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Gamer Hope Foundation

For a couple months now, the Escapist has hosted “Extra Credits,” an op/ed piece about electronic games, especially electronic game design. I stumbled across it via “Zero Punctuation,” to which it provides an excellent counterpoint.

Both care deeply about the quality of games, but where Zero Punctuation unloads venomous criticism of every tiny flaw, Extra Credits tends to focus on the bits they love most, which come from every game. ZP’s host, Yahtzee, often criticizes by catch-22, savaging every game element that doesn’t work at least as well as earlier titles and rejecting out of hand any game which isn’t a first-person shooter, but also complaining when games are too similar to others. EC tends to admit then gloss over current problems and look toward a brighter future, whether or not it is ever likely to materialize. EC isn’t quite pollyanna-ish, but it can seem that way when the team is understating a problem in your particular back yard and insisting it’s all good.

The feature’s saving grace is its business perspective. Writer, narrator, and artist all work in the industry, and know how things work, rather than simply envisioning cooler stuff. Their industry experience simultaneously forces them to admit games have problems and informs me (and I expect a lot of gamers who only want what they want when they want it) just why the industry is cranking out twenty FPS titles for every one of anything else, or why so many MMOs fail, or why game dialogue sucks so badly. Short and universal answer: games have to make a profit. It’s not that high-roller executives without a clue about game design sabotage everything (although that plays a role, one EC has yet to acknowledge), but that even companies devoted to turning out a good product often have to cut corners just to survive. And often we the customers contribute to lowest-common-denominator thinking by continuing to buy lowest-common-denominator games.

Extra Credits is, by and large, fair-minded and informative, and worth the watch five minutes a week. If the habit of ending on an upbeat note starts to get too sweet, you can temper each dose with a shot of bitters by clicking over to Zero Punctuation.

2010 10 29 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Posts of the Past

My friend Tim has only recently discovered the Leroy Jenkins meme and, with it, several other classic YouTube recordings from or about World of Warcraft. He never played WoW. For a computer gamer, that alone is unusual, but for a fan of computer “RPGs” like Diablo and Fallout, it’s downright bizarre. So now we’re getting periodic email asking whether we’ve seen this or that video. Of course we have. We played WoW. Which is why Tim figures the videos might be of interest.

Internet memes that go viral have much in common with top ten hits a generation ago: entertaining once, twice, maybe ten or twelve times if you want to sneak back and memorize them for geeky quotation purposes, but sooner or later you just wish they’d go away, perhaps that they’d never been made in the first place. And it’s slightly weird to have someone come by years later, totally unaware that it was played at all, much less overplayed to the point of eye-rolling, and ask, “Hey, have you ever heard this song? It’s awesome.” I wonder if readers of the 18th century were occasionally surprised to be asked whether they’d ever heard of this Shake-spear guy, it’s pretty good.

2010 10 27 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Putt Putt

Grandma Roth took my brother and me goofy golfing (also called miniature golf or putt-putt golf) often. I still enjoy it. Indeed, I enjoy it much more as an adult. Thanks to slightly better coordination and much better anger management, putting no longer threatens to send me into a tantrum. It’s a shame that most courses are so seedy—crumbling concrete, rotating obstacles whose motors have broken, ragged turf, damaged tee pads, warped lanes, detritus all over the greens. So finding a really good course is a pleasure.

We visited the location before, the miniature golf course closest to home, but it too was run-down and poorly designed, and we wrote it off. It’s had a face-lift since, and what a difference! Anyone intending to run a goofy golf course should look to Willowbrook Golf Center as a model of how to do it properly. Apart from good upkeep, features to emulate include:

holes without moving parts—electric motors are both expensive and unreliable, and add more frustration than thrill
few locations prone to striking a ball out of bounds
dramatic slopes in place of these hazards, but only in select locations, pockets to trap the unwary
patches of shaggy (really shaggy) astroturf, often combined with these traps, to simulate rough or sand traps
location of all these traps well to the edges of the “fairway,” penalizing gross inaccuracy rather than trivial errors
mild slopes elsewhere—just enough to give the hole personality, not enough to ensure that a bad putt rolls right back to your feet or, worse, enough to force all the balls to collect in the same groove
“greens” that are level and sufficiently large, if approached from a slope, to allow you to putt out after reaching it; none of those scenarios where you miss a short putt and end up rolling a dozen yards away
a minimum of random elements, like those scenarios where you putt into a preliminary hole, and your ball bounces randomly into one of several pipes to be delivered to the green
doglegs and obstacles designed to reward planning and lay-up shots

In short, the course deserves the epithet “miniature golf” rather than “goofy golf”: silly, gimmicky obstacles are absent, and most of the challenge lies in the approach to the hole, finishing up with routine putting if you’ve planned the approach properly. Maintenance helps—balls end up out of bounds a lot more often on courses where a wooden railing designed to prevent it rots away and isn’t replaced—but the holes are designed from the start to feel like golf in miniature. Which is just what it should be.

2010 10 26 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Where Do the Minutes Go?

Jamie Oliver has a show titled “30-Minute Meals” or something similar. The basic premise is that time is no excuse to give up on home cooking; you can whip up attractive, delicious, and nutritious meals in half an hour.

This is true, and I heartily agree that people should cook meals more often, rather than ordering pizza or nuking a burrito or whatever they do to fuel their system, usually involving too much processed food. (I also believe families should eat dinner together more often, and home cooking can help make that happen.) So I endorse Oliver’s intent.

The skeptic in me, however, rises up unbidden: in preparing his thirty-minute meals, Oliver fails to count an awful lot of minutes. He’s a trained chef, for starters; he can peel and core an apple in the time it takes me to type this sentence. For you and me, preparing the apples for a homemade apple tart is more involved simply due to inexperience—perhaps five or ten minutes’ work, instead of one or two. The program begins with all ingredients readily to hand, when the time spent gathering them up, thawing meat, selecting spices, measuring out a half cup of sugar, and so on—another three minutes or more, especially if thawing meat—ought to count as time spent cooking. Oliver enjoys a large, empty kitchen counter, which I, for one, do not share; we have few cabinets, so our limited counter space is further crowded by appliances, and my effective working space is about one square yard. Without space to work, an amateur cook can’t set out ingredients ahead of time, and loses more time to clearing space, washing hands, digging out new utensils, etc. between ingredients—maybe another three minutes. Nor can most of us blithely set the heat and turn our backs on a caramel sauce, confident in our ability to turn around and take it off the heat at just the right moment two and a half minutes later—time Oliver can spend readying his salad is time home cooks must spend watching that caramel sauce lest it burn. And it might burn anyway. Add two minutes remaking the caramel, ten minutes throwing open the windows and carefully cleaning the pan. And I guarantee what I turn out, using the same recipe, will not be as attractive as what he sets on the table.

The basic claim that cooking is faster and easier than it really is for mere mortals is a common refrain in cooking programs and cookbooks, typically accompanied by similar dodges, discounting time spent prepping, cleaning, making space, fixing mistakes, checking on the food’s progress. Ching-He Huang plays fast and loose with the timer when she races to prepare a noodle dish quicker than instant ramen. The Frugal Gourmet hides a lot of lost minutes (including time spent touching a dish up for photogenic purposes) when he pulls the pre-cooked pot pie from the oven, claiming that’s what the doughy pot pie he just popped in will look like when it’s done. Even beloved Julia hides prep time off-camera by sweeping scraps onto the floor—sweeping up and mopping afterwards isn’t “cooking time,” and besides, she has staff for that now. With Jamie Oliver’s show fresh in my mind, I heard a guest on Leonard Lopate today claim her chilled beet soup takes only five minutes to prepare. Once all the ingredients are sliced up and chilled, you can take them out of the fridge, and finish the soup in five minutes.

Excuse me? How is cleaning, peeling, slicing, and chilling the onions and beets not time spent making the soup?

Now, this doesn’t contradict the basic premise: that you can cook good home meals in a reasonable time with little effort. What takes Oliver thirty minutes to make might take me forty-five, or an hour at the outside, and it will be tasty and nutritious even if it can’t qualify for food porn. Still, I wish the prophets of home cooking would be a little more honest in their sermons, if only to avoid discouraging people who fail to meet false expectations.

2010 10 25 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Security By Exposure

An interesting defense for a whistleblower.

Wikileaks has again rushed in where more circumspect journalistic institutions fear to tread, alleging, with documentation, more scandalous military activity, in this case turning a blind eye to torture in the name of spreading democracy in Iraq. The army, predictably enough, has raised the alarm of national security. This is not, army spokesmen insist, a case of the army seeking to hide career-destroying material behind a fig leaf of official secrets. No, no, perish the thought. Why, the leak doesn’t even really jeopardize any extant operations, according to army spokesmen; Hillary Clinton, speaking for the State Department, is merely worried that the leak might endanger American lives in some unspecified manner.

You can believe that if you want to, but I can’t help noticing that is a curiously specific and curiously convenient degree of threat: just enough to justify the whistle-blower’s crucifixion under the PATRIOT Act and sequestering all relevant evidence, but not enough to require a change of doctrine, justify a change of strategy to safeguard the American lives now presumably endangered, nor to qualify as a criminal breach of security on the part of personnel who allowed the information to get out. I mean, it’s not like the US military doesn’t have a history of hiding war crimes and other embarrassments in the “state secrets” box. Were I in Wikileaks’ place, I’d just call bullshit.

But they aren’t. Instead, they’re playing along with the army’s claims to be concerned only for American lives. If that’s the case, Wikileaks asks, how many whistle-blowers would have been necessary to prevent the terrorist bombings of 9/11? How many whistle-blowers would have been necessary to make the case for invading Iraq at all politically untenable? If we’re measuring leaks only by the threat to American lives, isn’t there considerable cause to see a lot more transparency? And, given that the Obama administration has reneged on its promise of more transparency, and given that our established journalistic sources have virtually abandoned their role as watchdogs, where is the American public to turn for government accountability but whistle-blowers? Even if we care nothing for budgetary waste, abuse of power, and even treason, even if we care for nothing but the lives of American citizens, shouldn’t whistle-blowers be protected with fanatic zeal as effective, perhaps the best, perhaps even our only remaining safeguard?

It’s a highly intriguing riposte, and I’m eager to see whether it gets any traction.

2010 10 21 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Show Me Where It Says

Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, in formal debate with Democratic candidate Chris Cooms, shocked an audience of law students and their professors by denying that the US Constitution imposes a separation of church and state.

Later attempts to explain away the gaffe as merely a demand to see where the precise phrase “separation of church and state” appears in the Constitution are disingenuous. O’Donnell has claimed before, though to considerably less public sniggering because it was to sympathetic audiences, that there is no such imposition.

But the intention is a bigger lie yet. The phrase itself is not there; it originates in Jefferson’s personal correspondence: “a wall of separation between church and state,” and appears later in Supreme Court decisions. But the sentiment and the legal force is all there, in black and white. The First Amendment begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” To claim that there is no mandated separation of church and state simply because that exact phrase is not in the Constitution is something like claiming that murdering is Constitutionally protected because the word “murder” appears nowhere therein and so is a right “reserved to the States respectively, or to the People,” or that chaining up dark-skinned people and forcing them to pick cotton is acceptable, because the Constitution mentions nothing of chains and cotton in the Thirteenth Amendment, merely a prohibition of slavery, or that torturing political prisoners is perfectly legal, because the Constitution prohibits only of cruel and unusual punishment, not “torture.” And, God help us, we already seem to have accepted that last one.

Tea Party darlings: politicians who feel the laws only apply when convenient. Or better yet, made up entirely. By the right people, of course. Somehow, health care, another phrase which appears nowhere in the Constitution, is, in the minds of teabaggers, Constitutionally prohibited to an even greater degree than torture is acceptable.

Senators, like presidents, swear to support the Constitution. What, in the name of Ned, does O’Donnell expect she’ll be supporting?

2010 10 20 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

School of Hard Knocks

More horror stories today: lawsuits initiated by parents with plenty of assertiveness and no sense of perspective. Little Jimmy didn’t get an “A” on his geometry mid-term, which will keep him out of Harvard, which will mean he won’t become president, so I want twenty million dollars. Also horror stories about psycho teachers who decide little Jimmy is going to hell because he’s Hindu, so he should get a failing grade on every class assignment. We’ll get to read more about the details as part of our own class assignment.

We’re not supposed to focus on the right or wrong of the scenarios. The moral issues are about 90% settled anyway for anyone who isn’t bat-shit crazy, anyway, the uncertain 10% lying in the realm of precisely where the happy medium lies between complete lack of accountability and leaving teachers in fear of their jobs for the tiniest mis-step, and that’s a policy issue for administrators and politicians, not tomorrow’s teachers. No, we’re supposed to concentrate on the unhappy realities of the situation, such as the massive expense of fending off Crazy Dad and his $20M lawsuit and what that does to the rest of the school district, or the chance that little Jimmy is wound wayyyy too tight and jumps off a bridge when his GPA drops to 3.85, or just how much damage a certifiable loon can do to a classroom before finally being dismissed.

There’s two messages here. First: education law is written all too often to fit the left-field cases and not the functional majority. Second: teachers should be afraid of everything, all the time. Neither message is conducive to good education. But what can you do when you also need safeguards against cases like these?

2010 10 19 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

I Endeavour to Give Satisfaction, Sir

I came to it, as I do so many things, through RPGs. I thought it might be fun to play “the ultimate manservant” as a character, and even worked out how to simulate that seemingly psychic responsiveness to the master’s needs without resorting to anything as fickle as precognition. And eventually, I got around to dredging the source material for inspiration. There are many indispensable butler sidekicks, but they all pale in significance to Jeeves.

Jeeves is P. G Wodehouse’s masterpiece, valet to the callow, dimwitted, and self-absorbed Bertie Wooster, living off an allowance and engaging in misadventures with his equally callow, dimwitted, and self-absorbed chums from boarding school days, spouting banalities in fashionable 1905 slang, and generally making an ass of himself until his difficulties begin to look like looming calamities—marriage, for example—at which point Jeeves mildly steps in and saves Bertie from himself before setting out the evening’s scotch and soda and coasting silently from the room. Jeeves is infinitely the better man than his master, but remains happy to serve; one gets the distinct impression he would not care to rise to a station, such as prime minister, more befitting his talents.

They’re wonderful little stories, though I am at a loss to explain why. Simple trickster tales, and not very clever tricks at that, there’s really only one story told over and over—possibly two, if you distinguish between Bertie worming out of trouble some fussy aunt or half-wit chum dumps upon him (one trick) and trouble he creates for himself through failed subterfuge (two tricks). But they’re delivered with an art that makes them a delight to read, Thurber minus the resentful undercurrent, and decorated with Jeeves’ unflappable propriety and foresight.

“I ventured to take the liberty of doing so a few minutes before you arrived, sir.”
“You did?”
“Yes, sir. I thought it probable that the plan would meet with your approval.”

Postscript: Checked out the television version of Jeeves and Wooster, with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Blah. Too much farce, not enough gentle whimsy.

2010 10 18 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Daddy Issues

We’re pausing between campaigns to run a one-shot. I’d like to say we’re taking it as a palate-cleanser between grimmer campaigns, and we are, but the primary purpose is to buy Ella a few more weeks from stage-fright and her debut GMing a proper campaign. Also, Dave wanted to try out the FATE engine.

As a one-shot, and a two-fisted pulp adventure at that, we should employ throwaway characters, but I’m having a hard time keeping to the spirit of it all, which feels strange when I’m usually better at caricature than character. My problem is that we’re not simply grabbing characters off a rack; we’ve been asked to play the sons and daughters of the PCs from a previous steampunk-horror campaign, and mine was darker than most. He went mad exploring the hellish mineral Yernevite, which has now, twenty-four years later, become an ominous and worrisome super-fuel for mad inventions in this adventure. (For readers familiar with the Deadlands game: Yernevite is ghost rock with a different label and a green glow.) Officially, he’s a hero of the Russian state though himself a Pole with revolutionary sympathies; unofficially, he’s known nearly to have destroyed the world by chain reaction.

So much for daddy. Junior has inherited a lot of baggage. He’s lost a father at eight (who, in turn, lost his father young in the Krakow Rebellion); he’s struggling to live up to his father’s heroic name but growing suspicious that daddy wasn’t all he’s said to be; he’s grateful for the sponsorship he’s received from a Russian noble involved in the original expedition, but he’s grown suspicious that he’s kept in a gilded cage; he’s also a Pole in a Russian world amid revolutionary currents, but a Pole with a cushy army job. And he’s inherited at least a dose of daddy’s instability, though, denied its natural outlet, he has become a monster-slaying warrior rather than a mad scientist. Appropriately for a pulp hero, he’s a marble man, at or near the peak of physical perfection, young and handsome and polite and well-schooled as officer and gentleman. But the cracks run deep.

That’s more back story elements than I put into most of my characters for full campaigns, and they’re just the stuff mandated by the GM; I could add on another whole layer of who Constanz is in his own right, rather than what he’s inherited from Janos. It seems a terrible waste to blow all those richly conflicting motives on a quickie, but there it is.

2010 10 15 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Nobody’s Whore

Is all the froth about some staffer in Jerry Brown’s staff calling Meg Whitman a “whore” really necessary? I mean, apart from the Whitman campaigns eagerness to have something, anything, on the news apart from her own shortcomings? Okay, it’s not very polite to call someone a whore, but then, Whitman’s own staff—and family—and self—are not exactly the gold standard of polite intercourse, and name-calling on the campaign trail has become tediously common. More to the point, the time spent arguing over who called whom a whore is time wasted in the public discourse.

Especially since she is clearly not a whore. (A very unpleasant person, yes. But that’s something else again.) Whores sell sexual favors for money, or at least things of value primarily for their monetary worth. Metaphorically, whores sell their principles for monetary gain. A lot of Congress could be called metaphorical whores. But Whitman isn’t selling her principles; she’s campaigning on promises to improve the lot of millionaires and cut everyone else loose. Besides, it’s hard to imagine how she’ll recoup the money she’s sunk into the governor’s race even if she takes office and immediately sells it to the highest bidder(s), short of an impeachable offense like trying to sell the state to China or something. No, Whitman isn’t a whore.

She’s a john.

Really. She’s not the seller in this sordid affair, she’s the buyer. Unable to form healthy personal relationships with the people of California, she seeks instead to buy with cash money the favors that are supposed to be earned through devotion and respect. The real question is whether California is a whore. And I’m afraid we might not like the answer.

2010 10 14 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink