Author: Jason

Movie Round-Up: January 22nd, 2010

Reviews

Tooth Fairy:

I have absolutely no desire at all to see Dwayne Johnson in a tutu and wings playing the part of the mythical figure who takes teeth from under kids’ pillows and leaves money behind.  None.  Well, maybe if it is awful enough I’ll watch it for a laugh someday on DVD.

Extraordinary Measures:

Based on a true story of a man with sick kids who decides to help fund the research of a drug for a cure.  I got to see a screening of this a while back, and it was decent enough, but it was typical.  It tugged the right heartstrings at the right moments, it made me laugh now and then to lighten the mood, and I felt good watching it.  That said, it really isn’t worth the price of admission.  Not full price anyway.

Legion:

Angels versus humanity.  I got to see a screening of this last night and my opinion can be summed up in two words: wasted potential.  This movie isn’t horrible, but it also isn’t really good either.  The underlying ideas are fine, but the execution of them is lacking.  The film could have been staged better to be more exciting, the diner in the middle of nowhere felt way too cliche.  Every step of the way, every fight, every loss, every win, it felt uninspired.  The movie took no risks.  That said… there were some good lines and scenes.  I kinda enjoyed the movie on some level, but I wouldn’t pay to see it.

Singularity

Gaming

Over two years ago on this blog I decided I was going to investigate the idea of building a game where the player was only allowed to create one character.  From thinking about it on my own and from discussions on message boards, I came to realize that most MMOs simply couldn’t do it.  Mainly because their design has actually come to not only expect but actually count on players playing more than one character.  With shared bank space to easily swap items and continuing to limit characters in the number of trade skills and other aspect, as well as encouraging people to play alts and race through the old game again and again removing as many barriers to speedy leveling as possible, you simply couldn’t release a clone of any current DIKU-style MMO that only allowed one character.  You’d need to rebuild the game from the ground up.  And most MMO players simply weren’t interested.

Enter the Facebook game.

By default, the design of almost every Facebook game is that you only have one character.  As well, there is only one world and everyone shares it.  It is this element, and this element alone that has me taking a second look at the Facebook games that I originally dismissed.

The game play of most Facebook games still irritates me.  Some of them are what I refer to as “intensely casual”.  They are casual in that they require very little effort, but they are intense because their design is that there are actions to take and buttons to click all the time.  These games often provide so much micromanagement that a player can get lost in there quite easily.

I’d love to see some games that can dial back that intensity, like D&D Tiny Adventures (though they go a little too far and it barely feels like I’m playing a game at all), and I’ll keep looking for them.  Sadly, though, Facebook games are almost less diverse than traditional MMOs, so it won’t take long at all to go through them.

But maybe this is what it takes.  I said that to do one character in one world that MMOs would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, and maybe Facebook games are where that rebuilding can happen.

Chat Filter Abuse

Gaming

The other night I decided I’d drop in to Wizard 101.  It is a great game for just jumping in and banging out some combat or quests, then logging out.  It’s casual in the best sense of the word, in that you can play at your own pace and not that it only requires a browser and babysitting.

Anyway, I had forgotten where I had logged out previously and I committed the cardinal sin of Wizard 101: moving before looking.  I stepped backwards into the street and immediately joined someone else’s combat.  No big deal really.  There was only one monster, so I picked a card and attacked.  I picked my card first.  The other guy then picked his, but when it came to casting, he went first.  He threw a damage increase, death +30%, and then I fired off my weakest death spell, which amplified +30% only did about 90 points of damage.  A waste of the damage increase.  Now, keep in mind, when you pick a spell, everyone in your group can see what you picked and what you have targeted.  I picked first.  There was a good ten second pause for the other guy to make his move.  He could have said “Don’t use that.” or something, but he didn’t.

So the round is done and the damage increaser was wasted and the guy says, “your jack o as”.

One of the great things about Wizard 101 is that it is very very kid friendly.  There are two forms of chat.  The first is completely restricted and only allows you to speak in canned phrases like “Help!” and “Let’s go fight [insert quest target enemy here].” and other such things.  The other form of chat is free form typing, however, every word you type is compared to the Wizard 101 dictionary and if it doesn’t exist in there the word will stay in red on your screen and will appear as “…” to everyone else.  What my groupmate was trying to say was “you are a jack ass” but if he had it would have gone out as “you are a jack …” or possibly even just “…”.  I honestly forget how harsh the censoring is.  So, because of the chat filter, a new slang has emerged in Wizard 101 using approximate swears.

Back to the group… he then tells me “fine ill let them kill you i wont attack at all” which was fine with me, even though a second monster joined in I can easily take two at a time in this area.  Of course, he proceeds instead to target everything I target in an attempt to make me not fight.  *shrug*  We win and then he says, “more on” “flock off bench” “your a noob end of story there”.  Translated: Moron. Fuck off bitch. You’re a noob, end of story there.

Flippantly I threw in a “less off” in there in response to his “more on”, and when he was done I said “You’re”.  Which he took for arguing, like I was saying he was a noob when in reality I was correcting his language, his misuse of “your”.  He then followed with lines that included “sheet o face”, “little bench” and he tried to explain to me that “you’re”, “your” and “you are” all mean the same thing.  “master o bait”, “shut the flock up”, “as o hole”.  The really funny part is when he claims that because of my spelling and refusal to type insults around the word filter it is because I’m a little kid.

What?  So, in most MMOs, people spouting obscenities are often younger, less mature players.  But in Wizard 101 I’m being told that proper grammar and not swearing is a sign of immaturity?  Huh?

The sad thing is that the filter while preventing real swearing also prevents real communication.  The guy asked how old I was, and I couldn’t answer because the game would not allow “35” or “thirty-five” or “thirty” or “five” to be said.  In fact, at the end of our conversation he said, “i can tell from your crop of insults your not even third team”.  Since the game splits players between “under 13” and “13 and over”, I assume he meant “13” but had to say “third team” to get around the filter.

The entire situation ended in irony.  This guy was so pissed at me for the one miscast spell and my further arguments about his grammar that he reported me.  If you go to the Wizard 101 FAQ page and click on the question “What happens when I get Reported?” you will find the following text:

When you report someone, or you are reported, a message is sent directly to Mr Lincoln that includes the chat logs of everything that was said before and after that report.

Mr Lincoln then reads the log and assess the situation. He determines how bad the offense was, looks up prior offenses for the reported individual, and based on that assessment he issues sanctions such as muting or banning and sends an email to the offending account explaining the violation and the sanctions.

If the report was falsely made, that is determined as well, and the player who made the false report is investigated as to whether or not they have made previous false reports. False reports are just a egregious as valid ones, and similar sanctions can be levied against repeat offenders of false reporting.

Everything that a player enters into the chat window is logged. These larger chat logs are also routinely checked for those infractions that are not reported.

Under the question “What is considered a Reportable Offense?” you’ll find:

We appreciate that our players want to make Wizard City the best it can be, and we’ve placed the tools in your hand to report players for inappropriate behavior. We ask that you use the reporting feature to identify truly egregious behavior, such as creative profanity (swearing around the filters), solicitation of usernames/passwords, predatory threats, racist comments and other such actions as outlined in the Terms of Use. The old story of “the kid that cried wolf” has a lot of bearing in this situation and we trust that all reports received by players are valid and require support intervention.

So, shortly after my new friend departed (I did add him to my friend list), a pop up window told me I had been reported.  Shortly after that, my new friend vanished, both from the game world and from my friend list.  I can only assume my friend managed to get himself banned.  On the other hand, my account was muted for 1 day.  I asked for clarification and got it.  Apparently, when my friend said “you little sheet” and I responded “Sheet of what?” my use of “sheet”, a common sidestep for the word “shit”, was enough to warrant a 1 day mute warning.  I have asked if any action was taken against my friend, and I emailed them screen shots of the conversation, since I was unable to report him myself.  No word as of yet…

Oh well…

Removing Grouping – Part V

Gaming

The last thing I want to approach, and it is last only because I wracked my brain for weeks and could only think of five things a group mechanic provides (communications, status updates, rewards, content gating – everything else was purely social and not tied to the mechanic itself), is balance.

Many games these days that have groups use those groups to affect the design of the classes/characters in the game.  Some players may not think so, but a lot, and I mean a ton, of time is spent tuning things like “what should the mana cost of this spell be?” and “what differences should there be between the single target version, the group version, and the area effect version?”  You can look back at EverQuest and see that clearly in their buffs.  A single target version of a spell might have a 2 second cast time and cost 200 mana.  The group version has an 8 second cast time -making it harder to cast during combat- and costs only 700 mana -making it a big savings in both time and mana when casting it on a group of 6 players.  The area effect version has a 30 second cast time, costs 3000 mana, and uses a pearl, making it impossible to cast in combat, wipes out the mana of the caster and costs in-game money, but it lands on “every player within a radius of X” making it fantastic for casting on a ten group raid at the beginning of an evening of raiding or for spamming buffs at the bank but little else.  Every game (in the Diku mold) does this to some degree, using the group as an element of balance.

In Lord of the Rings Online, there are even group maneuvers where one player starts an action that opens up options for other group members to continue the attack.  Without the group mechanic and the built in selection of who to notify of a group maneuver, the game would need to move indicators of group actions to the target itself so that a random collection of people without a formal group structure could pull off the same action.

Like with rewards and content gating, the group structure here is a fundamental element of the design for balance and weighs heavy in lots of the decisions made in what players can and can’t do.

Movie Round-Up: January 15th, 2010

Reviews

Now commencing, the week of “The” …

The Spy Next Door:

Our first “The” film is this little throwaway kid friendly family film starring Jackie Chan as a secret super spy who also babysits.  Or something like that.  Take the kids, sure, but don’t expect to be anything other than predictable.  Not worth my money, and I had the opportunity, three times, to see this for free and never did.

The Lovely Bones:

Our second “The” film is an adaptation of a very successful book.  I’ve actually wanted to read the book, however, I put that idea aside once I heard there was to be a film.  Films always have to excise content from the book, sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad.  If the film is good, I’ll read the book in a couple of years.  Anyway, if you don’t know, its about a girl who is raped and murdered looking in on the world after her death.  She follows her family and the man who killed her and she watches her family fall apart and the murderer prepare to go after another girl.  I’m not sure I’ll make it to the theater for this one, mostly because dramas don’t really benefit from the big screen (and often are hurt by people who won’t shut the hell up), but if I head to the cinema, this will be on my list.

The Book of Eli:

Our last “The” film is this post-apocalyptic tale.  I was lucky enough to get into a screening of this last night, and let me tell you, in my opinion, this is one damn fine film.  The Hughes Brothers have taken Gary Whitta’s script and painted it beautifully on the screen with excellent use of Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.  I know some people in the theater were bored, because their shuffling and chatting occasionally distracted me, but I was enraptured.  Even having already seen it, I may pay to see it again.  Well done, gentlemen.  Well done.

And here ends the week of “The”.

Do You Play Facebook Games?

Gaming

I have to admit that the casual games on Facebook fascinate me.  However, their “abuse” of social networking keeps me away from many of them.  Every time a friend of mine updates me with some event in a game, or invites me to play, I hide all statuses from that game.  In a similar fashion, anyone on my Twitter follow list who enables the twitter features in most games that offer them will be unfollowed.

To date, my foray into Facebook games has been two fold.  On one hand you have games like Scrabble and other board games where you challenge people and play, or go looking for open games and play.  On the other hand you have things like Farmville and Mafia Wars (the Zynga games) where in order to succeed you have to spam and invite your friends and join groups of people you don’t care about just to be able to progress.  It is that latter group of games that turns me off.

So, what about you?  Do you play Facebook games?  If so, which ones?  If so, what draws you to them?

The Innovation Apocalypse

Gaming

Everyone these days seems to be talking about innovation (every letter is a link there).  And by innovation they mean games doing something “new”.

I’ve made a few comments around, but there is one thing I want to post about here that I feel is important.  I’ve touched on it before, at the end of this post.  MMOs are a different beast that other forms of games.

Left 4 Dead 2 made some game play changes from the Left 4 Dead model.  They added melee weapons, and the new boss infected shake up how you have to play, and the new “hordes until you turn them off” events instead of just the “hordes for X minutes/waves” ones change everything.  However, if you hate the changes, all you need to do is put your old Left 4 Dead disc and play.  The original game is still there.

When EverQuest launched, it had flaws.  Parts were unfinished and some things just didn’t work.  They released patches to fix those, and over the course of the first few expansions they expanded the game with new races, classes, item slots, abilities, and more.  But, the underlying game, the way in which you played, really didn’t change.  That came later.  If you were to play EverQuest now, you’d find it plays very differently from the original game.  With the new quest/task system that mimics WoW’s abundance of quests as opposed to EQ’s original more in-depth longer quests, mercenaries, more instancing, and other bits and pieces, it just isn’t the same.  The old game still does exist on the EQMac server, but if you are on a PC and want to play the old EverQuest, you can’t.

Even World of Warcraft is not immune.  The game as it exists now doesn’t play exactly the same as it did in the past.  The faster leveling, the LFG tool for instance cross-server groups, the changes in raid designs.   If you want to play the old WoW, you can’t, you have to play the WoW that exists now.  The new Cataclysm expansion will put an end to the old game permanently as those zones won’t even exist in their original form anymore.

This is what I mean by the title, The Innovation Apocalypse.  MMOs are expensive to make and expensive to run, and companies don’t want to see their game dwindle to a hardcore fan base and be faced with launching a sequel.  EQ did that with EQII and initially EQII was a flop.  They’ve recovered somewhat, and they have continued evolving EQ (up to expansion number 16 now).  They are looking at EQIII (which might be referred to as EverQuest Next), but don’t expect it to be an iteration of the existing model – it will probably be a complete reinvention.  If you are a fan of EQII, you should be thrilled with the idea of EQIII, because it means that all the new ideas are headed that way and are likely not to be implemented in EQII for a while yet.  But that may just be a matter of time.  Many of EQ’s more drastic elements didn’t come until after WoW and EQII were out.  Someday, the EQII that you love may be gone as well.

Personally, I’m all for innovation in new games.  But please don’t innovate in the game I’m already playing and enjoying.  It is heartbreaking when a game you love ignores you and is ruined in its chase of a new lover.

Removing Grouping – Part IV

Gaming

Communications and status updates were easy problems, relatively.  Especially compared with the mine field of the reward structure.  The next element I want to look at is content gating.

Many games implement areas where only one group can enter.  Or two groups, or five groups, etc.  When the designers put a cap on the number of people that can enter, it allows them to more reasonably design content.  If group size is 5 and you limit the dungeon to a single group, you can make content and then test it with varying groups of 5 characters much more easily than trying to design content to scale in challenge as the number of people increases.  Something that is challenging for a group of 5 might be trivial to a group of 10.  Of course, a formal group structure isn’t required for this, as the number of players within an instance can be maintained by the instance itself.  You could even place a UI element called “People in Instance” that would provide you a list of the players in the instance for easy selection and pinning to your UI.

After a long look, it actually seems that the main benefit of groups to content gating is actually in getting people who intend to play together into the same instance do they can play together.  Getting around this winds up being overly complicated with solutions like having one player enter the instance and then inviting each other player to join him.  That first player being designated the instance “leader”, a job he will pass off to someone else if he quits playing.  Then you have issues of players wipes, when everyone gets killed.  How does the game keep track of who belongs to this instance?  Is it because you have a dead body in there to recover?  If you get frustrated and log off for the night, is the group now permanently down a player because you left your body in the instance so the game holds your place?  Again, it looks like if you wished to remove the group mechanic from the game, like with reward sharing, you wind up needing to examine the entire game from the ground up and make changes all over in places where the group mechanic was either planned on or taken for granted.

Movie Round-Up: January 8th, 2010

Reviews

Skipped last week because, oddly, nothing opened on New Year’s Day…  anyway, onward!

Youth in Revolt:

Just as I’m getting tired of seeing Michael Cera play Michael Cera over and over, it looks like he finally decided to take a project which might prove he can act.  Sort of.  As Nick, he’s Michael Cera as usual.  But from the bits you can see in the trailer, when he’s Francois he’s actually not Michael Cera.  The movie looks entertaining, but as surprised as I am to see him acting, I’m not about to drop money at box office prices for another Michael Cera film.  I’ll see you on DVD, Michael Cera.  Perhaps I should revise this review, because I don’t think I said Michael Cera enough.  Michael Cera.

Leap Year:

Amy Adams in a romantic comedy about two people who are wrong for each other turning out to be right for each other.  The wife deserves a date night every now and then, and I can use it as an excuse to feed my addiction to chick flicks.  Yeah, I’m in.

Daybreakers:

It is really nice to see someone do something interesting with vampires now and then.  Hush, you Twilight fanatics… vampires who sparkle like diamonds in sunlight are many things, but interesting is not one of them.  Now, Daybreakers, on the other hand, takes us to a world where vampires run everything, and they hunted humans down nearly to extinction.  One vampire is looking for a way to make high quality synthetic blood to save his race.  But a group of humans have stumbled on something else: a cure.  In addition to just sounding cool, the movie looks cool, and it’s got Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe, all of whom I enjoy watching work.  I think this followed by The Book of Eli next week are going to be a nice one-two punch of awesome at the theater.  I’ll be there.

Michael Cera.

If Only Spam Were True…

Random Thoughts

Having run a blog for quite some time now, I’ve seen my fair share of spam.  Since installing Akismet with whatever version of WordPress it became included with, my site has blocked over ninety-six thousand spam comments.  This number is actually low because for a period of time I also ran the Bad Behavior plug-in that would block some spam before it got to Akismet (I had to disable Bad Behavior because it was causing other plug-ins to fail – long story).

Because of this, I have seen spam evolve over the years.  You still get the usual vigra and tramadol and other pharmaceuticals, and you get the porn, but as administration and spam catching have changed, so have the spammers.

One of the more common spam protections is to simply force all comments to be moderated.  Then, when a valid comment comes in and you approve it, that poster, assuming they use the same credentials, will bypass the moderation queue from that point forward.  To that end, more than half of my spam these days are attempts to get approved.  They say things like “Love your site. Adding it to my bookmarks!” and “I never thought of it that way, but now I am. Thank you for posting this!” and other similar things.  They almost look real.  In fact, if you dig through my comments you’ll probably find one or two that I’ve let slip through.  Of course, I don’t use that level of moderation, I use Akismet, so being approved once doesn’t mean you are approved in the future, and the ones that have slipped through are likely early spams before Akismet learned it was spam.

According to my feedburner and a few other tools, there are about 100 people who are not bots (as far as I and my tools can tell) who read this site.  Less than a dozen have probably ever commented.  Perhaps that is because I’m not writing things that are comment worthy.  Or it could be when people agree they are less likely to reply than if they disagree.

In any event, one of the things I am going to try to do in the future is to comment on the blogs that I read.  Maybe not every post, but at least every once in a while just to say “Hey, enjoyed reading this!” or something.  Because, you know, it is kind of lonely when only the spam tells you you are doing a good job.  Heh.