Category > Gaming
Lets Play
Killer Games
I am a gamer.
That is, I spend much of my spare time (as much - if not more - as I spend Writing, Coding and reading) playing computer games. At the moment, I am playing Unreal 2003, Medieval: Total War, Warcraft III and Age of Mythology. Over Christmas I will probably go back to Battlefield 1942 and cycle back in GTA3. I understand the jokes in Penny Arcade, I am a FilePlanet subscriber, I even work at a company that develops mobile games.
So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am 21 years old, and I am a gamer.
That doesn't just mean computer games, of course. I've been a DM (Always was a better GM than player, it's the world creation stuff I adore), I play Fluxx often, and have an obsession with playing cards which is scary. I know most of the rules of the Game We Cannot Name, and have spent hours locked in a fierce game of Mornington Crescent. Games - whether they be computer, card, role-play or meta - are what I do, and I really should let more of that into this site. Lets start now.
The worst thing to hit gaming for as long as I've been doing it is probably the Columbine thing, when two social outcast kids walked into their school wearing trenchcoats and carrying automatic weapons and opened fire on fellow students and also teachers. The parents sued the people who made the games they played, blamed the Internet for hypnotising them, blamed the videos they watched for forcing them into violence and generally decided it was the media's fault for making these evil things.
I disagree.
The shooters were members of a close-knit group of "loners" known as the "trenchcoat mafia
(BBC News, April 99). Close-knit loners, oh? Neat. They were part of a typical gang of teenagers who hated the society that worshipped the people who were popular. The people who worship the most become the most worshipped. I could point out that I know what they mean, but point me at someone who doesn't and I'll show you someone who was on the inside of it. This is all, however, beside the point. The claim wasn't that they weren't insane, the point was that media had driven them to violence.
This I actually agree with, there is a certain mindset that will see violence on TV, or on Monitor, and think Oooh, cool! Can I do that?
, but equally there are people who don't follow that branch line. I can spend several hours a day shooting the shit out of people with huge guns in UT, or in tanks in Battlefield, or firing rotting corpses at buildings in Warcraft (Warcraft isn't that graphic about it, for those of you going "Eww", but that's what the undead catapults do) without feeling the need to construct a rail-gun out of paper-maché and LEDs and kill my family with it, nor do I want to buy a tank and flatten Cambridge, Nor do I feel the need to make the undead rise and do my bidding. Likewise, playing AD&D didn't make me dress up in a robe and memorise books in my sleep (Though I did take up archery); Fluxx doesn't make me want to collect the Sun and the Moon; and GTA hasn't taught me how to club a policeman, steal his gun and car, and ride off into the sunset with a police helicopter on my tail. There is a line between games and reality. Games like Assassins ("Killer") and paintball may blur it, but it's still there, and trying to reenact Doom II with a semi-automatic you stole from your parents is quite a bit on the wrong side of it.
So how do we stop the people with a distorted sense of reality from being inspired by this blatant filth, whilst letting those with a functioning reality switch get filthy? I suppose there is some kind of mileage in some sort of system whereby the creators of media entertainment put some kind of recommendation on the box for who should be able to buy or rent this item. If we really wanted to go into pipe-dream mode we could imagine some kind of governing body that assigns these rating things, and were people who sold them could make sure that the more explicit material wasn't rented to anyone who couldn't see it!
Oh, Hang about!
Yes, the system exists, it just doesn't work. Games have ratings. Most games in the UK at least have the ELSPA rating, at least. Videos have ratings, even the bloody internet has ratings, but parents have to try to enforce them. Everyone has to enforce them, otherwise they don't work. And thats where we are at the moment. Also, ratings are quite a bit more lax than they used to be. Battlefield 1942, a game where your job is to run around shooting people and thats it is rated 15+, so the kids mentioned above would have got it no problem. The only real way around it is for parents to vet everything there kids do, even if it's round a friend's house, or for compulsary morality tests to happen. Censoring media isn't currently terribly effective, mostly because it surrounds us and buries us. You can no more avoid the media than you can the water, short of finding a mountian to hide up. And you'd be terribly bored.
So, whats the alterntive? Well, the UKs answer to it (after Dunblane) was to ban guns. Gun licence laws got stricter. The US doesn't have that kind of thing, because owning a gun is a much more traditional thing to them, and they see it as being a Divine Right. I disagree, but then I'm British. My solution would be for licences of guns to be licenced, heavily, probably by the NRA. People with traceablity don't kill people.
Of course, it isn't society blaming the games completely unjustly. There can be little justification for the moral enrichement that Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball or XXX BMX Racing provide, nor really for Grand Theft Auto other than that it's fun.
And that's supposed to be what playing games is all about.
Politics, Geekdom and a little Comic Relief
So, Mr Bush gave his speech on the state of the union, and I watched the BBC news report of it, in which it pointed out that it sounded more like a sermon than a political speech.
George W Bush is a problem, because he is quite plainly going to go to war no matter what happens. My problem with this is that someone we didn't elect appears to be dictating British policy (Whether the country who have him as Grand High Poobah did is another matter). My problem is also with the person we did elect, whose next job is to convince the 94% of the country that don't believe Mr Bu^Hlair's position is correct. Note that word. Convince. Less than 6% of the country think it's a good idea to go to war without UN backing, and our leader is trying to convince us otherwise. I have a feeling this should be the other way around, this being a democracy and everything, the idea is for us - the people - to put them - the politicions - in charge. When the Minister for Technology is able to install a new hard-drive, when the Minister for Sport has managed a sports club, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer has a degree in finantial theory, then I might start trusting the political system again (Oh, and yes, there are geeks who meddle in politics. Watch Debian-[devel|legal] if you don't believe me...).
Why are we fighting Saddam? Because he might still have the Weapons of Mass Distruction (Argh!! Irradiated Wafers! Poisoned Wine!) the US (and us) sold him a dozen years back? Because we as Englightened countries have the right to enforce our views on politics? For fucks sake, the UKs last prime minister was recently raked over hot coals for an affair with a co-worker, the last US president too, both have suffered major economic crises in the last few years, the UK has unemployment levels that are just scary and a system for dealing with it that is just as much so (As LoneCat says, if she had been relying on the Jobseeker's Allowance for food and rent she'd have starved to death long ago). This mythical Freedom of Speech
thing? The UK doesn't have a divine freedom of speech, though it has the Human Rights act, which says we do, and libel, slander and other laws that say we can't. The legal system is like an os code-base that's been in use and development for decades without a rewrite, There are function calls never used, deprecated (but still occsionally used so we can't lose them) updated to buggery and new functionality tacked onto the end, and enough loopholes for the thing to crash every so often.
Is our system any better? We don't stone people to death, but we do send them to prison for three years of a life sentance before we decide they didn't do it. Personally, I'd prefer the government to put more money into things like the Transport Network, but that's just me.
The argument about archives goes on, too, so it's time to bring out the real guns. I mean, are people still using serif fonts on calenders? I mean, it's so passe, darlings. Go for the sans-serif, or I'll remove you from my blogroll. All of you. That'll learn all y'all.
Comic Relief then. I read too many comics. There is my neatocool Today's Comics thing at my start page which shows you exactly how bad my addiction is. The newest two are a couple I've been meaning to catch up with for some time. The first is Angst Tech, and the second is Polymer City Chronicles. Both are computer-gamer orienated, but I *think* they are both good enough to sustain you though the bits you don't understand if you arn't a gamer. Oh, and Jeff Minter not only has a new game in development, but also a weblog. Yay.
Those who spoke on this:
Quote
And the prophacies were made of those threads of time that will certianly be woven, and the time when the veil will be lifted and threads past the veil seen again, and the prophacies speak of a savior, as prophacies usually do….
(Spoken in the middle of one of the most clichd explainationary monologues I’ve ever had read at me, in The Longest Journey)
On worlds and writing
I've finished another computer game, which makes the second this week, and indeed the second this year, and third in the past two. Generally, I either don't buy games that get "Completed" (SimCity, for example, where you just play until you stop) or play games until a) I get bored and buy a new game (common when I have an income) or b) I get to a point/mission I can't pass without cheating. Since I won't cheat on any game I paid for unless it's just fate (For example, saving when I have 5% health and no ammo, then encountering a room full of enemies just before the save) or bad design (If I get stuck on a puzzle with absolutly no progress for over 45 minutes, I find out what I do next. This is Game Enjoyment rather than cheating). So tend not to cheat at games.
That wasn't the point of the post. This could be, it depends on how the digressions go:
I have this affinity for worlds outside stories. This may be a common thing - I don't know, most of my social circle I met though literary preference which means they tend to share this trait, so isn't a random sample - but I tend to enjoy any book with a complete world outside the story more than I do worlds that live around the story in progress. A case in point would be my own stuff - unhelpful, since nobody besides LoneCat has ever read any of my worlds-based stories, but nevertheless - where I have two interconnected worlds, distantly related, one of which has a couple of thousands of years history, with absolutly no stories that touch upon any of it.
Er, better example. David Eddings' Belgariad and Elenium worlds both had histories, worlds, stories within stories and fine detail down to the grain. He published an entire book of his writings about the world that he had used for writing the histories. The history bore the ten books of the tales well, and a volume of prehistory excellently. (Polgara The Sorceress, fact fans, doesn't exist in this timeline. I'm charitably ignoring it) (It's not that I hate PtS with a passion unholy, or anything, it's just that... ahh..).
Robert Jordan's universe is holding up nicely, too. Or was, the last time I looked at it, which may have been book six. If Jordan's going to die before finishing the bloody saga, I'm not going to start it. If he doesn't, I'll read it if I can get back to book six without wanting to strangle the female characters (Don't care which one, they're all the same).
But the plot has to hold up too. The Eddings' last-book-but-one was a five book epic in a single volume, and managed to get through an entire epic plot without touching the sides. Somewhere behind it was a detailed, well-thought-out magic system, a rather interesting prophacy system, some nice politics and some great battles. None of which you saw in the book, because they had a macguffin to save Eddings writing the "wandering along travelling" bits that he did so well the previous 19 books.
That wasn't the point of the post either, hang on a second, it'll get here. Wrong sort of digressions on the lines, apparently.
So, I just completed The Longest Journey, which was hailed (as every Adventure Game for the five years previously and the three years - so far - since have been) as the Final Swan-Song Of The Dying Point And Click Adventure Genre. This time, however, they could have been right. TLJ was the last (As far as I've seen, and I've been looking damn hard) true point-and-click adventure game professionally published, which it was in 2000. Adventure games since then have been 3D turn-and-point (Escape From Monkey Island) or 3D turn-and-click (Syberia, Cryo's entire hateful catalogue), and this doesn't seem to be likely to change (Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max 2 will both use the Grime (Grim Fandango-style, sucessor to Scumm (Script creation utility for Maniac Mansion) which powered every Lucasarts adventure game from 1987 to 1998) engine (Fear the brackets in that sentance)), and (We're back to TLJ now) enjoyed every minute of it.
Partly (Warning, fast point approaching, please step away from the pointer) because it mixed an engrossing and very much classic fantasy-style storyline (Overuse of words "Destiny" and "Prophacy") with a less classic future-based storyline and a overarcing world architecture that made everything fit logically at the end. Which it didn't.
Oh, the story ended. Role resolved, apocalypse averted, Plot pointed, heroine hooray, but the world was left open for more stories within it, and hints of the story that wasn't told, and possibly never will be. That's kinda an interesting point, there. It has everything beyond a notice at the end saying "We'll make a sequel if this sells", whilst leaving you satisfied that the story is over, almost. And they will make a sequel. They (FunCom, who later created Anarchy Online) have said they want to. And they can, because the world didn't close with the story like it does in most games.
Those who spoke on this:
dearg:
Wow, stream of consciousness alert!
Do you think with all those parantheses too? :)
When it comes to FPS, I cheat like hell because I love blowing bits out of things and dying or running out of ammo is darned inconvenient. Games against other entities (bots or humans) are different, it’s about skill and pitting your wits. Other games, I may cheat a little to prevent myself from running around doing things again and again and again, just because I died, made some error or something.
Adventure games, now they’re something special. I loved text adventures (also known as interactive fiction) and at first eyed point and click adventure games with suspicion. Then along came Monkey Island. ‘Hooked’ would be the term, I think. Also Day of The Tentacle and the Myst trilogy. Oh, and the graphical Zork games (they rock – the original text adventures contain elements of randomness which I find annoying, these don’t).
I, too, love rich worlds with subplots and intersecting stories. This is why, after the first hundred or so pages, I finally got into The Simarillion. Life is not a single story progressing towards an ending you can see a mile of, neither should a story be, whether it be a book or a game or a TV programme. Incidently, I’ve read the stuff you had (I can’t find it atm) put on here; is there more that the Caervern, or are you just imagining we don’t read it?
Aquarion:
There is infinitly more Ceavern than anyone has ever seen. The main event hasn’t been written yet, most of the world hasn’t even been hinted at, and the short stories that do exist by now bare little resembelence to the current world (The last story (Pre “Sunday Writing”) that appeared here was written in ‘98, some of it as far back as ‘96. I’ve learnt a lot about writing it since then :)
Itai:
You finished The Longest Journey? I didn’t realize that was possible.
dearg:
Is it worth buying?
I just played the demo (I think I completed it, is the ship supposed to sink?) and it seems reasonably interesting.
I need a new adventure. And a new shoot-’em-up, but Unreal2 is out now so a shopping trip (possibly to amazon) is in order soon… :)
Aquarion:
Yes, it’s worth buying. And yes, the ship is meant to sink :-)
As for shoot-em-ups, Unreal2 has been fairly universally ho-humed over. Nothing special. pretty, but nothing special. No-one lives forever, however, is fantastic. As is Alice.
...must do reviews section…
dearg:
I wish you would :)
It’d be really useful to know before I bought a game whether I’d like it. Without buying a game or going to some other website…
Laurabelle:
Erm, there are multiple sites on the web for a reason.
Aq.com is not one-stop shopping. :-)
Itai:
Actually, AQ.com is a website that contains the immortal verse:
“Do you want to get free HITS?”
To which the only reasonable reply is “maybe”.
Today's Quote
Ahh well, seems like I'm back now.
From Dave Taylor's (ex-ID, ex-Transmeta, ported Quake to Linux, founded (with American McGee (also ex-ID, and also creator of AM's Alice, one of my favourite FPS's ever)) & worked for C6, then left it in December) Blog[1]:
[T]here will be no laws in Davetopia unless they can be programmed in a standardlized legal programming language and implemented literally into code.
This way, lawyers will be replaced by a sophisticated web interface available to everyone, for nothing. So it's basically gauranteed that every member has free access to the actual code governing his life. Instead of having to pay $300/hr to interpret a tiny piece of it.
Anything that doesn't suit the programming language basically becomes a kind of useless case law, completely unenforcable, nothing more than a code of ethics that some people choose to follow. Most likely, several different codes of ethics will emerge. The system will be corrupted by coders that start incorporating the citizen's membership within a particular code of ethics into the coded law, which will break the legal system by letting the inputs become subjective, leading to complete failure: lawyers. But that's OK, because by then, as soon as we spot the first lawyer and realize we've hit a losing condition, we'll know how to start over and make society even better.
On the down side, programmers will now be the most powerful, corruptable politicians in society. But on the bright side, programmers will now be the most powerful, corruptable politicians in society.
XMLaw, anyone?
[1] One day, I will follow though on my idea to create the worlds greatest Games site, so I have somewhere to store all this useless information I have without burdening future generations with it. However, before that I should really finish Epistula. And Nomical. And Project Alice and Toffia and Ceavern and Albertross and Forever and Afphrid[2b|!2b] and... and... and... gamabase will have to wait.
Those who spoke on this:
amy:
American McGee rocks! Esp some of his add-on Doom2 levels, we played them deathmatch until we could walk through them blindfolded and asleep…
Ketchup
Various things have happened to me, and to Epistula, while I’ve been away. Also to the blogroll. So once more, it’s time for:
While You Were Out
- Epistula got Textiled so I can write all my entries in english and the computer does the hard part. Yay.
- Aqcom got a new Projects section. It’s currently a flat HTML thing mainly as a list (As much for my benifit as yours) as to what I’m working on. Eventually it’ll become fully Epistulated.
- I got a new project, or more accuratly a reactivation of an older idea. It’s a full Geek Thing review system, which I’m building as generic as I can, and exploring all the things I learnt while doing Epistula. Plus the kind of detailed cookie-based login system I haven’t done since StoryVille (Ex fiction project. Died of code-deletion). Interesting thing about it right now is that users select a licence for user-submitted reviews & comments to be released under. This allows – for example – someone to licence all their reviews under a CC(Creative Commons) thing. The two things I would like to happen to this idea would be for reviews to be editable based on licence (So if someone releases a GDL review, someone else can edit it), but that could get too complicated, and also lead to the possibility of someone going though and replacing all GPL‘d reviews with a string of spaces. So, Freedom of Information verses Fuckwittery Of Idiots. Round one, ding ding.
- Funcom have announced a sequel to the game I was raving about last month: The Longest Journey
- I applied for jobs. I got phone calls from recruiters, I still haven’t had a single interview. I wait patiently.
- And then there is the World of Ends stuff. My response is somewhat like Stavros wrote, only less amusing. The internet is* complicated. Not in spite of, but because the idea is so simple. ”[T]he Internet was designed to hold smaller networks together, turning them into one big network” lies up there with “They’re only words written down, how much damage can they do?” in tales of “Points, Missing thereof”. The thing isn’t that the idea of The Internet is complicated, it’s that the consequences are quite so far-reaching. The document appears to be doing the classic thing of arguing about what it originally was, as opposed to what it means now. Because the internet *isn’t the simple network of networks that once it was, not in the public mindset. It’s the far more complicated idea of the people using the network of networks. From granny on AOL though to Luke The L33t Hacksaw burning though a 1024 bit/sec connection. We need a new name either for this new thing, or for the old one. Then we can have this discussion without terminology getting in the way.
- Cam returned with a well formed rant about Americanism. The US Administration still scares me, even more so now it appears to be running England as well. Blessings of any deities listening to anyone caught up in this fucking mess. That’s all of us, by the way.
- Still not king yet.
Those who spoke on this:
gilmae:
mate, you’ve been on the List so long, you ain’t ever gonna excise the stain. You might as well start calling yourself Lady Macbeth now.
A Nameless One:
This has really puzzled me. Why do people feel the need to reinvent HTML (and reinvent it badly)?
Seriously, what is the difference between text, [strong]text[/strong ], and text? I can see a few:
Only one is formally defined in a specification – HTML
Only one has massive amounts of mindshare behind it – HTML
Only one has clear and unambiguous escaping rules – HTML
So really, wtf is up with all these different systems, when HTML does the job much better than any of them?
Aquarion:
As Tom says, it’s partly because I don’t want to do the gymnastics involved with making HTML clean for the use of people who I can’t trust.
For the Textile thing, the difference is a lot more simple, it’s correctness. The difference between “text” and “text” is limited, but the difference between “this is a sentance – subclause – that has a subclause” and the full HTML way (“this is a sentance &emdash; subclause &emdash; that has a subclause”) is that I have to pause while the words are flowing to get the syntax right, and I don’t want that, it acts as a barrier between my words being written and them appearing. This way I can just type as I’m used to and textile will get it (mostly) right.
The third is future-proofing. Parsing HTML is ikky, parsing Textile is less ikky. I want the ability to export any given page as LaTeX – for example. Having a meta-format I control that I can then transform into something I like is nice.
beaneater:
Burning through a 1kbit connection? Riiight.
As for text input (comments etc.) I’m still undecided. It’s nice to do things to people’s comments, rather than just dumping them in a , but there are always problems. (1) It doesn’t always do what you first expect. (2) How do you over-ride the default behaviour when you know what you want?
For the first, consider Texile. The translation of hyphens is a good idea, but turning a double hyphen into an em-dash breaks my mind. As any good LaTeX user knows, a double hyphen is an en-dash. And a hyphen surrounded by spaces for an en-dash? In ASCII, I always used to use that for an em-dash.
The second often means second-guessing the translation. For example, automatically turning links into ’s, or the equivalent, is done wrong so often. How do I override an incorrect “guess”?
A third problem: trying to reverse engineer somebody’s mark up to find out how to use it. For example, the list I had above was meant to be an unordered list, but prefixing the lines with stars simply removed them. Using a line (or paragraph) for each item with a number in front munged them up together somehow. Whatever I try, I cannot work out how to seperate paragraphs in Aquarionics comments.
I’ve never had that problem with a .
Aquarion:
Double-newline creates new paragraphs.
For some reason, lists are broken unless there is nothing after them. Working on this.
beaneater:
Sometimes.
In other words, that was the impression I got, but in some cases a double newline appears to fail to start a paragraph.
Not entirely sure under what conditions, but the second paragraph in my previous comment should have been four (notice the newlines where paragraph breaks should be). Adding a short paragraph (such as “Foo”) after this one merges this and the previous one, in your preview at least.
Unreal
One of the nicest things about my current computer is that the following things work:
As I type, I’m listening to Pulp, f.e.e.l.i.n.g.c.a.l.l.e.d.l.o.v.e. You won’t see this in the “Now Playing” box because I’m having an argument with the doSomething plugin for winamp over the correct definition of “ID Tag”. Yet I digress.
Whilst I do this, I’m installing SuSE in a virtual machine, just for kicks, whilst playing the old Amiga game Top Hat Willy in a UAE window (Currently paused while I type diary entry). Earlier this afternoon I was playing the original “Jet Set Willy and almost impossible to complete to boot. Not because of bad mechanics, but the fact the game is a) huge, and b) difficult. Yet – once again – I digress) to which Top Hat Willy is a remake/sequel/2040 of. This involved getting a Spectum emulator and making it work, always fun.
Anyway, there was a point to all this, and it goes as follows: I was reminded of a game called “Valhalla” which I played over at least a decade on the Commodore 64. It was an adventure game, where you interacted with all these random people (Well, less random, more Viking Mythology) in the form of “Ask Thor buy hammer” “Thor refuses to sell you the hammer” “Throw fireball at Thor” “You throw the fireball at Thor, Thor dies” “Take Hammer” “You take the hammer” “Thor enters” “Thor attacks you” “Thor Kills you” “Say ‘Fuck’” “Mary enters.” “Mary hits you” “Mary Leaves”. That was it. Well, there were some things like having to discover the great sword of sommat or other, and the helm of mit, Ring of Phyre, etc etc. It had about a hundred differant locations on many many levels (If you jump, you go up a level. If you die and there is a level below you, you go down, otherwise you get randomly put in a new location. Same goes for the AI).
The reason for all this drawn-out nostalgia? Someone has done Atari Adventure in Flash.
Those who spoke on this:
MP:
Hmmm… You realise I will now become addicted to at least one of the games mentioned… This is a bad thing.
Of course, I have no patience with emulating other machines, especially when a PC version is available. Ever played PC Dizzy? :-)
Aquarion and the Tactical Error
As of 12:00 this afternoon, I am officially part of the Great Unwashed. I, too, can look upon the unemployment statistics of this great nation, and feel that I’m a part of something. Something large, Something with a lot of people in it. Something with absolutly no money in it what-so-ever.
The rant about Job Seekers Allowance is going to have to wait for another day, because I can’t do it justice right now. It begins with the process of actually getting the benifit, goes though the six to eight weeks for delivery of said benefit, and how people without work are made to feel like third class citizens, ranking somewhere below pond-scum.
But that isn’t todays thing, oh no. Today I walked into the Job Centre Plus (Which I can only assume is like a normal job centre, but with more objects) and walked to the reception.
“I have an interview in about five minutes” I said to the blonde girl on reception, who was somewhat inadvisably dressed in bright red with enough gold jewelry to make Scrooge McDuck want to go swimming in her.
“Right,” she said “Hand me your forms, and we’ll get this started”
I handed her the forms and went to sit down whilst she sorted them out. I was given a new form to fill in, filled it in, and gave it back. This is important, watch the birdy.
I was called to a desk by a middle-aged man named Roger, who was to be my Claim Adviser on this sunny day, and we went though the forms and put it on the computer piece by piece. He gave me a booklet to get signed when I sign on, and we agreed a “Job Seeker’s Agreement” which basically codifies what I have to fail to do to get my beneifit taken away. I introduce him to the fact that Web Developer is different from Web Designer, and convince him that ability to touch-type neither marks me for secretarial or data-entry work (Which would send my RSI back in full force), and then the system fails to let him say I attended my interview.
Now, when you enter the Job Centre Plus for an interview, you sign a piece of paper to say you’ve arrived, hand in the forms, and wait for your turn, possibly whilst filling in another form they find, roughly in the same way some doctor’s waiting rooms have colouring books. In this case, the brain-dead moronette behind her castored desk had taken my form and given me my colouring book replacement without signing me in, meaning that some other Enterprising (Enterprising: Adjective, Deserving of being shot into space to seek out new life and new civilizations, and go where no one has ever gone before) indervidual had looked at the interview list, looked at the sign-in, and entered me into the computer as a No-show within the two minutes of me sitting down.
This means that at the start of my Job Seeking career I already have a black mark against me for not turning up to an interview. Gah.
Since then I’ve had more phone calls from recruiters in the last eight hours than the previous six weeks (ie, two), been sent a couple of jobs that appear to be tailor-made for me (One as an emailed link, One as an emailed 8mb Tiff-file scan of a want-ad, thanks mum) to which I’ve applied, and made the tactical error to which this entry title refers.
You see, today I introduced LoneCat – my Girlfriend – to The Sims, a game which will not run on her laptop, and only on my desktop. This has earnt me a certian amount of Quality Reading Time, and may have been a Tactical Error on my part. Oh well.
Those who spoke on this:
Ali:
They have corrected it on the system now though, haven’t they? After all, you were there for your interview at the correct time, and if they failed to enter it on the system, that’s not your fault. Perhaps next time you have to go in, you can ask them to check?
If they try to give you any crap about not being able to change it after the event, just remind them that they have a duty under the Data Protection Act to make sure that any information they keep about you is accurate. Even if the frontline staff themselves aren’t able to change it, they must have a procedure for getting corrections made.
Those who spoke on this:
MP:
I’m sorry… I’m not convinced. None of the rooms could be described as a tip… Lonecat was most insistent about one of the rooms being a tip… :-)
Marco:
Bastard. Now I want to do the same thing with my house, but that means I have to get The Sims.
You utter bastard.
(Looks nice, by the way. The only unexpected comment was generated by LoneCat’s room: “Oh, what a petite bed… oh, what a not so petite cactus!”)
beaneater:
Diablo_14?
Now I’m thinking of some Diablo/Sims crossover. Arg.
Those who spoke on this:
crisp:
Hai,
Just to let you know that I’m actually short of time and of sleep as well.
Note that this is just a demo version that is still in development; it has still got a lot of bugs and shortcomings….
Games Are Evil. Again
bq.An Arkansas mother was arrested after her 3-year-old daughter died sweltering in a closed car, while her mother played EverQuest, police told the Northwest Arkansas Morning News.
So, Point by point then.
- Mother, Leaves small child in hot car
- Mother plays computer game for a long time
- Game blamed.
Gah.
Those who spoke on this:
Brett:
Sounds about right.
allways been the same. blaime music blame roleplaying but tont blaim the individual.
morons
Marco:
This is the sort of cases that makes a “Parenting License” seem like such a good idea.
Sometimes I wonder if people are stupid or bloody stupid. I don’t think there are any other alternatives.
Nomicality
Once, I was a member of a Nomic game. Then the owner got exams, and it stopped. Then I was a member of another Nomic game, and the owner got a life, and it stopped.
Since I need more things to do in my life, I’m starting a Nomic game. “What is Nomic?” I hear you cry. Nomic is a game which defines itself as it goes along, and is thus really fun to play :-)
“How Do I join?” I hear you cry, and I can respond to that one. You can find more details at the Nomic page
Nomicality Redux
So, with little fanfare and a couple of outstanding bugs, the Nomic Rules Management system for the new Nomic game (Which is still open, btw) has gone live.
Technically, it’s a marval. Well, It has marvelosity. Technically it’s a malted hot drink then. (And with that, we begin the descent into anarchic britiocentric referencing, for which we apologise).
Okay, so this post is split into two parts, Nomic the Game, and Nomic Rule Manager 1.0. With this duet of games and geekness, I forsee that I’ll be able to totally alienate both halves of my readership at once with no unplesant verbal bending.
Nomic, Then.
Nomic is a metagame. It was invented by Peter Suber as an anology of law making. Basically, it’s a game in which there are no – or very few – rules to start with, but the ability to create new rules is in the rules. More information can be found on NomicNet, more specifically in the NomicWiki. My personal set of starting rules is derived from Peter Suber’s set, with a number of differences, mostly involved in playing it online instead of in person (In person, I prefer The Chairman’s Game) and doing away with all of the inital winning conditions so we can define our own.
Nomic Rules Manager is a simple rules manager for Nomic. It’s written in PHP, backends onto a database, and has an RSS (And ESF) feed. Yay. Code is Here
Those who spoke on this:
Phil Ulrich:
Sorry to comment on a nearly-year-old entry, but I was wondering if you actually had the code to this somewhere available. If so, any chance I could get my hands on it?
Trust the Computer
Troubleshooter: PDC!
PDC: Yes, Citizen user?
Troubleshooter: Please add citizen Rachel-R-BLT-2 to my address book.
PDC: Accessing. I’m sorry, citizen user. There is no such citizen.
Troubleshooter: But I left her in cubicle ZXY-12 in BLT sector just ten minutes ago!
PDC: Accessing. Cubicle ZXY-12 is currently undergoing cleaning and renovation by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and Mind Control prior to new occupancy.
Troubleshooter: But.. Please access cloning records for Rachel-R-BLT.
PDC: Accessing. There is no citizen Rachel-R-BLT. There has never been a citizen Rachel-R-BLT.
Troubleshooter: But..
PDC: You are mistaken.
Troubleshooter: But..
PDC: You seem distraught and possibly delusional, citizen. Please be calm, and remain in the area. Assistance is on the way.
(From Costik.com)
Write first time
Workrave is telling me I should stop for the day. I trust it. This should not take long.
RSI back. Sentances shorter. Feel like am in a bad Bridget Jones parody.
Possibly Shatner impersonation.
Learning Python. Have taught python to play Foursquare solitare.
Badly.
Am positive that are better ways of doing things I’m doing. Doing it anyway. Learning Process Considered Nonhalmful.
Recent Things Seen:
(Blinks not working. No idea why. Suspect aliens. Possibly Allens.)
Aquarionics now has its own Amazon ASIN code. Counting days until am in bargain basement.
Fanpants. I’ve no idea what I can say about this.
Real ask Apple to open up AAC DRM because Real are famous for opening up formats and everything.
Freedom Force 2 Diary for great justice.
Am getting tired of sentances fragmented are they. Am going to cast Summon Gramatical Ability, to see what happens.
—
Ahh, better this is. Irritating that structure was getting.
—
Try that again. Right. It’s been an dull week on Planet Aquarion. I’m attempting to make the most of my employment limbo by learning how Python actually works. Despite having written Aquaintances in it, I’ve little to no idea how the language actually works (Aquaintances is very much cargo cult programming, and anyway, I’m no longer using it, I’ve switched to Bloglines instead along with the rest of the known world). This has involved working though Dive into Python and applying the new knowledge gained to solving the problem, which is making FourSquare work.
FourSquare Patience
- Shuffle normal 1c52 deck.
- Deal four cards into seperate “play” piles
- Remove any Kings from the top of any “play” pile.
- If any cards on the top of any of the play piles add up to 13 (A=1, J=11, Q=12) remove those two cards to the Win pile.
- If any play piles are empty, deal one card to each empty space and go to step 3.
- Otherwise, go to step 2.
- Once you run out of cards to be dealt. Add play piles together, do not shuffle and go to step two.
- When all cards are in the win deck, you’ve won.
(1c52 == 1 standard deck of 52 cards, meaning no jokers. Contrast with 2c52, 1c104 (Include latin suites), 1c54 etc)
For a patience game, it’s very simple, can be completely automated, but can be made more or less complicated more or less arbitarily. For example, you may want to consider which cards are underneath at step 4, to see if removing this pair rather than that pair will gain you access to that queen which matches that ace.
In short, it’s a nice progamming exercise for learning a language, but the real test is to see how much of the code you can reuse for writing BlackJack further down the line.
And no, I’m not publishing the code for at least another four lessons or so :-D
Also, I’m still playing x2, Tropico 2, and – thanks it getting posted back to me – Battlefield 1942 (Actually, mostly Battlefield Pirates) and waiting for my life to get interesting again.
We lied to you, too
Open letter from the Computer industry to the Entertainment industry
Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don’t treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less
This part, if no other part of that manifesto, is bollocks.
This month I’ve bought five new games (It’s been something of a bad month for my self control). Of these, four of them have had sixty-four-thousand digit CD-Keys that I have to type in, three wouldn’t work in my old CD Drive, and one had a prerequisite of two other games (It was the final NeverWinter Nights expansion pack) which also required sixty-four-thousand digit CD-Keys, and one required signing up on a website also.
All in the name of “Copy Protection”.
In fact, I could bypass all this copy protection by downloading the games from Kazaa or eDonkey or something, because the first thing the Pirates do is remove all the copy protection. So it’s not the people who download the games who end up feeling like they’re being treated like criminals. It’s us, the people who buy the fricken games for £30 a pop.
The only game that didn’t have any kind of copy protection – no magic drivers, hidden sectors, no CD-Keys, no Web registration – was also one of the ones that wouldn’t work in my old CD Drive.
Since it was a 1950s era Monopoly set.
It’s got wooden buildings and everything, it rocks.
- 2004-09-22 07:55:29
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Computer Games & Gaming
Those who spoke on this:
Senji:
We bought a copy of that too.
It rocks.
Sarabian:
Recently, I upgraded to Monopoly 2000 (actually I think it was ME). Apart from the plastic houses (is this a security issue? I’m sure a wolf could blow down a plastic house. Maybe a SP will introduce brick houses) the upgrade was flawless and was totally compatible with all the old pieces including my lucky boot.
Barry R:
You forgot to mention that “Every time I want to play the game it asks me for the CD… The reason I installed 5GB of files is because I don’t want to have a sodding CD in the drive to play the damn game.”
My personal Bugbear Elitewh. (Sorry, too much NWN ;) )
What's going on
So, I start at Evolving Media next Monday. This means I have to get this current project done – absolutly done and finished – by exactly one week today. Annoyingly, a number of things that dropped off the schedule over the last three months have been noticed, taking me from comfortably on schedule to “Oh fucking hell” in about 48 hours.
I am not enjoying being the only coder on the project. Last time this happened, we could at least split the panic between two of us. I foresee a number of late nights (and early mornings) in my future. This must be finished by friday, or the money won’t be there to pay me.
Roll on a stable career.
Been playing a lot of City of Heroes recently. It’s the first MMO game I’ve tried (and I’ve tried several) which I’m actually using enough to be worth the money. The fact I can pick it up, blitz for an hour or so wiping out thugs on the main map, or alternatively head for some proper quests for a couple of hours, or team up with whoever’s around and do either means it’s a game that suits how I want to play at any point.
Plus, Sims 2. Timesink.
With the assistance of LoveFilm, me an LC watched Big Fish yesterday. It was a good film that was almost but never quite a great film. Worth watching, though.
What else? Oh, LoneCat has a job. Woo. We shall both be employed at the same time. Wonders will never cease.
Anyway, time for the Spiraling Shape to go Erradicate Evil in Paragon City
TTFN
- 2004-10-08 20:56:43
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Computer Games, Gaming & Personal
Those who spoke on this:
Pol:
You have managed to confuse the Universe. She got a job because you were finishing one, only you had already arranged a job to be going to and as such have managed to break the universes view of Catrion employment.
Bad you – breaking the universe. Don’t do it too often.
Just often enough to both stay employed.
City of Heroic Devs
This is one of the reasons I like playing City Of Heroes.
Crypic, who make CoH, recently announced that Blasters (Cyclops is a blaster, so is Raynebow) were going to get a new ability called “Desperation” where the amount of damage they do is inversely proportional to their health. Thus a dying Cyclops can do one huge, massive power blast that knocks Dr Robotnik over the skyline of Gotham City, or whatever.
Blasters are squishy enough already, having something called “Desperation” as one of our gameplay benefits isn’t something that makes us, as heroes, feel heroic. Players said this, at much length, on the forums. Today:
CuppaJo (CoH Online Community Rep)
The name has been changed to Defiance.
This point will now be brought up repeatedly until the end of time when someone says “the devs never listen to our feedback.” Just sayin.
See? Response, correction and humour. Still not sure about the idea (Blasters don’t have great defence – part of the archtype design – and this gives moronic blasters an incentive to stay unhealed and risk more death. We’ll see how it works when it makes it to the Test Server)
(I am Raynebow, Spiralling Shape, Darker Thoughts, Pixlin, Firenice and Foad (Global: @Raynebow) on the Virtue US CoH server) Talk to me if you want to team).
- 2005-07-09 15:00:28
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Computer Games & Gaming
Inferiority
Just in case you feel the need to feel like an inferior programmer, or just want a geeky printout to paper your walls with, ID Software have Open Sourced the Quake III engine under the GPL (Fileshack Download)
(No resource files, obviously, so you can’t compile it and suddenly have Quake 3 Arena, but I’ll interested to see what’s created from this)
Those who spoke on this:
Jens Ayton:
Damn, those download sites are annoying.
MP:
Yes. But there are a whole range of places that have it, so if you poke around you can find one that doesn ‘t make you register, doesn’t make you wait for hours for a download slot and doesn’t cap your speed at 5kbps…
You have to go through all of the above versions to find it though, usually…
Pure Evil
I’m currently beta testing City of Villains, which is cool. With a few days to go the NDA is lifted, and I’m going to share a couple of characters.
In fact, just one for now, since The Hat has been wiped along with the server he was on. Bah.
(Stalkers main power is to go into Predator style invisibility and reappear in front of them to cut their noses off. To do this they have a generic power called “Hide”)
But also I saw this, and it amused me:
If only it were that easy…
Those who spoke on this:
Jester:
This is where we make absolutely no comment about clothing colours, right?
Games are Evil Round X
My problem with Boris Johnson is this: For all he appears to be a bright bloke, he can – at certain proscribed times – entirely resemble the rest of the party from which he is an often welcome break. His latest missive from the depths of ignorance is an attack on computer games, in which he says:
These machines teach them nothing. They stimulate no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory—though some of them may cunningly pretend to be educational. I have just watched an 11-year-old play a game that looked fairly historical, on the packet. Your average guilt-ridden parent might assume that it taught the child something about the Vikings and medieval siege warfare.
The game is, incidentally, Medieval – Total War, The Viking Invasion. Rated Teen by the ESRB, so next time there is another outcry about violence in video games and how they should be better rated, someone please go talk to Boris’ 11 year old.
Anyway, Side-tracked. Books, you see, are educational. It’s a well observed fact that merely reading any book makes you 67% more clever than the kid over there playing computer games.
Incidentally, I write web applications for banks. A few of the other gamers I know are Cambridge graduates, high falutin’ executives, school teachers, writers and other obvious drains on society, patently burnt into grunting husks by mere application of pixels moving on screen.
I’m not saying games are educational, because in 90% of the cases they aren’t. They can be intellectually stimulating in the same way that Boris might recognise more classic games such as Rummy, Bridge, Whist &c to be, in that the ability to recognise patterns and build an internal working map of the current state is something that will stand you in good stead generally.
But mostly, they’re for entertainment. Psychologists may argue they tickle the long-lost hunter instinct in us, tracking and eliminating our prey. Personally, I enjoy games because they are fun to do. In the same way Boris would object if you took his book out of his hands, I’d imagine.
He’s also right, up to a point. Sitting inside gazing at the screen isn’t healthy, and having stories shot at you in easily-digestible chunks in cut-scenes like a multipart poison in blow dart form isn’t really good for your general welfare, so you should
Itai:
Angst _is_ good enough to sustain you through the bits you don’t understand if you aren’t a gamer. For instance, there was an EverQuest sequence which I found amusing despite having never played EverQuest (albeit I did play AC for a while).
gilmae:
You are questioning if liberal western democracies, even ones that have grown like a pearl around grit, are morally superior to military dictatorships? She went to prison for three years because a single doctor who the court trusted didn’t turn over all the evidence. That is the fault of the system? Two code bases that grant and limit freedom of speech, and you are complaining. Can you imagine The Guardian in Iraq? Actually, come to think of it, I like to imagine The Guardian in Iraq :- )