Tea Leaves

Just when you thought it was safe to browse your internets, the intellectually challenged have come out to play again. This seems to happen once or twice every year. Or maybe it only annoys me this much once or twice a year. This year, I come to the partial defense of the current punching bag of the defensive gamers everywhere: Roger Ebert. You may recall that he said some stupid things about games versus art last year and like a kid in an Internet Forum, he is back to troll again.

First things first. I don’t really agree with what Ebert has said about games. I believe that video games as a medium have the potential to provide a rich and varied emotional response in the player. I think we have seen flashes of this possibility from time to time, but I am hesitant to say that any one game has put it all together.

I believe that Ebert isn’t really interested in the question at hand at all. To him games are a diversion for kids, and in this sense he is showing a shallow and prejudiced point of view. I believe that he is overstating his case for purposefully dramatic effect. He is, in fact, trolling the entire gaming press Internet nexus and waiting for the flames to come back to him.

And he’s done a pretty good job. The hue and cry this time around has not been as voluble, but many of the same tired arguments have again been trotted out by those who would defend their beloved medium. Most of the time they boil down to calling Ebert an ignorant fool while providing no evidence whatsoever that he is wrong. For example, this noted critic takes Ebert to task, but then puts up Half-Life 2 as one of his pinnacles of gaming narrative. Now, I love HL2 as much as the next shooter fan, but here is how you sum up the narrative:

You start on a train. You shoot a lot of stuff. The guy with the beard talks a lot. You end up back on that train

Strangely, that was the story in Half-Life too. It winds around and goes nowhere precisely so Valve can take you on the same ride again in their next episode. The strength of the game was never the narrative, it was the hallways full of aliens, and those marines.

The normally more intelligent Escapist magazine has also chosen to take on Ebert this time around. They trot out the help, help, I’m being oppressed defense. See, games can’t be art because the poor developers can’t follow their true vision unless they are allowed to let you cut people’s balls off with a hack saw. The fallacy here is that for games to achieve an artistic status they must be edgy and subversive. This is patently false. The other fallacy here is that the road to edgy and subversive is paved with the corpses of the NPCs that you have dismembered as part of the emotionally compelling gameplay and narrative in your new work of art. This is also patently false.

No video game that had over the top levels of violence or so-called sexual content ever made it past the children’s pulp section of the artistic pantheon. There are certainly a lot of vehicles for fantasy and diversion there, but no one will ever convince me that any of them had anything more intersting to say artistically than “dude, you totally killed a hooker.”

The one intelligent beacon that I found in all of this mess was this critique which actually manages to make a couple of intelligent points while also taking the standard route of calling Ebert and ignorant buffoon.

My only complaint is that Croal gives the gaming community too much credit for being an intelligent and erudite group of people who are just misunderstood and beat down by the man. He cares too much that Ebert is dismissive about “the entire medium”, and again he provides no real evidence that there is anything in the medium that Ebert should care about. I love to play that game where we dismiss critics from the past for saying stupid things about great works as much as any self-important elitist snob, but it doesn’t really advance the discussion of the artistic impact of video games as a medium.

My humble contribution to this discussion would be to encourage gamers to get over the obsession with competing on narrative. Game stories just are not that good, get over it. But that’s not what I am here to talk about.

There is this notion in the gaming orthodoxy that the true strength of the medium is in its potential to provide a truly interactive story. Games, they say, will finally kick the ass of traditional “passive” media when we can give the user a interactive simulation of some alternate reality that will react to the player’s actions and adjust reactions of everything from the other characters in the game to the game world itself in response.

Almost every comparative discussion of video games brings up this notion. Even when they are beating on Ebert, they take a time out to put out this utopian vision of future gaming excellence, for example, in the articles I linked to above, we have

The truth is that videogames’ interactive nature allows their creators to craft experiences that can evoke a much broader array of emotional responses than any passive medium, because the story can change as the player interacts with the game – leading each time to different consquenses, different resolutions, and different revelations.

and

Others, like role-playing games, have a similar improvisatory element, but because they place more emphasis on narrative, they’re more like a novel or a play that is co-written or rewritten with every play session. Alternately, actors were called “players” in Shakespeare’s day; perhaps we players are the actors in today’s videogames. Massively multiplayer online games could be seen as improv theater.

I think there are several points to be made about statements like this. First, they are ludicrous on their face because no game has actually done this. Any narrative that there is in a game is put there by the designers. Some games allow player actions to change some small aspects of the in-game narrative, but no one has ever come close actually making the story react to what the player does in any significant way. I am also skeptical that any game in the future will ever do this.

Second, if the future of games is to allow the player to craft the experience, then I’ll get off the train now. Any experience that I craft for myself would be really boring, and involve a lot of writing code, or writing strange incoherent rants on the Internet. I’m not good at crafting game experiences, that’s why I want a game designer to do it.

Finally, the alleged malleability of in-game narrative is exactly what Ebert objects to when discussing video games as art. And I think he is right about that.

I think video games will truly reach their pinnacle when designers learn how to create experiences that are at the same time interactive and perfectly controlled by the designer. This would be the gaming equivalent of authorial control. The author of the game should be able to control the player’s response to the game even in the face of providing the player with an interactive landscape.

I think Ebert thinks this is impossible. I think he might be right, but I would also note that a few games have shown flashes of being able to do this. It will seem clichéd to bring up Shadow of the Colossus but I have to because as my esteemed colleague peterb wrote about the game:

In other words, this is a story that is more powerful because it was told in this medium. We care about the game because it is our hands that are unclean.

Those gamers that wish for games to really reach the narratve quality of film, or literature, or even to some extent music, should be looking to this sort of design for their wishes. Here is a game, I think, that would interest Ebert precisely because it has the control of the author that he so craves.

But games don’t need narrative to have this effect. Many of the classic Nintendo games do an admirable job of providing a precisely controlled and uniform response in a wide range of players even though they are primarily interactive puzzles with no real story. I think I could probably play Mario 64 forever, and so could my son, who isn’t old enough to really know what’s going on yet. You can just sit in the world and marvel at the design and the pretty colors. But most of all, you can make the the little man run and jump and slide and collect things and fly out of cannons and do literally dozens of other things. And, over the whole of this richly interactive world there is the strong authorial hand of the game designer making sure that everyone who plays has a strong and controlled response to the game: they have fun.

The fact that video games offer experiences like these make me optimistic about the future of the medium. I think it’s true that for the most part video games have produced a lot of pap that isn’t really worth a second thought. But it seems to me that the potential for more is there if you look in the right places.

I’ve been happily playing through the opening chapters of Resistance. The game is as good a straight up shooter as I’ve played in a while. The presentation is strong, the level of polish is high. Even if the game doesn’t quite reach a Halo-like sense of place and atmosphere, the game does present enemies that are enjoyable to shoot in a world that is mostly enjoyable to look at. Here is the one problem though.

I started on Medium, and I should have started on Easy.

This happens to me with action games with shooters. The problem is that at the beginning of the game, I am overconfident. Even though I know I’m really not that good I think I will be better this time. But it is never the case. So I start the game on Medium difficulty and I’m OK for the first two or three areas and then I start getting stomped. If the game is a checkpoint game, I find myself playing the same area five or six or ten times. Then I wish I could change to Easy. This is where I am with Resistance. I got there with Halo, although I made it through that game on Normal. I got there with God of War and slogged through. With Devil May Cry and God of War 2 and Gears of War I got smart and went right to Easy.

The developers of Devil May Cry and God of War 2 were at least perceptive enough to put code in to insult your manhood and offer the Easy mode once you died a few times in the same area. Macho insults aside, I found this to be a gracious gesture. Most games are not so nice to you. Resistance gives you two choices. Either slog through to the end, suffering with a difficulty level that is ok most of the time but very frustrating on occasion or start the entire game from the beginning in order to reset the difficulty. This seems terribly inflexible, and this lack of flexbility might make me give up on a game that I am otherwise enjoying. To me, this is too bad.

This problem with difficulty seems to me to be isolated in the Action Game genre. I guess the marketing people think that only the hard core guys like action games, and so they make their games “challenging” so that the hard core player can wave his penis around when he beats the game. Resident Evil 4 is a happy exception to this rule. It only has one difficulty level and it is perfectly tuned. Maybe that means normal hard core players find it too easy. That’s too bad for them. They probably figure that since it was originally a GameCube game, it’s too kiddie anyway.

For some reason most RPGs don’t suffer from difficulty problems. The only one I can remember having trouble with was Oblivion and it was easy to tweak the sliders to fix that problem. I seem to recall that a lot of people look down their noses at such shenanigans. These people are either masochistic or stupid and should be ignored. Many RPGs and other games that feature a progression of player power also have a built in manual way to tune the difficulty. You can just grind until you are more powerful and then the game is easier. My other favorite Insomniac game, the Ratchet series is a good example of a non-RPG that does this.

Ideally, of course, the game would tune itself. If I die too much in a given area, the game could make the enemies imperceptibly easier to kill, or slightly slower, or make my armor or weapons slightly more effective until I manage to survive. This is easier to say than to do, but it’s surprising to me that more games don’t at least take a shot at it. The trickiest part is doing it in a way that is not noticable to the hard core set. It seems to me that nothing upsets them more than little in-game assists like auto-aim or adjustable difficulty. Such devices make your penis smaller, you see.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a night off from the fight against the alien hordes and watch The Fifth Element again in Blu-Ray. Maybe while I watch the movie I’ll figure out how to start the game from my previous checkpoint in Easy mode.

This weekend I went to heaven. It turns out that in heaven there are lots of blueberry bushes.

Heaven is just north of Ligonier, at The Berry Patch, a pick-your-own blueberry farm. The same week that Whole Foods raised their prices to $4/pint for berries shipped halfway around the country, I was picking fresh berries off the shrub for $2.50 a quart. I have a few quarts now. Quite a few.

The atmosphere at The Berry Patch was relaxed and friendly. The current owners have been operating the farm for 3 years. The berry shrubs are lined up in rows, with a small colored flag indicating which variety (Blueray, Berkley, Herbert, Jersey, Early Blue, Bluetta or Colville) is in a given row. I started off trying to keep my varietals segregated, but after a while just began throwing everything into the same bucket with abandon. Based on my tastings off the vine, I liked the Berkleys the best, so that’s the lion’s share of what I got.

The best side effect of having so many blueberries is that I can do this:

Blueberry Daiquiri

Put a cup and a half of blueberries, a shotglass of Cointreau, two shotglasses of decent rum, and some ice in a blender. Blend until it is slush. Pour in a glass and serve to your friends. In about 15 minutes, you should find it pretty easy to take advantage of them.

This drink is remarkably similar to the fig daiquiri I pushed on you earlier in the season, but I’ve learned from experience. The fig daiquiri ended up tasting a little too strongly of lemon, so I eliminated the citrus entirely, substituting Cointreau instead. Blueberries are already tart enough to not need the lemon juice, anyway. This substitution has two effects. First, it makes it taste better. Second, it increases the Booze Quotient even more, turning what is already a powerful drink into a sort of eternally powerful alcohol delivery system.

Some people might say “What’s the point of making a hugely powerful drink with lots of fresh fruit?” To those people, I simply have to say that I’m not shome kinda thingmabobby wittha linoleum lawnmower shugrit vashhhhhznil afsa 89RU*(QU@#HOIASNFFIJFFzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

…it is because I appear to have lost my precious Nintendo DS, along with the game that was in it at the time.

Curses.

Update: The missing lamb has been located. The crisis has ended. Shop as usual.

I got the PS3 last night. My overall impression is that Sony should stick to hardware, and Microsoft should stick to software. It’s really too bad that the companies did not end up as partners.

The out of box experience is great. It’s just one box and two wires. No retarded power brick. No connectors the size of a washing machine. No kludgy external wireless doohickey. You plug it into the wall and into your TV and you turn it on. When you turn it on it doesn’t sound like an airplane taking off. As a pure hardware experience, the PS3 is great.

The software is more of a mixed bag. I like the minimalism of the base interface. On the other hand, I really don’t like the on screen “forms” with their little text fields and buttons that you have to push the cursor to using the d-pad. The gamepad has 4 buttons on it, let me use them in your forms UI. This is a fairly minor annoyance and is more than made up for by the fact that the machine doesn’t have a DVD-drive in it that sounds like a washing machine. Did I mention that the machine is pretty quiet?

On the other hand, the Playstation Network is like the little brother that Xbox Live kicks into a ditch every day. Microsoft gives you one account that works everywhere on the network. Microsoft also gives you multiple entry points into the network via your web browser, rather than limiting you to the console interface.

Sony gives you a PS3 network ID that has nothing to do with any other presence you might have with the company and which only works through the PS3 interface. There is no web presence except for some useless documentation. In fact, the main “login” interface at the Sony web site is for the Playstation Underground, which has nothing to do with the Playstation Network.

It’s fairly clear to me that the software groups at Sony are completely self-contained and they all sort of hate each other.

What the two machines do have in common is that both of them have many fewer games to play than the PS2. Luckily, my PS3 has the nice emulation hardware in it, so it plays the PS2 games very well. Although it does get a bit noisy in doing so. I guess emulation is hard work even with the hardware support. Of course even going full blast the machine barely made more noise than my central AC.

Finally, Resistance is a nice shooter. Nothing super special or new, but it is well produced and enjoyable. Also, unlike Gears of War, the neighbors can’t hear the DVD drive running when I play Resistance. The machine stays nice and quiet. To me, this counts for a lot.

For those following along at home, my Xbox 360 Died The Death about a month ago and I shipped it off to Microsoft for repair service. When I sent it they had not yet announced the repair program, so they billed me $70.

A package with an Xbox 360 arrived yesterday. I don’t know how they plan to refund my money, but hopefully it will just magically happen. Anyway, there are a few things worth discussing in terms of the machine that came back.

• It came with a nice letter explaining that instead of repairing my old unit, they just sent me a new one, and they apologize for the trouble.
• Interestingly, the new unit feels much lighter than the old one. I can’t tell if this is my imagination or not. If it’s real, I approve of this change. If I am imagining it, I approve of my imagination.
• The new unit’s DVD drive is quieter (although still not “quiet”).
• There’s much less heat coming from the unit when playing (the surface gets hot, but it’s not actively radiating, whereas with my old unit we were in serious pottery kiln territory, to the point where I always left my cabinet open when playing for fear of burning down my house).
• The new unit has a different serial number, but all the paperwork was done in advance, so purchased games still worked, the warranty was transferred over, etc.
• The only ‘work’ necessary was that I had to resync the controllers after turning the box on.
• They also included a gift card good for 1 month of Xbox Live.

The moral of this story is that those of you who have an original heavy-and-hot Xbox 360 should probably hope that it fails with the red ring of death so you can score one of these nice new units.

Update: Here’s a nice copy of the letter they sent with the unit. Click to enlarge.

There is a prevailing line of thought in the circles of economic theory that consumers will act in a manner that is in their best interest. This is the idea of a rational consumer. The notion is that consumers will evaluate the choices given to them in a manner consistent with logic and reason and the pick the choice that maximizes whatever it is that consumers want to maximize. Not being an economist, I’m sure I’m doing violence to their elegant theoretical thinking. The trick to making this idea work must be in defining the function to be maximized in a clever way. After all you don’t need to look too hard at how people buy games and gaming hardware to throw out the idea that they are acting rationally.

I think the behavior of the average consumer is more complex than a cold state machine driven only by logic and carefully calculated utility functions. I come to this conclusion based on extensive study of a consumer that I know very well, me. Generally, my state of mind about purchasing any given item goes through three phases:

1. I don’t know what it is.

2. I know what it is, but the BUY IT bit has not been flipped.

3. The BUY IT bit has been flipped.

The two interesting states are obviously the last two, and the interesting question is how this magic bit in my head gets flipped. Before the bit flips, I am perfectly capable of making a completely reasoned and logical decision. I can take on a detached demeanor, and compare all the choices at hand without any regard to my shallow emotional problems. For example, the rational-me will be able to trumpet the idea that one should wait (say) two years before buying a new game console, because then the library will have filled out and games will be comparatively plentiful and cheap. There are always plently of games to play until the new stuff comes around. Waiting on the new console avoids that empty period between launch and when the good stuff finally comes out. The rational-me comes to this conclusion and everything goes smoothly.

But then the bit flips.

The bit flipping is a strange and unpredictable event that is not really tied to any sort of physical reality. The state of the external world before and after the bit flips is usually pretty much the same, although I will try and come up with retroactive rationalizations for why the bit flipped. For example:

Well, ya know, Obvlivion came out, so it was time to get the new Xbox.

or

The Wii is the hot new thing! It’s so innovative!

The truth is, I saw an Xbox 360 at the Best Buy, and the bit flipped. I still haven’t figured out why the bit flipped on the Wii. I think it had to do with an inner delight that Nintendo was finally giving Sony a bit of payback. In any case, once the bit goes over, the purchase is made. Having had some experience with this behavior, I can usually tell when my state of mind on something is about to flip over. I get a little tingling sensation in the back of my head, just under the skin. It’s especially strong if I happen to see the item in the store. This is the usual sign that I should make sure I have room on my shelves, money in my bank account, and that certain parties in the household have been properly informed. I now know to make these kinds of arrangements no matter how ludicrous the particular purchase is on any rational level.

The astute reader will have figured out where this is going.

I had been following the saga of the PS3 as a mostly detached and amused obvserver until last week, when they finally dropped the price, then didn’t drop the price, then said they were phasing out the current model, then said they weren’t, then said they were. This would have just been one more notch in the soap opera, but something about the price drop pushed my inner bit about halfway over. There was a tiny little voice inside my head trying to tell me that I needed to get the machine before they took out the PS2 emulation hardware. This is, of course, nonsense. I have a perfectly good PS2 emulator sitting on the shelf under my TV. It’s a PS2.

But then it happened. We had to cancel our long weekend in Toronto because of another failure with our piece of shit Chrysler car. Faced with a whole weekend at home rather than basking in the dim sum and sushi, my fragile inner defenses collapsed and allowed the bit to flip the rest of the way over. This did not upset me. I saw the warning signs. As before, the bit was not controlled by rational forces but I was ready for it. I had allocated the necessary mental and monetary capital. What came next is what upset me.

I looked around my local city for one. There were many to be had, but there was a problem. The Exchange had a used machine and some used games. But I didn’t want a used machine, I wanted shiny newness. The local Target had the machine, but it did not have the game I wanted or the HDMI video cable that is the best way to hook the machine up to the TV. Best Buy would probably have the machine and the game, but a quick check on their web site indicated that they would only sell me an HDMI cable for approximately 10x the cost of what I could get on the web at monoprice. So I ordered the cable from monoprice and the machine from Amazon.

This, I say, is the truly irrational consumer at work.

I should explain. The HDMI cable I bought costs $5. This means the one at Best Buy costs about $50 or a bit more. This is less than 10% of the total purchase price of the item that we are talking about (PS3 plus one game). In order to avoid this staggering cost, I ordered the PS3 at Amazon instead, and am waiting four entire days for the machine to be delivered to me rather than overpay for the cables. I could have just bought the PS3 at the Target and used it with the crappy cables until the good ones came, but I didn’t think of that because my brain was fogged by the “anal-retentive dork will not get reamed” syndrome. So I one-clicked on Amazon instead, and I was instantly afflicted by “Amazon remorse.” This is when you realize that for the next four days you’ll be reloading the status page on your Amazon order instead of unpacking and playing with the PS3.

The irrational consumer is a really stupid and hateful beast. At least Amazon is sending me a free movie (Resident Evil Apocalypse) and remote control (a $25 value!).

I don’t read game manuals.

I should qualify: I don’t read manuals for games first. After I’ve been using a program for a while, sure, I might look up a specific task in the manual. Or if I’m truly obsessed with the game, I might read it later, for recreation (really, everyone should keep a copy of the manual for Dominions 3 in their bathroom). But I never read a game manual before actually trying the game out.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this behavior. That leads me to a very simple conclusion: if I can’t figure out how to play your game without the manual, it is a bad game.

This topic comes up today because I have recently been playing two games in the same genre, by the same company, that offer two completely different user interface experiences. One of them was reasonably intuitive and self-documenting. The other was a whirling nightmare of incomprehensibility. Guess which one I liked?

The company in question is the Strategic Studies Group (SSG), and the games are Carriers at War and Battlefront, both published by Matrix Games.

SSG is an Australian wargame developer with a storied history. They made some of the most well-loved wargames for the Apple ][ and other 8-bit microcomputers. In other words, they’re a company with a history of making grognard games. As such, I have a tendency to want to give them a pass on UI issues. That tendency must be sought out and destroyed: I wouldn’t cut BMW any slack if they started manufacturing a horse-drawn buggy, either.

First, some definitions. “Good UI” doesn’t mean “has pretty graphics,” although those who don’t understand UI design often think it does. It simply means that the user can sit down in front of the UI and easily discover how to work the damn thing. The Infocom text adventures, for example, have a perfectly transparent UI, despite their lack of visual glitz.

Carriers at War has a good UI. Battlefront has an abysmal UI. Both are simulations of World War II-era warfare. Carriers at War is a task group level game focused primarily on aircraft carriers, locating a hidden enemy, and executing air strikes. Battlefront is a battalion level game focused on strategic manuevers, bombardment, and close combat.

Each games has a different turn system, but neither is real-time. How did these two games end up having such widely divergent user interfaces?

User interface is largely concerned with three questions:

• How do I make something happen?
• How do I find out how to make something happen?
• What the hell just happened?

Find the button!

I’ve long been an advocate for games that use standard UI elements (”UI element”, here, is a fancy way of saying “button”). I have learned to accept that I am in a tiny minority on this issue. Most people are perfectly happy to use decorative buttons, and in most cases it doesn’t really matter. Frequently, however, developers make games that prove my point; Battlefront is one. The main UI is an interface composed of innumerable controls and displays. I found it completely impossible to determine which elements were buttons from simply looking at them. The tooltips don’t help, because they don’t exist. The in-game manual doesn’t help, because it doesn’t exist. The in-game tutorial doesn’t help, because it doesn’t exist. Even if you know what buttons to press, you immediate run into the next problem, which is that the game does a terrible job of answering the “What the hell just happened?” question.

There’s a strain of thought that says that games with poor UIs are necessarily complex. They have so many buttons and controls, the theory goes, because they are intended for smart people, like me. You know. A guy with a huge brain and a gigantic penis. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s got nothing to do with the potency of one’s brain, or other body parts. It’s simply that the guy who has free time to spend on a game with a poor UI is the guy who has nothing better to do with his life.

CAW: Buttons!

I went into Carriers at War wth some trepidation, afraid I’d encounter the same sort of muddled design that Battlefront suffered from. That turned out not to be the case; CAW is fairly straightforward, and succeeds where Battlefront fails on multiple levels. There is an in-game tutorial, so right off the bat the game is already miles ahead of its sibling. Secondly, a little more thought went into the design. Buttons look like buttons, and readouts look like readouts. I haven’t found myself hopelessly clicking on something that turns out to not actually be a control in CAW.

The upshot of this is that Carriers of War has been a fairly engrossing experience for me. Instead of forcing me to focus on the vagaries of its user interface, the game invites you to think of things in strategic terms. Instead of thinking “How do I move this task group closer towards Wake Island?” I’m thinking “Where has Admiral Nagumo deployed his carriers? And has he found mine yet?” That’s what a good UI accomplishes. It allows you to focus on the things that matter, instead of the things that don’t. Good UI can help save an otherwise marginal game. Bad UI can annihilate an otherwise good game. Please, please, please, developers: make having a straightforward user interface one of your top priorities. Your customers — and your bottom line — will thank you.

Hornet torpedoed

UI isn’t only about control, but about feedback. Consider the way combat is resolved in our two games. In Battlefront, when you attack, you see a couple of dice roll, and a line in a little table is highlighted. What the various abbreviations on that line mean is not at all obvious. in Carriers at War, there is a brief animation of planes flying over some ships, dropping bombs or torpedoes. When a bomb or torpedo hits, there is an explosion. When a plane is shot down by chaff, it explodes. So Carriers at War actually makes the answer to the question “What the hell just happened?” fairly obvious.

One aspect of Carriers that it accomplishes grandly is playing the “What if?” game. The included scenarios — Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Coral Sea, Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and Phillipine Sea — cover the breadth of the war in the Pacific. A number of the scenarios also have variants (for example, a version of Pearl Harbor where the US was expecting the attack). The game drives home exactly to what extent warfare in this era was about information. It’s impossible to play as the Japanese in Midway, for example, and not be aware that there are three American carriers out there, somewhere, looking for you. Needless to say, this can lead to dramatically different outcomes than were seen historically.

My summary: if you like naval combat games — and let’s be clear, I do — then Carriers at War is a slam-dunk. It’s easy to get started, and provides enough depth to encourage many, many replays. In contrast, I’d have a hard time recommending Battlefront to even the most experienced wargamer. Its tragic interface is simply too intrusive. Where it should sit back and let you enjoy the game, it is instead interposing itself between you and fun.

Both games run under Microsoft Windows.

Additional Resources

• Carriers at War at MatrixGames.com
• BattleFront at SSG’s web site

Almost everything about the “new generation” of gaming has revolved around High Definition. High Defintion allows console games to look as “good” as PC games. These same consoles, at least the two that aren’t selling that well, are being used as a wedge to try and own the High Definition movie market. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been watching Planet Earth in HD. I have also been re-playing Resident Evil 4, which is decidedly not in HD. While you can’t really compare these two experiences directly, my conclusion after having had both experiences is that the H in HD is more about hype than about reality.

Let’s get one thing straight first though. Planet Earth is absolutely stunning. I am not what you would call a “nature buff”. I would much rather have a nice hot shower and sit at a coffee shop than search out my spiritual connection with the land. One of the reasons I stopped actively seeking out landscape photographs was because I found myself much more interested in cities and architecture than plants, rocks, grass, and worst of all, animals. Even given this context, Planet Earth causes me to drop my jaw on the floor and stare in amazement. There are crazy time lapse shots that span weeks and months, and are sometimes taken from space. There are tracking shots that move the camera down the vertical wall of a cliff that is hundreds of feet high. There are shots in pitch black. There are shots from the air. There are shots from the ground. It’s just amazing to look at. I am also pleased by the HD presentation, but like all of my experience with HD, the differences between “high” and “standard” are more subtle that you would think.

If you spend any time in the TV store, or reading the TV press, you tend to get the idea that the HD screen will be akin to the second coming of Jesus, motherhood and apple pie all at the same time. HD, they say, is so detailed and so stunningly beautiful that it is “like looking out a window out into the natural world”. I say: horse shit. The HD picture is nice. It is even on occasion almost as nice as looking at a decent color photograph. But don’t let anyone fool you, it is not life-changing. High def. tends to come into its own only in certain kinds of shots. If the shot is a wide vista with a ton of small details, then HD manages to hold those details better than a standard DVD. On the other hand, the majority of tight shots and close-ups probably do not benefit, because as you move in everything gets bigger and more clear anyway. This is certainly what I have found when comparing SD sports TV to HD, and also with the few HD movies that I have watched.

This is a problem for the consumer industries trying to sell people on HD. They want Joe Consumer to walk out of the store with equipment that costs an order of magnitude more than the television (and dvd player, and sound system) that he is replacing. They can’t do this very well by telling Joe that his spiffy new television will be somewhat better some of the time. The sales pitch thus tends to be heavy on the “like looking out a window” sort of nonsense. If you are buying a big TV, my advice is to keep your wits about you and evaluate everything carefully. Personally, I was mostly after size so that movies would be bigger and more watchable. My large TV is, in fact, large. So I am happy. The whole HD resolution game was only of secondary importance to me, so I am happy.

The new game consoles from Sony and Microsoft have a similar marketing problem. I think one of the reasons why Sony, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft have not made a huge splash is that they are asking consumers to pay unprecedented prices for a game console on the promise of a huge leap in graphical fidelity, and that leap just is not there. For example, the last game I really played on the Xbox 360 was Gears of War. The style and mechanics of the game are at least partially inspired by Resident Evil 4. I have been replaying RE4 on the Wii lately, and comparing the visuals in the two games illustrates my point. Microsoft and fans of the game would have you believe that Gears is an order of magnitude leap over what the poor Wii can achieve. The real jump is smaller.

Just as HD movies mostly stand out in shots that have a lot of small details, the graphics in Gears stand out when you have time to really stare at all the tiny details in the textures and art design. Once the two games are in motion, or if you are trying to stay alive rather than staring at the environments, the differences are harder to see. I’m not saying that RE4 looks as “good” as Gears, because it doesn’t. I’m just saying that when you are actually playing the game you don’t really care that you can’t see every little brick in the textures on the sides of buildings and such. You are more worried about the zombie people than the low-res textures.

In other words, while Sony and Microsoft would have you believe that their HD graphics are worth a significant premium over the “weaker” rendering engine in the Wii, I think that most people have correctly decided that the premium is not worth it. As a result, they stand in line for the Nintendo console or they go out and buy a PS2. Since I’m a gadget and media whore, I’ll probably buy a PS3 anyway. I appreciate the HD graphics, but I am realistic enough to realize that it’s just not that different from the previous generation. Don’t buy into the hype. Go and look very carefully for yourself.

Snippets from a real conversation I had this weekend with my friend Nat:

Me: “Hey, you remember that game Exult, the re-implementation of Ultima VII?

Nat: “Sure I do.”

Me: “I’ve been not playing it quite a bit lately. I grabbed the sources from CVS and built it so that I could have a Universal binary to be not playing.”

Nat: “Did it build easily?”

Me: “It wasn’t too bad. There were some hidden dependencies that I needed to tease out. I probably spent maybe a half or or so getting the thing built, which isn’t that bad for something that I spend so much time not playing. And I didn’t like the idea of not playing the PPC version on my Intel box.”

Nat: “Huh.”

Me: “The most interesting thing is that there’s a concurrency bug in the midi thread. I spent about an hour debugging it and sent in a patch, so that the fan doesn’t spin up and the CPU doesn’t get hot when I’m not playing. I hate not playing games that make the fan spin up. They’re so loud, y’know?”

Nat: “You realize that this is the logical conclusion of “I like installing games more than playing them.”

Me: “Yeah, I know. I just really like not playing the Ultima games, though. There are so many of them that they really give a lot of bang for the buck. Not all of them, though — I tried not playing Ultima VI and it didn’t really grab me. Martian Dreams is great, though. I’ve also been not playing Flight Simulator, but that’s just a one-off.”

Summary: What the hell is wrong with me?

Additional Resources

• More on my obsession with Ultima.
• If you’re only going to play one Ultima game, play this one.
• In the course of our further discussion, Nat and I discovered Blogging Ultima. Sometimes reading about someone else playing a game is better than playing the game yourself. Go figure.

Today I am inspired by the sauce I just ate. But I’ll get to that later. My story begins with a long standing conflict that I have with my lovely wife. Karen, in general, has the role of telling me what to cook. Left to my own lazy devices I’d just eat ramen noodles and hot dogs every night. Thus, Karen spends her time making up shopping lists and handing me recipes for the dishes that she’d like to have that week. Then I look at the recipes and make the food however I want. This causes a certain amount of friction.

In my defense, all I can say is that I do this because in my experience the recipe is almost always wrong in various ways.

Now, I am by no means some kind of cooking genius. I know how to cook a few fancy Chinese dishes handed down to me from my mom. I know a little bit about Italian food. I know how to put butter into the sauce at the end to give it that French Bistro richness. Everything else that I can do comes to me not from any sort of innate talent as much as a lot of rote practice over the last 20 years or so. If you go through the motions enough times, you get a feel for what will work and what will not. This is all I really bring to the table, so to speak. I have no deep universal culinary insights. I’m not as good as Remy in Ratatouille.

Having said that, when reading a recipe, keep these things in mind:

1. Never use raw “seasoning” vegetables as the base of a dish. If there are onions, carrots, celery, peppers or whatever, always saute them. Always beware of recipes that start with something like “take vegetables A, B and C, mix with meat D and dump this into a pot with water and turn the heat on”.

2. If you are sauteing something, season it. Don’t dump a pound of salt on everything. Just a small pinch of salt and pepper to get the taste out and into the food. Never put all the salt in at the end. What you have done then is just added salt to something that is tasteless. The recipe will never tell you to do this. But this is what you should do.

3. Don’t use plain water when you have stock and wine around. Whenever a recipe calls for water, I at least mix water and white wine. Ideally you’d use stock because you are presumably making a soup or something. But, the rigors of modern life often dictate that there isn’t an ample supply of fresh made stock around, and if you use the canned stuff I’d have to kill you.

4. Many food magazine recipes put in little foofy flourishes that might make sense in a restaurant, but are useless to you and I. If I’m just making dinner, I don’t bother with garnishes, colored sauces on top of the soup, multiple blender stages with some of the beans but not others, and so on. I try to streamline things to be more convenient.

5. There is no meat stew on earth that takes less than two hours to cook. Don’t believe the recipe when it tells you to simmer the meat for 45 minutes and then claims that it will be tender. These people are lying to you.

6. Be wary of instructions that tell you to cook thick pieces of food in a frying pan. What they almost always really want you to do is finish the damn thing in the oven.

7. If the recipe calls for more than about 20 minutes of total prep work and the result is no fancier than a piece of fish on a plate, or a nice stew or something, they have done something wrong. If you have the right stuff in your kitchen, there is very little that you can’t do in 20 minutes, not counting things like simmering time. After all, that’s how long you wait for even the fanciest dish at a nice sit down restaurant where they make everything to order.

Finally, the best way to learn how to make a certain dish is to go over to someone’s house and watch their mom do it. This is the one universal culinary truth that I will offer up. Which brings me back to the sauce.

I wrote down a recipe for a tomato sauce that I made sometime last year, and made the regrettable mistake of mentioning that I thickened it with the old Chinese corn starch and water trick. I know for a fact that this horrified many of our readers. All I can say is I wish I hadn’t written it down, and I didn’t mean for people to think that I do this on a routine basis. I was in a hurry and I got desperate.

Anyway, last night a good friend sent us home with some proper red sauce and meatballs, which inspired me to formally apologize for my little gaffe from before. With any luck, I’ll be able to go over to their house and watch them make the stuff so I can do it right in the future. Without the corn starch. Sorry about that.

iStopMotion is a wonderfully simple little Mac app that helps you make stop-motion movies. I made the below movie with a tethered Canon Rebel XT, because I’m an abject, hopeless wanker. An easier (and probably more correct) way to do it, however, is probably to use the program’s excellent support for the iSight camera.

OK, OK. As you can see, I’m not Martin Scorsese. I’m probably not even Ed Wood. But I still had fun.

I wonder how much work it would be to redo Spartacus with Fisher-Price figurines. The hard part will probably be getting the lead character’s shirt off.

It seems like just the other week that I ranted about the Xbox 360 design being unacceptably fragile. And what’s the news this week? Microsoft is extending Xbox 360 warranties for the “red ring of death” to 3 years (even retroactively!), refunding service fees for that repair already paid by customers, and taking a one billion dollar (plus) charge to cover the costs

Without any schadenfreude or sarcasm whatsoever, I’ll just say “good job, guys.” This is the right way to address a serious customer-facing problem. I will confess to wanting to be a fly on the wall in the postmortem where they figure out how this ended up happening, though.

It’s been a few years since I made a video of the fantabulous walnut pastry (”hodo kwaja”) machine in Toronto (see À la recherche du temps à noix, from 2004). I figured it would be a generally good idea to get the video on YouTube, just to make it easier to find and view. Enjoy!

The 80/20 heuristic states that in most computer systems, you spend 80 percent of your time in 20 percent of the code. Another way to say this is that 80 percent of your users will spend most of their time using about 20 percent of the application that you have so painstakingly constructed for them. This leads to a lot of meetings where we spend time trying to guess which workflows we must support in order to please the “80 percent” users. In my experience, concentrating on the 80 percent users allows projects that have limited resources and short schedules to get done and ship something that most users will be happy with.

Having watched this process a long time, I have noticed one paradoxical difficulty with applying this heuristic. The problem is this: many users (mostly the dorks) are convinced they are in the “special” 20 percent rather than the happy 80 percent, and you can’t do anything about it.

I have a lot of experience with the mindset that self-selects into the special 20 percent because I spend a lot of time in indulging in dork hobbies. In fact, this particular sort of delusion is related to the OCD that also afflicts those who buy technical gadgets.

In general, what I will call “the 20 percent delusion” is a syndrome in which the dork dreams up requirements that fall outside those of the 80 percent workflows that are absolutely critical to whatever it is they think they want to get done with the device. You see this all the time:

In photography, there is the creature who is completely paralyzed when he needs to decide what equipment to carry for a particular photo project. He thinks he must be ready for everything because he really has no specific purpose in mind. Therefore, instead of the single body and one lens that he needs, you will find him walking around Paris pulling a rolling suitcase with the EOS-5d, a Rebel for backup, 3 huge zoom lenses, 4 “fast” prime lenses, macro equipment, two flashes, a light stand, umbrellas, radio remotes, and a tripod strapped to his wife. I saw this guy once. He had just set up his Pentax 6×7 (which is in the roller along with the digital stuff) in front of the Arc de Triomphe at noon taking a bad shot of the Arc with a white sky behind it.

The photo delusion takes people in other directions too. The internet forums are full of people who are convinced they need the most robust, most flexible, most expensive and heaviest “pro” equipment. There are usually one of several rationales presented for this need for “pro” equipment. For example:

1. I take pictures in manly man environments and no wimpy-ass plastic body will hold up. I need my camera to be a solid 15 pound chunk of metal. Also, there should be no electronics in it, because I might get stuck in a cave 2000 feet underground where there are no batteries.

2. All my favorite pro photographers use German lenses, so my camera must use German lenses. Also, it must be able to run for 5 years without needing to change the batteries for the light meter.

3. I take pictures of such a wide variety of subject matter that I must have a completely modular 18-piece camera kit that I can “configure” any way I need. Also, it must be able to run without batteries, because I might be in the desert away from human contact for months at a time.

The neurotic need for configurability comes up in other contexts besides photography. You see it all the time in computing. One favorite target of my hatred, the X11 window system, is so configurable that they didn’t even specify the user interface that it presents to the user at all. This is great for a research system on user interfaces, but it pretty much sucks for everything else. The problem is that for more than a decade now, the design discipline that puts flexibility before functionality has resulted in huge amounts of work going into X11-based desktop systems that are very configurable but completely unusable.

This attitude extends naturally into the realm of computer hardware. Historically, computer hardware used to be something that you tinkered with. I knew people in high school who built single board computers from parts, because at the time this was the only way to get something cheap. This led naturally to people who tinkered with the insides of their Apple II, or IBM PC. If you wanted to tinker, things like expansion slots, prototype boards, and user editable operating system kernels make a lot of sense. In those times, that was what the 80 percent user wanted to to.

Of course, all of this has changed. Computer systems these days want to be a turnkey commodity, something that you just turn on an use. And yet the hardware design is still driven by the people who think they want to tinker. Marketing literature that speaks of expandability and flexibility still tries to drive the purchasing decision from the mindset of the guy with the soldering iron, even though only a tiny fraction of users actually care about that stuff.

The truth is, most people would be happier with a box that they could plug in, turn on, and use. Of course, when companies try to actually build a machine that can do this, they get slammed by the 20 percent crowd for building an underpowered, inflexible piece of crap that you can’t upgrade. The result is that the industry is still dominated by hardware that has a lot of useless flexibility built-in, even though no one really wants it.

So, how can you tell if you sometimes fall into the delusional 20 percent? When was the last time you saw a really excellent tool that would make a big difference in your life, only to reject it out of hand with a sentence that begins with the words “if only”. Yeah, I’ve done that too. It’s OK. There is still hope. Here is what you do.

First, deconstruct the “if only” sentence. Then sit down and really evaluate what you are asking the tool to do, and decide if you really really need it, or if you just think you need it. It can be helpful here to collect some quantitative data. Mark down the number of times you really need the “if only” feature over some period of weeks or months. My experience is that usually this number will be close to zero, and you will find that the tool in question really does do everything you actually need it to do.

For example, one of my “if only” hang-ups is that I can’t stand the idea of the meta-data in my digital pictures not being stored in the picture files themselves. I used to have a really well-argued rationale for this, but I can’t remember it anymore. The result was that I resisted moving to an integrated photo workflow solution like Lightroom even though the app is fabulous to use and much faster and simpler than what I used to do. Having thought about this harder, I think I have convinced myself that I don’t really care about this problem anymore. So now I can be happy using Lightroom, and I have reduced the number of tools I use for my photo workflow significantly (truthfully: I still use Photo Mechanic for import and initial tagging, but that’s just because I’ve paid for it and I haven’t figured out exactly how to remove it yet).

There you have it. One small secret on the path to happiness: analyze your life, and figure out how to get yourself out of the 20 percent and into the 80 percent. I have worked hard over the last ten years to apply this principle in my computing and to some extent my photography and it has served me well.

Still in the throes of my newfound Pokémon addiction, I went overboard and picked up Pokémon Battle Revolution for the Wii.

Meh.

To be fair, this is one of those cases where I have no one to blame but myself. The ad copy for Pokémon Battle Revolution makes perfectly clear what it is: it’s essentially a “visualizer” for Pokémon battles. So the battle mechanics are the same (or nearly the same) as the handheld Pokémon games, but instead of just getting a modest shake or a small animation, you get a beautifully modelled 3D depiction of one Pokémon kicking another Pokémon’s ass.

So the Nintendo restaurant delivered exactly what it promised. It’s just that once the meal was on my plate, I realized that I had ordered a plate of pixy stix. Sweet and colorful, but not all that satisfying.

The most clever parts of the game? You can transfer your little creatures, wirelessly, from your Nintendo DS copy of Pokémon Diamond or Pearl, and you can use the DS to control the game in a multiplayer battle mode. The least clever parts of the game? The complete lack of any interesting Wii-like controls, and the fact that the UI locks up whenever your onscreen hostess bows. It’s a Japanese game. She is bowing all the time.

In summary, either of the DS Pokémon games offer ten times the fun for half the price. Don’t bother with Pokémon Battle Revolution.