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Casting a Short Shadow

The calm following spring break didn’t last long.

After a week off, both teachers and students had a chance to get all their stuff together. The kids were, by-and-large, sufficiently refreshed to put up with sitting through lessons. We had pleasant weather, but not so pleasant as to keep the students focused on getting outside.

Now it’s Wednesday, and it’s all back to business as usual, or worse. Lots of missing assignments, and shoulder chips visible to the naked eye. And my kids just aren’t getting the lessons. It’s our third day on probability in one class, our second on some very simple formula work in the others, so I chalk the failure up to a lack of attention and not the difficulty of the material, or to my own arcane delivery. And the bad apples are being complete shits: three detention slips in one day.

We’re only three days past a week’s vacation, and already I want a break. Or at least a nap.

2011 04 28 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Independent Streak

Last night, one of my fellow RPG players delighted to announce that this was the first time that her character had been allowed to operate independently, to which she hastily added “with the sanction of the rest of the group,” because her character is a sneaky little bastard, a liar and thief with no regard for societal norms and little regard for his adoptive group, and has operated independently several times already—without supervision, and to everyone’s general regret. I say “little” and “adoptive” because he’s also about ten years old. In modern Providence, Rhode Island, where he should be going to school and handed to state child support services, because none of us is a proper surrogate parent. Is it any wonder he hasn’t been trusted with a whole lot of freedom?

The implied criticism that we aren’t allowing her to play the way she wants rubs me the wrong way because the rest of us were forced to perform some contortions simply to accommodate little Michael Valdez at all. Creating a sympathetic character who wouldn’t turn a ten-year-old over to the authorities for his own good, but would instead bring him into a deadly secret magical war is mighty difficult, and sharply reduces the other players’ options for fun character concepts. Creating a character so callous to a child’s needs as to let him run free in a secret war, but not so callous as to object when he screws up our corner of the story while “just staying in character” and also naïve enough not to recognize that a kid channeling the avatar of the Artful Dodger might not be entirely trustworthy is both difficult and full of potential for not having fun. Expecting four players to do so at once is grossly intrusive upon other players’ prerogatives. That in itself can be fine, depending on the players in question; some groups accept a lot of cross-player influence on character concept. But anyone willing to push that hard has no complaint when the rest of the group pushes back by, say, refusing her character freedom to operate on his own.

And now, after four players and a novice GM bent over backwards to accommodate little Michael Valdez, halfway into the action, including prophecies that he’s going to be part of the climax, Michael has announced that he’s had enough of this whole supernatural-threat-to-the-world thing and is just going to strike off on his own to find his parents. It’s essentially a player announcement that her role in the campaign isn’t really as fun as she’d imagined, and she’s prepared to quit, or at least shoe-horn in a new character. The potential disruption is great enough to take on overtones of threat: play the way I want or I’ll wreck the campaign for everybody.

If you want to be part of the campaign, it’s up to you to create a compatible character. When you create a character without reference to the campaign’s setting or theme, the action moves on without you. When you create a character without reference to your fellow PCs’ goals, they quickly discover they have no connection to yours. And when you create a character without concern for your PCs’ concepts, you quickly find they have problems with your behavior, and may even seek to stymie you. (Why not, when you’re already screwing them over?) If that perpetual status of contemptible outsider isn’t fun, don’t force your fellow players to deliver it to you. Or at the very least, suffer in patient silence when they discover they must.

2011 04 26 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Just Chat

I had a very interesting job interview yesterday, though I didn’t realize it until I was already driving home. Job interviews, for any job, tend to be pretty similar, since they serve a similar purpose. There’s a standard format to them, and a set of standard questions. Some, like the infamous “what’s your greatest weakness?” seem to come from some manager’s manual. Maybe they do; after a few interviews, you begin to recognize almost a bullet point list of questions offered with only minor variations.

This last interview wasn’t like that; the department head was just chatty, asking how my student teaching is going and commiserating over the certification process. I have a hard time with small talk, to the point where it can put me ill at ease. In general, a bullet point list is more comforting. But this discussion, at least, was just a pleasant conversation. Seemingly. As I reviewed the conversation in my head, I realized we’d hit the whole bullet point list of questions after all; but the exchange was couched in a way as to make it seem perfectly natural.

Perhaps I helped make that possible, knowing what kinds of things a school might want to know and sharing that reflexive desire to explain as completely as possible common to teachers, especially math and science teachers. But I doubt it. I suspect I was coaxed through by a very skilled conversationalist, and would have given the same information just as naturally had I different answers to give. Very impressive. A talent to envy.

2011 04 26 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

No PC is an Island, Entire of Himself

Last night, one of my fellow RPG players delighted to announce that this was the first time that her character had been allowed to operate independently, to which she hastily added “with the sanction of the rest of the group,” because her character is a sneaky little bastard, a liar and thief with no regard for societal norms and little regard for his adoptive group, and has operated independently several times already—without supervision, and to everyone’s general regret. I say “little” and “adoptive” because he’s also about ten years old. In modern Providence, Rhode Island, where he should be going to school and handed to state child support services, because none of us is a proper surrogate parent. Is it any wonder he hasn’t been trusted with a whole lot of freedom?

The implied criticism that we aren’t allowing her to play the way she wants rubs me the wrong way because the rest of us were forced to perform some contortions simply to accommodate little Michael Valdez at all. Creating a sympathetic character who wouldn’t turn a ten-year-old over to the authorities for his own good, but would instead bring him into a deadly secret magical war is mighty difficult, and sharply reduces the other players’ options for fun character concepts. Creating a character so callous to a child’s needs as to let him run free in a secret war, but not so callous as to object when he screws up our corner of the story while “just staying in character” and also naïve enough not to recognize that a kid channeling the avatar of the Artful Dodger might not be entirely trustworthy is both difficult and full of potential for not having fun. Expecting four players to do so at once is grossly intrusive upon other players’ prerogatives. That in itself can be fine, depending on the players in question; some groups accept a lot of cross-player influence on character concept. But anyone willing to push that hard has no complaint when the rest of the group pushes back by, say, refusing her character freedom to operate on his own.

And now, after four players and a novice GM bent over backwards to accommodate little Michael Valdez, halfway into the action, including prophecies that he’s going to be part of the climax, Michael has announced that he’s had enough of this whole supernatural-threat-to-the-world thing and is just going to strike off on his own to find his parents. It’s essentially a player announcement that her role in the campaign isn’t really as fun as she’d imagined, and she’s prepared to quit, or at least shoe-horn in a new character. The potential disruption is great enough to take on overtones of threat: start playing the game I want, or I’ll wreck the campaign.

If you want to be part of the campaign, it’s up to you to create a compatible character. When you create a character without reference to the campaign’s setting or theme, the action moves on without you. When you create a character without reference to your fellow PCs’ goals, they quickly discover they have no connection to yours. And when you create a character without concern for your PCs’ concept, you quickly find they have problems with your behavior, and may even seek stymie you. If that perpetual status of contemptible outsider isn’t fun, don’t force your fellow players to deliver it to you. Or at the very least, suffer in patient silence when they do.

2011 04 26 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

End of Dinner

Over spring break, we took an overnight trip to Boston, partly to visit my high school buddy Brian and his wife, Nattie, but mostly for the food.

We went overnight in large part because I wanted to visit two Chinese restaurants of my college days: Mary Chung’s, which Eileene has tried and loves, and King Fung Garden (informally known as Brezhnev’s), which she hadn’t. Also, Toscanini’s ice cream.

What a disappointment Brezhnev’s was. It’s still a hole-in-the-wall, built into a converted gas station, about five tables packed together. But nothing else of what I remember remains. Much of the charm of Brezhnev’s was its seediness. Half the menu was pinned to the wall, hand-written only in Chinese, and the student clientele had to learn by trial-and-error, word of mouth, and pantomime conversations with Chinese patrons what dishes to order. The seats were shredded and duct-taped over. You could just barely see the cook rummaging up your ingredients, because he had no space in which to work. The waitress didn’t really speak English. For many years, there wasn’t even a sign out front, which is how the restaurant got an unofficial name. The board of health frequently shut the place down. But the prices couldn’t be beat, the food was plentiful and very good (hard-to-find Shanxi cuisine), and the seaminess contributed to a sense of adventure, a sense that you were getting the real gastronomic deal.

That’s gone now. The restaurant is still run-down, but not to the point of gaining a horrible charm; it’s just run-down. There’s fresh paint and decorations on the walls. The menu is wholly bilingual, and the signature dishes have been replaced by Americanized entrees to match. The beef lo mein, once very nearly the reason to go at all, is no longer gloriously greasy and rich but spongy and dry. The potstickers (called Peking ravioli in Boston) obviously came from a crate. The owner/cook, who resembled Leonid Brezhnev and thus gave the place its informal nickname is gone, and with him both ambiance and food, and a little piece of my soul, as well.

Mary Chung’s was its usual treat, but my swan la chow shou came with a side order of memento mori. I first visited in 1986. Twenty-five years is a long time in the restaurant business, and I’m both surprised and grateful that it’s still there. But not forever.

2011 04 25 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Memento Mori

Over spring break, we took an overnight trip to Boston, partly to visit my high school buddy Brian and his wife, Nattie, but mostly for the food.

We went overnight in large part because I wanted to visit two Chinese restaurants of my college days: Mary Chung’s, which Eileene has tried and loves, and King Fung Garden (informally known as Brezhnev’s), which she hadn’t. Also, Toscanini’s ice cream.

What a disappointment Brezhnev’s was. It’s still a hole-in-the-wall, built into a converted gas station, about five tables packed together. But nothing else of what I remember remains. Much of the charm of Brezhnev’s was its seediness. Half the menu was pinned to the wall, hand-written only in Chinese, and the student clientele had to learn by trial-and-error, word of mouth, and pantomime conversations with Chinese patrons what dishes to order. The seats were shredded and duct-taped over. You could just barely see the cook rummaging up your ingredients, because he had no space in which to work. The waitress didn’t really speak English. For many years, there wasn’t even a sign out front, which is how the restaurant got an unofficial name. The board of health frequently shut the place down. But the prices couldn’t be beat, the food was plentiful and very good (hard-to-find Shanxi cuisine), and the seaminess contributed to a sense of adventure, a sense that you were getting the real gastronomic deal.

That’s gone now. The restaurant is still run-down, but not to the point of gaining a horrible charm; it’s just run-down. There’s fresh paint and decorations on the walls. The menu is wholly bilingual, and the signature dishes have been replaced by Americanized entrees to match. The beef lo mein, once very nearly the reason to go at all, is no longer gloriously greasy and rich but spongy and dry. The potstickers (called Peking ravioli in Boston) obviously came from a crate. The owner/cook, who resembled Leonid Brezhnev and thus gave the place its informal nickname is gone, and with him both ambiance and food, and a little piece of my soul, as well.

Mary Chung’s was its usual treat, but my swan la chow shou came with a side order of memento mori. I first visited in 1986. Twenty-five years is a long time in the restaurant business, and I’m both surprised and grateful that it’s still there. But not forever.

2011 04 25 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Trainyard

On our Boston trip, Brian introduced me to an iPad game called “Trainyard.” Excellent.

Your goal is to shepherd colored trains from starting depots to the proper exit stations, indicated by matching colors. When trains meet, they share colors, so a blue train that bumps into a yellow train becomes green. If the trains meet on merging track, they join to become a single train; if they pass in opposite or perpendicular directions, they continue on their separate routes, becoming two trains sharing a compound color. So it’s not enough simply to lay track from point A to point B; you must arrange the trips so that trains meet (or not) in such a way as to get the right number of the proper colors to satisfy the stations’ color code. Timing can be crucial.

To accomplish all this, you lay your track all at once, push the GO button, and hope you planned everything out properly. The automated flicking of shunting switches on branching track often force you back to the drawing board. There is very little space to work with: just a 7×7 grid. On the tougher puzzles, this doesn’t seem like enough, but there’s always a way. In keeping with the iPad’s communicative nature, players can share their solutions—allowing cheaters to give up and look at the answer, and egotists to compete for shortest/fastest/simplest design.

Altogether excellent. I’m not buying an iPad just to play it, but I eagerly await a PC port.

2011 04 22 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Just Small Talk

I had a very interesting job interview yesterday, though I didn’t realize it until I was already driving home. Job interviews, for any job, tend to be pretty similar, since they serve a similar purpose. There’s a standard format to them, and a set of standard questions. Some, like the infamous “what’s your greatest weakness?” seem to come from some manager’s manual. Maybe they do; after a few interviews, you begin to recognize almost a bullet point list of questions offered with only minor variations.

This last interview wasn’t like that; the department head was just chatty, asking how my student teaching is going and commiserating over the certification process. I have a hard time with small talk, to the point where it can put me ill at ease. In general, a bullet point list is more comforting. But this discussion, at least, was just a pleasant conversation. Seemingly. As I reviewed the conversation in my head, I realized we’d hit the whole bullet point list of questions after all; but the exchange was couched in a way as to make it seem perfectly natural.

Perhaps I helped make that possible, knowing what kinds of things a school might want to know and sharing that reflexive desire to explain as completely as possible common to teachers, especially math and science teachers. But I doubt it. I suspect I was coaxed through by a very skilled conversationalist, and would have given the same information just as naturally had I different answers to give. Very impressive. A talent to envy.

2011 04 22 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Portal 2

Mmm… Portal.

For those who have lived in a Siberian cave for the past decade, Portal is a game—a series of puzzles, really—that employ a first-person shooter engine but replace the usual bullet-shooting gun with a gun that shoots magical teleportation gates: shoot a blue gate onto a sufficiently large, flat surface, shoot an orange gate onto another, and objects (including you) can pass directly between them. The original Portal ran you through a deadly Skinner rat maze requiring the use of the portals to progress from test to test and ultimately escape, taunted the whole way by GlaDOS.

GlaDOS was the psychotic AI running the tests, equal parts HAL9000 and Nurse Ratched: cruel, petty, and transparently insincere, brilliantly scripted. Her voice transformed the game from appetizer-sized addon puzzle to phenomenon. The world loves GlaDOS.

Portal 2 had a tough act to follow. Inevitably, it failed to match Portal. The Valve guys did all they could, but… something’s missing. As a sequel, Portal 2 lacks novelty value. GlaDOS and two new personalities are still brilliantly scripted, but the shock value of GlaDOS’s passive-aggressive malice can’t be reproduced. The puzzles remain excellent, but players now expect to do cool and clever things; the shock that holy shit you can also do this with a portal gun can’t be replicated. Plus, as I predicted last June, there’s only so much you can do with a portal gun alone; the new puzzles have to employ a wider variety of puzzle elements to remain new, at some expense to the elegance that made the original so amazing. Matching the near-perfection of the original wasn’t merely grossly improbable because near-perfection is tough to pull off; it was impossible because we’d already seen it.

So “not quite as good” is a huge compliment here. As I say, the narration is swell and the puzzles clever. They retain the magic of making you feel smart for solving them, despite some very broad hints. The two-player screens add a rewarding new dimension without a loss of elegance. Definitely worth your time and money. Maybe not quite as worth your money as the $10 original, and, like its predecessor, over all too soon, but still…

2011 04 20 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Portal Returns

Mmm… Portal.

For those who have lived in a Siberian cave for the past decade, Portal is a game—a series of puzzles, really—that employ a first-person shooter engine but replace the usual bullet-shooting gun with a gun that shoots magical teleportation gates: shoot a blue gate onto a sufficiently large, flat surface, shoot an orange gate onto another, and objects (including you) can pass directly between them. The original Portal ran you through a deadly Skinner rat maze requiring the use of the portals to progress from test to test and ultimately escape, taunted the whole way by GlaDOS.

GlaDOS was the psychotic AI running the tests, equal parts HAL9000 and Nurse Ratched: cruel, petty, and transparently insincere, brilliantly scripted. Her voice transformed the game from appetizer-sized addon puzzle to phenomenon. The world loves GlaDOS.

Portal 2 had a tough act to follow. Inevitably, it failed to match Portal. The Valve guys did all they could, but… something’s missing. As a sequel, Portal 2 lacks novelty value. GlaDOS and two new personalities are still brilliantly scripted, but the shock value of GlaDOS’s passive-aggressive malice can’t be reproduced. The puzzles remain excellent, but players now expect to do cool and clever things; the shock that holy shit you can also do this with a portal gun can’t be replicated. Plus, as I predicted last June, there’s only so much you can do with a portal gun alone; the new puzzles have to employ a wider variety of puzzle elements to remain new, at some expense to the elegance that made the original so amazing. Matching the near-perfection of the original wasn’t merely grossly improbable because near-perfection is tough to pull off; it was impossible because we’d already seen it.

So “not quite as good” is a huge compliment here. As I say, the narration is swell and the puzzles clever. They retain the magic of making you feel smart for solving them, despite some very broad hints. The two-player screens add a rewarding new dimension without a loss of elegance. Definitely worth your time and money. Maybe not quite as worth your money as the $10 original, and, like its predecessor, over all too soon, but still…

2011 04 20 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink