Two years later …

This is like writing a note in a bottle, really – the odds of anyone actually seeing it are fantastically small.  But I wanted to keep it here just in case.

In the last two years, I’ve nearly died of H1N1, become a relatively prosperous web developer, and generally moved from game theory and design as a passionate hobby into game theory and design as an offshoot of my business persona.  This means two things:

1. That the Kuma Pageworks ‘brand’, if you can call it that, is being retired for now.
2. That my thinking on games needs to be couched in more professional terms, if not a more professional tone.

So I’m saying goodbye to this blog, and moving everything of relevance over to:

http://elsewar.es

Surely my life isn’t all work and no play – I occassionally get to spend some time decapitating zombies in the very amazing Left 4 Dead 2.  This is a game that may as well have been written explicitly for me.  I enjoyed (and conquered most of the Achievements for) Left 4 Dead, so I was worried that L4D2 wouldn’t crank up the tension enough.

Au contraire.

I’ve had more pants-crapping, adrenaline-fueled moments in L4D2 than I can admit to.  The additional of melee weapons makes the game exceptional visceral.  There’s something to be said for sniping your way carefully to safety – there’s something else entirely, AMAZINGLY FUN to be said about carving your way out of a rampaging horde of rabid zombies with a machete, or the satisfying *crunk* of head colliding with cricket bat, then detaching and flying into the distance.

L4D2 is so good, in fact, that its the first game I’ve played where cowardice seemed like the most viable option.  Recently, I was playing online with some friends (including Story Games guru Andy Kitkowski), going through the Swamp Fever campaign.  The climax of this campaign is a showdown at a gothic Antebellum mansion – and it’s easily the hardest of the endgame scenarios in both versions of Left 4 Dead.  The infected pour in from every direction at long range, and even with a well-knit group chances are that you’ll get overwhelmed.

We managed to make it through (barely) and absconded from the upper balcony to the gates where a boat is due to arrive and holed up there for the last couple of waves of infected, waiting for the real killers – two (!) Tanks – big, beefy ‘roid-raging zombies that can knock you into next week.  This is the only place I’ve ever seen such a thing, and the first time I realized there were two Tanks, I almost gave up the idea of finishing the campaign.  But again, we soldiered through and (barely) survived intact.  The gate blew, and I ran along with the Rochelle-player out into the water.  It was then that I noticed Coach went down.

I was almost on the boat, but I stopped, knelt and pointed my sniper rifle back to see what was going on.  Nick was still there as well, and the two of them were being swarmed.  I had the sniper rifle (so much fun!) and started cutting through the swarm by shooting just over Coach’s head.  It looked like Nick was going to be able to get him up, but then a big rock came out from nowhere and knocked him to the ground as well – the calling card of another Tank attack.  So I had a choice – try to wade in and save them both (possible, but unlikely) or save my own virtual ass and get on the boat.

Normally, I play with a chip on my shoulder.  I aim to win – not just survive.  But this was the first time I’d gotten to the damn boat, and that elusive Achievement called to me.  Then I watched another wave of infected burst through the gates, past the now-dead Coach and nearly-dead Nick.  I turned and ran like the coward I was.  The feeling as the credits rolled wasn’t mixed – I was elated.  And not because I’d actually survived – but because a game had given me such a visceral shock, caused me such trouble, given me such pause that at the very end, when I had the chance to play the hero I turned tail and ran from the sheer horror of it.

Oh, the beauty.

I’m back.

There’s precious few of you around to notice, I gather.  According to my Google Analytics statistics, there are 100% less of you visiting the site than there were a year ago.  100% less might seem daunting.  It might seem like there’s NO ONE AT ALL actually paying any attention.  And with good reason, mind you – with my burgeoning programming work, my blogging time has fallen from ‘the thing I do on a nigh-daily basis’ to nil.  The time I used to spend carefully crafting my posts now goes into creating data models.

And yet, blog I must!  My creative side has been engaged, but in a completely different way than I’m used to.  I have to constantly be creative to overcome the hurdles that web apps keep throwing up in my path: figuring out how to do X when all I definitively know how to do is Y.  (Answer: Split the bottom of the Y with a hatchet to make the X.)  But that’s not writing, and it’s even different from game design, which has also lagged behind as Phase I of Being My Own Boss has come to fruition.  I don’t want to get my writing brain so rusty I need a crowbar to pry it open.

Steps need to be taken.

So back to blogging it is – it’s right under my nose every day, and I am paying for this website after all.

Assuming that there’s anyone still reading, let’s explore my latest epiphany: the Model-View-Controller paradigm of programming, and why it’s so freakin’ amazing – and how the Rails community is blowing it with helping other folks become better programmers.

MVC, if you’re not familiar, is just a way of thinking about dealing with a web application (or any application, really).  If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, read this.  If you don’t really care, then just accept this notion: using MVC divorces all of the look-pretty stuff that goes into a web page (all the images and styling) from the actual engine of the site, which is also separate from all of the back-end mucking about with databases.

And I get it now.  I didn’t for a long time, but I get it now.  I understand why this is such a smashing good idea.  I’ve recently been working on some projects with long legacy histories, where the code was all cobbled together and strung out in one long chain of if-else statements.  And now I see MVC for the good that it can do.

I’ve known about MVC for a while, having been poking at Rails and trying to fire up various Rails projects.  But I’ll be damned – damned straight into the ground – if Rails isn’t the biggest pain in the ass to get working.  A large part of the problem is the Mac-centricity of the Rails community.  Rails screencasts are on Macs.  The best editor for Rails is Textmate – which is inexplicably Mac-only.  The very few attempts at Rails tools on Windows are either outdated or clumsy – even InstantRails, about the only Windows Rails development package worth mentioning, is nominally dead.

Now, I should mention that as I speak, I have a Mac Mini sitting on my desk for iPhone development, I own Textmate, and I have two VMWare Linux servers running.  I’m OS-agnostic to a very high degree.  But until Apple makes a laptop of similar power that retails for Dell-ish prices, my development core is in Windows.  That’s just how I have to roll.  (And don’t even get me started about the fact that you can’t roll OS X into a virtual machine – I’ll be here all day yelling.)

Surely the Rails community at large knows about this imbalance – and neglects it.  Maybe it’s even benign.  But I don’t think so.  I have a stack of books that talk about the Ruby Way, and by extension the Rails Way.  Rails discussion is replete with the ‘right’ way to do things.  Mind you – it’s all good advice.  Great advice, even.  But it certainly points up the one-wayism of the Ruby community, and I think that the Windows bias is part-and-parcel of that attitude.  And it’s a shame, really.

But luckily for the rest of us, there’s PHP frameworks like Zend, CakePHP and CodeIgniter (my personal favorite) – that I’m using in all sorts of projects (including an open-source project called Hermitage that will be up on Github soon).  CI implements (but doesn’t enforce like Rails does) an MVC architecture, and my coding is better for it.  As far as I can tell, the only real deficit to the PHP frameworks from Rails that I haven’t been able to overcome (yet) is the lack of ORM (object relation mapping) – having my objects in CI know, for example, that a user’s Cart has Items in it, and if I call for the Cart, I want the Items in it as well.  In Rails, you set it up when you create the object – in PHP, you need to explicitly write out this code, which takes time.

So get your head out of your buttocks, Rails.  I’m sure I’m not the only developer out here who wishes that Rails was easier to develop on Windows, and to deploy … period.  But my deployment woes will have to wait for some other rant.

I’m overhauling the look of Elsewhere, and I’m also going to change what it’s about. I’ve kept this strictly game-centric since I started it, but my attempts at starting other blogs have failed miserably. So instead of trying to fire up yet-another blog, I’m going to roll my other interests into this one.

This coincides with the continuing convergence of my interests – mainly games and programming. I’ve started coding a new version of the famous Mix-O-Tronic in Ruby on Rails, and it’s pretty exciting for a first Rails project.

So pardon my dust (most people read this blog on Facebook and Planet Story-Games), so I don’t anticipate too many people throwing up their hands in disgust while I break the CSS of the site repeatedly.

Think playing the Virtual NES console online is retro?  How about playing Adventure for the Atari 2600?

I found a stash of really, really old-school gaming books at the Evanston Public Library.  Their collection is odd – they have enough graphic novels to stock a small comic store, but their kids’ DVD collection consists mostly of badly-produced documentaries.  I was perusing the games section of the stacks, looking mainly for a book on Go, when I found the following titles:

1. Naval War Games: Fighting sea battles with model ships, by Donald Featherstone
2. Wargame Design, by Strategy & Tactics – the house magazine of SPI (RIP)
3. A copy of Little Wars, by H.G. Wells (forwarded by Isaac Asimov!)
4. The Complete Wargames Handbook: How to play, design and find them, by James Dunnigan

And there were at least an armload more that I couldn’t get because I had to carry my daughter to the car.

There’s something poignant about reading these books – they talk about tabletop wargaming in the present tense – not with a wary eye to the future, but with a bright sense of optimism that wargames are the way of the future – particularly the Featherstone book (one of a series, according to the inside cover), which was published in 1965 and contains instructions for building scale WWII models out of wood with a Dremel.

I also picked up The Book of Games: Strategy, tactics and history, by Jack Bottermans.  It’s the only one of the bunch that can still be found on Amazon (scratch that – I’ve added links to the others that I’ve found).  It’s a weighty coffee-table tome that could easily put someone into a coma if you hit them over the head with it.  Inside are the rules for every ‘open source’ board game in existence, from Shogi to Chutes & Ladders, which I was stunned to discover wasn’t a crappy game from Parker Brothers, but a game used to teach karma in India.  There’s even a picture of one of the old stone boards in the book.

So why am I reading all of this?

I’m cramming my head with a critical mass of information, to try and spark the creative process and get back to game design.  It’s the last thing that I haven’t picked up from before this summer’s shenanigans.  I’ve been reading a lot of ‘modern’ stuff as well, online and in PDF form, but these books have filled me with ideas – old ideas at that – that are still quite relevant in to making a good game today.  I think the lesson that I’m learning is that what makes a good game isn’t tied to finding the next great thing.  It’s taking what we know now, salvaging what we can from the past, and fusing them together.  Wargames are still incredibly popular, after all – it’s just that with the PC they’re not played with counters and hexagons (at least physical hexagons and counters) anymore.

But more than retreading old game forms with new technology, these older games speak very plainly about what makes a solid game, because there aren’t any bells and whistles attached. It’s like peeking under the hood of a new car – there’s still a combustion engine in there that hasn’t changed since the Model-T.

I think sometimes we as designers forget that

I’m doing a ‘light’ makeover of the site.  One of the things that I’ve done is remove all of my links – frankly, half of them were dead or at least comatose.  The landscape has changed a lot since I last updated the entire list, and it was taking up a lot of real estate.  I’m going to be putting together another list of current game links for myself, and if anyone wants it (or wants to be included on it), let me know at b.e.hollenbeck (at) gmail (dot) com.

The wife and I went to the beach this afternoon, and found a profundity of very smooth basalt stones.  She mentioned that ‘these would make great game pieces’, so of course I scoured the beach for a couple of handfuls.  The result:

beach stones

Twenty-five stones in all of various sizes: twenty-one drak gray, and four white ones.  The mechanic: reach into the bag and draw out the stones for a conflict.  Grab as many as you want, but if you draw a white one (or more than one), you fail.

I’m also thinking about the arrangement above: the stones are laid out in a 5×5 grid, with the final pattern being significant in some way.

Now the question is: what’s the theme?  What sort of game would call for this as a mechanic?

I was in the ICU for two weeks in a medically-induced coma. I missed GenCon and blew my self-imposed deadline for becoming a published game designer.

And yet, I’m alive so it seems like a decent trade.

More from me soon.

I’ve finally found a way to post to my gaming blog from my mobile. That means all of the incredible insights I have while walking my cat around the yard, freezing my ass off at midnight will finally make it out of my head and into the rest of the my-blog-reading world.

Enjoy.

Another thing I’ve discovered: the Mixotronic looks great in a mobile browser. So now you can get you solid-gold ideas ANYWHERE.

You’re welcome.

I dropped my registration on a couple of domains I had, and with the extra room I picked up welcometothepandemic.com.  I’m not sure what I plan to use it for, but ideas are rattling around.

As part of my continuing self-education in web programming, I’ve decided to take a crack at revamping the venerable Mix-O-Tronic (which is still in quiet existence, by the way) into a Ruby on Rails application.

While I was sketching out the idea in my notebook, I suddenly got a flash of inspiration to use it as a sort of jump-off point for a social site.  Terms are still put together to elicit concepts from people – but users would have the option (if not obligation) to comment on any of the terms (I’m thinking of renaming them ‘phrases’), or the concept as a whole.  When terms come up for other users, they can see the trail of comments that people have left, some other concepts that have been created with them, and so on.  And if a concept comes up for another person, the same applies.

Terms could be added by users (subject to approval, of course) – which would cut down on the workload for keeping it up-to-date and back-cataloging the whole thing, which is still a problem.

I think it would be a very niche (but fun) social site, and pretty straight-forward to code in Rails.  A sort of high-concept pitch machine rolled in the madness of crowds.

In other Mix-O-Tronic news, I have the following books out from the library:

1001 Books to Read Before You Die

1001 Movies to Read Before You Die, and

The Encyclopedia of American Television (1945-2003).

Reading the entry on Benson alone is worth lugging around the last title.

I’ve added a plugin that makes Elsewhere mobile-friendly. It’s the same fabulous URL – if you go there on your handheld device of choice, you can read this blog without causing eyestrain or needless data downloads. You’re welcome.

I watched the first episode of Dollhouse last night.  It was very, very good – it’s a testament to Joss’ power as a TV god that he can have a show that hits the ground running like Dollhouse did.   The first entire season of Buffy had a sort of stilted quality to it; Angel had the leg-up of being a spinoff (I think Angel actually declined in quality after all of the Connor shenanigans until Season 5); Firefly hit all the marks but still was wobbly until Our Mrs. Reynolds.  

Dollhouse is solid, through and through.  But it still has issues, the first of which is that Eliza Dushku, while very easy on the eyes and apparently passionate enough to help bankroll the show (she has producer credit), is really … not … that .. good … of an actress.  The first few minutes of the show I just kept thinking ‘what is Faith doing here?’ – her presentation of the in-over-her-head Echo was the same performance as her in-over-her-head evil Faith, and her negotiator persona was completely unbelieveable.  She played it like someone acting like they’re acting like they’re acting.  Which is either brilliant, or bad acting with too much analysis on my part.

The premise is intriguing (and Alias with a sci-fi twist, but never mind that), and of course I’ll follow Joss to the grave.  It was fun to see Commander Lock, Faith the Rogue Slayer, Helo from BSG and Mirage from The Incredibles (the resemblance of Dichan Lachman is UNCANNY) all in the same show.

* * *

And now to the inevitable (at least for me) game idea:

The players are all Actors (are they not?) who work together as a team.  No one has a character sheet to start with – they all get the stock characters for their assigned roles: negotiator from Quantico (I mean, come on …), bad-ass commando, &c., which are in themselves amalgams of other personalities (think of the Personas as LEGOs that get put together instead of single entities).  As they rotate through these personas, they leave a trace behind – those traces start to add up into the true personality of the Actor who’s been wiped.  All of the echos start to become the true voice of the character.  Think of the entire campaign as a character creation.  The echoes (when triggered by another character in the role with the echo), causes first an echo for that character, but also causes a stronger echo in the first character – a sort of positive-feedback loop.

So Character A has the negotiator persona (Persona A) and has a small echo of the wiping process caused by a stressful situation.  That echo (and its cause) stay with the persona.  Character B gets a persona that includes the echo’d bit.  Player B activates the echo (for some positive benefit), and gets their own echo that attaches to Persona A, and meanwhile Player A gets a stronger echo in Persona B; a chain reaction.

I recently combed through the last 100 or so posts (we’re almost at 300 now!), and came up with a complete Bucket List of every game project that I’ve put the least amount of thought into.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1. DEAD
2. AFTER
3. Terrible World
4. Strangers
5. OORT
6. Expressionism
7. Bluebeard
8. Decathalon
9.  Merchant
10. Elsewhere
11. Elseworld
12. Cold War
13. Makuria
14. Get It On
15.  On the Air
16. Big Kahuna

So let’s play with this a bit to get priorities straight.  If I rank them in order of “words on paper” or “work done”, the list looks like this:

1. Elsewhere
2. DEAD
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Elseworld
6. Strangers
7. Decathalon
8. OORT
9. Expressionism
10. AFTER
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. On the Air
14. Get It On
15. Big Kahuna

Really, Big Kahuna is just an idea – but I included it for sake of completeness.  So now if I take this list and put it in order of “games I would want to have done”, it looks like this:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. AFTER
4. Merchant
5. Terrible World
6. Strangers
7. OORT
8. Elseworld
9. Expressionism
10. Decathalon
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. Get It On
14. On the Air
15. Big Kahuna

So if we add the ranks from the two lists together, we get:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Strangers

The interesting part of this exercise is that Merchant made it to the top five – the things that I really want to get done.  I think this is a sort of wake-up call that my pursuits are out of whack.  That I have so much done on things like Elsewhere and Merchant, but they’re sitting there on the shelf.  Mind you, they’re definitely not in a place where I could exploit them for the GenCon Year – not by a long shot.  But I think I need to take a long look at myself and my process – and figure out how these sorts of things happen.

I’ve been combing around in my brainbox since I started thinking about recasting the Elsewhere podcast.  Here are a list of ideas that I’ve been kicking around between my mobile and my laptop, gathered while staring at the amazing blue sky we’ve had here lately, along with a brief explanation of each:

• My story of gaming in 8th grade – more than one episode?

This is one idea that’s in the ‘definitely’ column – talking about the rather dark days I had in middle school, and the way that games and the escape that they provided kept me from far more destructive activities.  Talking about the characters, the storylines, and reflect on how they were a part of my life.

• My struggles with Elsewhere.

Talk about the process of designing of the omega to my alpha, Elsewhere, and about how very hard it is to design a game.  Talk with others about struggles in designing, and biting off more than you can chew.

• Bren & Antony.

These are two Vampire characters, one mine and the other belonging to my friend, Marcy.  We played them, on and off, for about four years.  It’s the only time that I’ve delved that deeply into a role-playing character (hell, any character), and perhaps getting Marcy on the phone for an interview wouldn’t be out of the question, he said knowing that she might read this on Facebook.  Perhaps it could be part of a larger arc on people’s characters and what they meant to them at the time and later.

• Immersion?

The weakest of the ideas so far, because it’s very nebulous: getting people to talk about their experiences with immersion in games – computer or otherwise.  My 60+ hour marathon with SimCity 2000, for example.

• Metanarrative of Total War – audio diary?

This is something that I definitely want to explore – the corollary to the stories about people and their games – the story of the games themselves.  More than once, playing the Total War series, I’ve had the impulse to just write a journal of everything that was happening, to get caught up in the sweep of the story.  This merges with the last idea: take someone who’s never played, say, SimCity, and have them talk their way through a session.  Or the Sims.

• The Horseheads Crew.

This is a long-shot.  Finding and interviewing the people in my D&D group in high school.

• How to Lose WWII.

The story of how, at my first convention, I played a game of Third Reich as the British and basically lost the game for the Allies.  Still my most crushing loss to this day, if you don’t count the hammering I took recently in Paths to Glory, a WWI game that I played (and lost terribly) to my friend Mike in Minnesota.  Maybe a whole podcast on loss and losing.

That’s what I have, so far.  Other than that, I’ve mostly been trying to figure out what sort of equipment I’m going to need to get to have a decent-sounding podcast.  Suggestions are welcome.

And message me, MJ.