Okay, so this is my review/plug for my favorite video game of the pre-teens**.
Little Green Guys with Guns (LGGwG) is a turn-based play-by-email strategy wargame in which you do battle with one or more opponents with a mix of troops. What separates LGGwG from the typical turn-based game is that player orders are resolved simultaneously (or nearly so). Instead of the Risk-style of play where I take all my actions, then you take all your actions, we submit our orders for all our units for the turn to the server, and the server resolves the first of my actions for the turn, then the first of your actions, then the second of my actions, then the second of your actions, and so on. This provides a complex set of possible interactions, and because all your orders are submitted in advance of the turn being resolved, your plans often fall apart upon first contact with the enemy. Shit happens, and because it's happening to pixelated vat-grown aliens from Tau Beta and not real people, it's wonderful and frustrating and funny; when your plans actually go right, it's glorious.
Also, the folks who are currently fans of the game are fun to correspond with -- the forums are fairly active without being overwhelming to follow, and in-game, with each turn of orders you submit you get to send a message to all the other players. Wolff collects some of the best ones on the forum.
** Standard Disclaimers: I'm friends with the game's creators. Also, I don't play a whole lot of video games; however, I try to choose good ones when I do play -- LGGwG, Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Wizardry 8, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Battle for Wesnoth, Audiosurf, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 is pretty much the whole list from the last 10 years. You'll notice a pattern here; mostly strategy wargaming and RPG. Audiosurf is really the odd one out, but it's tons of fun.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
The Embedding (Ian Watson) 1973
finished 2/20/10. Spoilers below. This was another Nebula finalist, one of the 87 also-rans to the Forever War in the 1975 voting.
In story A, stiff british experimental linguist Chris receives a letter from his old friend Pierre who may be the father of his child. Pierre is French -- perhaps to more naturally explain his dalliance with a married woman? whatever -- and hanging out in the Brazilian rainforest with some natives who may hold the key to understanding some obscure poem with interesting linguistic properties. Chris just so happens to be trying to raise four children under conditions which might also create interesting linguistics. All right, can't wait to see what Pierre is doing directly and how the stories will converge. Next, in story B1, instead of going to Pierre, we see an American engineer with a checkered past in Nam (sigh, the book was published in '73) and ironically and amusingly named "Charlie" working on a dam to flood the Brazilian rainforest (which would wash away all the natives with interesting linguistics). Don't care! Back to Chris, where he badly explains his work on "self-embedding" to Tom, a slick car salesman-ish American linguist, who in turn wants to recruit him to talk to aliens. In New Mexico. Far, far away from his research on the children. Sigh, story C. We finally go to story B2 to see Pierre and his natives, and then flip back and forth between stories C and B2, with a little bit of connective tissue between B2 and B1 in the form of Brazilian terrorists who want to blow up the dam. Finally we check in on Chris's kids back in England to remind us they exist and that they could use Chris's help because they're starting to self-embed. Back to story C, where Chris discovers the aliens want "embedded" minds, and they offer some Brazilian natives in exchange for deep space flight technology. In story B1, the local authorities have captured and are torturing the Brazilian terrorists and Charlie goes apeshit. In story C, Charlie and Tom go to Brazil with some CIA-type spooks to get some natives and blow up the dam -- they don't want to flood the forest b/c the natives' "embedding" is partially based on some fungus that only grows in the rainforest, and they can't simply stop dam construction b/c only a few countries know about the aliens. Whatever. Quick updates on each of the stories as we build to climax, and, oops, the CIA-types blowing up the dam got their helicopter shot down in the process of blowing up the damn and a Chinese saw the tacnuke explosion from a spy satellite. Cut to story C1, where shadowy American government types decide to blame the explosion on "hositle" aliens, kill them all, and try to piece together their tech from the rubble. This happens. The natives are no longer needed, and so the gov't just picks up Chris, Tom, and Pierre from Brazil. Chris takes Pierre home, goes to see his kids at the research center, takes one of them (Vidya) home, his wife freaks out because she thinks he's punishing her by bringing his "real" kid home to show off to Pierre, Vidya's "self-embedding" has turned him into a powerful projective empath, and Chris has a serious head trip before Vidya breaks his own neck. In the aftermath, Chris is being taken back to the lab for observation while the other researchers talk to his wife, and Pierre has *completely disappeared* without warning from the story. Maybe he's up in the bedroom. He is French, after all. Whatever.
In story A, stiff british experimental linguist Chris receives a letter from his old friend Pierre who may be the father of his child. Pierre is French -- perhaps to more naturally explain his dalliance with a married woman? whatever -- and hanging out in the Brazilian rainforest with some natives who may hold the key to understanding some obscure poem with interesting linguistic properties. Chris just so happens to be trying to raise four children under conditions which might also create interesting linguistics. All right, can't wait to see what Pierre is doing directly and how the stories will converge. Next, in story B1, instead of going to Pierre, we see an American engineer with a checkered past in Nam (sigh, the book was published in '73) and ironically and amusingly named "Charlie" working on a dam to flood the Brazilian rainforest (which would wash away all the natives with interesting linguistics). Don't care! Back to Chris, where he badly explains his work on "self-embedding" to Tom, a slick car salesman-ish American linguist, who in turn wants to recruit him to talk to aliens. In New Mexico. Far, far away from his research on the children. Sigh, story C. We finally go to story B2 to see Pierre and his natives, and then flip back and forth between stories C and B2, with a little bit of connective tissue between B2 and B1 in the form of Brazilian terrorists who want to blow up the dam. Finally we check in on Chris's kids back in England to remind us they exist and that they could use Chris's help because they're starting to self-embed. Back to story C, where Chris discovers the aliens want "embedded" minds, and they offer some Brazilian natives in exchange for deep space flight technology. In story B1, the local authorities have captured and are torturing the Brazilian terrorists and Charlie goes apeshit. In story C, Charlie and Tom go to Brazil with some CIA-type spooks to get some natives and blow up the dam -- they don't want to flood the forest b/c the natives' "embedding" is partially based on some fungus that only grows in the rainforest, and they can't simply stop dam construction b/c only a few countries know about the aliens. Whatever. Quick updates on each of the stories as we build to climax, and, oops, the CIA-types blowing up the dam got their helicopter shot down in the process of blowing up the damn and a Chinese saw the tacnuke explosion from a spy satellite. Cut to story C1, where shadowy American government types decide to blame the explosion on "hositle" aliens, kill them all, and try to piece together their tech from the rubble. This happens. The natives are no longer needed, and so the gov't just picks up Chris, Tom, and Pierre from Brazil. Chris takes Pierre home, goes to see his kids at the research center, takes one of them (Vidya) home, his wife freaks out because she thinks he's punishing her by bringing his "real" kid home to show off to Pierre, Vidya's "self-embedding" has turned him into a powerful projective empath, and Chris has a serious head trip before Vidya breaks his own neck. In the aftermath, Chris is being taken back to the lab for observation while the other researchers talk to his wife, and Pierre has *completely disappeared* without warning from the story. Maybe he's up in the bedroom. He is French, after all. Whatever.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Forgetting to turn off the mp3 audio
A former co-worker sent me "Invest in Analytics: eHarmony's (not so) secret formula for competitive advantage." at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT6L-85c4xc
It's an interesting video, but on a slightly embarrassing note, I often have my home desktop playing music during the day, and choose to listen or not listen by putting headphones on or taking them off. It just so happened that as I clicked on the link to the video and put my headphones on, the mp3 player was between songs, and so the video began just as the Who's "Teenage Wasteland" started. I had forgotten that I had music playing and took it to be the background music for the video. I thought it was an odd choice, especially since the singing was competing with Meta's voice at times, but figured she knew what she wanted to do with it, and it wasn't until 10 seconds were left in the video and the "soundtrack" jumped to "The Russian and Molokov" from Chess that I realized what had happened.
Oops.
I still like the idea of adding a soundtrack to the video, though.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Video gamers doing tabletop rpg
Penny Arcade is in my RSS feed reader (and it should be in yours if you care even a smidgeon about computer gaming, and maybe even if you don't), and the most fascinating story of the past year+ has got to be "Gabe"'s ongoing foray into gamemastering a Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 campaign.
I also liked the discussion of players not feeling sufficiently threatened, and the need for new gamemasters to understand the Old Ways (and the written discussion). Player death, and in particular the decreasing rates of player death over time, is an annual discussion among the PrinceCon GMs. When I GM, I try to shoot for creating situations in which the possibility of character death is possible, but good play allows them to live. Unfortunately I err on the side of not being dangerous enough. This year I'll get a few for sure!
Some of the stuff is really cool, like creating a 3D gamespace for arbitrating a combat in freefall (and scroll down).
His players also twitter during the gaming session, and I can't decide whether this is annoying or something that we should try to do at PrinceCon.
I also liked the discussion of players not feeling sufficiently threatened, and the need for new gamemasters to understand the Old Ways (and the written discussion). Player death, and in particular the decreasing rates of player death over time, is an annual discussion among the PrinceCon GMs. When I GM, I try to shoot for creating situations in which the possibility of character death is possible, but good play allows them to live. Unfortunately I err on the side of not being dangerous enough. This year I'll get a few for sure!
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Survey techniques that could use improvement
A couple weeks ago, the CDC called and wanted me to take a phone survey, which would "only take about 10 minutes." All right. I know that this is a lie and it will probably take 20-25 minutes. Fine, I'd like to help the CDC. So, the first few questions have ordinal level answers, like "How many cigarettes do you smoke a week? A. None, B. 1 to 3, C. 4 to 10, D. more than 10." And the like. We get to "How many times have you tried chewing tobacco?" and I answer, "Never" and the interviewer starts to list out all the possible answers, and I repeat, "Never" to which the interviewer replies that they have to read all possible choices, to which I replied that I couldn't complete the survey under these conditions, as the conditions under which they wanted me to take the survey was wasting my time.
I can sort of understand the need to list out all possible choices for a nominal response; if they ask what my favorite color is, I could perhaps mistakenly answer "A. Blue" instead of "C. Yellow", but when the response is ordinal, there's absolutely no need to read out every single answer. Case closed... but no, the CDC called back. It took two minutes to explain to the nice interviewer what the problem was, but finally, case closed. No, the CDC called back *again*. This time I simply said I wasn't finishing the survey and hung up.
What I don't understand is why they don't have an online survey option. An entirely automated call system could call you up, go through the necessary decision tree to get the right person in the house on the phone, then ask if you if you want a live person to administer the survey or take one online. The live person choice connects you to one of their phone interviewers. The online choice tells you to go to cdc.gov (or other short url) and enter your phone number, and the site then administers the right survey. Put a button on the online survey that says, "I want to talk to a live person" that connects you at any time to one of the phone interviewers. I can read faster than any interviewer can speak, it lets me take the survey on my time, they might actually get more interviewees whose time is valuable, and they can conduct more surveys with fewer phone interviewers. It's really that easy!
I can sort of understand the need to list out all possible choices for a nominal response; if they ask what my favorite color is, I could perhaps mistakenly answer "A. Blue" instead of "C. Yellow", but when the response is ordinal, there's absolutely no need to read out every single answer. Case closed... but no, the CDC called back. It took two minutes to explain to the nice interviewer what the problem was, but finally, case closed. No, the CDC called back *again*. This time I simply said I wasn't finishing the survey and hung up.
What I don't understand is why they don't have an online survey option. An entirely automated call system could call you up, go through the necessary decision tree to get the right person in the house on the phone, then ask if you if you want a live person to administer the survey or take one online. The live person choice connects you to one of their phone interviewers. The online choice tells you to go to cdc.gov (or other short url) and enter your phone number, and the site then administers the right survey. Put a button on the online survey that says, "I want to talk to a live person" that connects you at any time to one of the phone interviewers. I can read faster than any interviewer can speak, it lets me take the survey on my time, they might actually get more interviewees whose time is valuable, and they can conduct more surveys with fewer phone interviewers. It's really that easy!
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