Back to Paragon City

Okay, I cancelled the WoW account. Too much travel time, not enough actual game-playing. It was fun, but not fun enough to keep paying for, and I just didn't feel emotionally invested in any of the characters I was playing.

I think part of the problem is that it's a stuff-based game. The rewards are in new and better stuff for your character, delivered on a relatively regular basis as you level up. The problem I have with that is that getting stuff for the most part doesn't give me new things to do. City of Heroes, in contrast, delivers a lot of character improvement early on, with the rate of improvement slowing over time as leveling gets slower. This means it's easier and more fun to create alts and have meaningful differences between them, as the various power sets play differently. Also, you get to choose a custom look right away, as opposed to the WoW problem of every Night Elf going through the "green bike shorts, leather vest and Boy Scout neckerchief" look at level 6. Seriously, ever single one of them looks identical except for the hairstyle and hair color. That's not enough variation for me, I'm afraid.

So it's back to City of Heroes, where the Invention System delivers new ways to customize characters.

World of Warcraft sucks...

...you in. I've started playing, partly because I'm playing with Nihilix, and partly because, well, I just wanted to see what it was like these days.

I've played a lot of City of Heroes the past couple of years, and I was pining for a fantasy setting that I could play cooperatively. Oblivion is neat, and I will get back to playing it when the expansion ships (at least, I think I will), but what I want is Diablo III. Since that's not happening right now (although the Median 2008 mod is really tempting me to re-install one of the 4 or 5 copies of D2 that I own), I'm trying out WoW.

It really does suck you in. There's the character progression, of course, but the big thing is the acquisition of stuff, including crafting, and the player-driven economy. My wife points out that the character creation is incredibly disappointing after getting used to the costume generator in CoH, and the wide variety of power options across the archetypes, so it doesn't start off with much of a feeling of engagement. I feel less invested in your character, since all I've done is make a small number of choices (faction, race, class, and a couple of options for face. hairstyle, hair color and the like). And then, of course, the early look is the same for all characters, since it's governed by the items you are finding, and the initial drop tables are pretty limited. The early quest rewards are the best items you get, so everyone is wearing them, and they look... disappointing. Night Elves that can wear leather armor all wind up wearing some kind of green bike shorts and little red capes about level 4, so it's like a huge Boy Scout convention. Early armor choices for warriors look like capri pants and muscle shirts.

Part of the problem, of course, is that they're spending so much graphics horsepower on the world, and aiming for a high frame rate. Characters can't be high-detail or your computer would choke on it. The result is a world that is consistent, with reasonable performance and almost no zoning, but you get invested in the world, not so much in your character as yours. The character is defined by the stuff, not the character itself. There's nothing wrong with this model, of course -- it's worked well for years with a wide variety of games. I'm just kind of disappointed that in the MMO genre we're not seeing more games follow the lead of CoH or Second Life and allowing customization of the look and presentation of your avatar that isn't driven purely by the stuff you have.

The other problem with looks based on stuff is that, if I can see it on the enemy, I want to be able to pick it up. Morrowind and Oblivion did this really well -- that guy over there with the glowing sword? Take him down and you'll get the sword. Of course, he's going to use it on you, but that's the breaks. WoW doesn't do this -- I get the stuff from the drop table, not the equipment being used against me. This does give nice variation, which is more fair for various character types, but moves away from the immersion that I'd like to feel.

Also, the skill progression in WoW feels like an afterthought. For tradeskills, it works relatively well -- you need to have a skill of a certain level in order to be able to do some things, and you increase skill by using it. Fair enough. But the model was also extended to weapons, in kind of a half-assed fashion. Weapons don't require a skill number to use, they require you to be a certain level. If Blizzard implemented a skill-based (instead of level-based) method for limiting weapon use, it would increase the power of racial weapon advantages and give meaning to weapon skill. As it is, if you want to pick up a new weapon type past about level 12, it's a trivial cost to enable the skill and then you simply need to spend some time in low-level areas grinding to build up your skill number so your to-hit percentage doesn't suffer. That doesn't do much for immersion or fun, does it? There's no trade-off you are making, deciding to use one weapon type over another, and (apart from a relatively small amount of time and money) no real cost to switching.
What does it all mean? I'm liking WoW for the most part -- I enjoy getting to play with my friends (my wife is playing as well, but since we were already playing CoH together, it's not a new thing), I enjoy the fantasy setting, I'm liking the feeling of learning and building stuff, but it's not perfect.

Then again, what game is?

A tale of two restaurants

I like dualities, I guess.

Last night, my wife and I went out to dinner at Zander Cafe in St. Paul. The night before, we and our kids had been to Sunsets in Woodbury. It's probably not fair to compare the two experiences, because aside from us paying for a meal they weren't very similar (small vs. large, couple vs. family, and so on), but then again fairness is looked for more often than it is found.

The upshot of the two experiences was that we took Sunsets off our list of restaurants to visit, and reminded ourselves that we need to go to Zander more often.

The best part of the meal at Sunsets was the dessert (creme brulee, which it is possible to screw up). The second best was our daughter's chicken fingers. The third... well, my wife's suggestion was "my Diet Coke wasn't bad...". Definitely the worst part of the dinner was her filet mignon. When you put filet mignon on your menu, you should definitely hire cooks who know how to prepare it.

The meal at Zander, on the other hand, was excellent -- I had a pork loin filet that was excellent, accompanied by a butternut squash that I ate every bit of. My wife had "the" jambalaya, which she pronounced "pretty good" and then when pressed clarified to "I mean excellent." She has a habit of understatement at times.

Apart from the entertainment value of making fun of last nigh's disastrous dinner, this got us thinking about restaurants and our tastes. I'm of the opinion that our tastes and expectations have changed (we have higher expectations now) even as the overall quality of food has fallen at chain restaurants.

The key problem, I think, is the economics of running a chain. When you have the opportunity to pursue volume discounts, you start making decisions based on having as many options as possible with your stuff, and not based on making the best stuff you can. TGI Friday's, for example, has in effect a menu matrix. You choose some kind of meat, some kind of sauce or topping, some kind of side, and so on. They're almost doing Garanimals with food. This approach works relatively well for cafeteria-style food, but I don't want to eat at a cafeteria when I am paying restaurant prices.

I need to remember to eat out more at smaller restaurants. It costs a bit more, but the quality is better, and I like voting with my daily behavior. Food isn't a commodity, and treating it like one is a disservice to ourselves.

This Internet thing could be big.

So the post preceding this one was an attempt by me to help the Internet work. I had a problem with my iPod, and spent many hours trying to resolve it before finally finding the (simple) solution.
Why did it take so long? Basically, because the way I was describing the symptoms was different from the way that Jeff Bryan over at the 5G iPod forums at Apple described the underlying problem. I was looking for something having to do with ipodservice.exe taking up 100% of CPU, while he was describing a problem with drive letters. Fortunately for me, I found his post and guessed the issue he was talking about might be related to the one I was experiencing.

Then I figured that I'd try to make the internet better by putting the information I had gathered in someplace where it could be found, so that others might benefit. Thus far, 3 people have left comments indicating that this was a good idea. I'm pretty happy with that.

This kind of highlights the problem with the web, though. Almost all of the information you want is somewhere out there in the long tail, but finding it, weeding out the useful thing from all the other crap, is a nigh-insurmountable task. Without a deliberate attempt by humans to wrest order from chaos, the internet isn't going to live up to its potential as a transformative mechanism for humanity.

Most attempts to create order from internet chaos have been top-down. Yahoo was my first exposure to someone attempting to categorize all the stuff on the 'net, and even early on, it was pretty obvious that the amount and variety of stuff was growing faster than the ability of people to come up with categories. I think the future of order-from-chaos lies in tagging and folksonomies. Yes, they introduce a lot of crap data, and have the potential for abuse, but I believe the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Especially because we can build mechanisms for determining who to trust based on behavior, as Google has done with their ranking mechanisms for sites.

iPod 100% CPU utilization - problem solved

I finally gave in an got an iPod. I was a relatively early adopter of digital music playback, as I've had an Iriver IHP-120 (also known as the H120) for a couple of years. It died on a flight back from Boston a couple of weeks ago, and I had a whole day before my next flight, so I bit the bullet and picked up an iPod.

Things went okay for the first week or so, but then I started to have a problem where I could not eject it -- iTunes would lock up hard when I tried to eject the iPod. Then I developed a new problem, where connecting the iPod would cause ipodservice.exe to activate, and my machine would go to 100% CPU and stay there.

I tried a lot of things to fix the problem, none of which worked (until the last one, of course). Over the space of two days...

- I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it, which did nothing
- I uninstalled iTunes and Quicktime, and then could not reinstall Quicktime until I (finally) found the quicktime files in /WINDOWS/System32/
- I deleted dozens of quicktime and itunes references from my registry
- I uninstalled and reinstalled again

And of course, I rebooted dozens of times.

The problem, as it turned out, is all about drive letters. It seems that iPods do not like to share their drive letter with other devices, even if said devices are not connected.

If you're having this problem, try what worked for me:

With the iPod connected (and CPU at 100%, of course)

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Select the iPod and choose a different letter. I picked "I" since it's high enough I should not get another drive up there. You'll get a warning that changing drive letters may make software not work. This is only true if you are running applications from your iPod, so I felt safe ignoring it.

This fixed the problem immediately.

Scoreboard updates

Things are looking up. The Twins are 4 games up in the wild card, a game and a half behind the Tigers for the Central, and leading the BoSox 6-nothing as I type this. Odds of making the postseason are up to 95%, saith Baseball Prospectus.

And the race for the Senate is looking up. Latest polls have a 50-50 split, and with the way the wind is blowing, I am hoping for a change.

Scoreboard-watching, in two ways.

It's the time of year when I watch the scoreboards, in two ways. Why do I think in twos? Dunno.

The first kind of scoreboard-watching is baseball. My Twins are currently embroiled in a fight for the postseason. As I write this, they're a half-game ahead in the wild card race and four back in the division race. The statheads (my peeps) at Baseball Prospectus have them at a 65% chance of making the postseason. So I'm watching the scoreboard, not just to see how well they do, but also the other teams they're competing against.

The second kind is electoral. The Votemaster has returned, and www.electoral-vote.com is back in action. As an unabashed Democrat, I'd really like it if we could get control of the Senate away from the Reptiles. Sadly, his projections for control of the Senate are not as rosy as the Twins' chances of making the postseason.

City Clowncil. Yay.

Apparently, my City Council is composed almost entirely of 12-year-olds. Entertaining (from a schadenfreude kind of perspective) can be found here.

A tale of two demos

I play a lot of games. I buy even more games, although not as many as I used to. See my earlier post on the economics of MMOs -- I am still playing City of Heroes after two years, which reduces my interest in other games. But that's not why I'm motivated to post. No, I wanted to talk to my future self about why demos are important.

The first demo I want to talk about is a failure, in my opinion. I've been interested in Titan Quest for a while. I loved Diablo II, and TQ looks like a good D2 clone, with high-quality graphics. So when the demo became available, I promptly downloaded it, only to find out that the damn thing won't install on my machine. The demo installed was created and tested on machines that have Windows installed to the C: drive, and relies on that. In my case, my primary HD is G: (it's SATA, and I have no IDE hard drives), so the installer bombs. There is a fix, of course. All I need to do is go out and buy an IDE hard drive and reinstall Windows, and then I can install the demo. Or I could install it on another computer, copy the install over and edit my registry. Neither of those is a realistic scenario.

In my mind, this makes the Titan Quest demo a failure. The point of a demo is to get me enough of the game experience to make me want more, so I buy the full game.

One demo that worked really well is Armadillo Run. I got an email from an online acquaintance with the link to the site and a recommendation. It's somewhere between The Incredible Machine and Lemmings, but simpler and somehow more engaging. At heart, it's a puzzle game, but one with many possible solutions for each puzzle. You're presented with a simple scenario -- get the armadillo (which strongly resembles a basketball) safely to a target area. To accomplish this, you use simple construction materials to build a route it will roll along. The materials have physical properties and obey basic physical principles -- things fall if unsupported, heavy things will break under their own weight, and so on.

The demo installed fine, so the first barrier was passed. I played through the simple tutorial and the six demo puzzles in about half an hour. While I was doing this, my wife saw the game up and asked me to forward her the link. About 15 minutes later I bought the full game.

What's the lesson? It's simple -- If I can't see your demo, I can't tell how good it is.

Which, of course, leads right back to switches and dials.

Okay, I suck at this

It would seem that I suck at blogging. I'm not finding the time to devote to my own projects. I need to regain some balance.

So, is this a commitment to trying again, or an admission of failure? Good question. I don't like giving up.

I do want to write up my thoughts on switches and dials, and the importance of applying interaction design principles to game UI design (which ought to be obvious, and yet is not). So the chance I will do so is pretty good.

It would seem I must link. Increasing the connectivity of the Internet is a good thing.

I found this recently, and it caught my interest. I'm familiar with Tog as an influential member of the UI design community, and have read his stuff before.

First Principles on UI Design