky stuff...)

And to that I say this: If you find yourself applying force, consider rethinking your approach.

While I did finally learn where the Media Lab is (it look an extra-special long time since I didn't know what the building looked like, and I had chosen to complicate matters by adding a spurious '0' to its street number in my notes, causing me to walk the length of Ames Street into Cambridge Center before I concluded I made a mistake), as soon as I confirmed I had found it by peering into one of the Lego-filled labs, which I had before seen only in newspaper and magazine photos, I found that I could go no further, not alone. I felt very much like a tresspasser, intending to find my way into a non-public event to which I was not invited, and was nobody's guest, in an unfamiliar, and frankly intimidating, place.On the other hand, I thought to myself, There is something to be said for remaining in-character,, and so I left. And now I am physically crushed from 75 minutes of ceaseless walking in bad shoes.

I'll just fall back to attempting to make contacts in a less forceful fashion. Email, email, and maybe I'll show up at the party tomorrow, if I have enough work done.

Work!

And get some good sneakers.

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Look, a Venn spanner.