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Sooner or later, we all become Dave.
A quick glance around this site should reveal that I have a profound dice problem. I can’t walk into the geek store without picking up a couple of new dice, even when they are sold for the outragous price of $0.75 ea.
Steven talks about the various places he’s lived and compares notes on the weather. This brings to mind the following…
I’ve only ever lived two places: Near Pittsburgh and near Boston. I lived an hour north of both cities. (Er. Not at the same time. You know what I mean.) The climate is similar, although the winters in Boston seem bleaker because the days seem shorter. The two places are in the same time zone, but Boston is several hundred miles northeast of Pittsburgh, and could easily be in the next time zone. So, the sun sets a good bit sooner. Specifically, it set before I got off work at 5:30, which means that during the winter I only really saw the sun on weekends.
But the big thing that made me crazy in Boston was the flatness. Western PA has the texture of a wrinkled blanket – you can never find a level spot. If you’re moving along the ground, then you are also either moving up or down. I never realized how important this was to me. (I can understand how someone from flatland would dislike Western PA. The hills would make them feel walled in and it might make someone seasick if they aren’t used to it, but I grew up here and so it feels normal.) Sometimes you’re driving uphill and all you see is the road leading off into the sky. Then you crest the hill and you can suddenly see for miles. Then it’s back down into another valley.
But Boston, being near the coast, is very level by comparison. I never expected this is be so irritating. I felt like I could never get an “overhead” view of where I was. Without great big hills giving the horizon some shape, I couldn’t map the place out or judge distance. If a winding road heading west-ish began to bend slowly Northwards, I couldn’t sense it because I didn’t have a fixed marker on the horizon. Since most roads were built before cars, the road system isn’t a grid; each town has a bunch of roads projecting from them at random angles. It looks more like the old “spiderweb” view of the WWW.
So, the roads were mapped out according to a system of total chaos. I couldn’t navigate by landmark because I was stuck on a flat plane. I couldn’t intuit where to go based on direction. The upshot of all of this was that I was lost all the dang time. It was pathetic. Even after living there for a year I was still wary of venturing too far off of my familiar commute between home and work, because a bad turn could get me lost for an hour.
They made a big deal about how beautiful the place was in the autumn, but autumn was the same in Pittsburgh. The only difference was that in Boston the trees right in front of you would occlude all of the trees behind them, so you could never get that big, panoramic view of golden trees going all the way to the horizon. Also, the place was so densely developed that if you did somehow see it from above, you’d see way more buildings than trees. There just weren’t that many trees left.
It’s interesting. Lots of people love it, but because it wasn’t what I was used to I just couldn’t. I suppose someone born there who moved here would be irritated for all of the opposite reasons.
This is cool: My little YouTube movie was mentioned in TheyNow, an unofficial They Might Be Giants audioblog.
(As an aside, What is that little embedded audio player? It doesn’t seem to be branded. It’s a very small and low-profile player, which might make it the sort of thing Fledge was looking for a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure. I can’t tell where the audio is hosted, which is the key question here.)
Anyway, in the podcast Bryan talks about me using a TMBG song for my little movie. The song I used in this case was “Older”, and the version I used was off of their Mink Car album. He speculates that I chose the song at random. Sadly, the real reason I chose that song was even less interesting: I chose the song because it was the shortest of all of the TMBG I had on my computer. The cut of Older that I used was almost exactly two minutes, which was about how long my movie was. That was the only reason I chose it in the first place. It was only after I dropped it into place that I realized how perfect it was: Each section of the song fit nicely over a segment of the movie, and the most exciting part of the song lined up really well with the action part of the movie, which is where the rollercoaster runs everyone over. Those booming hits of percussion turned out to be ideal cues for the cuts I wanted to make.
I enjoyed making the movie, and a lot of people on YouTube have subscribed to me in hopes that I’ll put up another, but I honestly doubt I can do that again. It was the result of serendipity as much as creativity.
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Any seasoned roleplayer knows they are not limited by the rulebooks. Anything is possible as long as they can justify it to the DM.
While looking through the various videogame movies on YouTube, I found this bit of madness from Japan: Sexy Beach.
I can’t read the menus, but I’m going to guess this is something like Animal Crossing meets Colorful. Only the Japanese could imagine such a union. I imagine the fellow playing this game looks just like this guy. (Scroll about halfway down the page, and behold the lair of the panty otaku!)
Again, I’m just extrapolating, but I’m willing to bet that this game has you engage in some of low-risk but dull activity to earn some sort of currency, which can then be used to unlock new girls to oogle, new outfits for them to wear, and new locations in which to ogle them.
Like all of the best stuff from Japan, it is both humorous and frightening.
WordPress, the software that runs this blog, assigns each post a number in the order that they are written. For example, this is post #744. According to the admin page, I’ve published 615 posts.
When it comes to my longer essay style posts, I usually let them simmer for a few days. On Day 1 I’ll type some sentence fragments of the points I want to make. Day 2 I’ll gather some URL’s and toss them in. Day 3 I’ll try to hammer the thing into some sort of prose. Day 4 I’ll read it over and decide if I still like it. If I don’t I toss it. If I do, I clean up and post it, sometimes rembering to spell-check. Lots of essays never make the cut. Somewhere in the chain of events I’ll just abandon it, or decide I don’t care, or that the idea is boring.
I didn’t think this happened very often, but going by the numbers WordPress is giving me it looks like I throw away a little more than one out of every seven posts. I’ve tossed 129 posts so far. The casualty list is actually a bit longer than that, since I have a few dozen posts that I’ve abandoned but haven’t gotten around to deleting.
Since the essay posts are the ones that get killed before they mature (smaller posts get written and posted in a single sitting) and since most of my posts are “small” posts, I would say my essay survival rate is probably closer to two out of three.
In retrospect this seems a bit wierd. Anyone else do this? How do you blog?
Jay Barnson is talking about using the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying system on a computer. I just want to refer back to this bit I wrote a while back, where I pointed out that d20 gaming is great for pencil and paper but translates poorly to the computer.
Adding to my previous thoughts in that post, I would say another important concept to keep in mind when making roleplaying games for the PC is that the games ought to look for ways to make the character growth ladder as tall as possible.
The idea is that players love to get “power rewards” where they become stronger, usually by leveling up in some fashion. These rewards keep them playing, but you need to keep them coming at a steady rate if you don’t want the game to feel like a grind. You also need each power reward to matter. The player is not going to get excited if you give them an extra 0.001% damage and another half a hitpoint when they level up. They want real, tangible rewards that they can see in action. Finally, you’ll want lots of them, since the goal is to make games that are long.
The only way to do this – to have lots of meaningful rewards that go on for a long time – is to make the difference between the starting player and the end-game player be several orders of magnitude. Now, this isn’t exactly realistic, but it does make the game fun. The Final Fantasy usually works this way, where the player starts out at level one or two and maxes out at level 99. Yes, it’s funny when you travel back to the beginning of the game and find some monster with fifty hitpoints that used to give you so much trouble, and kill it with a single attack that delivers 9,999 damage. Not realistic, but funny. And rewarding.
A computer RPG doesn’t need to go quite that far, but it should look for ways to reward players more often than standard D&D. With only 20 levels, you just can’t give the player rewards very often.
Another issue is the time taken during level up. In D&D, leveling up is a big event. There is paperwork to do. Allocate skill points. Select a new feat. Perhaps select an attribute to improve. Roll up your new hit points. Add some spells to the spell book. There is a lot of screwing around to do and numbers to run and tradeoffs to consider. In the slow pace of a pencil and paper game this is fine, but in the context of a computer game this becomes quite an interruption. When using the d20 system on the computer, rewards are too rare, and when they do come they are too big and take too long. Better to re-work the system so that that one big step is broken in a few smaller ones.
And finally, a lot of stuff in D&D just doesn’t translate at all. D&D is a social game where real human beings have real conversations. On the computer, the game is focused more on combat, and if you’re talking to someone then you’re usually navigating a dialog tree. There are social skill and feats that just don’t work very well in this context, and some that are all but useless. (Gather information and sense motive are particularly tricky to convey in a game. I’m sure there are others that can’t be used at all on the computer.) Even if the designers went to the trouble to allow you to use social skills in a conversation, it isn’t nearly as satisfying to do so, and not as obvious that you are actually using those skill points when you do.
The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that d20 on a computer is a bad idea. This is not to say that Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, or Planescape: Torment are bad games. There is a lot of fun to be had, but I think they are so in spite of their shortcomings. I think those same stories, built on a system geared more towards the computer, would be even better.
LATER: Many excellent thoughts from David V. S. here, as well as in the comments below. The post over at Maggid’s Musings is particularly brain-tickling if you’ve ever contemplated game systems and how they work (or do not work) and how they could be made better.
MORE LATERER: I like how my link to Maggid’s Musings said “Megid’s musings” for a whole day and nobody said anything. Makes me afraid of what other typos I’ve thrown up here and everyone just let slide.
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
T w e n t y S i d e d
