This news hits home, though, because I lived on Brick Workers’ Lane, a hutong in the shadow of the Drum Tower. I was told it was named because it was originally housing for the builders working on the drum tower, and I loved the connection to the past as we made our way down the twisting pathways. Lasseter says that at least one block’s already been razed, with plans for more to go, and I wonder if WarCraft Man or Grandma Waitress or any of my old neighbors have been moved on.

I liked the neighbors in the hutong. I was still a tourist attraction — like in Yantai, I often found neighborhood children hanging on my gate waiting to see the white girl — but the hutong grandmas would fight through my toneless Mandarin and limited vocabulary to ask if I was warm enough, or cool enough, or wanted to drink some tea. I’ll never understand the Chinese love of tea in hot weather, but it was lovely to be asked. Especially after Stick had gone home, and I was alone again.

I loved the area, down back alleys to the small grocery or noodle shop, or out of the maze of twisty little passages and across Dianamen Wai Dajie to the real brewed coffee and rooftap bars of Qianhai.  I loved walking home with takeout Xinjiang barbeque and beer, and passing Beijing-ren who were living just as Beijing familes have lived for generations.

It’s sad that this neighborhood will be over soon.

Via McClatchy blog: China Rises (well worth a visit for the hutong snapshots)

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Bu Chai

The second is Princess Fury, a classic combat RPG for the iPhone from Chinese developers Mo-Star. So far, this tends towards button-mashing, not my favorite gamestyle (I see button-mashers as the checkers of videogames — there’s nothing wrong with it, but wouldn’t you rather play something else?), but I’m really enjoying my adorable purple-haired princess with her giant sword and her male harem, er, adventuring party.

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RPGs With Chinese Characteristics

I checked out Choice of Dragon, a free text-based adventure game  for a web browser or iToy.  The multiple-choice interaction gave me the opened-ended storyline I loved in text games, without the turn-key-in-lock frustrations of a game that parses text entry. (Hey, I wasn’t THAT nostalgic) You play as a dragon in a generic fantasy land, full of princesses to capture (or princes, your dragon can be an equal-opportunity kidnapper), adventuring parties to torment, and treasure to steal.

CoD is a solid IF game. Engaging descriptions of scenes and character never become long-winded. The story uses fun fantasy stereotypes, without going into the complete parody in Fantasy University or Kingdom of Loathing, and uses light sarcasm, but never takes on the unhelpful DM’s tone from Zork or Adventure. The game is fairly short, but reading the game is such a delight, it’s practically impossible not to play through a few times for different stories.

Each decision players choose has an in-game effect. You can fight or flee, split the booty or turn on your ally for the whole thing. Burning the village increases your infamy and treasure hoard, while letting the villagers live as your vassals increases your honor. Your stats continue to affect your abilities and choices, giving you more story options and personalization.

The game could be improved with a way to save the game. At several interesting crossroads,  I was sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, long I stood / and looked down one as far as I could. What works in poetry could be greatly improved with a saveslot. Right now, an incomplete game is stored for further progress next time, but there’s no way to return to a particular place besides restarting the game and trying to make all the same choices to lead back to that point. Knowing how way leads on to way, it’s a poor solution that could be solved with an option to save the game.

Choice of Broadsides, another similar game from Choice of Games, won my love with a choice of gender. Some games give you a female avatar, or swap some pronouns around to make the ladies feel at home, but CoB creates a world when young ladies sail the high seas and young gentlemen are sweet domestic angels. You encounter mutinous sailors, brave enemies and honorable sea captains, all female. Later, when one of your salty companions suggests you marry, and give yourself an attractive mate and the comforts of home life, you can choose a husband from an array of accomplished young gentlemen.

I didn’t enjoy the naval adventure quite as much the fantasy one, partly because I’m more of a princess-capturer than a vessel-seizer. I also felt like there were some choices that could be made in CoBroadsides that were just wrong, that in certain crossroads there was a distinctly correct and incorrect choice to be made, while in CoDragon I felt like different dragons and different choices led to different but equally valid stories.

If you also have fond memories of text-based games, both games are available online here or on the App store.

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Choice of Dragon

TE: CotRB is based on the paranormal romance novel Tiger Eye by Marjorie M. Liu. Look, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of paranormal romance, despite the best efforts of a certain college roommate who really loves Laurel K. Hamilton, too (you know who you are), but two things drew me in to Tiger Eye anyway. First, the game should avoid a lot of the usual spinoff pitfalls by staying pretty faithful to the book. Liu wrote the game’s script, and everyone on the dev team read the novel.

And second, a lot of the story is set in Beijing! It’s not breaking my NDA to point out that Passionfruit uses real Chinese characters in the background in environments in China. I love seeing actual Mandarin in places where pretty red and gold squiggles would have been just fine.

Plus, one environment has my favorite hutong-and-skyscrapers composition:

Source: Passionfruitgames.com

I’m excited to help out with the beta, of course, and I’m really interested in seeing what Passionfruit does with a romantic premise. Romantic games and dating sims are pretty popular in Asia, but in the US, they’re hard to find and usually pretty second-rate games. It’s dangerous territory because poorly done romance can easily turn laughable or creepy. (Kind of like dating.)  But at the same time, a good game with an engaging, romantic storyline can really stand out between find-six-hearts HO games and save-the-world epics.

I’ll have more to share when the game comes out next month.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Passionfruit Hutong

Joymax, an independent developer and publisher of interactive entertainment for the global market, today announced the launch of a third “Clean Campaign” for historical fantasy MMORPG Silkroad Online. During the event, which will run until April 6, users are encouraged to unite against verbal abuse in-game and come up with ways that Joymax can encourage good manners in the Silkroad Online community.

Joymax hopes that the event will remind players that their behavior in-game doesn’t just reflect upon their own character, it also reflects upon the character of their community and country. A large team of people has worked hard to make Silkroad Online the most welcoming world it can possibly be, and they ask that players around the globe help them ensure it continues to be a fantastic destination for online adventuring. [Emphasis mine]

I came into MMOs from MUDs, where the object of the game was to textchat with other people. Players spent the entire game was typing complete sentences into the chatchannel, and reading what other players had written, and interacting with other players. (Of course, it wasn’t called a chat channel, it was called an online game. Also, we had to walk to school in the snow. Uphill both ways. But we had boots, I mean, I’m not that old.)

But it’s hard to play any MMO now without dealing with some chatchannel aggression and rudeness. It’s just a function of the anonymity of the internet, the same mindset that creates nasty blog comments or forum posts. There are, of course, many great players, many friendships and relationships that come from ingame chat, and guilds full of fun and helpful discussions, but there’s also a strong streak of general rudeness. (Wait, maybe I am that old. Kids today and their lack of manners!)

Joymax is a Korean developer, which explains the Asian focus on community and face in this press release about curbing chatspam. At the risk of falling into blanket east-west stereotyping, I doubt that many American players will lay off the Chuck Norris jokes to improve the impression of Americans abroad.

But in-game behavior does reflect on nationality. When I was playing WoW from Yantai, I picked a username that took full advantage of my fledgling Chinese, but I eventually deleted the character because I was sick of Barrens chatters calling me a Chinese farmer. And I don’t know if chatchannel politeness will charge American gamers’ view of Chinese gamers –  it’s hard for good party members from China to cancel out the impressions left by auction halls full of farmed gold.

Pointing out that chat channels are full of abusive comments is just stating the obvious. Joymax is also looking for suggestions.

Talking about Asian games, internet usage and campaigns for better manners immediately brings to mind the harmonization of the Chinese internet. There was a movement in China to force internet users to register with their full names to make people accountable for their online actions. Obviously this had more to do with netizens causing political unrest or talking about three certain T-words, than gaming. I don’t think games have to take such a hard line, but I imagine that interacting online using one’s full name would also create a more polite, more responsible, more – dare I say it? – harmonious internet society.

Using a full name, like requiring a chat channel moderator, seems to force some accountability into in-game interaction. But it also seems to suck some of the escapist enjoyment from an MMO.

The new MMO Fallen Earth dumps new players into Help chat by default. It helps keep newbies from clogging up general chat asking where the trainers are, or how to open their inventories, which in turn prevents the annoyance for long-term players when the millionth new player ask where to buy recipes or how to repair armor.

This is also a moderated channel, which may explain why a player can ask how to activate autorun without the usual chat channel response from a half dozen wits suggesting CRTL-ALT-DEL. But is a moderator the only choice? I’m embarrassed to think that the only way gamers will be decent to other people who share the same hobby is if there’s a moderator watching.

Some open-ended adventure games, like Morrowind, offer a reputation value. As your character rescues innocent peasants and helps cats down from trees, he’s treated like a hero by the local NPCs. And, if a character commits heinous murders or thefts, he’s greeted with fear and NPC guards might even come to punish him. Perhaps some way to link chatchannel behavior with ingame reputation — merchants find you rude and overcharge you, for example — would encourage chat room politeness without breaking the illusion.

What would you do to encourage more friendly chatting, without ruining the escapism fun of MMOs?

You can find the full text of the press release here: Joymax Prepares to Clean Up Dirty Mouths in Fantasy MMORPG Silkroad Online

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Silkroad Society

Google’s last toy, Google Wave, was kind of a flop for me because it seemed like a neat collaborative tool, but none of my friends were on it yet. (On a reread, doesn’t that make me sound like a pretentious tech geek?) Like any social network, it’s only as good as the people using it, and as Google doled out Wave invitations, I kind of lost interest in sharing information with the two friends who were on with me. But I like Google, and I was willing to give them a pass on Wave since they’d won my heart with GMail, the Google Copernicus center, their Beijing building, that time they sent me an Adsense check, and so forth. So I was pleased to try Buzz.

Buzz seems to be flopping for the same reasons that the early Facebook news feeds flopped when they were first released in 2006. The two major complaints then were the invasion of privacy and mind-numbing boredom.

I think the lack of privacy complaints are largely coming from users who are having trouble separating their private GChat and Gmail conversation from public GBuzz conversations, or who added their other sites to their Google profile and didn’t expect to see their Picasa or Blogspot feeds on Buzz.

I didn’t feel overexposed with Buzz but I don’t really want to talk with every person in my GMail contacts, all the time. My Buzz was the minutiae that Twitter-haters whine about, it seemed like page after page of acquaintances’ shopping lists. I don’t know if the familiarity of Google made people feel more informal, but the ratio of mundane  noise to interesting tidbits seems to be off.

For every published piece I have, I’ve responded to many calls for submissions, only to find out that the publication is offering their writers valuable exposure! A platform to share your ideas!  The glory of seeing your name on the internet! A percentage of the ad revenue, once we have advertisers, that is. A chance to contribute to a startup and get in on the ground floor of a great new project! Positions are not paid at this time, but our volunteer writers will be considered first. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And now, our relationship does not end here. If I want,  I can find out what they’re are having for lunch, or see pictures of their cars in the snow, or find out what song they’ve got stuck in their heads. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I also have fascinating, relevant streams on Buzz, because I have such amazing, interesting friends (Yes, you.) but it turns out that I’m already following essentially the same content on Twitter, or reading their blogs, or seeing their Tumblr or del.icio.us links.

The great part of Google products has been innovation, and so far, Buzz doesn’t offer anything we don’t already have in other forms. We can already share links socially with Facebook (and a dozen other sites), we can already chat online, we can already share status updates.  If I want to share more, I can pull feeds from other sites into Facebook or  use Facebook Connect, so everyone can know when I crop a Flickr photo or read an article on Huffington Post. And if I want to see less noise from my friends feed, I can shut off FarmVille notifications or other applications. I have Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and a feedreader, so Buzz doesn’t seem to be bringing anything new.

Are you using Buzz? How’s it working out for you?

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Buzz Off

And re-enrolling was the right choice, too, because going back to school introduced me to more  books that I hadn’t read yet, and one day in a Roman history class, I met a boy called Stick — maybe I’ve mentioned him? — who’d left an underwhelming job at the phone company to come back to college. And that was good.

I started working at a local restaurant a few weeks ago.  (And Stick returned to the phone company a few months ago, but this is my blog.) This is slightly different from my mid-college diner job, although it still offers all the intellectual stimulation of carrying items from kitchen to table and back again, it’s really pretty nice. It’s a Middle Eastern restaurant, which means a kitchen full of cardamon and coriander, and the owners are very relaxed about letting me experiment (for me, I mean, not to serve to the customers), and I really can’t complain about all the mango lassis. The dining room is pretty, with exotic decorations, and the customers are not inhaling meals on the rigid work breaks like my diner patrons, and the hours work around my classes at Chinese school. As long as I don’t think too much about how going back to college was supposed to prevent exactly this situation from happening, the job’s good.

The Urdu-speaking chef likes to call me senorita, much to the amusement of the Spanish-speaking kitchen staff who respond with the throat-clearing noise that means miss in Urdu. After my stress and success differentiating the four and a half Mandarin tones, and forcing my mouth to make sounds that aren’t in our alphabet, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that there are sounds in other foreign languages that don’t sound like words. And even so, hearing Urdu is just as shocking as hearing full speed Yantai-hua again. That was a sentence? How can anyone possibly pick words out of that? I’ve already ranted here about my massive struggles to learn Mandarin, and overall, I’m quite proud of myself. Still, I look back on it, and keep thinking that if I’d just done a little bit more, and tried a little bit harder…  everything would have fallen into place. (Just another way Mandarin resembles my ex-boyfriend). I’ve been missing the daily challenge of speaking a second language. And Spanish is wonderful, with that nice alphabet for easy transition between reading and speaking, and nice Latin roots for guessing.

Even my mistakes in Spanish are wonderful. When I screw up un poco and pequeno, for example, I can be told that un poco is more like a little and pequeno is more like small, instead of that zhāng is a measure word used for flat objects, except not for paper and not for things that come in a pair or come in a bunch, and actually my tone was wrong anyway and I really said monkey balls. (I’m looking at you, Chinese.)

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Waiting

Cake Mania 3 is an adorable time-management game for the Nintendo DS. Jill, our heroine from Sandlot Games’ PC versions of the Cake Mania imprint, is cheerfully preparing for her wedding day when she accidentally breaks a time-bender (I suppose it was wedding decor), and sends herself and her loved ones off through space and time, only to be saved through extensive cake baking! Jill must rescue her displaced friends and family, repair the time-bender and make it back for her wedding – all by making and decorating cakes.

Once Jill lands in a new location and sets up her bakery (“Oh look,“ Jill notices, “My oven works in ancient China! That’s not weird at all!”), the top screen is used for progress stats, like time spent and money earned, and icons of waiting customers. The bottom screen is Jill’s bakery. Players send Jill rushing from oven to customer with a tap of the stylus. A checkmark appears over the future actions in Jill’s queue so you can easily keep track of what she’s doing. Tap the checkmark to remove a planned action from Jill’s to-do list.

Read the rest of my Cake Mania 3 review over on Casual Gamer Chick.

I didn’t mention how excited I was to receive this review copy, because professional reviewers do not share when they do the idiotic happy dance. Yeah. This is me, not sharing.

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Cake Mania 3

What I meant to say was, thanks for putting up with my moody high school crap, for letting me hang out in your classroom when I really should have been in gym doing… um… actually I’m not entirely sure what one does in gym since I never went, for pretending you had no idea who built a dummy DOS with a fake reformatting option and left it running on other peoples’ machines, thanks for turning me on to frustration and ecstasy of programming, I never did much with my Pascal skills but it was excellent practice for life in China.

Somehow what came out was a mutual rant about school politics, the joys of students who learn something in your class, and frustrations of precious-snowflake parents. This is because an announcement was made over the PA that there would soon be a fire drill, and that all students were expected to leave quickly and quietly, and wait at designated areas until they returned to class. There was to be no stopping at lockers to get coats, although it’s a planned drill, in November in New Jersey, and no leaving school property, even though students will be sent halfway to their cars. There would be undefined Dire Consequences for rule-breakers. And students must not dawdle on the way back to shortened pre-holiday classes since that would cut into their academic time.  Long winded announcements, it seems, must just be part of the learning process.  Seriously, how can you talk about life-altering influences that made me want to teach English when you have such school admin stupidity in front of you?

We talked for a while, catching up, until the alarm went off. I thought that the incessant clanging would be a good cue to go, so we said goodbye and I made my way through straggling students towards my car. I was feeling like a new stage of my life was opening, since I’d just talked to a former teacher as an equal. And he said I’d grown up!

On my way out, one of the school security guards tried to prevent me leaving school grounds, and I had to explain that I was actually an unauthorized trespasser, and not a wayward student. Perhaps I’m not as mature as I’d hoped.

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Standard Deviations

It seemed, suddenly, like less of a surprising decor choice and more of a tangible symbol of excess, the constant bombardment of stuff. We don’t just consume Halloween candy, disposable naughty-cat costumes and window-cling ghosts, but we need a plastic severed head hanging from the ceiling to remind us that it’s time to buy those things.

Thinking about the layers of stuff reminds me that even my heavy-handed symbolism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I didn’t look too closely (because, um… I did mention that it’s a plastic severed head, right?), but it seems to be injection molded plastic, which means someone designed the mold, and the paint. Do you think it went like this: Today, I have made my mark on the world, I designed a mold for plastic severed heads, and these heads will outlast me. Or maybe all those new hires in design are incompetent, so I got stuck redesigning the neck wounds. College kids come in and think they know everything, but it takes years in the field to really get that look of severed spine. Do you think, after that, someone else worked out that they could save 84 cents per dozen by making the plastic just a tiny bit thinner? And someone mixed a paint palette of  dead-flesh colors.

A factory probably bid on a contract for plastic severed heads, and lost.  Honey, I was thinking of going to Bali for our anniversary, but we lost the severed heads contract, so that’ll have to wait for next year. Maybe someone else was rejoicing over their new severed-heads prosperity.

Was it made, like everything else,  overseas? Eric once had a job working for a packing and shipping company, I wonder if he designed any cartons for the most efficient shipping of plastic severed body parts. If it was made in China, I’m starting to understand the pointing and staring thing. I mean, I come from the land of mass-produced plastic severed heads, who wouldn’t stare?

And the head in a chain store, which makes me wonder if there’s a Halloween seasonal plan-o-gram with the placement of the severed head marked out on a photocopied sheet. Is there a variation for other floorplans? Does a larger store get a tier-two plan-o-gram with a second plastic severed head? Does an employee get scolded by home office for misplacing or incorrectly hanging the severed head? And do you think it’ll go into a box in someone’s office next month, to make room for Santa Claus?

I hope in the far distant future, when archeologists are looking at the ruins of our cities, that the plastic severed head is an artifact uncovered for the American civilization.

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Severed Heads