Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Feb 7, 2007

Filed under: Links 19 comments

Problem: People in Asia don’t want to buy the XBox 360.

Solution: Launch an ad campaign asking these potential customers, “What’s Wrong With U?”

Even in English, this comes off about as well as, “Dear Jerk, why won’t you be my friend?” Even if this really is the tone they want to take, the phrase itself is a horrible idea. It’s a mildly insulting figure of speech between English speakers, but how is it going to sound in Japanese, Cantonese, or (I’m guessing here) Korean? It will come out something like “What defect do you have? or “What is the difficulty that you are experiencing?” Not exactly catchy. Maybe they need a jingle to go with it.

PC users know this won’t work, because Mac users^* have been using this one on us for years to no avail.

To be fair, I’m almost as curious as MS as to why they aren’t buying the 360. Is it price? Is it just too soon for another console? Lack of titles available in their own language? Is it the Wii? I’d like to know as well, but I bet I could come up with a smarter way of finding out. In fact, this ad campaign seems to be an attempt to solve the problem without needing to address it. “Whatever the reason you don’t want our stuff, just get over it and buy a 360 already.”

* I’m not prejudiced, “some of my best friends are Mac users”!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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DM of the Rings LXI:
Words Get in the Way

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Feb 7, 2007

Filed under: DM of the Rings 66 comments

 DM of the Rings LX:
The Madness of King WhatsiznamePrevious Post

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Everything But the Girl 

Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn enter the Golden Hall.

Players Stuck in non-interactive cutscene.

If you’re having trouble with wayward players derailing your carefully designed plot, you can always fix this by making the game non-interactive.

Let me know how that works out for you.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings LX:
The Madness of King WhatsiznamePrevious Post

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Everything But the Girl 

66 comments

Temporal Vertigo

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 6, 2007

Filed under: Links 14 comments

 Free Radical ReviewedPrevious Post

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Lileks has a beautiful picture of a young mother and her baby (halfway down the page) which he lifted from a humorously silly ad, circa 1956.

Pictures like this really get to me. I’ve described the feeling before as temporal vertigo: The dizzying sensation you get when you are given a sudden, brief perspective on a long expanse of time.

Once in a while I’ll see these old ads and I’ll get that gut-punch sensation as I realize just how much time has passed between then and now. Saying “fifty years” doesn’t give the same impression as imagining all the stuff that can happen in fifty years, and even that is nothing compared to seeing a tiny bit of the past preserved, and realizing that the moment, and the people, are gone.

Several times he’s posted pictures from the 30’s. Images of a mundane day in the big city, which was a lot less big back then. Businessmen in hats shuffle from one side of the street to the other. A woman pushes a baby carriage – the big black kind with the large wheels that we always see in cartoons and never in real life. An old man catches his breath on a corner before working up the air to finish his smoke and cross the street. None of them are aware that this moment is being captured, and will endure for decades. All of them are now dead.

The woman in that ad would be in her mid 70’s today, if she’s still with us. The adorable baby is probably 51 or 52. They’ve lived their lives without me ever being aware of them, and now I have a picture of the two of them together, fifty years ago, and I can’t shake it.

Also: I agree with James. Her haircut is great.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Videogames + Exercise

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 6, 2007

Filed under: Game Design 53 comments

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Dance Dance Revolution has a good reputation for helping young people stay in shape. Now someone has lost weight just by playing the Wii – presumably by standing and waving the wand around and not by parking himself on the couch and just exercising his wrist. For the last couple of years years I’ve been expecting a game focused on exercise to show up. It hasn’t happened yet – at least not on a large enough scale to appear on my own limited “industry trends” radar – but recent controller innovations indicate that someone might start thinking in this direction soon.

TOP: A high-end DDR Dancepad. MIDDLE: Nintendo Bongo controller. BOTTOM: XBox360 Guitar Hero controller.

I think the success of DDR, Guitar Hero, and (to a lesser extent) Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, proves that people are willing to pay for a new input device if the device leads to new gameplay. I also think the bajillion dollars people spend each year on trying to not be so dang fat demonstrates they are willing to shell out some non-trivial bucks towards that laudable goal. The question is: Can these two purchases be combined? Would gamers be willing to pay for an input device what one would normally expect to pay for exercise equipment? Oh yeah: And buy a game on top of that?

I think so. Maybe now that Harmonix is no longer making Guitar Hero they will investigate something along these lines in their now-copious free time. Maybe someone else will take a crack at it. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the next console generation before someone works up the nerve.

I have a pretty clear picture of how something like that should work, and an excellent picture of how it could be royally screwed up, which is more than likely.

The key here is that we want to harness the “just one more level”, or “just a few more minutes” nature of videogames, and tie it in with some form of steady, low-impact exercise. You want the player to keep going, keep playing the game, and keep exercising.

And here is where things are likely to get hosed:

The game should in no way be focused on racing.

The most obvious thing to do is to plug an an exercycle into the XBox and have the player “race” against the CPU. This is a terrible idea which is doomed to failure. Here is how that little drama will play out: The player is going to select a challenging race, and then pump furiously for two minutes. They will then stagger away from the machine, exhausted, dizzy, and suddenly keenly aware of their heart and the role it plays in sustaining their life. They will walk – perhaps crawl – away from your device and your game, not feeling particularly fulfilled, either from an exercise or gaming perspective. They will not return.

I suggest that the exercise in our theoretical game should be an aspect of the gameplay, not the entirety. It should be steady and prolonged, not intense and short. It should allow the player to slow down when they feel fatigued and speed up as they recover, without punishing them for the respite with things like total failure. All of this lends itself to more interesting gaming, and (as an added bonus) is less likely to kill them.

So the idea is to present the player with a more or less “normal” game experience, and then provide them with motivation to keep pedaling. Let’s outline our needs:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Videogames + Exercise”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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53 comments

LiveJournal

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Feb 6, 2007

Filed under: Nerd Culture 42 comments

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Some notes about LiveJournal:

A majority of my (visible) readership hails from LJ. Most of my incoming links are from LJ pages. A lot of my comments are from LJ users. (Have I said thanks? Lately? No? Hey: Thanks.)

I’m sure I have over 100 LJ links. Contrast this with MySpace (2 incoming links) or Blogger.com (none, that I’ve noticed) or Blogspot (one, that I’ve noticed). One of my favorite things to do is go to sites who’ve linked me and see what they are all about. I’ve found some crazy stuff that way, some interesting stuff, and some sites that I return to on a regular basis.

Now I wonder: Why is this site so popular among LJ users, and not so in the other blogging communities? (I’m talking about the community sites like LJ, MySpace, BSpot, etc. I’m not talking about just random domains or forums.) It’s entirely possible that this is just due to it not attracting attention in these other areas, but I can’t imagine these groups are that isolated from each other. If Blogspot users were interested in the site, it seems it might have made the rounds by now. So, what I strongly suspect is that these communities have very different sorts of people. Perhaps they like different things, or perhaps they behave differently when it comes to linking & sharing.

This bugs me, because I feel like there is some underlying complexity or pattern that I’m missing. The traffic is too unbalanced to be random – there is a reason why links from LJ users outnumber all other types of links combined.

Having said this, I must say I can never get the hang of LJ. To avoid implicating anyone, here is a fictitious yet realistic example of one of my many, many trips into LJ:

I’ll see a comment from someone named “HPFan“. They will say something nice about my work, and so I’ll want to visit their site and find out a bit about them. If nothing else, it would be nice to know their gender so I know if I should use “he” or “she” in my reply. Their name links to their website, which is amazing-rando.livejournal.com. I visit the site, and see the site is named Shiva’s Lair. Their user portrait is a .gif animation of Hello Kitty saying “Die. Mortals.” Under this picture It will say User: amazing-rando, and under that it says, Name: Poetic Crank. As a bonus, they may offer an email link like: agent69@gmail.com. As someone who has always blogged and emailed and comented and posted under his own, real name, I am confused by this. To me, it’s like this person has six names.

If I made a LJ site, it would be shamusyoung.livejournal.com, my site name would be something like “Shamus’ Place”, and would say User: Shamus. Name: Shamus. Email: [email protected]. And the user picture would be a picture of me. However, I’ve never seen a single LJ user do this. I think I’d be breaking some sort of taboo.

I’ll surf around Shiva’s Lair and try to find out a bit about this person who was good enough to visit my site and pay me a compliment. The site itself will instantly make me feel out of touch, because it will be centered around some aspect of online culture which I have never heard of, and that is apparently very established, complex, popular, and quite beyond my understanding. Like, maybe the site is frequented by a group of people who spend their time translating the entire series of Harry Potter books into iambic pentameter Shakespearian prose. They will have their own acronyms and terms for things, so much so that I’ll understand less than half of what they have to say.

I’ll suddenly feel like a small town priest visiting the big city, who unwittingly blunders into a dimly lit fetish club for BDSM enthusiasts, some of whom like to dress up like nuns and priests. I may escape with my virtue and sanity intact, but I’ll be left with the frightening realization that the world is so much bigger than I imagined.

LATER: A further note is that I find sites which link me by looking at Technorati. It’s possible that I’m getting BSpot / Blogger / MySpace links that Technorati isn’t finding, or that LJ is just more Technorati friendly.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Free Radical Reviewed

By Shamus Posted Monday Feb 5, 2007

Filed under: Links 16 comments

 htAkismetPrevious Post

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Goblin Paladin has posted a review of my cyberpunk novel. He focuses on the book’s strength and and quite positive in his review. Thanks for that.

When the book was new I coaxed and hinted around, hoping someone would write a review of the thing. (In an act of hubris, I tried to get a Slashdot review. Now I’m glad that didn’t happen. I’d have gotten savaged.) Writing fiction without an editor is a bit like working without a net: If I screw up, there isn’t anyone to keep me from making a fool of myself. I think most authors want a (positive) review that will entice readers to read their work. I wanted a review so I could get some objective analysis of what worked and what didn’t. Even five years later, I’m still grateful when someone is kind enough to email or post their thoughts once they finish the book.

And now I am going to do something unseemly. I am going to respond by reviewing my own book.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Free Radical Reviewed”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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16 comments

DM of the Rings LX:
The Madness of King Whatsizname

By Shamus Posted Monday Feb 5, 2007

Filed under: DM of the Rings 72 comments

 DM of the Rings LIX:
Disorder of the StickPrevious Post

Next PostDM of the Rings LXI:
Words Get in the Way 

On one hand, taking away their weapons is a dead giveaway that they will need them. On the other hand, by the time conflict starts the players will already have opened the rulebooks and found the parts that deal with bare-handed combat, performing disarm moves, and using improvised weapons.

Players may blunder through dialog with shocking ineptitude, forget the name of the country they are in, or get confused about which side they are on, but once it comes time to roll for initiative they all turn into Sun Tzu.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Disorder of the StickPrevious Post

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Words Get in the Way 

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