A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

07:44 pm - Wedding

Before I start talking about some other damn thing: warmest congratulations to my dear friends Jess (dictator555) and Nate-of-no-real-social-media-presence on getting married yesterday evening. I was pleased and honored to be in attendance for the relaxed and friendly ceremony out in Western Mass, which turned into kind of a con (of the fannish variety)... eventually nobody was left except a gaggle of gamer geeks staying up late, and many of us slept over. (The venue had a B&B conveniently attached.)

I just realized that this now means more than half of the seven players from the Diplomacy episode have gotten married since we filmed the game in early June. Wow. And they call that game divisive?

11:42 pm - Diplomacy - deleted scenes

Some bonus silliness for you.

12:56 am - Alea iacta est

Earlier today, ran into a reference to Julius Caesar's The die is cast, and its meaning in context. Here we are crossing the river, and while I have stacked up the odds in my favor to the best of my ability, from here on out its all down to ol' dame fortuna. Roll 'em.

As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.

And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.

So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.

01:03 pm - Please don't tell me to rewrite Volity for another platform.

Or rather, go ahead, but I'll just tell you the same thing I tell everyone else, when they say "Hey, you should make Volity for $SOME_NEW_THING" (most recently, this has been Google Wave). "No," says I, "you should make it. It's an open protocol. Knock yourself out."

My attitude towards Volity today is something like borderline hostility. I consider it an aspect of what William Gibson has called "the great clomping foot of nerdism", the kind that is always more interested in taking things apart and exhaustively cataloguing the components than it is in creating wonderful new stuff. Obsessed with categorization and taxonomies, of finding the common root to all things, and then trying to capture that in code, or at least in sprawling wikis. And then, when it's "done", wondering why nobody except for one's fellow robed adepts show any interest at all in it.

It's the video-game equivalent of spending more time writing and trimming an enormous, detailed "world bible" than in creating any stories set in that world. Or of tabletop-game "systems" like Icehouse or Piecepack, which despite their aspirations never sold to anyone other than hardcore game geeks (hi).

If you want to make a video game, go make it. The tools, community and resources to help you do so are all there for you. And yet, if you're a certain kind of geek, the temptation will exist to instead treat your game idea as the top level of a stack: the real prize, you're sure, lay in generalizing all the lower levels, paring and refactoring them into some sort of Ur-Game technology that will solve gaming, somehow, and lead inevitably to lifelong fortune and glory.

My advice is: don't go there, because I know you have great ideas and you're a ninja and everything, but that is folly. Please just make your game instead. I guarantee that you'll be happier with it, and you'll make more fans that way, too. If you're new to making games, the fans might not come, but you'll be so thrilled at what you made - even though it sucks - that you'll do it again, and again, and it will keep getting better. And eventually you'll really be onto something.

06:34 pm - Long in the tooth

Reading the most recent post on Play This Thing, where the writer (not G. C.) refers to the relatively recent Knytt as being the first freeware game they ever downloaded, reminds me of a small discussion I attended at last month's GameLoop. It was about game visuals, and most of the handful of attendees were actively employed as artists for modern video games.

Two things happened there that neatly confirmed the fact that I have moved into a new age demographic among game-players. The first was when the discussion's leader said "I'm going to date myself here, but..." followed by an allusion to Sonic the Hedgehog. This is a game that was published as I was starting college, so I don't automatically consider it a very old game, even though our prickly blue friend is old enough to vote now.

The second occurred when I casually mentioned the art style of arcade game cabinets as part of a larger point, while I was participating in the discussion. Nobody in the room knew was I was talking about - they may have been lifelong gamers, but it was well before their time! They all gazed at me like tell us about the war, grandpa, so I felt obliged to pull together a tiny art-history lesson about it. If you're at all familiar with my recent video projects you can correctly imagine that I took some enjoyment out of this.

Honestly, I'm kind of grinny about this realization, especially since I'm setting myself up to dive deeper into independent game journalism (c.f., c.f.). Having an air of experience isn't at all a bad thing!

01:47 pm - GameLoop afterword

Notes on a talk I led on game criticism, and a list of links I dropped in the middle of other peoples' talks: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/08/notes-from-my-gameloop-talk-an.html

09:44 pm - Goin' to GameLoop 2009

I shall be going to GameLoop on Saturday, the BarCamp-style "unconference" for game professionals. I had a great time at its inaugural event last year, and I've been especially looking forward to it since attending Boston BarCamp in April. I appreciate these sorts of nerdly social stewpots, and the combinatorial ideas that can come out of them.

Big fail, alas, on the work-goals I set for the weekend. I will have neither a finished Gameshelf episode, nor completed personal-bizcards. It's for the right reasons, I guess - I got surprised by a surge of Appleseed work this month, and have been putting in one fully billable day after another despite myself, with no desire afterwards to work on anything else. It's what I deserve to have stuffed into my gob after bitching so much about money problems. Here you go, then! Eat up. Oh well; they'll get done in the fullness of time.

And anyway, showing off one's own shit is a secondary reason to go to these things anyway. I go to meet interesting and smart people, and talk about games with them! My own status as a "game professional" status is very in-betweeny right now, but that doesn't mean I don't have a lot of stories to tell. Since last August, I've:

• Gotten serious about a commercial video game project, and then had it die in IP-licensing negotiation
• Launched an entirely new initiative in the online-gaming space, worked feverishly at it for six months, and am now (slowly but surely (but mostly slowly) ) looking for business partners
• Had more cockamamie ideas about new (as far as I know) styles of online gameplay that get me excited, and also reticent, because having some dork blather at you about their AWESOME completely unimplemented game idea is worse than someone telling you about this CRAZY dream they had last night, but anyway
• Revived Jmac's Arcade and the Gameshelf, and became filled with idears about what I'm going to do with the latter and how it will be different from what I've done so far

Yeah, so, it'll be a good time.

09:45 am - August? That means it's time for stoopid idears!

Should have worked more on the Gameshelf yesterday, the first day in August so far that wasn't a blur of either under-deadline work or other people's parties. But I got sidetracked, and instead banged out two complete designs for digital games. Both are follow-ups to another game design I wrote out a couple of weeks ago. The whole set comes from my continuing obsession about improving the space of internet-based multiplayer gaming.

It may seem a little strange, but I haven't done this before, at least not for a digital game. (No game I wrote for Volity was an original design.) Just writing the specs feels like a complete project. For each, I spent a few hours in intense thought and writing, and when I came out the other side I felt like I actually accomplished something, even though the rest of the world is none the wiser. Some props are due to queue and his recent output from attending a game-design workshop, whose first-day assignment is "go home and design a game" and don't care if it sucks, because of course it will, but look you've still just designed a game.

Anyway, these games. The last of the three, and the only one I feel is a viable game idea, concerns a style of online game-play I don't recall having seen before. Six years ago, when I was a younger nerd with fewer scars, this would encourage me to throw away the game and declare that the framework was the real prize, and then spend a long time working on only that, making it as general and well-documented and open-sourcical as possible. In fact, I did do that. I do not need to do this again, strong as the temptation is.

I don't have the time to work on this now, at least not right now. But I do wanna jump on it as soon as a slot clears up. It really is easy to get into the fallacy that one should just shelve the idea and let it age and mature a bit by itself. It doesn't work that way. Ideas are not cheese. See also Ze Frank's classic bit on "Brain Crack".

01:21 pm - jmac talks about copyright

A colleague just asked me about copyright for some reason. Well, I suppose because I've found myself in plenty of situations over the last few years where I've had to make some educated guesses about copyright law.

Just for amusement, here's my response. If I got anything hilariously wrong I'd love to hear about it.

What happens to the graphic and sound assets from old 8-bit or arcade games that have an expired copyright? Could an iPhone app developer make clones of old semi-popular games (assuming the popular ones have renewed copyrights). What about iPhone apps for board games that have expired copyrights?

Unless you're talking about arcade games produced before 1910 or so, your notion of "expired copyright" might need some revision. Copyright law is a real minefield, and it's very wide. You should probably assume that all the works you're interested in sampling or deriving from are still under copyright protection, unless you seek out works that are explicit about being in the public domain or in the Creative Commons (which I do with my own stuff, whenever possible).

IANAL, but practical experience suggests that you can confidently make all the game-clones you want so long as you don't literally copy any source code, art, text, or other assets from the original, and name it something different. If the game is _patented_, then all bets are off, so consider doing a patent search for the original.

If you do wish to lift assets out of another source (like music from an old video game) directly, here are your choices:
• Don't. Either create your own soundalikes, or find some at a resource like freesound.org.
• Ask for permission.
• Go ahead, and have a contingency plan in mind should the sample's copyright holder send you a cease-and-desist order.

Examples of contingency plans:
• The ability to argue that you're using the sample as part of a parody, a review, etc.
• The ability to re-release your work with the offending samples removed.

It's the responsibility of a work's owner to defend its copyright, so you won't get a cease-and-desist letter unless all the these are true:
(a) They still exist as a legal entity
(b) They notice your use of their material
(c) They give a shit about it

If you're confident that any one of these is likely to be untrue, you can risk using it anyway.

09:48 pm - Draw six, discard down to four

Lately, sitting at my desk, I feel like I'm playing Race or Cribbage, and all the cards in my hand work together so well that I really can't bear to discard any of them.

And, yes, as a result, I sit there sighing, rather than playing the goddamn game!

04:05 pm - I've been playing games

So, a lot's been going on. Good things!

I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.

I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.

03:33 pm - IF meetup tonight @ MIT

I'm going to the Boston interactive fiction meetup tonight, 6:30, at MIT 14N-233 (Nick Montfort's office). Guest: Steve Meretzky. Come join!

(Ha ha, that was totally my first-ever pasted-in Tweet, suckas.)

http://groups.google.com/group/boston-if?hl=en

01:14 am - Come roach with me

Dear Local Gamers,

Would anyone be interested in a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach at my place on Sunday the 31st? Starting at, say, around 3PM? Currently need at least a couple more players.

It's a one-shot RPG, and I intend it to act as my own introduction to narrativist role-playing games. I don't expect any other to have played this game before, either. I have no idea how it's gonna work, but I'm putting Vegas odds on it being a blast.

12:12 am - Jmac's Arcade #6 - Pac Man

If you see a little icon instead of a video player, clicking it should make it appear... (Blah LJ)

10:59 pm - A really good Memoir 44 game

Another exciting Memoir 44 game, playing scenario 40: Breakout at Klin, part of the Eastern Front expansion that classicaljunkie got me for Xmas.

M44 has kind of become "our game" - we have a reputation among some friends for liking it a maybe a little too much - but we hadn't played it in months after I got kind of burned out on it over the winter. Early summer rain combined with a good work-day put me back in the mood.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to know that even though I boasted on Twitter about how I expected to make short work of Amy's russians, she turned it around. I think I made a mistake my throwing units at Golyadi right at the start of the game, figuring I'd be able to hold them for the duration. Amy correctly focused on knocking them out for an early lead, and that kept me off-balance for the whole game. Duh: occupying territory is an endgame move in Memoir, not an opening gambit. I deserved what I got.

And, as always with Memoir 44, it really helps to remember to roll the dice well. I kept forgetting to do this, clearly. It feels like I kept rolling flags, allowing Amy's units to flounce away from all my attacks, and meanwhile she kept rolling tanks, neatly taking apart all my Panzer units.

It came down to one of those ridiculous situations where it's mutual game-point and there's two adjacent units chipping away at each other until one of them finally rolls the right symbols. But that's war for you.

10:29 am - Ludo-whatnow?

Just had reason to touch up my LinkedIn profile. Re-aimed the Volity link to the increasingly useful company page Zarf made, changed my profile's headline from "Software Consultant" to "Software Consultant and Ludocentric Entrepreneur", and added this graf to my description:

I am also the president of Volity Games (http://volity.com), a little startup I run with a few friends. Through various experimental web-based projects, as well as a blog and occasional TV show we produce, we study games as a communication medium, and seek innovative new ways for people to come together through play.

07:11 pm - Game stuff I wanna do soon

Since starting to reclaim some life-space due to paring away extraneous projects and applying some long-overdue organization to what's left, I've been feeling the urge to move my game-playing life in new directions.

Here is some stuff I wanna do soon. Not really making plans yet, but I reserve the right to link back to this post later. If you're totally into any of these ideas (or wish to tell me how wrong I am), feel free to make your interest known!

classicaljunkie

misuba

taskboy3000

10:19 pm - Well, that's depressing

Wired reports that unscrupulous players now have the power to disrupt online multiplayer Xbox games by DDoSing individual players. It's possible thanks to some new tools that make it easy to get the IPs of the people you're playing an Xbox game with, rent a slice of botnet time, and willfully firehose the former with the latter.

I didn't know this until just now, playing an otherwise delightful game of TF2 with lediva and a pile of anonymous members-of-public. Playing on defense, we both found our connections had become unusably choppy moments before our opponents' raiding party showed up, time and again - how curious. I was blown clear off the server at one point. Ms. Diva suspected the likely culprit, and forwarded me the article link even as we soldiered on. (We still managed to win, but jeez.)

As far as I know, there's no practical way to defend against this, or even react using the system's reputation tools, other than blanket-voting-down every member of an opposing team - it's impossible to know which of them threw the DDoS at you. This is a real bummer, and rather a wet blanket on the idea that NXE's friends-only chat channel would let you play with strangers online without being exposed to idiocy. Boy if only there were some way to easily gather a group of non-strangers to play together and etc. etc.

11:25 am - Boob tubage

Been on my Xbox 360 a lot lately, both to play games and watch TV...

I learned from "Penny Arcade", of all places, that most (all?) of Doctor Who, new and old, is now available via streaming Netflix, which I am able to enjoy via the Xbox. So, I finally got to watch "Blink". Hooray. Even classicaljunkie liked it! We are likely to go back and start watching season 3 from the start. (I gave up midway through season 2 when Sci-Fi Channel was broadcasting it, either after the Satan-in-space one or the Cybermen ones. It was just too cheesy.)

I finished "Operation: Anchorage", the first chunk of Fallout 3 DLC. Meh. The super-easy combat isn't any harder, and the game once again makes it even easier by pairing you up with a literally invulnerable NPC buddy. (The main storyline has one of these too, but at least you can choose to make the game harder by telling him to stay home.) I had fun with it, but I am unlikely to purchase further expansions for this game. I still have plenty of the main map to explore, should I feel like it later.

I picked up "Castle Crashers" finally. It's stupid fun, as expected. Also lots of poop jokes. I wish 360 controllers weren't so dang expensive or I'd go pick up a couple more, just to be able to host a four-player local game.

My field trip into non-random Xbox Live play last Tuesday evening was a success, thanks to Anthony and Sean. I got to try out the new "party" system, introduced to all Xbox users with last November's OS update, and confirmed that it will dovetail quite nicely with a certain project of mine.

Hmm... I'd better go hit the trenches and finish up what's left of said project, now.

03:39 pm - On Xbox Live tonight

I'm going to be online for some Xbox Live shenanigans at 9PM eastern tonight. TF2 and Castle Crashers are likely to be played, and maybe some Carcassonne. Feel free to join me! Note that I'm going to concentrate on how player-herding menu options work at least as much as on actually playing any games... this is a research trip!