My article on BeeAppi‘s CyberWord is in the latest issue of Indie Game Mag.
I had a great time talking with Karen about iPhone game development, and I also went to hear her at the Triangle All-Stars iPhone panel, which might make me a BeeAppi fangirl. (Oh, and Karen? That part where I call your boyfriend a booth babe? I meant that in a good way!)
Manager codes for a cash register just strike me as ridiculous. (Some of the other things that have this effect are insurance for rented exercise equipment and plastic severed heads.) It’s like an announcement from the employer that their employees are trustworthy enough to handle cash without stealing, but not trustworthy enough to handle voiding items without stealing, or perhaps that their employees are smart enough to make change without screwing up, but not smart enough to void a sale without screwing up.
Anyway, turns out I’m smart enough and trustworthy enough to have a manager code at the restaurant. I knew that degree would come in handy! I usually put my hands over my ears and sing loudly whenever a boss suggests I take on more responsibility, because although I do like working at the restaurant, I also like to go home and not think about work! But sometimes my customers change their orders or have special payment requests, so I guess I have to be responsible, just this once. The code I’d been using, which was not quite 1234, but along those security lines, making me think that my boss sees manager codes the way I do, recently changed over the weekend, and I was given a new, four-digit code.
The next day, when I came in to open, there was a note from a co-worker on the register saying the code had changed and giving me a new, 8-digit code, and asking me to memorize this number and destroy the note.
Yesterday, there was a new note, with a new 10-digit secret code , and a request to memorize this number and destroy the note after reading.
I imagine I’ll need my social security number and a PIN to use a new twenty-digit code tomorrow. But I hope the next note will be high-security enough to self-destruct after reading!
This Joymax press release on multiplayer games, virtual societies, and Asian culture, landed in my inbox the other day:
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
I was way too excited for the new My Boyfriend game. I anticipated all the fun of Sim dating, plus my favorite guilty pleasure (changing my avatar’s clothes every five minutes), without all that tedious eating and sleeping and meter-watching of actual Sims. I really wanted to like it. I wasn’t lying in angry-feminist wait for objectionable themes, I wanted to blog about frothy dialogue, cute outfits and imaginary boyfriends.
But it was awful.
The game opens with you and your best friend arriving at a resort full of fun activities and hot guys! Unfortunately, the dialogue is stilted, partly because it’s EFL, and partly because I hoped for witty banter. There’s a lot of clicking ok, only “ok” is an awkward agreement. The dialogue was so awkward that I couldn’t always tell who was supposed to be an attractive possible friend and who was a mean girl to be thwarted with my killer wits. I could tell which guys were potential boyfriends, though, because the minor NPCs only had one line to say. Over and over.
As you walk around the resort, white stars appear over activatable items, and you have the option to participate in different resort activities. Whether you choose to relax in the sun, rent waterskiis, or swim in the pool, you don’t play a minigame or even watch a little cutscene animation. You watch a clock tick. I’m not exaggerating. You watch a pink clock tick. Um, when does the fun start?
Other activities do involve minigames. These are activated by talking to an NPC. I’m usually a big fan of minigames (see also: all my recent hidden objects game reviews), but these minigames were awful. AWFUL. We’re talking incomprehensible directions, repetitive gameplay and bizarrely uneven difficultly levels. For Step Aerobics, you need to click the right color in the right order five times to complete level one. For Kareoke, you need to click the right color at the right time FORTY EIGHT times to complete level one. Wait, one is more difficult than the next by a factor of ten?
Your character can also experiment with makeup, but the extremely limited choices forbade either adorable looks or hilarious fashion trainwrecks. (If you think makeup doesn’t lend itself well to a videogame, check out the facial minigame in Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger for a makeup game done right, or Sims 3 for recreational avatar decoration.)
I really wanted to like My Boyfriend, but we have to break up. This just isn’t working out.
So, how about that Google Buzz, huh?
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?
Sometimes when people whine about how their town sucks or there’s nothing to do here, I secretly think they’re just not trying hard enough. Only boring people are bored, and so forth. Also, that feeling of I-hate-it-here is inextricably tied to my high-school angst. (Other things I hated at that time: My parents. Being at home. Being at school. Boys who didn’t pay attention to me. Boys who paid too much attention to me. I must have been a real delight, don’t you think?)
But admitting to myself that Cary is not for me has actually made me feel better. It’s allowed me to reset my expectations, so I’m pleased by finding something nice, instead of constantly disappointed by comparing Cary to other places I’ve lived.
Zen of the cul-de-sacs. That’s me.
Anyway, one of those nice things is Cool Breeze, a Indian vegetarian fast-food place. It’s small and a bit hard to spot if you don’t know it’s there, which is often a very good sign for a restaurant. Inside were plastic pizza-parlor style benches and no-frills tables, handwritten signs offering specials, and Bollywood music videos.
I really like Indian food, and I think I’m pretty familiar with the tandori and vindaloo and dosas on the average menu, but I was pretty lost here. We ordered almost at random, trusting that the good smells meant the food would be good. The menu was almost no help, Cool Breeze would really benefit from a picture menu and proper descriptions of the items. I’m too laoweito know if “paratha” is better than “chaat”, and with all the tasty options, it’s a shame that it’s not more user-friendly. In their defense, the guy working the counter was knowledgeable and happy to answer our questions, but I imagine he has better things to do than describe fifty-something menu options to us.
Food is surprisingly inexpensive, so don’t do what we did, and assume that a three dollar order will be a small portion! Everything is served on styrofoam plates, and almost everything comes with green chutney (the sharp minty kind, not the cilantro kind) and yogurt.
The paani puri, described as round shaped crispies and spicy water, turned out to be small hollow fried breads, with an assortment of sauces to eat with them. There’s also a paneer paratha, which is a tasty wheat bread stuffed with paneer cheese. Batata vada was a lot like a potato pakora. (Downside was listening to Stick say “batatavada” over and over. He’d like you all to know that it’s lots of fun to say and that he’s cursed with a no-fun girlfriend.) Overall, it was filling vegetarian fare with a great mix of flavors. Did I mention the background Bollywood music videos?
Like everywhere else in Cary, full-length windows look out on the parking lot, but my newfound mindset means expecting every place to be in a strip mall, so that’s ok!
Cool Breeze
740 East Chatham Street
Cary, NC 27511
(919) 463-9130
Edit 2/16: My wonderful boyfriend Stick finds it necessary to read the internet to me, sharing his stream-of-consciousness whether I’m listening or not, whether I’m in the room or not, whether I have cotton balls in my ears or not. This morning he was on his laptop and I knew he must be reading this post because he said “Oh yeah, Cool Breeze. That’s delicious!” as if we hadn’t eaten there again last night. A few seconds later, he started saying batata vada over and over. This was followed by an impolite word, as he read the next line, where I mock him for saying batata vada over and over.
A few weeks ago, Harold and I exchanged tweets (why is there no convenient usage for this?) about reading selections, and how revealing a reading list can be. My choices right now are skewed towards travel (No surprise that I wish I were traveling again), Romans (I wish I were an ancient Roman), and most recently, Tudor historical novels (I guess I also wish I were eating smoked quail and manchet, or wearing a gable hood).
Then the other day, John from Sinosplice asked how I made my What I’m Playing widget over there on the side, and I had to admit it was a cut-and-paste from BigFishGames and Amazon. But it made me think about adding a booklist widget.
I’ve installed Now Reading Reloaded, a nice plugin that lets you add an ISBN, and it will fill out all the rest of the info, and get a nice cover picture from an Amazon search. I tinkered with the sidebar display for a while but now I’m really happy with it. And that was hardcore tinkering! With php! Be impressed! But I’m not really skilled, so I can’t figure out how to reverse the order of books displayed to show the most recent, instead of the oldest. Of course I can backdate whichever 5 books are my favorites, but that invalidates all the cool library functions. I added all the books I’ve read so far this year, which turned out to be 11.
It may sound like a lot, but I read almost every night before I go to sleep, and also, there’s a slight possibility that maybe I slack off at work a little.
In the novel The Light Of Other Days, sci-fi great Arthur C. Clarke posits a future where a new technology means anyone can see what anyone else is doing. Any past antics are available for review by any future employers, future spouses, and, when a former kegstander or topless party girl achieves a respectable career, any high-minded rivals can see any youthful indiscretions. We may not have time-traveling wormhole technology quite yet, but now that every college kegger and ill-advised hookup is instantly documented by cameraphone to Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, our lives are increasingly on display.
In the age of googling prospective hires and prospective dates, we are increasingly tied to our online past. With online archiving, our names could be forever linked to a bad review, a high school manifesto, an embarrassing photo or whatever pieces of our past generated the most traffic. Let’s hope it’s not an inadvertent appearance on the Fail Blog.
Omnipresent social media brings the public into our lives. For every Dooce who turns an inappropriate blog overshare into a career and a book deal, there are hundreds of red-faced Twitterati, and Facebookers untagging photos. And, although Cosmo suggests sending your man racy texts or naughty photos to spice up a relationship, I imagine that a certain ex-Miss California wishes she’d skipped that issue. Ex-Miss California, Carrie Prejean, came under fire for her comments on gay marriage, and then again when her fledgling career as a Christian spokeswoman fell apart when a solo sex tape sent to an ex-boyfriend surfaced. But is this outrageous hypocrisy, or just a young girl’s normal identity experimentation?
It is the public knowledge of one’s private affairs that turned Monica Lewinski, a girl who, like most of us at the same age, hooked up with a desperately inappropriate partner, into a girl whose name is now synonymous with blowjob. (As I write this, I shudder to think what that word will do to my contextual ads)
Our first reaction to this kind of story is to wonder how she could be so stupid. How could Prejean think she could make it as a Christian, conservative spokesmodel with a sex video in her past? And for Christian spokesmodel and sex video, feel free to read Olympic athlete and bong, or prince of England and Nazi Halloween costume, or… well, you get the picture. Now that all of our actions are blogged, tagged and digitally archived for social media posterity, it seems that the prereq for a later career as a teacher, politician, pastor, lawyer, or anything other than D-list sex tape celeb, is never having made a youthful mistake.
One frequently suggested solution, then, is not to take photos, not to share them, and certainly not to blog and tweet about our exploits. Would-be staffers for Obama were asked to share their blog URLs and social media aliases to spare the president any future embarrassment. Even small-time bloggers have to weigh the benefits of a post venting about the boss or the in-laws, with the consequences of having that post read. Solidarity and support through comment validation, or an awkward Thanksgiving dinner when that post is mentioned? Social media allows us to connect and share our thoughts, but like anything in print, blog posts, Facebook updates and hastily-written tweets can come back to haunt their writers.
Do we all have to give up blogging, building a group scrapbook of shared photos on Facebook or Flickr, mugging for the ever-present iPhone camera, in short, give up sharing and recording our lives? Must we live the unexamined life to have any chance of future success?
In The Light Of Other Days, Clarke’s society grows to accept that their lives are constantly on view by any interested party. After an initial reaction of repression — that would be the sci-fi version of deleting your profiles, making dual Facebook accounts, or coming up with a clever code name to keep your work-hating tweets from your boss’s eyes — society learns to accept the new intimacy.
Once everyone has a burn box of our embarrassing moments digitally archived and publicly accessible, will it even matter anymore? And, once there really is an society-wide expectation of archived and accessible chitchat, could work-related tweets lead to a new honesty? (I mean, corporate management can’t really think that wageslaves are loving their hours in front of the fryer or ringing a register, and honest discourse could do a lot for employee retention and job satisfaction.)
When the Facebook and Twitter generation becomes the human resources department, the hardhitting journalists and the clergy of the future, we will see a shift towards acceptance of social media consequences. Maybe a silly drunken photo or a blog overshare is only an embarrassment while there are people without any net records of their own coming-of-age.
My morning before class started with sleeping through the alarm, and as always, rushing set off a series of other minor catastrophes. When I saw the No Left Turn – Train sign by Chapel Hill Road, I realized I’d have to teleport to make it on time, and my usual pre-class coffee was completely out of the question. (By the way, I haven’t mentioned how that wee sign next to the left turn signal gives me the giggles. Hmm, I didn’t notice the GIANT TRAIN blocking my intended path, it’s a good thing they put up that little sign!) I called my program director, and left a frantic message for him, apologizing for running behind, saying I’d be about 5 minutes late, promising that I was coming to class as soon as I could.
I’ve been on the receiving end of too many work-related last-minute phone messages to feel really comfortable about this news getting to the kids, but when I finally got to my classroom, they were all sitting in their seats, and the chatter wasn’t too loud. I figured someone must have come by to tell the kids to wait quietly, and I asked the kids if anyone from admin had been in.
“No, but don’t worry, Miss Meg. We wouldn’t have told them you were late!” one of my students said immediately. “We’d have said you were here, but off doing something really important!”
I would never ask or encourage the kids to lie to school administration for me, but, secretly, I’m a little flattered that they would have.
The zaniness we love about the Sims arrives in The Sims 2: Castaway
I’ve written such angry things about sparkly pink shopping games as “girls’ games”, that I hate to admit when I fall into a traditional girl pattern, but, well, I love pretend cooking. I like it in World of WarCraft, too, if that make me sound any less like an eight-year-old girl. I also like making Sim clothes and playing dress-up. Castaway avoids being an unappealingly feminine game by also having survival puzzles and mini-games about fish-catching and fire-building. Oh, and the game’s not pink, which is always good in my book.
Sims 2: Castaway seemed to make much better use of the DS interface than Sims 2. In the regular Sims 2, you’re forced to ignore the stylus, and use the clumsy buttons to navigate, but you can’t put the stylus away completely, because you need it to select menu options that really should be hotkeys or at least accessible by arrow keys. Sims 2: Castaway takes better advantage of the DS-specific interface, using either the stylus to move, and even creating minigames that require use of the microphone. The top screen is used to display the meters that are very familiar to Sims players.
One interface annoyance is the crafting book. When crafting, your Sim cannot create multiples of the same item. You need to select the crafting spot, tap Craft Things, then click the item you want to make,which leads to a screen showing you what materials will be reguired. On this screen, you must click Make. Then you’ll see a picture of what you’re making, and you must click OK. Then you see a picture of what you made, and you’re forced to click OK one more time. If you want to make a duplicate (or a second item), you’re back at the crafting book, and you need to do it all over again. And if your item is on the second or third page of the crafting book, it can be even longer. And if you need three of one item to make something special, well, seems like EA figured out how to most of the suck the fun from a crafting game.
I was a big fan of Sims 2 for the computer, so I expected to like Castaway. It was even better than I expected, with the exotic island theme, a zany but cohesive storyline, and all the adorably realistic animations we expect from the Sims.
Sims 2: Castaway on the DS was originally published June ’09 on Thumb Gods
