Why I’ll Never Write For IGN:I’m not retarded.
Courtesy of the forums at Quarter To Three comes this little gem: IGN declares the Playstation 3 to be the “best new game console” of 2006. Their rationale? The PS3 plays DVDs and you can install Linux on it. And maybe there might be a good game or two sometime next year.
Surprised At SeaWhen the remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! was released in 2004, I completely passed it by. I was thoroughly addicted to the original 1987 release. I simply assumed that the major effect of any remake would be to embitter me by wrapping the trappings of the franchise around a sucky game.
I recently rented the game from Gamefly, out of morbid curiosity.
I was wrong. The Xbox version of Sid Meier’s Pirates!
The game has gotten a graphical overhaul, as you’d expect, but the improvements go below the surface. The clever-but-clunky combat system (which always reminded me of combat from the Apple ][ game Moebius) has been streamlined and improved. It maintains the same basic mechanics — attack or parry low, middle, or high — but feels more cinematic. More dramatic. More piratey.
Sailing has become much easier, a development about which I feel conflicted. On the one hand, no one can deny the essential boredom of trying to sail East in the original game. Going from Cartagena to Barbados was an exercise in frustration, and it felt like it took hours. In the new game, sailing with versus against the wind is largely a distinction between “your ship sails incredibly fast” and “your ship sails only somewhat fast.” On the one hand, that’s a crime against “realism”, so perhaps it should bother me. On the other hand, we’re talking about a game where none of the daughters of the colony governors have smallpox scars on their face, so really worrying about “realism” at this point is silly. On the whole, I think this was a good call. When you get into ship-to-ship combat, the direction of the wind has the expected (and, dare I say it, realistic) effect; it’s just on the overmap that it becomes a nonissue.
Speaking of pox-ridden daughters, one new addition to the game is a “romance mini-game” where you dance a minuet with, apparently, one of Elizabeth Bennett’s less intelligent sisters. On the Xbox it’s fairly mechanical and easy, but I’m told that in the Windows version of the game
The game maintains the various “missions” available in the earlier title, although it’s much easier to encounter them now. You are perfectly free to ignore the game’s main quest and practice life as a peaceful trader, a nationalist privateer, or as a rogueish marine freebooter. The original Pirates!, along with Elite, might have been one of the first “sandbox” games. The remake honors that tradition.
You’ll find the Xbox version of Pirates! on discount shelves in used game stores everywhere. This is, it seems to me, a no-brainer acquisiton. It provides most of the fun of playing the original version with none of the annoyances. It’s a fine addition to anyone’s game library. I’ll be buying a copy shortly, and you should too.
Of the YearIt’s the time of year to do “best of the year” or “most of the year” or “worst of the year” lists. I couldn’t focus on any one theme, so after spending some time in a food-induced coma, I came up with the following hodge podge of “of the year” topics.
Sports Gaming Console of the Year
The Sony PSP. Between Madden ‘07 and MLB 06: The Show, I’ve logged dozens of hours playing sports on this shiny black wonder. Both games play at least as well as their PS2 counterparts and neither is particularly stripped down. Madden in particular is better in every way when compared to the same game on the 360. The only real negatives are the load times in each game, but the instant-sleep more than compensates for this.
Moron Launch of the Year
There is a tie in this category. First, Sony gets the nod with the PS3. The only people who appeared to care about the PS3 launch were the Ebay scalpers. High price, a launch lineup that made the 360 look rich and the whole “looks-even-more-like-ass” emulation snafu didn’t help matters. The result is that in stores everywhere, people are stampeding past in-stock PS3’s to look at the empty Wii shelf.
Tied with Sony is Microsoft, with the Zune. The Zune is a cunning combination of an integrated user experience that barely works and completely screws all of the third parties that Microsoft signed on to their “open” DRM system. Way to go.
Unexpected Ass-kicking of the Year
Nintendo Wii. I still don’t have one. Everyone I know wants one.
Most Infuriating Of the Year List
The normally excellent NPR interview program Fresh Air ran a list of “Cultural Defining Moments” the other week. In addition to having a title of questionable grammatical correctness, the program appeared to define “cultural” as “anyone famous being an asshole”. Topping the list were Borat, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, George Allen, the cartoons involving the Prophet Mohammed, and Stephen Colbert pissing off the uptight journalists at that special dinner they give to themselves.
What strikes me about this list the paltry amount of cultural content that it contains. Colbert and Borat are nearly sophisticated satire, but the rest of the list contains nothing that indicates the use of higher level brain function. To me, it seems to be more of a list of wet dreams for the people in the media who cover the media. It gives them a lot to talk to themselves about, while we look on and wonder why in the world anyone would care.
Left-Center Hard-on of the Year
NPR actually allowed the term Obamamania into the national news cast and then allowed their senior political reporters to go to NH an drool all over the annoited one and behold his supernatural glow. I feel sort of sorry for Obama, because he has obviously been annoited too soon, which means that at some point between now and 2008 he will become the new Howard Dean, and flame himself out in spectactular fashion.
Dork Nation Event of the Year
NPR has now run no less than three full length stories populated by people hanging around in Second Life. God what a bunch of geeks.
Game that Generated the Most Comments of the Year
This one is easy. No game generated more text on this site than Oblivion. I count eight or nine actual articles about the game. And, who can forget this classic collection of comments where we met an obscure yet brilliant Computer Science researcher.
Accidental Food Product of the Year
Karen made chocolate truffles. She forgot the egg yolks because she was having a busy day, full of distractions. As a result, the truffles taste like butter infused with dark chocolate. Or dark chocolate infused with butter. I can’t decide. Still, it’s a truly unique food sensation.
Next-Gen Raspberry of the Year
Ubisoft gets this one because the best way to play the new Splinter Cell game on an Xbox 360 is to buy the version for the Xbox and play that under emulation. The graphics are a bit worse, but you get actual co-op missions, much faster load times, a camera that is backed off a bit so I can see my feet, dialog with subtitles, and more depth in the game’s narrative. It’s sad that creating all those high resolution textures for the 360 game ate up so much schedule that they couldn’t actually, ya know, finish the game.
Most Tortured Camera Launch of the Year
The Leica M8. Following on the heels of the ten pound digital back that they produced for their already five pount behemoth SLR, the R8, Leica finally answered the prayers of small-handed photographers everywhere by producing a digital body with the form and mechanics of their M series rangefinders. By all accounts, this should be the perfect digital camera for the guy who does not want to carry a bazooka-shaped professional SLR. Of course, this being Leica, they outsourced the sensor development to that other old world photographic power, Kodak. And, together, they botched it. Because of insuffciently aggressive IR filtering, the camera has color balance problems, especially in the dark tones.
In a fabulous twist of irony, the proposed fix for this problem is for Leica to give you a cheap IR filter to put on each of your lenses. You know, the ones with the glass of magical and mythic status. To get correct color, you have to put a cheap filter on your $4000 lens. Leica truly knows how to torture its faithful cult members.
“Number of Comments” in XML feeds in WordpressI got this working today in the Atom, RDF, and RSS 2.0 feeds. It’s not working in the RSS 1 feed, but WordPress’s RSS 1 feed sucks anyway, and if you’re using that feed you should change to a different one.
Using the RDF feed as an example, all I did was change this line:
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('’, 0, ‘’) ?>]]></content:encoded>
to this:
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('’, 0, ‘’) ?><p><?php comments_popup_link(’Comment now »’,
‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’, ‘commentslink’);
?></p>]]></content:encoded>
Hope that helps those of you who were looking to do something similar.
WiibloggingSurely, I must be one of the first people to post to their blog from a Nintendo Wii. I’ve only found one other Wiiblog entry so far.
To type, you use the Wiimote like a laser pointer. It’s a bit ponderous. But editing is quite easy.
Hmmm. I wonder how much work it would be to attach little Mii icons to each post…
The user-agent comes across as “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en)”
Happy festivus, everyone.
ProductivityToday I got tons of stuff done at work, finished editing three articles for Played To Death, did the Christmas shopping, and began work on a gift I’m making for someone.
But I didn’t write a real article for the weblog. My apologies. Anyone have a time machine?
Dork NationWhen I was in high school, I was a bit of a dork. No really, it’s true. Back then, even a passing interest in the emerging digital technologies was looked upon with suspicion and would get you beat up during study hall. We geeks were antisocial outcasts, relegated to self-created school ghettos while the normal people did normal people things while dressing better.
Over time, the things that used to amuse us dorks have slowly wormed their way into the everyday lives of normal people. So while they may still be better dressed, a sociological flip-flop has occurred. The evidence is all around us. Normal people have turned into bigger dorks than any of us could have imagined possible. Collectively, we have become Dork Nation.
The roots of this Borg-like assimilation of the normals were starting to take hold during my college years. It was during this period that modern user interfaces and modern networking technology were developed in the basements of university buildings, research labs and a few obscure computer companies. It would take ten more years before graphical interfaces and easy to use networking were polished into the shiny perfection of the Internet.
It was at this point that everything tipped. I had just moved back to Pittsburgh after finishing graduate school. Strange things started happening. The CMU coke machine was in the news as an Internet Appliance. NPR started giving out an e-mail address for listener comments. They couldn’t quite figure out how to read an e-mail address with the right cadence though. At one point, I got in an elevator and perfectly normal looking people had a conversation about how their Mapquest directions had steered them wrong. Pretty soon, the net had taken over.
These days, people can’t be away from their e-mail long enough to collect their carry-on luggage. You’ll see them standing in the aisle, thumbing away on the tiny little keyboard like a 13 year old Japanese schoolgirl. Then, in the next seat over will be a 50 year old business man talking into one of those wireless cell phone headsets that make you look like Jean-Luc Picard after he has been assimilated.
Every square inch of our public spaces seems to be filled with networking and laptops. The worst thing that can happen on a business trip is for you to lose your Internet. You can’t even escape laptops in bed.
It’s suddenly hard to tell the difference between normal people and dorks. The guy you are partying with at the local hip dance bar could, the very next day, be writing code next to me and doing a better job of it. Dorks come with all sorts of different talents and interests now, not just the technical toys that sucked me in. There are dork musicians, dork writers, dork filmmakers, dork artists of all kinds.
You can’t turn around at the movies without running into a dork on the screen. Dork action heroes type search phrases into their laptops and watch progress bars with nervous anticipation. This year, we even found out that James Bond, in addition to all of his other talents, is an expert at cracking the highest levels of computer security.
There are real world dorks in the movies as well. WordPlay, which ran in theaters last year and was somewhat successful, is a heartfelt and loving ode to the crossword puzzle solver. Here we follow computer technicians, librarians and professional puzzle people as they travel to the national crossword puzzle tournament. The tournament provides all the highs and lows of any great sports movie. And as if to show how mainstream the whole thing is, the film interleaves this story with interviews from real famous people who are also crossword geeks. Jon Stewart! Bill Clinton! The Indigo Girls! Mike Mussina! Even the jocks have turned out to be dorks.
In recent years, the Christmas season seems to bring out the dork in all of us. This year was no different. Costco, Wal*Mart, and Target were all filled to capacity with TVs that use the souls of engineers to generate a picture. The Apple store had tables with literally several dozen pre-boxed iPods ready to become gifts. Right next to them was another table with pre-boxed laptop computers. Well-dressed people walked through the store mesmerized by the shiny bounty.
But the hottest items of the year were the things you could not find in stock. Regular people lined up in droves to try and find a Nintendo Wii or a Playstation 3. Twice now I have arrived at my local Target at 8am in a failed quest to get a Nintendo box for myself. Twice I have observed something amazing. Near the head of the line were multiple generations from the same family waiting together for their chance to obtain the glowing white box. The kids I can understand. The college students I can understand. The 45 year old camping out all night I have a hard time with. And yet there they are.
And we know they are everywhere, because the next morning they get interviewed on NPR. Just ten short years ago, this group of people couldn’t pronounce an e-mail address with the right cadence. Today they don’t even read paper letters on the air anymore. Only e-mail. A couple of years ago, they ran an infuriating piece on how the digital generation is simply inscrutable to the poor normal people of the world. Now you can catch them running interviews from inside an online multiplayer video game.
The rest of the news media have nothing to be proud of either. The New York Times quoted Joystiq, a haven for geek news of questionable accuracy and even more questionable editorial standards, in their review of the Playstation 3. Time magazine has proclaimed 2006 to be the year of You Tube, with runner up prizes going to del.icio.us and Technorati. I am not even sure what Technorati is for, and there was a link there from the front page of this very site for the entire time I have been contributing.
In the larger view, I don’t really know what to make of this. I am not an observer of larger social trends. I just know how these trends affect my daily existence. All I know is that I grew up loving this stuff, and now I have an uneasy feeling about never being able to escape it. I can’t escape it in the news. I can’t escape it in my escapist entertainment. I can’t even escape it at home. The other month I went home to discover that my parents had been using Skype and a Skype router at home for what must have been at least a year. There I was with only a passing notion of what Skype even was (although I did think iChat was pretty cool). My parents had out-dorked me.
Maybe this is where the root of my anxiety lies. For all of my life my identity has been wrapped around the notion that I was out on the bleeding edge of the geek universe. But, as I have grown older and more mature, this has become less and less true. Everything that I used to think was pretty cutting edge has become so mainstream that even the wankers at center-left news radio stations understand it. This leaves me in an uncomfortable personal position. I have lost my edge. I have been left behind. When the next wave of cool toys hits, I’ll be sitting on my porch screaming in a raspy voice at the local kids wondering why they need to play with such a darn fool device, when in my day a normal computer with a god-damned keyboard was just fine, and the kids will look back at me and try to figure out just how someone can get so old and clueless.
Transition nearly completeWe’ve cut over DNS, and so you are viewing the new site. Our old articles are still available at their original URLs, so any direct links you had to them previously should still work.
For the time being, we are requiring logins to leave comments, until we better understand our spam-fighting options. But don’t think of it as yet another annoying password to remember: think of it as a chance to join our community (by remembering yet another annoying password). (psu informs me that we’ve turned off requiring logins, but I encourage regular posters, particularly those who might want to write for Tea Leaves, to go ahead and register anyway.
While you’re here, please enjoy Corey Kosak’s article Computer Scientists and Cruciverbalism”.
It’s good to be back.
Computer Scientists and CruciverbalismIt seems to be a reasonable childrearing principle that you should give kids a break in order to foster their creativity. “Look, Mummy, I’ve made you a dinosaur out of cotton balls and toothpicks!” “Oh Billy, that’s so precious.” And it is. But at some point, say after Billy has gotten his PhD in computer science, you need to finally expose him to the idea that the world is a competitive place and he needs to be a harsher critic of his own stupid ideas.
Every computer scientist in the world has, at some point, decided that he is going to write a computer program to generate crossword puzzles. (That was my generation… today’s crop of top graduate students wants to write computer programs to generate Sudoku). Just to be clear, the problem of crossword puzzle construction is different from that of crossword puzzle solving. Solving, at least according to the TV ads, is what you do when you want to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon in bed with your hot boy/girlfriend, a pencil, your chrome/glass furniture, and a copy of the New York Times. Construction refers to what the poor shlubs have to do to create those puzzles. Specifically, it means starting with an empty grid (containing a smattering of black squares which define the boundaries between words), and then filling it with letters such that all the across and down slots contain different, valid words. There are numerous technical conventions as well: the grids are typically square in shape, have a size of at least 11×11, and have rotational symmetry. Experts try to keep the word count low (lower word count implies fewer black squares which implies a lot of interlock). Before you publish such a puzzle you would also need to provide clever yet precise clues, but so far clueing is considered outside the scope of what a computer can do.
While reasonable people can differ about whether it makes sense to use taxpayer-funded defense money to pay a bunch of slackers to jerk around, the real problem is that every single person approaches the problem anew as if they were the first person to ever consider it. You may be wondering what such people do when they graduate and get research jobs. Give a computer scientist his first $500K grant, and I can guarantee you exactly what will happen: “Look Mummy despite being ignorant of forty years of prior art I’ve built you a videoconferencing/telepresence system”.
But I’m talking about crossword puzzles. If you want to be just like these computer scientists, here’s what you do.
This actually happened to me. I found some guy who built such an automated crossword generator and showed it to me. (By the way, he’s a friend. Yes, I mock my friends. And yes, after a few turns of the crank I have more mockery than friends.) I took one of its output grids and gave it to another (not-yet-mocked) friend of mine, who happens to be a world-class crossword puzzle constructor. Remember, I’m not talking about solving here. I’m talking about construction: taking an empty grid and filling it with stuff. It took him less than five minutes and I think he used his pencil eraser twice. In other words, he filled the thing longhand almost as fast as he could write and did almost no backtracking.
Congratulations, you tragic little man, you have just built a computer program that quickly solves a problem that most practitioners would find trivial.
Because my gnomish anger is exceeded only by my thoroughness, I then asked my friend to provide me an example in the reverse direction: with a grid that he was able to fill successfully (so a solution is known to be possible) but that he found difficult (it had taken him several hours to do so). I gave it to the other guy and asked him to feed it to his program. It failed. Horribly. It was a total nightmare.
(One must take care to be precise when one is talking about with programs that run for a long time, especially those you suspect may never terminate. To use a metaphor: strictly speaking, it is not correct to say that Matt Damon will never go on a man-date with me. Perhaps Mattie and I will both go on severe calorie restricted diets and live to be 150; perhaps a thousand years from now, an insane alien computer will regenerate our personas from, in his case, footage from the film “Stuck On You”, and in mine, some DNA I may have left on a towel at the Holiday Inn). My point is that the best you can say in these cases is that “Matt Damon has not gone on a man-date with me YET”.
Or, in the instant case, if a computer program correctly implements exhaustive search, sooner or later it will try all possibilities in the puzzle space. Just realize that “later” can be, like, ”way” later, as in, dude! the sun just blew up and melted my ’puter!.” In cases like this you basically have to pick a cutoff time and if the thing isn’t done by then, you pull the plug. That’s what happened here. He ran it for a few hours, maybe overnight, and then admitted failure.
I need to add a little postscript here. Initially I wasn’t sure how this piece wanted to end. Coming back to it after a couple of days, I realize that, I actually think doing research is a worthy endeavor. And I think it’s quite common that some young punk comes along with an insight and shows a bunch of crusty old fools how things should be done. So if you are a young punk, now that I’ve told you what NOT to do, I really ought to tell you what TO do. One suggestion is this: because the search problem is, as they say, “embarrassingly parallelizable”, I’d like to take one of the open problems (an open 8×8 with no black squares) and see if you could find a fill for it using, like, some vast grid of 1000 CPUs. Maybe you’d have to make a friend with access to a farm at MIT or Sandia or Google. And remember, no words can repeat in the grid. Allowing for repeated words makes degenerate grids that are very easy to fill.
Another suggestion is to study how humans create these puzzles. They generally don’t use exhaustive search; they use insight, see patterns, know a bunch of tricks, and basically do a bunch of rejiggering when they find themselves painted into a corner. It would be interesting to formalize this approach and see if you could get a computer to do the same.
Web 2.0 Picoreview“All the power of WordStar with all the hardware requirements of Windows 95″. And all the flexibility of VAX/VMS.
Excuse Our DustOver the next week or so, updates may be sparse and you may notice problems reaching the site as we prepare to move to a new content management system. Things should be back to normal relatively quickly.
We are, however, having a small contest to go along with this. Because looking at CSS makes our eyes bleed, we will reward the first person who designs a set of WordPress templates and stylesheets for us with a DVD or video game.
Our prejudice is that we want something where the main body view looks exactly, in every detail, like what we have now. But if you think you can do better, feel free to show us. Our only strict requirement is that the icons for categories have to stay in use. We love ‘em. We are, however, less attached to the details of our sidebar.
For your fabulous rewards you may choose from the following DVDs:
-The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine, or
-Nude For Satan
or, if those are too sophisticated for you, we have a number of games on offer:
-Counterstrike (Xbox)
-Indigo Prophecy (Xbox)
-Kessen (PS2)
If you want to participate, send mail to tleavesweblog - a t - gmail (dot) com.
Princess Zelda and the Childish AdultSeveral years ago, one of my favorite authors, A.S. Byatt, wrote a scathing review of the Harry Potter books called “Harry Potter and the Childish Adult.” In this review she roundly criticized not Rowling, but the adults who chose to read her books. She said, essentially, that there was something fundamentally misshapen about adults who would choose to invest so many hours in a work created for children.
Byatt took a lot of heat for this review. I was disappointed because it was clear that Byatt couldn’t correctly articulate her problem with Rowling. She wrapped her critique in some fairly sophomoric Freudian analysis before getting to the real point: Byatt observed — correctly — that Rowling’s prose is somewhat drab and clumsy. Rowling does not write beautiful sentences. It’s clear, at least to me, that if Rowling wrote with the precision and playfulness of someone like Terry Pratchett, Byatt would have overlooked the subject matter and approved of the works.
This is the sad truth behind literary criticism: there’s a widespread belief that the craft of storytelling is not as important as the craft of writing. This is, of course, ludicrous. For the novelist, both skills are important, but I’ll take a clumsy storyteller over a brilliant but boring linguist every time. When you have a great storyteller with a superb gift for words you end up with Martin Amis
Frankly, I’d rather be bludgeoned about the head with Rowling’s entire body of work than have to sit through another page of one of Tartt’s sickening apologias for the overprivileged. There is more depth in any one page of Rushdie’s “children’s book” Haroun and the Sea of Stories
All of which is a preface to the point that one can have a great story and tell it in a bad way, or vice-versa, and that things written for children can be enjoyed by adults without guilt.
Which brings us to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I’ve been pondering this game for a while now, as I play it. I won’t be reviewing the game in this space — you can read my review in the holiday issue of Played To Death— but I found some aspects of the way it is constructed to be interesting, and it reminded me of Byatt’s essay. Not because it’s poorly written, or a bad game — I’m enjoying it immensely — but because I find the maturity level of the game to be so confusing. This isn’t a game written for children. This is a game written for adults who played an earlier Zelda game when they were children.
The games in the Zelda series have always treated unapologetically in adolescent and heroic archetypes. The story of every Zelda game is this: an evil power threatens the land of Hyrule. An orphan boy, Link, is drawn in to rescue a friend. In doing so, he acquires various weapons and tools of legend (a boomerang, a magic bow, a magic sword, a grappling hook, and so on). In overcoming obstacles, he inadvertently delivers the power of the godhead to the villain. Link must then confront the enemy and defeat him to save the land.
The details in each game change, but the pattern is the same, which is fine. The previous game, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, was beautiful to look at. The characters were cartoony and iconic. Backgrounds were rich, saturated, and looked like they came straight out of a 1940’s-era Warner Brothers cartoon. From a purely graphical perspective, Wind Waker was designed with a bold, uncompromising vision.
I thought the Wind Waker art style was daring and wonderful. It fit the ideals underlying the world perfectly. But among many fans, this gutsy art style was a complete flop. My understanding of why is somewhat limited, but it seems to have something to do with the misapprehension that playing with things that look like children’s toys will shrink one’s penis. Regardless of the reasons, many people complained about this style, and one can’t help but worry about the possibility that the stylistic decisions made in Twilight Princess were a direct result of this feedback.
Twilight Princess takes the basic pattern of Zelda and puts it in a “dark” world, drawing elements from a number of other games including Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, and Silent Hill.
The end result is a game that is too scary for children to play, but not scary at all to adults. The fear in Silent Hill, for example, came not from the eerie music and atmosphere, but from the fact that the rusted, fecal exteriors in the game were so patently signposts pointing to the sexual and violent elements of the player’s psyche. Shadow of the Colossus was disturbing because it cast the player, implicitly, in the role of a villain, of someone who becomes his own Shadow. Such possibilities are never even remotely imaginable in Twilight Princess. Link is a good guy. His Shadow is not something he would even think about becoming.
As I said, my theory is that Zelda ends up in this stylistic bind because their platonic Zelda player is an adult who has played the other Zelda games. What they’re trying to do, I think, is present the story as “dark” or “serious” to avoid the player shunning the game for fear of being infantilized. At the same time, they have to maintain the essential innocence of the characters, because that’s what the archetype requires: evil, even evil that has tainted us, must always come from the outside. I think that the tension between these two goals resulted in a visual design that doesn’t quite sit snugly on the shoulders.
Perhaps I’m simply wrong, and projecting, and really a whole new generation of 7-year olds are encountering and loving Twilight Princess. As a game, I think it is clearly the best of the series. But stylistically the game looks like a compromise to me, and it is weaker for it.
When to go WideWide angle lenses, roughly speaking, are lenses that for a given image size, provide a wider than “normal” field of view in the final picture. For 35mm cameras, we generally consider lenses with a focal length of 35mm or less to be wide. Back in the day, I asked my photo expert buddy whether I should buy a 24mm lens or a 20mm lens for my wider-than-35 wide angle needs. He said if I knew what I was doing, I should get the 20, otherwise, I should get the 24. This was very wise advice.
Generally, you should not buy a lens unless you have some idea what you are going to do with it. If you are considering buying a wide angle, you should ask yourself why you need to go wide.
If you ask a beginning photographer this question, they will sometimes answer “I need the wide angle for those huge vistas in the landscape.” Sadly, this answer is almost always wrong.
If you really want to isolate a huge vista and get that grand Ansel Adams feeling, the best thing to do is to be a few miles away from the subject and use a telephoto lens to get the picture. For example, consider this shot:
I made this picture while standing in a parking lot that was right next to the great expanse of desert and rock. If I had shot it with a wide angle, the mesa would be a little dot in the distance and the foreground would be all parking lot. You never want that.
Here is a good example of shot where the wide lens has been used to “get the whole picture”, with the end result being that there is nothing of interest in the frame:
Notice how everything that might be interesting in this picture (the building, presumably) is tiny and in the background. Meanwhile, your eyes immediately focus on the foreground which is nothing but an empty green blob. There is basically nothing to look at in this picture.
This sort of mistake is easy to make because wide lenses distort front to back perspective. You must remember this: wide angle lenses make stuff close to the lens really big and stuff far away from the lens really small. It’s like those rear view mirrors on cars, only a lot worse.
You use wide lenses when you want to take advantage of this distortion. For example, you might want to show the viewer something small and intimate in the foreground and but lead her eye to the background where there is a familiar setting:
Or, you might have figured out how to arrange a shot where the foreground and the background are interesting:
Finding an interesting subject and an interesting background is twice as hard as just isolating your subject against a blown out background. This is why wide angle lenses are challenging to use. Whenever you are trying to control more than one main element in a picture, you will have a harder time.
The wide angle perspective also comes in handy when you are indoors. You might be trying to take a picture of a group of people at your house for dinner. They are all sitting around the table. You grab your trusty normal lens and start backing up to get the whole table into the shot. You have about half the people in the viewfinder when you find that you have walked into the stove and your pants are on fire.
This is when you need that super-wide angle zoom:
Of course, all the standard wide angle challenges apply. Watch out for empty foregrounds, and remember that since you will be placing so many different elements into the frame, you have to be careful to arrange them in a way that is pleasing rather than just confusing. I don’t have any great insight on how to do this. I might say that in my pictures, I tend to try to maintain a strong front to back perspective with lines that lead the eye from one side of the frame to the other, but that would just be self-concious wanking. The truth is that I fool around with a lot of different things and then I attempt to remember what worked well and what didn’t. Over time, you get better at doing the stuff that works and avoiding the stuff that doesn’t.
Finally, here are a few other random tips:
1. Don’t take close up portaits with a wide angle, unless you like making the person look like a distended freak.
2. Do take portraits with wide angle lenses if you want the background environment to be part of the portrait.
3. Remember that with wider lenses things that you place at the edges of the frame will look distorted. This can be a bit disturbing when you put your Aunt Betty in the wrong part of the picture and she gets all stretched out.
4. Be careful whenever you tilt a wide angle lens up or down. It makes the world look funny.
5. Practice, practice, practice. Edit, edit, edit.
The Internet Is Full. Go Away.My dad used to tell a groaner of a bad joke about a guy he knew opening a cheese shop in Israel. The name? Cheeses of Nazareth.
I thought of that joke today, and on a lark typed “cheesesofnazareth.com” into my browser…and then name is owned by a domain name squatter, offering to sell it.
The Internet is full.
Played to Death #12The Holiday issue of Played To Death magazine is out. Download the free PDF now and you can read my reviews of the Nintendo Wii, The Wii’s online service, Wii Sports, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Xbox Live, as well as many other fine articles.
Because I am Stupid I Make Myself SufferMy rag-tag group of adventurers had just prevailed over the ghost-like sewer monster. The fight had not been too tough, although it did require some careful tactics. Having come all the way here, I figured I’d have a look around. Just around the corner from our fight was another network of sewer pipes and water ways, so we took a few tentative steps that way. From the shadows, a brown lumpy form appeared and took a swipe at me. The blow landed on my head and with one hit, the game was over. My last save was from 45 minutes back at the entrance to the sewers.
Welcome to Final Fantasy, I thought.
My esteemed gaming buddy tilt has often commented on the notion that games have large scale mechanics and organization that make up an “outer loop” along with small scale mechanics that make up their “inner loop.”
Madden is a football simulation wrapped up in a large scale management simulation. In Zelda, you crawl through dungeons, solve clever puzzles, find interesting items, and fight tedious boss monsters while at the same time working towards your ultimate destiny as the periodic savior of Hyrule. The Elder Scrolls games are a collection of linear quests that are hard to find wrapped up in a min-max leveling game. Halo strings together a chain of thirty second pieces of combat as you journey from cut scene to cut scene. I could keep this up all night.
It’s no coincidence that game franchises work hard to maintain their core mechanics from version to version. Fans of the franchises became fans because the gameplay was enjoyable. They eagerly await the new Bloodspank game because they want the same experience as the old Bloodspank game but a new setting, or new characters, or higher resolution textures. Therefore, to keep their fans, developers strive to remain faithful to the original experience.
Which brings me to Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy, it seems to me, has a very clear two level structure that has basically remained unchanged through all twelve instances of the game. On the one hand there is the standard RPG inner loop: you fight stuff, you collect loot, you gain levels and abilities. Each game tweaks these mechanics, streamlining some while making others more complicated.
The large scale organization of the games are also similar in that they are a linear jaunt from dungeon to dungeon. Each dungeon is designed to be encountered when your party has been appropriately developed and buffed. In between dungeons, there are cut scenes.
This combination of content: the fighting, the dungeons, the cut scenes, is what keeps people coming back to the game. For whatever reason, people like working through these little obstacle courses in a quest to watch the next cartoon.
The tricky thing in this game is that sometimes difficult areas are interleaved with the areas that are safe, and it’s hard to tell when you’ve gotten yourself lost and are about to be punished for it. This happens repeatedly to me in FF12 whenever I venture even the tiniest bit off the shiny rails that the developers have built for me to follow.
What I discovered this week was that this problem seems to have inhabited every FF game ever built. Because being punished over and over again on my PS2 wasn’t enough for me, I picked up the recent reissue of Final Fantasy III for the DS.
I played through the intro. No problem. I got into the first town and looked around. No problem. I walked out into the overworld and ventured north, not knowing that I had missed the cut scene that told me to venture south. Thirty seconds later, two wolves in the woods crushed my head like a grape. Even after almost twenty years of development, if you are playing Final Fantasy, you are never more than a few steps away from a one hit kill.
Besides this long standing structural problem and an annoying lack of savepoints before boss fights that I tend to lose, I have generally been enjoying FF12. The streamlined combat takes a lot of the tedium out of the RPG inner loop. For once the writing, and overall production of the outer loop isn’t cringe inducing. Even the voice acting is pretty tolerable.
So, I’m looking forward to spending the next few weeks beating up creatures from the nightmares of Japanese children, picking new abilities out of a large checkerboard, trying to min-max my character development and watching cut scenes. I think I’ll put off the side quests for now though. In Final Fantasy, you can’t be too careful.
Musings on the Eternal Console WarsI showed up at Target a few Sundays ago and stood in the cold for about an hour to try to get a Nintendo Wii. I had number 42. Unfortunately, they only had 41 of them.
Ouch.
Through some machinations and good luck, however, I managed to pick up a Wii the other weekend. My “real” review of the box (and some of the games) will be in Played To Death’s holiday issue, but I have a few philosophical ponderings to share here.
First, and most importantly, the name doesn’t really sound any less stupid the more you say it. But in a way, that’s comforting. For any given thing you can buy, there’s always something stupid or brain-dead about it. In the case of the Nintendo Wii, we know the answer up front: it has a painfully stupid name.
The console itself is nice looking (if a bit bland) and petite. The control is odd. It manages to be both more precise and less accurate at the same time: I’m constantly astonished that the cursor managed to hit what I intended, but even with the remote braced against a hard surface, the cursor always seems ready to slip away from me like the fish in Fool’s Errand. The ergonomics of the controllers themselves, though, are great. Nintendo deserves praise if for no reason other than liberating us from the Playstation-style dual-handed rosary. Friends and family who would never touch an Xbox seem to have no problem with the Wii: the remote is approachable, and everyone who has ever used a mouse is familiar with “Move your whole hand this way to move the pointer.”
If they can manage to make enough of them, I think we can state confidently that Nintendo has defeated Sony in hand-to-hand combat for this round of the console wars. They’ve basically taken a Gamecube, revved it just a little, and given it a nifty control scheme. They combined this with an interesting smattering of launch titles taken from their console legacy (Zelda) and their handheld library (Trauma Center) Then, they are selling this device for just about one-third of what Sony is charging for a larger, heavier, uglier device that has features no one wants and games no one cares about. Basically, Sony has managed to use all of their engineering and marketing prowess to launch a new version of the Atari 5200, only with fewer games. Nintendo, meanwhile, has done something practically unheard of in the console space: they’ve innovated.
What’s particularly saucy about Nintendo’s innovation is that it is in your face. Game publishers, as I have mentioned before, hate and fear innovation. Microsoft’s decision to include a hard drive in the original Xbox cost them millions of dollars, and the only reason they did it was the game publishers, lying like pregnant Catholic schoolgirls, swore up, down, left, and right that they would make games for the Xbox that could only work with a hard drive. Then they treated the hard drive like a glorified memory card for the life of the console, and ported all their games to the PS2. With the Wii, Nintendo has placed the innovation right in the user’s hand. There is absolutely no avoiding it.
There will be game developers who make games for the Wii that don’t actually use the controllers in any interesting way. These developers will be sad, because no one in the entire world is going to buy their games. If you release a game for the Wii that doesn’t use the controller in some interesting way, legions of twentysomethings around the world are going to stop referring to your company by its trademarked name, and will instead just use the shorthand “those retards.”
Of course, many of these games will fail, because often users hate innovation too. But at least when you fail you will have failed in an interesting way, rather than boring us with yet another clone of BladeHunt: DeathSpank 2: The Revenge (motto: “Now with Bump Mapping!”)
So, in summary: Microsoft’s innovation in this cycle centers around online play. Sony’s innovation centers around making their game machine stupidly expensive so that it can play movies. Nintendo’s innovation centers around their wireless motion-sensing controller. No one can promise us that future Wii games will be any good.
But for now, I have an Xbox 360, and I have a Wii, and I have no intention of buying a PS3 any time in the next year.
And I bet I’m not the only one.
