Author: Jason

The Tools You Need

Gaming

There is an old saying that goes something like this:

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

Throughout my career in computers, I have often referred to various tasks as “handing out fish” or “fishing lessons” depending on how I decided to approach it.  In recent years, I have often leaned toward fishing lessons over handing out fish because I hate having to repeat work, though sometimes if a task will never need to be repeated obviously teaching is a waste.

More recently, I’ve come to realize that I enjoy working with people who can figure things out, where I don’t need to actually teach them, but I can just give them the tools they need and they’ll teach themselves.  This I have come to refer to as “giving them a pole and showing them the ocean.”  Of course, this technique does require that the person is familiar in the arena.  I couldn’t do this for a programming job with the guy who cuts my neighbor’s lawn, but if I’m talking to another programmer then he should already be familiar with enough basics that if I give them a language and a goal they should be able to fill in all the missing steps themselves.

Since I put this in the gaming category, how does this pertain?

I’ve always admired EVE Online, even if I didn’t overly enjoy the game, because the game itself is little more than a set of mechanics and some tutorials in how to use them.  If that is all the effort you even put into the game, EVE is shallow, bland, repetitive and boring.  However, using the tools of the game and the Internet (in the form of message boards and other bits) and stepping outside the safeguards of high security space, the players have crafted themselves a very deep game of social interactions and political intrigue that rivals the plots of many popular novels.  And it is a game you can’t teach.  You can’t be an EVE player and teach someone how to get involved in the machinations of the social entities.  You can only give them a pole and show them the ocean.

Made To Suffer

Reviews

I’m a huge fan of Robert Kirkman’s series The Walking Dead.  Not huge enough to pick up the single issues, but enough to buy the trades.  I’ve been sitting on Book 8 entitled “Made to Suffer” for some time now.  I bought it off Amazon when I was buying a few other items and decided to throw it in the box.  After finishing up The First Law, I found myself between books and decided to go ahead and delve back into the world of zombies.

Two words: Holy Shit!

If you don’t want anything ruined for you, stop reading now.  I mean it.  Stop.

Still here?  Good.  What Kirkman does here takes a serious set of balls.  For seven volumes, he has gotten us to know these people, to care for them, and in part this has been done by inflicting small tragedies on them.  Small, I say, in comparison to the enormous one of the world succumbing to zombies to begin with.  But all that we have read so far is nothing compared to this volume.

I couldn’t put the book down.  Volume seven had ended with an attack beginning on our survivors’ prison home, but eight leaps back a bit and shows us how the attackers arrived.  For the first section of this book, you know where it is going, but getting there is no worse off for it.  Once the attack begins, you find yourself wondering how the hell they will survive this, and bit by bit and piece by piece you see their plan form, you see that they are going to make it.  Then Kirkman punches you in the gut and pulls the rug out.

Book nine is sitting on the shelf next to book eight, but I told myself I’d read another book or two first, to spread out the zombie awesomeness.  But it is taunting me, and I don’t know how long I can hold out.

Worth Fighting For

Gaming

One of the things that bothered me a lot while playing World of Warcraft is that most people really just didn’t care.  If you got too many monsters in the same fight, or an elite was just too strong, many people just gave up, took the death and came back.  The penalty for losing was so soft that no one minded, and in fact many relied on it to test the waters.  “Hey, let’s try this! What’s the worst that can happen? Lose a couple minutes and a little money on repairs?”  It added an element of fearlessness to the game, which had its own merit, but in the long run as you come to count on that losing doesn’t hurt, winning doesn’t feel as awesome.  Winning is just something that happens.  Winning, in World of Warcraft, is inevitable.

Meanwhile, back in the dark ages of 3D MMORPGs, death could easily cost you a couple of days worth of experience points if you couldn’t get a cleric to resurrect you.  In some ways, this was bad because people were less likely to try things unless they were pretty sure they had a good shot at winning.  However, a charismatic enough leader could convince just about any group to try anything once.  “I know we don’t have a cleric, but I’ve grouped with this druid before, and we have an enchanter to slow, we’ll be fine!”  That was the basis of some of my most memorable moments in the game.  Five monks and a druid as a group in Old Sebilis, ranger tank in the Plane of Storms, and so on.  But the greatest effect of a stiff death penalty was the will to survive.  If a pull went bad, or a wandering monster joined in your already iffy fight, not one person ever said, “Hey, let’s just die and come back in a couple minutes.”  Instead, the chat window would immediately be filled with chatter about who was tanking what, or what mob was going to get pulled away and rooted, or which mob to focus on as various forms of crowd control were tried.  My memories of EverQuest are filled with moments of healers being out of mana while the group is surrounded by five monsters all mesmerized and the enchanter ensuring us they could hold it while I yelled at the group, “No one touch ANYTHING until the cleric says he’s ready!” and people making sacrifices, “I’ll off tank this, but I can’t last more than a minute or two, if you don’t finish by then, I’ll be dead but I wish you luck with the add.”  I fought many fights where bad agro killed the cleric and the rest of the group fought tooth and nail to stay standing as long as they could.  Failure hurt, but snatching victory from the jaws of defeat felt incredible.

Many people will tell you that harsh death penalties are a thing of the past and that today’s players wouldn’t stand for it, and they are right.  The people who would never play EQ who have flocked to WoW aren’t looking for that sort of risk, just a few odd minutes or hours of entertainment.  But to me, that sort of investment in a game is what I’m looking for.  I want a game worth fighting for.

A Silhouette, an Eye and a Monster Face

Pictures

This morning I spent some time doodling a few things that just didn’t work out.  I wandered away for a while and decided to be less focused and just play around.  You can’t really tell, but I was messing with the blur and smudge tools to get a better feel of how they work.

A Heroic Silhouette
A Heroic Silhouette
An Eye
An Eye
A Monster Face
A Monster Face

This is how I spend my Saturday mornings…

Movie Round-Up: July 31st, 2009

Reviews

Aliens in the Attic:

Looks like good family fun.  Not something I’d pay $10 to see in the theater, but I can imagine plenty of worse ways to spend two hours at the movies.

Funny People:

I want to see this film, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it.  It will definitely find a place near the top of my Netflix queue when its available if I don’t.  If you haven’t seen the RAAAAAAAANDY clips, do yourself a favor and watch them.

The Collector:

Did you see Saw?  Yes?  Then you’ve pretty much seen this.  Sure, its not exactly the same, but this movie isn’t much more than elaborate MacGyver like traps that hurt and/or kill people all designed by a faceless nameless villain whose motives we never learn and *SPOILER ALERT* who wins.  It would be nice to see more horror movies that aren’t just an introduction to a series of low budget ultimately high grossing pieces of crap.  But its show business; as long as people keep paying for this junk, they’ll keep making it.  I wouldn’t pay for this even if it were the only way out of one of this guy’s traps.

Adam:

All I really knew about this film before seeing it was that it was about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome.  Its only open in four theaters at this point, but it may show up in more and if you look you might still find screenings of this in some markets, and it is worth seeing.  I think it really depicts quite well people with this illness and how they and their loved ones come to cope with it and make it part of their lives, working with the illness instead of railing against it.  A warm, funny, touching film that I really enjoyed watching.

Combat Pacing

Gaming

One discussion that comes up from time to time when talking about game design for MMOs is about combat pacing.  That is, how long should a fight last, and how “active” should the player be?  In fact, just last week a thread about this showed up on the forums over at Nerfbat.

Because I’m more interested in group play and social interactions, obviously my stance is to make fights longer and reduce the need for button pushing.  I’m extremely fond of the old EverQuest design where fights were counted in minutes and players often had between 3 and 10 seconds between actions.  In my opinion, this allowed for more tactical play, allowing you to see what was happening and consider your response as opposed to faster games where you tend to approach the fight with a plan and execute it, the individual fight lasting 30 seconds or less (excluding boss and raid encounters, which are obviously tuned to large groups and to last longer).

I also like slow combat because currently, unless you are playing exclusively with friends and using voice chat on a Ventrilo server or similar service, social interactions have to occur through the same keyboard that controls game play.  If you are hitting a key to perform a combat action every 1 to 2 seconds, that doesn’t give you much opportunity to chat.  The more “intense” the combat, the more “quiet” the game gets, and you have to practically stop playing the game in order to be social.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, also expressed in the thread.  If you want to join in the discussion, I encourage you to sign up at the Nerfbat forums and do so.

Makers versus Managers

Random Thoughts

I read this yesterday, and I can’t gush about it enough.  Paul Graham has managed to perfectly nail down exactly the problem that exists between the people who create (programmers, writers, etc) and the people who manage them.

Ultimately, this illustrates the best way to be a good Project Manager.  As a PM, your job is to be the conduit between the development team and the rest of the world.  You meet with your team on their schedule, leaving them large chunks of time to do the creating, and you meet with the other managers on their schedule.  If you have to do a meeting between the developers and the managers, you have to schedule it out a few days and either make it the first or last thing of a day (first is better, putting it at the “end of the day” can mean disaster to the developers who might be hitting a creative stride at 4 p.m. when you want to have your meeting).  I hear that good book editors work the same way, checking in on the writer when its needed for progress reports but not scheduling daily meetings to try to “keep them on task”.

Sadly, most Project Managers I’ve worked with over the years end up becoming just another manager, scheduling meetings with the dev team on a manager’s schedule and getting upset that the dev team’s productivity is dropping, resulting in more meetings and less productivity.

I really hope this article gets around and people take it to heart, because it really is true, and it would really solve a lot of problems.

The First Law

Reviews

Man, it has been a while since I reviewed a book that wasn’t a comic on here… but there is reason for that: I’ve been slogging through Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy (one, two, three).

Initially, I was going to review each book separately, but then I got to the end of the first book.  I enjoyed it, I liked what I had read, but it really felt like a good start and not a full book.  So I had a hunch, and rather than my usual running off to a new book and coming back to the second book later, I decided to run through all three.  These are big(ish) books, and I’m a slow reader anyway… but I finally did it, and now…

I really want to give this book a high rating.  Notice, I said book and not trilogy.  That’s because this trilogy reads more like a single book broken into three parts instead of three complete stories that work as part of a larger arc.  By the end of the first book you have been introduced to the characters and the world and the politics and wars and history and everything, and a number of exciting things has happened, but all those things don’t add up to anything satisfying.  Nothing is really resolved in the first book.  The second book is more of the same, and I mean that in both good and bad ways.  More people, more events, but the only real events that occur are one expected failure and one unexpected failure.  The second book did seem more rounded than the first, but it still left me wanting.  Not wanting for more, but wanting for the book to have meant something.  The third book reads like a good third act.  All the people and places coming crashing back together and lots of things coming to an end.

Overall, this trilogy would, in my opinion, benefit from some heavy editing, trimming this story down to one novel, or perhaps two.  I get the feeling that maybe the author had an idea and decided he wanted it to be a trilogy and fleshed the story out until it was.  A number of chapters could easily be cut, others trimmed and combined, and perhaps even the world itself could have been shrunk just a tad in order for the author not to feel like he needed to illustrate just how long certain journeys were.  I suppose my complaint is the same that I have for the Lord of the Rings, The First Law is like a travelogue.  We walk the world and are shown everything, but seeing that seminal work of fiction trimmed down to under 9 hours of script without losing one bit of the magic of the original, I think The First Law could be just as good at half the length.

That said, I look forward to read more by Joe Abercrombie.  The main reason for this is that after finishing this trilogy I thoroughly despise most of his characters, and yet I found myself rooting for them.  That is something hard to do, in my opinion.  To craft character that are not only flawed but flat out wrong and still get the reader to want them to survive, to be redeemed even when the character themselves is seeking no redemption.  I find myself having imaginary conversations with the author, “Hey, I really want to like this guy, could you please stop making him do horrible things?”

Anyway… would I recommend these books?  I would, maybe not to everyone, but to people who like a good well crafted world akin to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and are willing to put up with one story being told in three books and 1,500 pages.

Moon over a Castle

Pictures

This morning’s doodle was my attempt at drawing in the negative.  I wanted to do an image set at night, but I didn’t want to draw in white on a black background, so I doodled with black on white and when I got the image to where I wanted it, I inverted the colors.  It came out well enough that I didn’t bother doing any touch ups after the invert.

Moon over a Castle
Moon over a Castle

Of course, my edge bleed to white works less well with this theme’s image border, but if not for that, I like the effect of the uneven edge like perhaps looking through a window in winter.

Movie Round-Up: July 24th, 2009

Reviews

G-Force:

Seriously?  I guess its okay that all I want to do is mock this film since I am clearly not the target audience… but, super-spy gerbils?  Really?

Orphan:

I managed to find passes to a screening of this film, and I’m glad I did.  I’m not sure I’d want to pay for this one.  Its not complete crap, and in fact it is quite enjoyable… solid performances by all the actors, and the dialog is decent enough, and I even thought the “secret” was clever.  But it wasn’t very scary.  In fact, most of the audience was laughing through much of the film.  Sure, there were a couple of scenes that made you jump, and a couple of things that made you cringe, but it just wasn’t scary.  A little creepy maybe.  If I were you, trying to decide where to spend my hard earned wages this weekend, I’d hold off on Orphan and spend it somewhere else.  Catch this one on DVD or cable.

The Ugly Truth:

“Tonight… we dine… in Heigl!” “This!  Is!  Dating!”  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  But if I have to admit to a man-crush, it would be Gerard Butler, even before the whole 300 thing.  And I’ve liked Ms. Heigl since “Roswell”, so this movie already had two things going for it.  Throw in the fact that I’m a sucker for battle of the sexes romantic comedies and you’ve earned my $10.  I didn’t get to see an early screening of this film, and so I’ll be paying my way like everyone else this weekend.  I don’t see any way this movie could possibly be disappointing.