Thoughts from a new VR player

We got a Vive for Christmas. Here are a few scattered thoughts about the current state of virtual reality after a week of play.

• As I've gotten older, I've noticed I'm getting much more prone to motion sickness in games -- I just can’t handle very long sessions of shooters like Wolfenstein and Serious Sam without frequent breaks.However, I was surprised to discover that VR games mostly don’t make me sick.
• This is because VR developers have mostly figured out that motion sickness comes from motion. That is, it’s bad to have your visual sense tell you that you’re moving around, while your inner ear tells you you’re standing still. To address this, VR games either mostly take place in a single location, or handle movement very cautiously.
• For example, “I Expect You To Die” is a spy game with comedy elements, which contrives a bunch of situations where you are trying to escape a bunch of death traps sitting in a chair. One level has you trying to drive a car out a plane. Another has you trying to communicate with a contact from a hijacked train. Another seats you behind a desk in a supervillain’s lair, hunting for hidden information.
• For another example, there’s Serious Sam: The Last Hope. I love Serious Sam titles, and they’ve traditionally been fast paced run and gun shooters with ridiculous waves of constant enemies. But TLH is basically a shooting gallery. They dump you in an environment like an ancient temple or a canyon, and you pick a weapon to wield in each hand. Enemies charge at you or fire projectiles that can be shot down, so you just stand in this virtual space and try to hit things before they kill you.
• For games and environments that require you to explore, a typical strategy is to let you point at places on the floor and press a button to teleport there. When a game does allow free movement, there is often a “comfort mode” available, which restricts your vision to a very small tunnel until you stop moving.
• This is all very cool and clever. It feels really neat to be surrounded by a massive 3D environment and feel like you’re in a video game. However, it’s also a tiny bit disappointing that it’s not like scenes from “Ready Player One” for instance, where you’re just moving around like a regular person. You can’t actually go anywhere without bumping into walls.
• One of the other really fun aspects of VR is when a game makes you do fiddly things with your body or your handheld controllers. I Expect You To Die puts you in situations where you have to play around with switches and levers, lets you levitate things telekinetically, and sometimes makes you duck and throw things. In Serious Sam, Besides letting you dual wield and aim shotguns and rocket launchers -- which is already super cool -- there’s also a sniper rifle that you actually hold up to your eye with two hands, an exploding bow and arrow that you have to draw back, and a sword that blasts laser waves when you swing it. Superhot lets you physically dodge bullets in slow motion, and punch enemies. That’s all awesome.
• Besides games, there’s a whole lot of support for other interesting environments. YouTube has a VR section with videos frequently filmed by people who have a 360 degree camera. Google Earth VR is downright awe inspiring -- you can hover over a mountain, or see the whole Earth as a giant map in your face, with horizons above and below you. It’s fun to turn comfort mode OFF and actually pretend to fly around like Superman. But again, that motion sickness is a constant threat.
• Also, some “games” are just brief, mildly interactive experiences, which is still quite entertaining. There’s nothing quite like getting personally murdered by the huge looming face of GLaDOS from Portal, or waving a light around a dimly lit area full of creepy knick knacks.
• The main downsides are that the headset can get super sweaty after a lot of use, and games that make you stand around waving your arms can leave you feeling a little strained and sore. Come to think of it, I should really hunt for games that actually make you get exercise, because hey, may as well roll with it.

Election thoughts 2: Momentum and winning with intangibles

In my last post I talked about the long term consequences of the Republican strategy and about why Mitt Romney is losing as a result of it.  The question, though, is just how badly he is losing.

I've linked to electoral-vote.com often, since it is a site which breaks down polls state by state and collects them into an overall picture of how the important numbers may shake out in the election.  A similar site, with better analysis, is Five Thirty Eight, a New York Times blog run by Nate Silver, which uses some complicated math formulas to forecast the probabilities of each candidate winning.  (538 is the total number of electoral votes available from all 50 states.)

[...]

Play more video games with your kids

Here's a great interview with Dr. Cheryl Olson on the effects of video games on young kids.

Drs. Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner are cofounders of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. They've written a book called Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, based on a study of gaming in individual families. Despite what the title of the book sounds like, it's not the usual stuff about how game addiction is making kids into little sociopaths and we should protect them from it.

My takeaway from the interview is this section:

First, play games with your kids. Find things that you both can enjoy. Young teens who took our survey (and boys in focus group studies) said that they rarely played with a parent, and most would like to. I think more families are playing together now that systems such as the Wii make games more accessible to casual players. If your child is a bit older, ask him to teach you how to play a level of his favorite game. It’s a healthy thing for parent/child relationships for the child to teach the parent something for a change. It’s also a chance for parents to learn more about their child’s interests and strengths.

When you buy games, look for ones that encourage kids to plan and problem-solve (that could be Zoo Tycoon or a Legend of Zelda game). Choose some that allow for collaborative play, with you and/or with friends.

Notice how games affect your child emotionally. A lot of young teens we studied used violent games to cope with angry feelings. That’s probably healthy in moderation, but might be a problem in excess. Some teens use zombie-type games to master fears, playing over and over until they beat the game completely. If a game seems to upset your child, put it away until he’s older. Keep your games with grown-up themes or scary content someplace inaccessible, and only play them when the kids are in bed.

Don’t worry too much about how much time your child spends with games if she has at least one good friend, does well in school, takes out the trash the 3rd time you ask, etc, but be alert to signs of problems. If your child often misses sleep to play games, loses interest in other activities, or is doing poorly in school, the game play may be a problem or, it may be a symptom of another problem, such as depression, that the child is trying to cope with.

As far as I'm concerned, that's all great advice.

(Note: the preceding link is nearly a year old. Since that time, Ben's druid has reached level 45, he's specced as a spellcaster, and his damage is stacking up well against that of many random dungeon teammates.)

Starcraft II beta impressions

I am in the Starcraft II beta thanks to a connection who shall remain anonymous unless he chooses to identify himself. Thanks, anonymous awesome guy!

I won't necessarily post many updates on this blog, but feel free to follow my initial impressions and the ensuing discussion on this thread at the Motley Fool. If any new threads start on the same board, you can keep an eye on my participation here.

Why so many Warcraft pickup group players are bad

I hate to indulge in another World of Warcraft post, but I don't have a separate gaming blog. Maybe I should start one, but I'm already stretched thin across three blogs, so it's going here. For you non-gamers, feel free to skip this post, unless it captures your interest. It's got some philosophical bits about teamwork and interpersonal relationships, so there's that.

I like patch 3.3, which introduced the ability to join random groups across multiple servers. Running instances is a lot quicker in general, and especially quick if you happen to be a tank, which I am. (Here's Vinpricent, level 80 protection paladin.) Lining up for a PUG (pickup group) takes about 20 minutes or so if you're a damage dealer, five minutes or less if you're a healer, and two seconds if you're a tank. I have at least one of each at various levels, so I've seen this difference frequently. It's because tanking is a more demanding and stressful role that most players do not like, but it's a ton of fun when done competently.

At least half of the PUGs I join have competent and friendly players, run smoothly, and are a pleasure to play. But I encounter bad PUGgers pretty regularly, and I think I've identified a common theme.

Many of these people are highly skilled as individual players, but they have a play style which does not tolerate any less than perfection from anyone else in the group. Everyone is assumed to be a flawless player, and if they fall short of this ideal, it is always the team's fault and not theirs.

Anecdote 1: The super damage dealer

I am training up a friend who is new to the game. He started a paladin of his own, so I encouraged him to try tanking. I was playing a low level mage with him.

We grouped with a low level hunter who was loaded to the hilt with heirlooms. I'm a pretty capable DPS ordinarily, but this guy is outpacing me by about 3-1 according to Recount. This is a big problem for an inexperienced tank, who cannot hope to keep with that much threat. Monsters are attacking him constantly. To add to the annoyance, this is another one of those guys who will race ahead and attack more groups first, if the tank is not moving fast enough for his needs.

I say "Look, dude, you have great DPS, but our tank is inexperienced and you need to let him establish threat a little more." He responds by saying that he ALWAYS beats everyone in DPS, and it's never a problem. He also does not want to turn off Growl on his pet, since he knows his pet will need to keep monsters off of HIM.

This is actually the most frequent kind of bad player I see. Some DPS players believe that maximizing damage is their only job, and they don't notice or don't care when their personal style is hurting the team.

Anecdote 2: The bully healer

Mistakes happen. People die. Sometimes it's easy to identify who's at fault. Sometimes it's not.

I'm tanking Prince Keleseth, a boss who freezes random players in ice tombs, making them take damage and preventing actions. Ordinarily the DPS should attack the tomb and break it. Unfortunately, the healer gets entombed, and nobody helps him. We have solid DPS and I can survive well, so we survive, but the healer dies moments before the encounter ends. There is no wipe.

He starts cursing and yelling that it's MY fault (bear in mind that he was nowhere near me when he got entombed). He demands the shard I won as "payment" for letting him die. I give it to him, not wanting to jeopardize the run over his tantrum. As the encounter goes on, he starts barking instructions and acting frustrated when they are not followed, even though we move through at a fairly rapid clip with no other deaths.

Finally, another player and I shut him up. I say "Listen, chill out or quit the group. I'm a tank, I can have another group in 3 seconds. You died once, it is not worth the emotional response you're giving." He says that when he's done he'll go back and play with his top tier guild, whose members are much better than me. Finally I say "Yeah, but you'll still be a big whiner." As we approach the final boss I tell our shadow priest out loud: "Please be ready to off-heal in case he rage-quits in the middle." He doesn't quit.

Anecdote 3: The lunatic

Another healer here, the instant the instance is entered he starts saying "Start chain pulling, this is too easy for me." Gamely I start establishing aggro on a group at a time, moving ahead before a group is fully beaten. He keeps saying "Full mana! I'm bored! PULL FASTER!"

So I pull faster. When there are too many mobs on us already, the group gets feared, pulling even more. I can't get enough aggro, the healer is too far away to be useful. Wipe. I feel stupid for listening to him.



The thing is, even if you have skills which work effectively with perfect groups -- high DPS, big mana pool for healing, the ability to chain-pull as a tank without regard for how well your healer is keeping up -- stuff happens. Patrols hit you, healers go OOM, the tank can't pull the mobs back from your overpowered leather-armor-wearing jerk butt. And when unexpected things happen, if you were playing to the point where you were just barely not dying, that will quickly change from "only mostly dead" to "all dead" pretty quick.

That's why I'm a conservative player no matter what role I'm in. I don't pull more than we can handle; I let my healer mana stay near the full end and don't complain; I watch Omen and switch targets or STOP dealing damage if we have a weak tank.

I just can't believe that so many players have a hard time comprehending the fact that if you have a play style which increases the likelihood of a wipe, you will progress MORE slowly than a group that is cautious and survives.

Festina Lente -- the more haste, the less speed.

Odds and ends 1: Job situation and techie goodness

Haven't posted anything in a few weeks, and that always makes me uneasy, so here come a few of those "whatever springs to mind" posts in case some people I haven't spoken to need to be filled in.

I have a new job. In San Antonio. The commute is long and dreary. Lots of quality time spent with podcasts, however. The job itself is for a simply massive behemoth of a company which is involved with providing banking and insurance services for military veterans. The money is solid and I have full benefits again, although when you price out weekly gas mileage, wear and tear costs on the car, and eating out more often than I'd like, the value of the salary drops considerably.

Also, my official title is "senior developer," and the hiring manager specifically said that this job is training me up to be lead developer on some new projects after six months. So, as much as I hate commuting, I think this was an important move that will give me some more exposure to leading web technologies, while also giving me leadership experience that my career needs.

Lynnea and I are considering getting a place slightly south of Austin, which would work well for her also since she works downtown. This step would not only shorten both of our daily drives, but also mark the "moving in together" rite of passage. Needless to say, we would not take such a step if our relationship status was not fabulous.

I bought a new laptop. The laptop I bought for school in late 2006 gave up the ghost long ago, and I haven't had a working one since I worked at McLane and was allowed to take home my work PC. My desktop is about four years old, which qualifies it not as a dinosaur but more of a trilobite. Sure, it's been tricked out with more RAM and extra hard disk space, but it still creaks with age.

The new laptop arrived on Monday, and... well, DROOL. It was actually a budget item, only running $800. However, the specs (see this item) are still a massive jump forward from what I've had before. It has a dedicated graphics card with 1 GB of dedicated RAM, 4 GB of conventional RAM, 320 GB of hard disk, and Windows 7, about which I currently have no complaints.

Of course I can ramble about how important it will be for getting Serious Work done, but you'd know I'm lying, right? Web surfing and games, baby! World of Warcraft runs smoothly in every environment with the graphics settings cranked up to "high" (though I have not been brave enough to try it on "ultra" yet). Left 4 Dead runs smoothly at full res. The box warmed up a bit after a couple hours of gaming, but it wasn't even uncomfortable enough to remove from my lap while sitting on the comfy couch.

I haven't installed Eclipse yet, but I plan to do some recreational programming with it as well, I swear.

Basically the reason I decided I need this NOW is because I'm planning to save myself some hours of driving time and rent a hotel room once or twice a week. I get home very late and go to bed as soon as I can, while Lynnea works odd hours that bring her home at 11. So frankly, we'd "see" more of each other online if I could stay up a bit later due to not getting up so awfully early.

More to follow...

Family gaming

Warning: Gaming post. If you play World of Warcraft or a similar game, you might find it cute and heartwarming. If you don't, you will likely get lost in nerd terminology pretty quickly. You have been warned.

On Saturday, I ran a Warcraft dungeon called Razorfen Kraul with Ben, Lynnea, and my mom. We have been doing this off and on, once every 2-4 weeks or so, for several months. Ben (who is seven) started playing the game a long time ago, but only dabbled with it until he finally brought a particular character, a druid, all the way up to level 16 because he loved playing in animal forms.

That's when the fun started, because I had been explaining to him about dungeon fighting and he wanted to try it. I was hesitant to take this step, because Ben has kind of a short attention span, and I didn't want to ruin the fun of any strangers we might add to our group. But when I ran the idea by Lynnea and mom, they were both willing to join us, and I know them to be very kind and patient with Ben. Normally dungeons are done in groups of five, but the other three of us had characters that were higher levels than Ben, so we thought we might be able to handle it.

So I promised we'd try a dungeon that weekend, and I drilled three rules into his head repeatedly:
1. The tank (me) is the leader. Stay BEHIND the tank at all times. Do not wander off on your own, under any circumstances.
2. Attack only what I am attacking. (For you non-WoW players, this is important because tanks have to work to force individual opponents to attack them, and not the more lightly armored and vulnerable players.)
3. Be nice to everybody. Say thank you. Congratulate them when they get something good.

I repeated these rules, and made him repeat them back to me, many times throughout the week.

We ran the Deadmines dungeon. To everyone's surprise, it went off successfully. It took us two trips on separate occasions to beat VanCleef. But even on the first trip, what was amazing was that Ben followed directions. Oh, I think he had to be reminded of the rules a few times, but he always apologized for his mistakes and corrected them. And more importantly, we all had fun.

That was a few months ago. Now our team of four is more experienced in dungeoning together, we're all in the range of 25-30, and we still try to team up on a semi-regular basis. We've done some character switching, and at this point we have gotten into a nice groove with a very good mix of characters. You can click on our names below to see their current information.

• Russell: Maddow. My character is still the tank, although I let Ben try tanking in bear form one time. She is a female human protection warrior who is named and styled after a certain TV and radio host.
• Lynnea: Geighdayr. She is our healer. Her character is a male human holy priest. It's pronounced, um, "gaydar."
• Ben: Siaindiss. Damage dealer. He's a male night elf feral druid. He used to specialize in spell attacks, but since he reached level 20 and learned to transform into a cat, he's been a feral-focused melee fighter. The named is pronounced "see-AIN-dis"; the random name generator picked it for him and he decided how to say it.
• Sheryl: Gleeful. She is a female gnome warlock who takes care of our long range spell casting damage.

So the four of us ran Razorfen Kraul this weekend. It's a lesser known dungeon in the horde-controlled Barrens, that few alliance characters ever bother visiting.

It was a long, tough instance. It's populated by pig-men who have an annoying tendency to run away and gather reinforcements when they are injured. As a result, we had a lot of difficult fights that turned out to be much longer than we anticipated, and required a lot of split second decisions by everyone.

We went into it mostly blind, without reading a guide on WoWWiki. I just kept an eye on the dungeon map and guessed which way to go. We had to backtrack a few times.

Ben saved the day on more than one occasion. As a druid, he can temporarily turn into a bear and substitute tanking if I die, or turn into an elf and substitute healing if Lynnea dies. He won't necessarily think to do this on his own, but if we shout instructions then he'll remember. Both changes kept the team from wiping out at different times. I think we all died twice in several hours of play.

Three of us play from the same house, while mom is on a long distance connection from Santa Fe. She and I keep in voice contact during gameplay over Ventrilo.

Anyway, we all had fun, and all gained multiple levels before calling it an afternoon. We didn't quite reach the last boss, but we all felt we had seen plenty of RFK.

Now we're high enough to do Gnomeregan, so that's coming up next time.

Sudoku solver, new and improved

If anyone enjoyed the Sudoku program I made earlier, I should let you know that it's been updated.

In the latest version you can click on the game board and type numbers directly into the screen, instead of messing around with the text box. You can still copy the contents on the text box and save them for later retrieval.

Also, the box now displays periods instead of spaces for empty squares. This way, the correct amount of white space doesn't disappear when you type it in an HTML comment. For instance, in a previous comment, Tatarize was trying to get me to try this puzzle:

1.......5
....3....
..2.4....
.........
.34...7..
...2.6..1
2....5...
.7.....3.
.....1...

Go ahead and paste that in... it's long, but still quick at maximum speed.

Sudoku!

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I started playing around with a Sudoku solving program. So finally, here it is. Your browser must have Java enabled to view it.



Brief instructions:

To watch the program solve a puzzle, click "Solve." You can enter new puzzles by typing numbers in the text box and clicking "update." I recommend going to websudoku.com, copying a hard puzzle, and cheating to get a fast time.

Future updates include (if I don't get too lazy):

• The program doesn't validate the initial state, so you can enter an obviously unsolveable puzzle and it will waste a fair amount of time trying to solve it. This is my top priority for a fix.
• I'd like to be able to click directly on the image and be able to type in numbers there.
• No guarantees, but you might be able to paste a websudoku.com URL and have it automatically load the puzzle from there.
• Kevin, the director of engineering, discussed some methods to automatically generate new puzzles. I might give that a try. But it's a solver, not a game, so I might not.

Updates: Validates puzzles correctly. "Maximum" option set on speed bar. Move counter added.

One reason I like my new job

On my schedule today, the director of engineering will be delivering a presentation with the following topic:
"Solving Sudoku puzzles with recursion"

Knowing this was coming, I started writing an experimental Java solver over the weekend. I had a pretty busy weekend, so I only got as far as reading a puzzle from a file and displaying it. During off-stage time at my two chorus performances, I worked out a possible algorithm in my head, but I'll need a few more days to write it out and debug. I'll probably put it in a Java applet on my web page when it's done, and you'll be able to watch it "think" if it works out the way I'm imagining it.

My game characters, myself

PZ Myers regularly writes long posts about squid, which is his field of study and weird obsession. I don't mind those posts, but I just skip them. My weird obsession is computer games, which is interesting to some. But I always have this need to warn non-gaming readers when I am about to write a gaming post, so that they may bypass it as necessary. This is such a post. You have been warned.

I was an early adopter of online gaming. My sophomore college roommate Mark was much more technically savvy than I am, and as soon as the original Doom released a patch to introduce network capability, Mark and I spent several weekends messing with cable and network settings so that we could play cooperatively. Later, our room became a mini-gaming center where people would get together and play two way deathmatches for hours.

I never really found deathmatches all that enjoyable, though, and cooperative gaming has always been where it's at for me. I love playing with two or more players against a hostile opponent, whether the opponent human or artificial. Which, to an extent, explains the staying power of World of Warcraft for me. It also explains why my other favorite game right for the last few months has been Team Fortress 2, even though I usually don't go for all-out player vs. player action.

I don't know if my brain is wired differently from most players, but I love to play a support role. Most players seem to like pointing their gun and shooting it, while competing to do the most damage and rack up the most kills. Me, I like being a character who multiplies everyone else's abilities. My first Warcraft character was a priest, Kazimus. (You can see character detail at the link, if you want to.)

People would ask me, "Russell, you're an outspoken atheist. How can you like playing a priest?" "It makes perfect sense," I said. "In this world, you actually fight demons face to face. You can do magic and bring people back from the dead. Why wouldn't I believe in gods?" In real life, I'm an atheist based on evidence. In a universe with gods, obviously I would be a theist.

That's not the point, though... the point is that priests don't do the job of calling down destruction; they heal people. They keep everyone in the group alive and in other ways enhance everyone's experience. They are probably the least played but the most appreciated class around. Other people slaughter monsters for personal gratification. For me, I get gaming gratification from the appreciation of others. It may be a neurosis, but I find it fun.

So now that I've been a level 70 priest for several months, I find that there's another class that's underrepresented: tanking warriors. In an online game, "to tank" means to run in ahead of everyone, with greater risk of dying, and draw the monsters' attention so that they hit you instead of the weaker players who don't wear plate mail. A tank doesn't deal a lot of damage, but they do play the role of protector.

That's right up my alley, which is why Rupert Thrash the warrior is planned as my next power character. Whenever I try to join a group and they say "Well, we can leave as soon as we find a tank..." I'd like to be able to say "no problem" and fill that role. Tanking in Warcraft is a much different experience from attacking, and requires a different skill set... instead of concentrating on one monster at a time, you have to pay attention to the entire group and make sure no one's in trouble.

Similar for Team Fortress, which is basically a fast paced all-out slugfest between dozens of huge, ugly, heavily armed thugs... and then there's this guy.


The medic runs around with a big Ghostbusters-style ray gun that shoots healing beams out of it. He is one of the most necessary classes for a team to achieve victory, and also the most likely character to be missing from any giving game. This is because, presumably, most players of a "first person shooter" style game find it more fun when you're shooting to kill.

The medic is my best character. According to my in-game stats, I've logged a total of 17 hours as a medic, and my personal record is 25 points scored and 9,600 hit points healed in one life. Since medics rarely hurt anyone, they score points by being attached to another player when they make a kill, or just by healing a lot.

Being a support player doesn't necessarily mean always playing the healer, though. The neat thing about TF2 is that you can switch between the nine characters any time after you get killed. As a result, my favorite character is whichever one happens to be required on the team at the moment, and I switch classes as often as I need to in order to ensure victory. No other medics? Be a medic. Too many medics? Be a heavy weapons guy (huge slow guy who gets tremendous benefit from being healed). Need to capture a point quickly? Switch to the fast moving scout. And so on. For me, the character-switching aspect of TF2 is almost as enjoyable as the gameplay, looking at the overall strategy of the map and picking the right tool for the current job.

I don't know very many people who play Team Fortress 2, so if you play, please add me to your Steam friends list and drop me a message. I am Kazim27, and I always enjoy hopping on a team with friends.

Big-ish personal update

I've been a bad blogger. :( My wife silently reminded me of this when she wrote a new post updating our son's blog, which had no posts since this February. This month, I've written several posts over at the Atheist Experience and gotten involved in some enjoyable arguments over there. (I personally think my new Star Trek rule should be considered an instant classic, but I'm hardly the one to judge). Meanwhile, my own blog has lain fallow.

I guess what I love most is blogging about three topics: religion, politics, and entertainment. Since the AE blog gets more eyeballs than mine, thanks largely to Martin Wagner's tireless regular posting, I find it more gratifying to put religious musings over there these days so as to reach a wider audience.

Politically, nothing is happening. The primaries are now officially freakin' boring, and I'm yearning for the Obama vs. McCain smackdown match to get started in a hurry.

On the entertainment front:

• I'm still reading Ken Follett's World Without End. People often assume that I read books very quickly, and I don't. When I'm at home, I like being on my computer, either playing games or catching up with news via blogs. When I'm out driving, I usually listen to shows on my iPod. So although I know it's good for me, I rarely just sit down and read.
• We recently saw The Ruins. It was a passable horror flick. Ginny read the book and didn't think it was a good adaptation. I didn't read the book, but I read stories indicating that the author wrote the screenplay himself; so I have to assume that he was satisfied with the elements that he had to change.
  
• I've nearly leveled a second World of Warcraft character to 70. "Rupert Thrash" the warrior is sitting at level 66 right now. I was going to write some more about Warcraft in this post, but then I realized it was a digression. I think I'll put it in a separate post, so that you non-gamers can skip it at your convenience.
• My chorus is getting ready to perform Beethoven's 9th. What a pleasant change that is from last season! I didn't like doing St. Paul, I find the English lyrics distasteful and borderline anti-semitic, and the music mostly didn't impress me. But you can never go wrong with "Ode to Joy." My concert will be in three weeks. Ginny and Ben will attend. I encourage other Austinites to drop in also; it's going to be a great show.
• I bought Ben a Wii for his birthday next month, plus the latest Mario and Metroid games. He doesn't know yet. We're planning a party at our house. Ben's birthday is on the last week of school; the party is the prior weekend.
• I got a coworker and his wife hooked on Kingdom of Loathing. They not only both started playing last weekend, but also donated $40 between them. Bwahahaha. Game companies should totally pay me referral fees, I'm very good at hooking people.
  

And then, of course, there's my job. I have to repeat what a tremendous relief it is that my employment gap only lasted a week, and that I'm now making more money. Our financial situation is just starting to settle down... just in time to start repaying my first semester of student loans. :P

It's a really interesting company I've found myself in, and a great bunch of people. I was the first arrival of four new hires, so in a way I kind of got "seniority" for a few weeks. I had a project assigned before any of the others, and I had to go through getting accounts and bugging the IT department and such (since they hadn't dealt with a new person for years previously). I have a name plate on my cubicle wall, although I don't have one of the little plaques that say "One/two/three/N years of service". So anyway, that means that I had to blaze the trail and then teach the other newbies what I learned to make their hiring smooth. I enjoy that role.

I've essentially completed my first project and gotten my feet wet with the company data system, which is huge and intricate and proprietary. I'm proud of the work I've done so far, and now I have a bit of a lull. I am spending it by updating our internal documentation, which is in the form of a wiki. I'm good with wikis, and nobody else really seems to "own" the company docs, so I figure this will (1) establish me as an expert at something, and (2) give me a more solid overview of the whole business. I think those are good things.

The project I finished has to do with email addresses. Now, I won't name any names, but there is a company out there whose job it is to find your email address and sell it to people. I just need to know your name and home address, and I send it to this company, and they scour the web or do some other kind of black magic, and they tell me every email address that is associated with you. The price is seven cents per successfully located address. Success rate is supposedly about thirty percent, but bear in mind that this includes addresses for any person in the United States, including people who may not be on the web much. For YOU, the person who actually reads blogs, I bet it's well over 95%.

This caused some consternation between me and my project partner, because on some level we view this as evil behavior. This company does not spam people themselves, but it's very obvious that their whole reason for existence is to enable spam. And spam sucks.

I don't think that my own company is doing anything particularly bad. We are, however, using this tool to provide email addresses to specific companies that already do business with the people in question. The assumption is that those customers "forgot" (wink wink) to provide their email to the company in the first place. That's as specific as I want to get, because I don't want to get accused of sharing my company's business model.

We are, however, giving our business to this other company, which has great potential to use their powers for evil. As a card carrying spam hater, I have mixed feelings about this.

Even so, the data development process is fairly interesting, and I see good opportunities for some really cool work at this company. Maybe some of you just read my job description and thought "Boy, that sounds boring." I don't see it that way, but of course, I've spent years developing a specialization. I mean, my sister Keryn works with sick and dying old people, and is downright enthusiastic about her job. I listen to her talk about her work and am tempted to think she's just crazy, but that's what she likes to do. I like the internet and powerful databases. So there you go.

Leisure time

If you'll take a look at the green bar to your right, you'll notice I've updated my reading list. I hadn't changed the list since before I graduated, so I figured I should clear out some of the school books, which I'm not really reading anymore. For posterity, the list right now says:

What I'm reading right now (or trying to)

• Wizard's First Rule (on recommendation from my cousin)
• American Theocracy (gift from a journalism professor at UT)
• Pro Apache Struts with Ajax
• The Ancestor's Tale
• Collapse

What I recently finished reading

• The Conscience of a Liberal
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Managing Software Requirements
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Note that just because I say I'm currently reading something doesn't always mean that I'm reading it particularly actively. Collapse, for instance, has been in my bathroom for probably about two years.

Nice to be out of school, that's what I say. Also I'm playing a crapload of World o' Warcraft. My priest Kazimus is now doing regular guild raids at level 70, and I'm starting to move my warrior up the ladder. Yay free time!

Alyx Vance may be one of the best game characters ever

If you're a gamer, chances are pretty good that you are at least aware of Half-Life 2 and the recent expansions, dubbed Episodes 1 and 2. Since I finished playing Portal, probably about five times now, I've been exploring the other aspects that the Half-Life Orange Box has to offer.

Man, what a great collection of games. I liked the original Half-Life a lot, and HL2 was even better, but this is simply a triumph of great story combined with great action. In these last few days, my perception of Valve has jumped up from "A really great game company" to "Nearly Blizzard-like in their ability to consistently do everything right."

One of the major contributors to this perception is the character of Alyx Vance, an NPC (that's "Non-Player Character" for you non-gamers, although you folks probably stopped reading before the end of the previous paragraph) who stays at your side throughout most of the game. Alyx was a fun character in the first HL2 story, but she has really gotten a chance to shine in the expansions. With her specifically in mind, I present:

Seven surefire ways to make an NPC that every gamer will love!

1. Make her female. Because -- go on, it's okay, you can acknowledge it -- most gamers are male.

2. Make her kick ass. The damsel in distress is SO fifty years ago. Today's great female characters should be created in the mold of Buffy Summers, Sarah Connor, Ripley, and Hermione Granger. They aren't sitting around waiting for some man to come along and sweep them away; they can blow away armies of ant-lions on their own very well, thank you. And she does look so very stylish when she's kicking zombies in the face.

3. Make her spend a lot of time with you. Most 3D shooters are all about solo play in an environment where everything is either dead or wants you to die. Ever since Wolfenstein 3D, there has always been a distinct feeling of loneliness as you slog through level after level and don't see a single living thing that isn't evil. Having a buddy who is right alongside you nailing enemies can cause a huge difference to the mood of the game. That's why I always liked playing networked games in cooperative mode much more than I like Deathmatches.

4. Make her talkative. As a corollary to the previous point, if she's going to be around a lot, she'd better be talking because you're not going to. Having a NPC say "Wow, nice shot!" can be a tremendous ego booster, while having her occasionally say "Look out, I hear something" can make her feel like a vital trusted companion. If you're a real roleplayer (code word for "dork") then you can always talk back to her yourself and pretend she's responding to you. Not that I would ever do that. Nope. Not me.

5. Make her actually help you. If there are any in-game hints to give, it makes so much more sense to deliver them through the always-present NPC than a disembodied narration. Whether she's shooting something that just came up behind you, or suggesting "I think we should go this way" or yelling "Look out, grenade!" you need to appreciate having a friend in the game. But more than that, Alyx gets special abilities that set her apart from the player, like climbing to places you can't reach, and hacking through security systems. In the early levels of Episodes 1 and 2, she gets a gun and you don't, so you're relying on her for basic protection. Later, as you're strolling through hordes of zombies, it's just so comforting to see the laser targeting line which means Alyx has your back with her sniper rifle. And there had better be at least a few occasions where it's obvious you would be dead without her intervention.

6. Don't let her hinder you. NPC's are generally very hard to write into action games, because they get in the way and aren't supposed to die. The "Opposing Force" Half-Life 1 expansion was really bad about this. Along the way, you keep picking up small squads of soldiers who are vital to your survival. The difficulty in these sections is generally cranked up, so if you blow away your own squad with an errant rocket, you're really up a creek. NPC's in the recent HL episodes seem pretty near indestructible. You can't shoot them yourself, and the monsters don't finish them off for a fairly long time. Yes, it's cheating for a game designer to give a character near-invulnerability. But remember that the NPC is there for the purposes of story and atmosphere, and NOT as an additional obstacle to keep you from getting through the game. Nothing's worse than when you've just come to the end of a five-minute firefight, you're feeling pretty good about yourself, and then from fifty feet away you hear "Argh..." Alyx has died, game over.

7. Let her get in trouble, but only after you've established point #2. I don't really care about the data card that we've been carrying to who-remembers-where throughout the entire game. It's a MacGuffin -- supposedly important to the characters, but irrelevant to my understanding of the plot. On the other hand, I care a lot about Alyx, because her character has been established so well. So if she just took a fall while heroically protecting my life, you bet I'm not going to take a break from the game until I'm sure she's okay.

Gaming goodness

I had class this weekend, which means that only one weekend and two classes are left in total. My adviser finally got back to me to let me know that my thesis is interesting and well done, and only a few minor changes are necessary before submission. So on the whole it looks like somewhat smooth sailing from here on out, and therefore I treated myself on Friday evening to The Half-Life Orange Box.

I have not bought a game in several months, and part of the reason behind this purchase is that I had heard so many outstanding reviews that I couldn't stand to do without it any longer. This package contains Half-Life 2 (which I've played) and two mini-expansions (which I haven't) as well as some multi-player stuff that I don't much care about. And finally, there's Portal:



Many reviews have been written about Portal, but it's not the professional reviews that did it for me; it was Lore Sjoberg, a very funny guy who writes "The thing about Portal is this: it’s very funny. ...As a puzzle game, Portal runs way too short. As a comedy, it’s perfect." And it was "Yahtzee" Croshaw, whose great review of the Orange Box deserves to be watched and heard in full.



Yahtzee's a hilarious reviewer, and anyone who likes games will have a great time watching all of his regular weekly videos. He's also a very sardonic and pitiless reviewer, which is why it was especially meaningful when he said: "Lastly, there's Portal, and if you're a regular reviewer you'll understand how insane these words feel coming out of my mouth, but I can't think of any criticism for it. I'm serious. This is the most fun you'll have with your PC until they invent a force-feedback codpiece. ...Absolutely sublime from start to finish, and I will jam forks into my eyes if I ever use those words to describe anything else ever again."

Well, "sublime" is a very good description of the game. It is not only fun gaming, it also has brilliant writing, and it is alternately extremely funny and very, very, creepy and unnerving. Fun, amusing, and scary. Those are pretty much my three gold standard criteria for good games, and this hit them all exactly right.

Ben loved it too (and the scary parts were partly derived from uncertainty and the ability to read, so they weren't too scary for him). When you play the game, some puzzles require you to jump from a great height into a portal on the floor, so that you'll build up a lot of momentum before you shoot out of a wall going in a different direction. As we played together, we both started saying "Wheeeeee!" every time we jumped. Well, a minute later, the computerized trainer voice also said "Wheeeeee!" along with us.

Ben cracked up and kept laughing for several minutes. The afterwards, he wanted to know how the computer knew what we were saying. I had a hard time convincing him that it was a coincidence.

Meanwhile, in gaming news...

Two words: Starcraft 2!!!!!!!

I didn't bother posting it earlier, but I might as well bring up the "Hell Yeah" moment I experienced a few weeks ago when it was announced. Like many gamers, Starcraft is an old, old love of mine, and I look forward to revisiting it next year.

In other gaming news, those of you who tried Kingdom of Loathing in the past should probably give it another look next week, when the NS13 update rolls out. The game's getting longer and tougher, the Naughty Sorceress is getting bigger and meaner.

But back to Starcraft. Ginny and I used to play cooperative games on our network all the time. We weren't world class but we were a competent team, sometimes taking on three or four computer opponents at a time. Even so, her own excitement at the announcement of Starcraft 2 surprised me, since she had hardly played games at all since Ben was born. I showed her the cinematic video of the marine getting armored up, and then later I got the gameplay video, which looks extremely cool.

Now she's interested again, and we've played a bunch of Starcraft 1, shaking the rust off our abilities. Yay! Blizzard is saving my marriage.

Just kidding honey! Not that it needed saving. :)

Another meaningless gaming milestone reached!

Go, me! Through dedication, hard work, and entirely too much time wasted, I have acquired all six pieces of the best outfit in the Kingdom of Loathing! Check me out.

Nobody will care except those people whom I have introduced to this idiotic game, but this suit gives me an additional 60% stats, plus extra hit points and mana, plus huge amounts of extra combat damage and spell damage, more adventures, and elemental resistance. It also makes me more likely to get the first shot in combat, helps me find more items after each fight, increases the effectiveness of my pets, and lets me hum four songs in my head! Goody!

Oh god, I've wasted my life. :)

The Kingdom of Loathing

The Kingdom of Loathing is the stupidest game that I've ever been unable to stop playing. It's now been over a year since I joined the kingdom, and I decided that it is time for me to confess my shameful enjoyment of this diversion.

So you're this... stick figure, right? The good king Ralph has been kidnapped from the kingdom by the Naughty Sorceress, and it's up to you to save him. It's kind of a role-playing game, but your character classes have names like "Seal Clubber" and "Pastamancer". On the way to save the king, you'll fight a bunch of badly drawn monsters. Like you'll visit "The Misspelled Cemetary" where you take on "ghuols" and "skeltons." Or you'll go to the Hippy Camp on the Mysterious Island of Mystery, so you can fight filthy hippies and steal their filthy overalls. And at one point, the game temporarily turns into a parody of an old-school text adventure.

The game is riddled with pop culture references -- nearly everything you do will result in 2-4 inside jokes and you'll get maybe half of them. And also, you'll get drunk. You'll get drunk a LOT. In fact, if you are not making your character absolutely as drunk as you possibly can every day, then you're not playing the game to its full potential. Trust me on this one, you'll figure it out eventually.

In the year that I've been playing, I've gone through 19 incarnations of my character, accumulated approximately 1.7 million meat (the Kingdom's unit of currency), and acquired four out of six pieces of rare stainless steel armor as well as one out of six ultra-rare plexiglass items.

What's fun about it is that even though it's the stupidest game you've ever seen in the beginning, it's surprisingly deep because it has multiple levels of gameplay. As you play through the first time, you'll be focused on levelling up your character and experiencing all the wacky things that happen to you for the first time. At the end, you'll fight the epic battle against the sorceress, where you will die a lot but eventually "win". And then you get to ascend to a higher plane of existence, for a short time, before you voluntarily decided to return to the Kingdom and do it all over again.

Once you start getting into ascensions, you get to hold on to all of your items from previous lives as well as permanently save your favorite aspects of each character. You start to appreciate the power to combine skills like Transcendental Noodlecrafting with Saucemastery, while playing Ur-kel's Aria of Annoyance on your stolen accordion and infusing your pets with Empathy of the Newt.

The best part is, it's free! Sign up for a while to try it out. Just one piece of advice though, and I speak from experience. When a shady stranger offers you something in a dark alley, don't take it. You'll be really sorry.

Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within [GC, **]

I've owned Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within for over a year now, I think. Usually I either win a game within a few weeks or get sick of it and don't finish at all. With Warrior, I played it for a while and then set it aside, having the best intention to return to it eventually. Recently, I've given it another go.

I love the Prince of Persia series. I played the original game as a freshman in college. The second game was one of the first I ever played after I bought my first sound card, so I fondly remember the experience of hearing ACTUAL VOICES in the game for the very first time.

In the Prince games, you play a character with extraordinary athletic abilities. The first two games were side-scrollers. In a typical gaming session, you might be running from a bunch of angry guards, then you duck through a gate just as it closes, jump over some spikes, and finally leap across a wide chasm, just barely grabbing the ledge.

Also characteristic of the series is that it is both brutally hard on mistakes, and generous in allowing you to recover from them. Miss the ledge, and you'll plummet to your death many screens below as the prince lets out a terrified scream. (Hooray again for the invention of sound cards.) Then you'll be transported back a couple of minutes to the beginning of the scene, where you need to start running from those guards again. Luckily, you get infinite lives. The first two games had a time limit; later games have given that up, which I considered a wise move.

In the latest incarnation of the series, the prince has gone 3D on GameCube, PlayStation 2, and XBox. (Actually the Prince went 3D in an earlier PC version called Prince of Persia 3D, but that one was so bad it's best not to speak of it.) In Sands of Time, they introduced a terrific game mechanic, which was the power to control time. You get a limited number of "sand tanks", which you can fill by fighting enemies. If you get killed by one of the many cliffs or deathtraps, you can rewind time to a point just before you died as long as you still have time sand. It was a clever way to stick with the spirit of the series, because it allows you to feel that the world is deadly while still giving you an opportunity to recover from your mistakes without starting over very often. It reduced a lot of the frustration but still kept the tension high, because if you run out of sand then your next screwup kills you. The character was well designed and the new moves (such as running along walls and flipping around poles) were very cool.

In Warrior Within, it's like some committee of corporate non-gamers tried to redesign Sands of Time to make it "hipper," realizing that Sands is a great game but not having any understanding of why. In Warrior, the prince is darker and edgier. The fighting is more violent, and requires you to memorize "combos" -- buttons you have to press in a certain sequence in order to win the battles. Also, the introductory movie has a hot goth chick in chainmail, and there's actually a closeup shot of her chainmailed butt. I like skin shots as much as the next guy, but it was just so utterly gratuitous that it was stupid. It's not all that relevant to the plot and it feels wedged in to the Prince of Persia universe.

All that aside, though, I finally managed to enjoy the game for a while, until I gradually realized that there is one aspect of Warrior Within that I truly, truly hate.

Some games are linear, dragging you from event A to event B to event C on rails. That's okay. Some games are nonlinear, giving you free reign to explore what you want. That's okay too.

But in Warrior Within, the designers have chosen the worst aspects of both. The game is linear in the sense that you must unlock events in a particular order. But the geography of the game is nonlinear, because at any given time, you can travel to just about anywhere else you've already been. And the enemies are all still there.

In other words, it's really hard to tell which way you're supposed to be going. I just recently backtracked very close to the beginning of the game, fighting newly resurrected enemies all the way, before realizing that there's nothing happening there. Apparently there was some other branch that I was supposed to take. So I went back to hunt for the other branch, and got sidetracked going to another useless location.

Adding to this horror, some areas can only be accessed by a very roundabout route, but once you're there, you can instantly take a one-way path that drops you right back where you were. So if you make a wrong jump, you'll slide down a banner and land on the floor, only to realize that you're now in the same place you were 15 minutes ago when you started climbing, leaping, swinging, and shimmying your way to the top. Now you get to do it all over again.

Finally, the game gives you nothing in the way of hints about where you want to be. One button reveals a "map", but the map is just a big artist's sketch of the exterior of the palace. There's not even a large, friendly "you are here" arrow. At the top, it just says "Gardens." At the bottom, it helpfully says "Goal: Open the second tower." Say, it would be nice if you could let me know where the second tower is, you unhip suit-wearing fogey bastards.

It's a shame that there is such a high quantity of anti-fun in this game, because there really are strong hints of the elements that have made the entire Prince of Persia series so much fun. When you're climbing around an enormous yawning chasm, and you make a dangerous running leap, and JUST BARELY manage to grab on to the ledge as you fall past it, it gets the heart pumping while simultaneously conjuring up a delightful nostalgia for the original side scrolling games.

But the first game had different levels, and once you enter a new level, the door closes behind you. When you're on level 20 and about to rescue the princess, you can't accidentally drop down a few ledges and suddenly be back fighting the guys from level 1.

I rarely give games one star, preferring to reserve that rank for the absolute worst stuff I've ever played. This isn't that bad. But it's not good.

Score: ** (out of five stars)

Goodbye World of Warcraft

Hey everybody, it's time for another geek post that very few people will care about!

My subscription to World of Warcraft expired yesterday. I have twice paid the fee of $77 to keep playing for six months, but I was using an old credit card that got replaced, so they weren't able to charge me again. It would be a simple matter to enter my new card number and renew, but I didn't. I just let it lapse.

Those two $77 charges plus the initial purchase price of $50 add up to a whopping total of $204 that I paid to play just one game. Do I regret wasting that much money? No, because I've gotten an incredible amount of play time out of WoW. As a gaming buff, I usually buy a new $50 game every month or two. Since I started playing WoW, I can only think of three games that I bought. And they were used. As entertainment value per dollar goes, $13 a month for an hour or two of play each day is quite a lot, especially when you compare it to, say, renting a 2 hour movie for $5.

It's not that I don't play anymore; just the opposite. I still play very regularly. And in a way, that's the problem. Now that I'm in grad school while still being the sole household income provider, I've already got less time to spend with my family and I'm feeling it. The last thing I need is a bunch of online people craving my attention as well.

I love playing World of Warcraft. Lately it's been more of a single player game than a multiplayer one for me, because I play at odd hours and don't have the time to dedicate to playing long group sessions. But I'm leaving behind a level 60 human priest with 200 gold, a level 47 Tauren Hunter, and numerous smaller characters who range from level 34 on down.

I've also gained great enjoyment from my guild, The Motley Fools, all of whom are members of the Fool message board community and many of whom would not have joined without my glowing recommendations of the game. It was always nice to log in and see another 20 friends online, get greeted with a friendly "Hey Kazim!", and know that I have buddies available to go questing with or give me items I might need.

Still, real life beckons. Without the temptation of my Warcraft account, I will still play other games, but probably not quite as much.

At least not until I buy the expansion pack.