Tea Leaves

Regular readers may recall an article from last summer where I mentioned some PC games I picked up from the bargain bin. At the time I wrote that article, I had started playing through one of them (Myst III: Exile) and was enjoying it.

Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing it. This week, I bought Myst III: Exile for Xbox at The Exchange. I had also bought Silent Hill 3 for the PS2, another game I already owned for the PC.

The reason is simple. I can play the console versions of these games from my couch.

It is impossible to overstate how important this is to me and, I suspect, to many other people. I have never, ever, found a way to integrate PC-based gaming into my household social life.

My gaming PC is in the office. If I have guests or family over and I’m playing a game, then either they’re in my office (which is uncomfortable for everyone involved), or they’re downstairs talking, and I’m in another room ignoring them. This makes me feel bad.

I tried moving the gaming PC into the living room. Then I had a huge desk in my living room with a noisy PC, and even then I found I was still playing whatever it was with my back to whomever was visiting.

The consoles fit naturally in the media center. They play on the TV, so everyone can easily watch. I can sit on the couch with whomever is visiting and we can share the experience. If no one is visiting, I can lay down while I play the game instead of sitting in a desk chair. I can turn the games on in 15 seconds or less. If I’m playing a game where the developers aren’t retarded idiots who put stupid console-style save points in their game, I can shut the game down nearly instantly. Many games on the console are well-suited to in-the-same-room multiplayer, so I can just hand someone else a controller.

This one simple facet of the console gaming experience trumps nearly everything else for me. “But the latest PC games have better graphics if you buy this $600 graphics card!” I can play the console games from my couch. “I don’t like first person shooters where I can’t use a keyboard and mouse!” I can play the console games from my couch. “You can play user-developed content only on the PC.” I can play the console games from my couch.

And don’t talk to me about laptop gaming. Yes, some games work in that context. But most don’t. And you know it.

If other people feel the same way about this that I do — and I bet they do — then there is one thing that worries me. As the market for PC games continues to shrink, great little Indie game developers may find it harder to make money. But who knows? Maybe as competition in the console market heats up, console manufacturers will be forced to loosen their stranglehold on licensing (OK, OK, I admit it. I don’t believe that for a moment, either.) Or perhaps major publishers will simply abandon the PC market, leaving more room for the indies. But somehow, I don’t see it going that way.

In a way, this is the “media center” problem in a slightly different context. There’s no technical reason why PCs can’t replace the DVD players, Tivo machines, and even game consoles at the center of most home entertainment centers. But PC and OS manufacturers’ attempts to penetrate this marketplace have met with abject failure. Whether this reflects a lack of commitment on the part of the players, an inability to design acceptable user interfaces, or simply fear of entering a market without airtight digital rights management, I don’t know.

But it sure would have been nice to play the PC version of Myst III: Exile from my couch.

Yesterday’s article by psu about the importance of only showing your best photos really struck a note with me. That’s why I have added a Tea Leaves™ Decisive Moments™ photostream to the sidebar. This will let us subject you to unedited garbage share the immediacy of our vision with you.

First up: three weeks of cat pictures. Tally-ho!

For now, I’m using Flickr to host the pictures, until I find enough free time to write a proper template hosted at tleaves.com. Overall, flickr hasn’t impressed me. As my friend Alex said, “It seems like the sort of thing that joshua would do in an afternoon, only he’d do it better.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson has a lot to answer for. Renowned for a photographic style that brilliantly balances meticulous composition with apparently split second timing, Bresson brought hundreds of iconic images into the photographic literature. Unfortunately, his style and artistic rhetoric (The Decisive Moment) became so influentional that it inspired legions of would be photojournalists to march into the streets on a desperate and largely futile search for their own decisive moments. Sadly, these armies of would-be auteurs do not understand two fundamental principles: most of your pictures are crap, and you have to know how to edit.

Before the interweb, the fact that there were thousands of crappy photographers toiling in their little darkrooms producing thousands of inconsequential wastes of emulsion didn’t really have any effect on our quality of life. But now, with digital cameras and easy web hosting, you can’t turn around without being hit in the head with collections of “street pictures” shot by people whose lack of talent as photographers is exceeded only by their lack of talent as editors of their own work.

Gazing upon these collections, you can only wonder what their creators see in the pictures, and why they can’t see past it to the truth: that the stuff is crap. Actually, not all of it is crap. There is one shining beacon of photographic talent stuck into this pile of otherwise craptastic creations. This is because Mr. Dixon actually knows a good picture when he sees it in the viewfinder and also has the sense to only show you the ones he got when he didn’t miss.

So, don’t let this happen to you. Don’t let me get my hands on your crappy, crooked, out of focus, underexposed and barely composed drek. Shoot a lot, learn how to edit out the bad ones, and don’t show them to me. If I only see your good ones, I’ll think you are a genius.

Random notes, from about 4 years ago, on peterb’s theory of computer role playing games and why designing fun CRPGs is so hard.

“I don’t consider anything the Japanese do to be RPGs. Those are
movies with extra special boring parts put in the middle for
obsessive-compulsives.”

Why do most RPGs suck?

There are basically 3(*) elements that go into making a computer RPG.

1) Plot.


2) Conversations with non-player characters.


3) Combat mechanics.


4) General interactivity with the world.

(*) I said 3 because it sounds better.

I’ve ordered those elements from most to least important. Designing games where each of these elements is fun requires entirely different
skill sets.

Plot

Plot, surprisingly, might be the easiest element to get right. A
decent writer can create an interesting plot that isn’t silly. There is a
simple test you can apply to determine if the plot sucks:

If a chick in a chainmail bra appears in any of the box cover art or
the magazine ads for the game, the plot will suck.
I call this the “EverTest”

The only RPG with a truly superb plot in recent years would, in my estimation, be Planescape: Torment. And even that was probably incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t grow up steeped in the minutiae of Dungeons and Dragons. The game suffered from its milieu, rather than flourishing from it.

Conversations

Conversations with non-player characters are tough, also, because
you run the risk of confusing the player if you have lots of
unrelated stuff. But the benefit of having lots of unrelated
stuff is that you can create a more immersive world.

The best game of its type for conversation was Ultima III.

The worst games for conversation (of games that have any at all) are
any of the Japanese games. The particular way in which they’re horrible is they have a tendency to design where NPCs either say nothing useful at all or tell you something that directly advances the plot. There seems to be no middle ground.

Combat

Combat mechanics are the easiest element to screw up. This is where
the Japanese RPGs both excel and fail, in different ways.

Designers are caught in a conundrum: if the combat mechanics are
too simple, the player will not find the game interesting because
it will seem too simplistic. But if they are too complex, then
the game has the potential to be oh my God I want to die of boredom level
boring. (This doesn’t apply for “pure” combat games such as Final Fantasy Tactics. Presumably, anyone who buys a game whose entire raison d’etre is tactical combat knows what they are getting themselves into.)

The formula for determining boredom can be expressed as followed:

time required to resolve combat * number of non-plot-advancing combats = boredom

Probably my favorite way of preventing this formula from increasing the Boredom Quotient is to at a certain point just accept that the
player is going to win stupid little combats and resolve them
automagically. (To make up for how much bashing I’m doing of Japanese RPGs here, I’ll point out that Earthbound for the SNES did this. Some day I’ll write an article about Earthbound and how it transcended the boundaries of its medium by being self-aware in an almost postmodern way. But not today.) Of course, as a designer you should be asking yourself: if the combat is meaningless or the outcome predetermined, why bother subject the player to it at all? If the answer is simply “to increase R“, then you have a fundamental design flaw. One idea I like is the thought that perhaps the enemies will recognize that
the player is driving a Sherman tank and that their javelins
won’t hurt him much, so maybe they should run away.

Interactivity

A good game lets you do things that have nothing to do with the
plot, and has some sort of log or reminder system to allow you
to get back on track if you forget what you should be doing.
Baldur’s Gate (like all of the Bioware games) is pretty good in this regard. Examples of “bad” include
most of the Zelda games(*) (which have “side quests” but no feeling of a world that exists independently of the player), Final Fantasy whatever, and Wizardry
for the Apple ][.

(*): These notes were originally written years before Wind Waker, which did a slightly better job, narratively, of making the player feel that they were a part of a world, rather than the world’s reason for being.

Some designers have chosen to interpret “interactive” to mean that the player should be able to break or steal anything. This is indeed one definition, but it’s an unadventurous one. Like “realism” and “immersion”, other loaded terms, interactivity is something that you only want part of the time. You want the exciting, fun things you’d like to do to be interactive. You want the boring, stupid parts of the world to not be interactive. As much as I personally dislike the Grand Theft Auto series of games, they seem to have a sense about this: you’ll never have to stop to pay a toll to use a highway, or put gas in your Ferrari.

Any game that makes you replay a substantial portion of it when you
die sucks and the designers are going to hell. Canonical example: all of the Zelda games.

Conclusion

The question of what a CRPG is is itself hotly debated. In the years since Wizardry first codified the D&D-style level-up progression form of play, little new ground has been broken. Most CRPGs are, for the most part, still about wandering around monster infested areas and hitting “fight fight fight parry parry parry” once a round. The future of the CRPG as a genre depends on those pushing past the “show the user a spreadsheet full of numbers that slowly gets bigger over time” model of interaction. The best possible case is probably the disappearance of the genre as a separate recognized class (except among retrogaming fans), and for its best attributes to simply be absorbed by mainstream games, leaving the drudgery, such as inventory management, behind.

As anyone who isn’t living on Mars probably knows, Lance Armstrong bowed out of bike racing this weekend with his unprecedented seventh straight in the Tour de France.

Back in 1995, in the Indurain period, the long time cycling journalist Samuel Abt wrote a book about the transition in U.S. cycling as Greg Lemond was getting ready to retire. At the time, Lance was quoted as saying that he was tired of being called “the next Lemond”, and would rather be called “the first Lance.” I think that history will now show that Lance was right about that.

At the time, the statement seemed apt for a different reason. Lance was a very different bike racer than Lemond had been. He won one day races, not the long tours. He had not yet developed the physical skills he now has in the mountains and in the time trials or the mental and tactical skills that he has used to dominate the rest of the race. His first few trips to the Tour had always ended in planned early exits although he did get the occasional stage victory. When he dropped out again in 1996 I remember thinking that this didn’t seem too unusual, although the truth was, of course, much different.

I didn’t follow his progress after that day too closely until July of 1999 when seemingly out of nowhere he won the opening time trial of the Tour de France. This, I thought, was strange. This was a different Lance. And indeed, the last seven years have shown us the second Lance. Meticulous, mature and a master of the details necessary to win the world’s biggest bike race. Part of me still can’t believe he can suddenly climb that well, but there it is.

But some of the old Lance was still in there. That look he gave to Ullrich before riding away from him on Alpe d’Huez in 2001 was a classic example of his attacking style. Here was the first Tour champion in a while who actually won stages in addition to the overall. A perfect mix of the old one day racer and the new stage race champion.

The next few years in the Tour will be interesting ones as all the riders who have been second to Lance all these years fight it out. It will also be interesting to see which, if any of the new crew of American riders, many of whom rode on Lance’s teams, manages to come forward and compete for the top spots. Finally, it will be interesting to see whether Lance’s preparation methods will be adopted by other teams, and whether they will be successful in applying them. I suspect that Lance’s training works so well mostly because it is Lance who is doing the training.

I guess I can go get on my bike now that the race is over. But man, it’s too hot.

…mulberry tree.

I always thought it was a mulberry bush, but apparently I was mistaken. I parked underneath one of these trees outside one of my favorite bars — The Sharp Edge — the other day, with hundreds of perfectly ripe (and overripe) berries of a kind I’d never seen before. They looked like blackberries. They looked really good. Risking instant poisonous death, I gingerly tried one. They tasted good.

Mulberries, Maybe

As luck would have it, inside The Sharp Edge was Laura of Upside-Down Pear who instantly and fearlessly identified them as mulberries. (Later, at home, Wikipedia concurred, thus proving once again that Laura is always right.) I resolved to pick and eat some more. And, just in case, to save one for the emergency room.

Thus, as I left the bar, I stopped to pick some berries. This proved to be a small tactical mistake, because, ripe as they were, they were raining down on me like hailstones, and it turns out that mulberry juice is very red, very dark, and very, very hard to wash off. I did eventually get clean, but my car may never be the same again.

The taste was sweet, but gentle, with almost an orange rind aroma. The texture was less pleasant; the berries fell apart in my mouth like head cheese. I’d eat them again.

But next time I’m going to make someone else go pick them.

Addendum and Question

I decided that this article would be the first one in which I would serve the included photo from Flickr. Unfortunately, it has taken so long to upload the above photo to flickr that in the interim, I have written the article, postprocessed the jpeg by hand, uploaded that to the tleaves.com server, and posted it. And made some edits. And made tea.

Is this a common Flickr experience, or am I just exceedingly unlucky tonight?

Those who can, write code.

Those who can’t, wank about Open Source Licenses.

Tonight, in a pensive mood, I did something I haven’t done in a while: I picked a direction, started driving, and got myself good and lost. I ended up in Clairton.

Clairton is a burned-out husk of a steel-town along the Monongahela river, 8300 residents and dropping fast. If you approach it as I did, on route 837 from the north, you enter one of those curious areas created by Pittsburgh’s hilly, riparian geography: a two-lane road with almost no turn-offs, a retaining wall on one side, and the river on the other. This may sound picturesque, but it is merely claustrophobic.

Once you’ve gone a certain distance down Route 837, you’re going to Clairton. There is no escape.

A sign announces your arrival and introduces Clairton, without irony, as the “City of Prayer.” The altar at which much of the praying is done is that of steel. On the edge of the river, sprawling across nearby islands like a metastasized tumor, is the U.S. Steel Clairton Works, the largest coke manufacturing facility in the US. The first indication that you are approaching the plant is the aroma, which weaves itself into your hair and clothes. You will carry the scent away with you when you leave. Next, if it’s night, you’ll see the lights. Finally, you will round a bend and see the plant, stretching for what seems like miles ahead of you and above you.

Next to the plant are two or three nameless bars, concrete bunkers with no visible names, but just a lone Budweiser or Miller sign in the window. Anyone who has ever worked in a plant has also been to one of these bars. The rules are simple: these are the places that will cash your paycheck. They will serve cheap food. There might be a local girl dancing for tips. And if you don’t work at the plant, you are very much not welcome there.

I worked in a factory, long ago. I didn’t go in to the bars in Clairton.

That is the heart of Clairton. The tattered streets lead away from the Works, a network of small appliance repair shops, funeral homes, shuttered hotels, and convenience stores. Up on the hills above the Works sit small houses (median value: $38,500) where the families (median income: $25,596) live. Some men lurk on streetcorners, making oblique gestures at cars that stop near them. The town is overshadowed by the Works. It is an afterthought. It is as if some small mammals have built a nest in a thicket of dinosaur bones.

The juxtaposition of the reality of places like Clairton and the party line that the Pittsburgh region is revitalizing (thanks to Pittsblog for the link) is jarring. Perhaps someday the Clairton Works will be gone, and something rich and strange will take its place. But for now, it is simply industrial carrion. It is a place that was.

There may be residents (about 20% of Clairton’s residents are below the poverty line) who have dear and fond memories of growing up in Clairton.

But to me, it does not feel like a place to live. It feels like a place to drown.

Additional Resources

• Facts and figures about Clairton were taken from city-data.com and Wikipedia.
• Google Maps has an image of Clairton. The Clairton Works are visible in the satellite photo.
• I lifted the title of this article from Nick Cave

A recent feature at The Armchair Empire takes the gaming world to task for accusing Nintendo of being “only for kids.” I think the piece makes a series of good points, not the least of which is that the current crop of so-called “mature” games are really nothing more than juvenile power fantasies for the 17 year old set. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy the odd juvenile power trip, I did, after all finish both Resident Evil and God of War.

I think, however, that the article misses the real point. The real point is not that Nintendo “just for kids”. The problem with Nintendo is that they only make games for fans of Nintendo games.

This puts Nintendo into a sort of insular niche where they just keep cranking out the same games with the same characters in mostly the same situations. I mean, how many different sports do we need Mario to be playing? Admittedly, Nintendo does very well in the little area that it has carved out for itself. They sell games, and they make profit.

What they don’t do anymore is excite anyone outside of their core audience. As this core shrinks as a percentage of the whole gaming market, it gives Nintendo less room to experiment. This results in an even stronger concentration on the core franchises, which in turn results in the Nintendo niche shrinking even further. Maybe this is OK. Maybe Nintendo can live and prosper in its own little world. But I think that the Nintendo fans, and maybe everyone else, would be happier if they could break out of the bubble and really do something new again. There ought to be a life after Mario and Zelda. I’m rooting for Nintendo to find that and then it won’t matter if they are “just for kids” anymore.

The other day, someone was taunting me on our local chat system. He said something to the effect of “If Pete is so down on cliché and repitition, why does he watch the Tour de France year after year when Lance always wins the same way?”.

First of all, in the years that I’ve watched the race, there have been four or five different winners (Indurain, Riis, Ullrich, Pantani, Armstrong). Second of all, while the three week race has been pretty much the same every year, every day is a different one day race. The race within the race is what makes the Tour interesting for me, even if the overall is following the same old script.

Consider two stages from this week.

In the first, we have an American named Chris Horner who gets into the breakaway and stays away for more than 100Km, only to be caught 300m from the line, just missing the stage win. Here is a guy who until this year was riding on some little-known American team for the last ten years and won a stage of the Tour of Switzerland to make the Tour de France team. In his first tour, he has managed not only to survive, but come within ten seconds of winning a stage, something that most riders spend their entire lives only dreaming about.

And, until yesterday, George Hincapie was one of those riders. Hincapie has been a support rider for Lance Armstrong throughout his current run in the Tour. In earlier years, he helped Lance through the flat stages, protecting him from wind and crashes, and just surviving over the mountains in the hopes of winning a flat stage late in the race. More recently, one noticed that George stayed on the front in the mountain stages for longer and longer periods of time, pulling Lance all the way to the last climb on many days. Every year, he seemed to get better in the big mountains.

So yesterday, Hincapie found himself 18 minutes ahead of the peloton in one of those breakaways that do not need to be chased. But instead of a flat stage, they were riding the hardest mountain stage of the Tour. In epic fashion, Hincapie stayed with the break, covered two or three different attacks, and was finally first over the line at the top of the last mountain. It was an incredible individual win for a rider who has always been the consummate team player. There is no one on Lance’s team who deserves it more than George. Bravo. Go George.

Notes

If you ever go to the Tour, don’t do what this moron did.