Tag: blog

One Cup

Random Thoughts

So I have decided to make an effort to get into better shape.  I contemplated making a new category for the blog, but realized that making a category would make it feel like an obligation to write, at which point I would feel less like writing on the topic.  I’ll just try to write about it as I feel the need and shove it into the Random Thoughts category…

In any event, part of my getting into better shape is being more conscious of what I eat and how much.  So the other day I decided to read the label on my cereal box.  I ran through the nutrients and it all looked pretty good, perhaps I could do without the sugar, but every time I tried a cereal that wasn’t a sugary kids cereal it tasted like cardboard.  While eating things that taste like cardboard may, in fact, be healthier, putting up with the cardboard taste isn’t worth it.  So anyway, I also notice that the serving size of all this morning sugary goodness is “1 cup”.  I looked at my cereal bowl and wondered if it was a cup… so I got out a measuring cup.

One cup of cereal is a lot smaller than I thought it would be.  It turns out my usual breakfast is actually about two and a half cups, sometimes three.  So I poured myself a cup of cereal and a half glass of orange juice.

It seems until my body gets used to it, I’m going to be hungry a lot.

… and Taxes

Site News

Each year, right around this time, I become a vocal advocate of a shift from income taxes to sales taxes.  Normally, I manage to keep it off the blog by scheduling posts in advance or through other great effort.  This year, I just couldn’t manage to keep from ranting about it, so rather than post daily diatribes on how I think the Income Tax system of this country is flawed and sucks, I refrained from hitting the publish button and the blog was dark for a week.  I would pay someone to do my taxes for me, but I feel that only perpetuates the system.

Anyway, the taxes are filed, I took a day off to regain my composure, and the blogging will continue.

The Census

Gaming

Over on his blog, Tobold has provided a nice little analysis of hardcore players’ complaints on casual players. In the midst of that, he made the following comment:

If Blizzard wanted to know what their players want, they would have to put up some sort of survey *in game* with in-game prizes for everybody who answers, so that even the casual players would want to participate.

The funny thing about this, is that Blizzard has crafted a game world with enough tongue planted firmly in cheek that this could easily work.

First off, they’ve already introduced a game mechanic, the daily quests, that has taught the players to return to the same NPCs on a regular basis for new content. Using that, restricting it to “per account” instead of “per character”, and co-opting the sense of humor that already pervades their world, they could insert NPCs representing the Azeroth Census Bureau. These agents, standing in cities and towns with their clipboards, could ask monthly, or even weekly, questions in the form of quest text and reward choices. Participants in the surveys would be paid for their time, perhaps in money or maybe in faction for the location of the census representative. The agents could even have localized questions, asking about nearby raid instances or other features, if localized data collection would be of benefit.

With an in game mechanic like this, they’d be more likely to collect better sample data than that of any out of game forums. Well, except that hardcore players might not participate if the rewards aren’t great enough, but surely adding more avenues of capturing the voice of the players couldn’t hurt.

Pete and Re-Pete

Gaming

Pete and Re-Pete were paddling a canoe when Pete fell out, who was left in the canoe?
-first grade humor

Now take a moment to consider that. If you don’t get that joke, please, please… stop reading my blog. Encapsulated in that joke is the one thing that really irritates me most about MMOs. Just the other night in World of Warcraft, my group and I went off to collect the heads of some thieves. Now, when we killed each of the offending people and take their heads, my suspension of disbelief allows me to equate that fact that each of us gets a head to be taken as we have evidence of the head, or since we all plan to go back together that there is really only one head that we share. Of course, one of our group had killed them and taken their heads and turned them in for the reward two days prior.

People in EverQuest used to make jokes… “Oh thank you!” quest giver Sarah tells you. “You found my mother’s locket!” She tosses it over her shoulder into a box full of identical lockets.

I realize that designed content is limited, and players will exhaust content faster than it can be created, so I’m not sure what the answer is here… except to stop generating content. The one thing that EVE Online does better than any other game I have played is to encourage you to get involved in PvP. Honestly, unless you really enjoy playing the economy game of buying and selling goods (I have a friend who makes a billion isk a month and rarely ever leaves his hanger), or grinding the same twenty missions over and over, there isn’t anything else to do. Of course, EVE Online is a niche game.

And that comes to the real point… its one I’ve made before and will continue to make: the world needs more niche games. We need more companies who plan properly and would be happy with fifty to one-hundred thousand players, maybe less, maybe more. We need more companies who actively do NOT want to be the next big thing.

Independence Day

Random Thoughts

Freedom. It is a word that many of us here in the United States take for granted, and often, not comprehending the worth of it, are willing to trade for security. Elsewhere, people fight for freedom, and our forces fight for their freedom, whether they want it or not. But I’m not here to talk about politics.

If you’ve followed my blog, you know my feeling on the crutch of New Year’s Resolutions. Sure, they work for some people, but they are so horribly open ended that most people end up picking things that are just too much to hinge of the turn of a year. So I am proposing a new tradition: Freedom Day.

July 4th every year I am going to pick something that is holding me back, something that is oppressing my advancement, and I’m going to break free of it.

For our inaugural year we going to pick something simple: my weight. I am not a fat man. I’m 5’9″ at 200 lbs. and all my extra poundage is centered around my waist. If you dig, somewhere on this site you might find a picture of me with my shirt off. So, what I am breaking free from this year is my excuses for not exercising. I always seem to find some reason to avoid it. “I have work to do.” “I’m tired.” “I’ll do it tomorrow.” “I need a home gym.” “I need new shoes.” Well, no more. I have home equipment, an eliptical and a Total Gym, and work I can do pretty much any time I want, I have shoes, being tired is part of the reason I need to get in shape, and tomorrow never comes.

Three days a week minimum, starting this week. I’m out of excuses, and I will be free.

Reputation in games

Gaming

Over at his blog, Richard Bartle has layed out a very primative sketch of how an effective player driven reputation system might work. The short version is “Amazon’s You-might-also-like Lists”. You would rank people when you get to know them, and based on your selections and the selections of other people, someone you have never met before might be “recommended” to you because people who like the same people you like also like this new person.

Simple example ripped from Richard’s post:

You like A, they like A; you dislike B, they dislike B; you haven’t met C, they like C, so C is probably a decent person. The greater the insersection between lists, the higher the chance that you’ll share their opinions.

The only drawback he found was in the server resources it might take to maintain and display this data. Well, as far as maintaining it, there isn’t much I can suggest, it is going to be a huge amount of data – potentially if you have X players and all X players rank all other players (X-1), you have to store X*(X-1) records. Taking a game like EVE Online that runs a single server with over 100,000 subscribers, that is potentially 10 billion records. Calculating the data, however, could be contained by imbedding the “score” of a player to a “Looking For Group” tool, or as a given command (inspect player), so as to reduce the amount of processing done with these numbers, as opposed to his suggestion of having the results display all the time by a player’s name.

It is definately a good idea, I think, and merits a deeper look at the possibilities and realities of implementation.

Memory and Grouping

Gaming

Tobold, whose blog I’m reading more and more, made a couple of really interesting posts recently.

The first post is about repetition in game design. Basically, lots of MMORPG games are designed around the “fail and repeat” methodology. You fight, you lose, you try again with gathered knowledge. This can be great if you are the first, but once guides get put on the internet, chances are your guild is trying to learn the fox trot instead of inventing new dance moves.

I agree with Tobold in that games need more unique content. And by unique I don’t mean cramming a hundred developers in a room and refusing to feed them until they create a hundred unique dungeons, but instead games need a way to have content such that if you fail you can’t just repeat it, but instead it will learn from your failure or have a random set of possible design parts that combine upon spawning, if you kill all a bosses henchmen, they should have different henchmen when you return, not the same guys standing in the same places. But this isn’t something really easily done… there is a problem in that games that have tried to use randomly generated content feel randomly generated, and no one really likes RPG games that feel tossed together. They should feel like the tasks you are undertaking are important.

His second post about grouping in games details exactly one of the major issues that I have in World of Warcraft. The problem with grouping is in actually finding a group (well, not for me, I play a priest, I have half the server on ignore). So his conclusion is thus:

But even more effective would be for the developers to introduce tools that diminish the group finding time. World of Warcraft could make huge improvements in their looking for group tools. And meeting stones could be reprogrammed to work like a warlock summoning, so the first three people arriving at the dungeon could summon the two stragglers. The beauty of such changes would be that at first sight they don’t change the rewards rate at all. But by cutting down on the rewards lost to a group due to waiting, improved group finding and gathering tools would make grouping relatively more attractive to players, and lead to more positive social interaction between them. We are not a bunch of hermits preferring to play alone, it is the parameters of the game that influence our behavior and preference for soloing or grouping.

And that’s it. WoW needs a looking for group tool beyond the meeting stones, which most people won’t use anyway because they don’t want to be in queue so long that the game decides to make weird groups.

Recommend Me Some Books

Random Thoughts

I am always on the look out for stuff to read, but browsing the bookstores sometimes just isn’t enough. So, I want you (yeah, all like five of you that read my blog) to recommend a book to me. There are some requirements and limitations, so if you want, read on:

A) The book needs to stand alone. Don’t recommend me anything other than part one of a series, and don’t recommend a book that starts a series but doesn’t itself contain a full story.

2) I like Sci-Fi, but not real dry science Sci-Fi, not hard Sci-Fi. I like Fantasy, but not real crazy out there Fantasy, I like it at least partly based in reality in the sense that it has humans or human like people and not everyone is slinging magic all around to solve everything. I like Horror, I prefer my vampires un-gay (Anne Rice, I hate you). I don’t like “sex” books, if the plot revolves around people having sex and contains repeated descriptions of engorged members and the like, it is just not a turn on to me. And while I like superhero books, don’t suggest them unless its really cool because, as you can see on my library, I have a few of those in my future reading stack already. I also like funny, but not really politics-funny.

D) I’d prefer books that aren’t new releases, if only because I plan to look for them at used book stores or in paperback. I don’t want to spend a fortune.

So, with that in mind, if you feel like it, reply with a book and the reason you liked it (don’t spoil it, of course).