PAX Day 2

Today was somewhat underwhelming from nervous expectations, but I suppose that is both good and bad. I had a slow start from the late night and caffeine acting a little slower than I expected so I made a few goofy mistakes on the way out, primarily realizing at the last minute that I needed singles for the bus and having to make a roundabout detour to get change. I especially missed my bike today, remembering when these long paths were once more manageable... I've done a lot of walking this weekend and have the blisters and bruises to prove it.

I followed through with the plan and after I arrived, lunch in hand, shortly after 1300 to the tabletop area I demoed my game for about five hours. I didn't see much foot traffic, though. I expected much less than the expo hall, but I think Saturday's card game tournaments competed with traffic to the area I was in. I'm hoping to make that up tomorrow, particularly with the Dev Kit Tournament, even with fewer hours the expo is open. I'm planning to get out there early and will skip lunch if people are around (otherwise I try to find a bar with ESPN to catch the UofL/UK game; do you think a "Fox Sports Grill" might show ESPN coverage? ;-).

All of the (non-bug related) feedback I received was again immensely positive, and I can't help but feel good about that. In between demos I dealt with the fun of trying to power two laptops with one working power adaptor. (I swapped a power adaptor at the last moment with a wrong connector to when that doesn't work, it seems.)

Had another nice dinner and conversation with Deirdra, then watched the Hothead ...

PAX Day 1

Friday was my day of requisite linestanding. I stood in a line before lunch to get an easy access wrist band for my biggest guilty pleasure of what is ostensibly a "business trip": the Friday night concert. Whoever scheduled the concerts this year possibly read my mind in that the three acts that I most wanted to see were all lumped into one concert of awesome. I stayed late for amazing sets by The One-Ups, Freezepop, and Jonathan Coulton.

In between I had a nice late lunch with my good friend Dierdra, had a chance to hang out and talk about all sorts of fun random topics. I got a chance to do a brief "test demo" before a couple of "hardcore" Dev Kit players and got all sorts of good feedback and bug reproductions in just an hour of showing things off. Everyone seemed to like what they saw and I'm thrilled. For dinner I was invited to a wildly intimate Hothead "luau party" with Dierdra where I got to meet even more of Hothead's people, had good food and a little beer, and had a new opportunity to try not to come off as too much of a crazy fanboy to Dierdra's boss, the one and only Ron Gilbert. Hothead is awesome and definitely on my short list of cool companies I'd love to try working for.

Today and tomorrow the plan is simple: I'm going to spend as much of the day as I can demoing my alpha-quality "work in progress", known bugs and all, in the Tabletop Area in the Pike Annex. Tomorrow is the annual PAX Dev Kit tournament, so I expect to see at least a bunch of interested people tomorrow.

PAX Day 0

Couldn't get a later plane flight so I had a Thursday that ran 0300-2330 PST (0600-0230 EST). Because I knew I was coming in so early I registered for the Pre-PAX Dinner, so I got to my hotel in time for a quick shower and a nice jog to catch the buses that I needed to get to Seattle's Lake Union Park (from Overlake, at the edge of Bellevue and Redmond, aka Microsoft's campus). Food was ok, but the keynote from Chris Taylor (founder Gas Powered Games, makers of Total Annihilation, Space Siege, et al), despite technical issues, was great. He gave something of an overview of my PAX trip this year, talking about working towards your passions and a little bit of the lessons learned from starting his own business. Afterwards I talked with him a little bit and I got a little bit of free demo practice/coaching from a couple of guys on Bioware's community team. I think the night was worth the crazy sleep deprivation.

Books of the Moment: Tidbits of Non-Fiction

Picked up a couple of nice trade paperbacks a few weeks back and most of them were non-fiction just to spice up my reading a bit. I'm about three quarters through The Omnivore's Dilemma and it's a wonderful journey through what exactly it is that we eat and why. At times it can be disturbing or saddening, but full of things that we should think more about and filled with a kind tone and a light wit.

I've mostly refrained from political and religious discussion lately (at least no one's going to be offended or discriminate against me based upon my opinion of JRPGs), but I finished The God Delusion and it's something of a textbook that I wish I had in high school. Just about every corner of it was familiar, and much of that from honing arguments and reasoning in years of debate in high school. It was a nice refresher course, however, and perhaps something to recommend to the curious. There's a reason that Richard Dawkins is a best selling science writer, and I think that he has a good touch and a decent balance between readable arguments for lay people and pointers to the scientific arguments and reasoning that back them.

Is Braid a Failed Experiment?

I've been mostly quiet about Braid as I've been contemplating how best to write about the game. Several long conversations have sprung up lately in my feed reader and elsewhere. A spark uniting some of my own thoughts on the conversation were sparked when Corvus entered the conversation. Corvus mentioned:

[Braid's] approach to narrative and Blow's interpretation of "game mechanic as narrative."

It's obvious that it is here where Blow seems to have done himself the most disservice. His talks and slideshows and discussions seem to have left those most open to his message the most disappointed in his game. It's hard to see that the polish in the game's presentation, which attracts more of the mainstream and "core players" [1] to the game, ultimately belies the experimental nature of the game as (seemingly) only one small test (of potentially many) of Blow's thesis, rather than a culmination of his theories (a complete dissertation, if you will).

From that end a lot of the discussion has been "about why I'm disappointed in Braid" or "why I don't like Braid" and there has been, in my view, paltry little discussion on the more "scientific" questions: Is Braid a (scientific) failure to support the hypothesis? Does Braid contain any evidence of game play as narrative?

I'm not a huge fan of the game play or the overall narrative, as much as I loved the aesthetic and wanted to love the game. However, I can see interesting support for Blow's hypothesis and genuine examples that can serve future discussions of how to wed gameplay and narrative, even if they aren't, perhaps, the shining examples that people expected following Blow's public advocacy, they still exist as more examples than previously ...

Son of a Bitch! or Damn This Technology Dependency Part 2

Merely weeks after my laptop died, my Xbox 360 has suddenly succumb to the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Fuck. Murphy's Law is catching up to me in the run up to PAX... Right now I'm borrowing someone else's laptop to do game development on, but I had counted on my Xbox to help me continue to test. Now I can still work on the game but my ability to test gameplay has just diminished.

On more positive notes I've managed to get some good work done in the last few weeks and I think the game is more ready than ever to be demonstrated live. There are still plenty of things I'm unhappy about, but lately the list grows smaller everyday. It needs a lot more testing than I've given it, but I'm trying to work on that, too.

I'm also very grateful for the extended RRoD warranty on the Xbox. Quark's death was a huge unexpected setback with a large impact on my wallet. I'm thankful that the Xbox shall be replaced on Microsoft's dime and I couldn't be happier with how smooth the customer support calls went to get things ready to repair the system.

These are the setbacks of the small developer, assuredly, and times like these make wish I had a CIO and IT staff just so that I could yell at them that they aren't doing their jobs well enough or fast enough.

You Need to Watch The Middleman

That's right, I'm calling you out, my straw-men blog readers or stumblers that hasn't yet become addicted to fine televisual program named The Middleman. You need to watch The Middleman, your very future may be at stake, and you particularly need to watch The Middleman if you are one of those gifted with the mutant power that marks you as a member of the illustrious "Nielsen family". Some of you know that I'm much more of a hype follower than a hype evangelist, so hopefully you may take me on my word at this.

That's right, though, I can hear your skepticism: why should you watch The Middleman and what does your future have to do with it? Do you become assholes in the future?... No, no, no, it's your kids. Somethings got to be done about your kids! No wait, that's Back to the Future: Part 2, let's focus on you not becoming assholes in the future, forever wondering why the show you love so much on DVD wasn't watched when it actually aired...

I was skeptical at first. Unlike some of you I have no ignorance to blame for not watching the first few episodes when they aired... My sister tunes to the ABC Family station for mindless sitcom reruns and I actually saw promos for The Middleman. However, I was a dolt, I never questioned why the B-Superhero "Saturday Morning" show was inexplicably placed at a 10 PM time slot. I missed out on some of the humor and snarkiness in the promos the first few times I saw them. It was only through the incessant chatter on io9 about the show that I managed to actually sit down and watch it.

It had me enraptured at it ...

Darcs Workflow: Completely Distributed Pull-Only Workflow

I'm writing this as a a rough for potential rewriting for the darcs wiki section on workflows. My post on getting the most out of Darcs 2, through feedback on the darcs mailing list has actually been rewritten into patches for the official manual of darcs. When those get accepted it will mark my first official contribution to the darcs repository, which is pretty cool.

One of the fascinating things about a DVCS is that first D, distributed. There are models for working with source control opened up by a good DVCS that would have been unimaginable under a centralized system. It's still hard to advocate them to users because they sometimes take a mental leap that sometimes seems unmanageable. I'm personally fascinated by these sorts of workflows and I think that darcs is still the best of breed when it comes to allowing projects to experiment with them.

I don't know of any group currently doing fully distributed development with darcs (however, I'd be happy to hear comments about such development), but I use partly-distributed development on my own projects and with darcs there are lessons here that apply to even partly-distributed development.

I will use http URIs because it is very easy to set up a simple web server solely for read-only file sharing on every developer's machine, in any operating system environment. I'll use three example developers on local hostnames generically named deva, devb and devc. The basic theory is that each developer keeps at least one private working repository for the project and one special public repository for the project accessible via http. I'll use the generic name project for an example project, thus the public repository for deva for this project will be available at http://deva ...

Days of Decadence and Depravity

It began, earnestly enough, over a course of thick vegetable soup. It was loaded with vegetables, time-shifted into this early May lunch through diligent, or at least dreary, work from cross-national food conglomerates, and chunks of a well-cooked slow roasted chuck roast. Between greedy mouthfuls and long sips of sweetened iced tea he alternated story telling and dips of dripping grilled American cheese sandwich. He talked of how much it reminded him of his grandmother's version of the vegetable soup, only that it needed fresh okra and good Kentucky lima beans so big that they qualified as steaks in some countries, and so juicy that eating one was its own mini-bowl of soup.

The place was packed and at a general level even more excited than he was. It was a pharmacist's lunch counter, grade A Americana, spelled with a capital Kitsch, and filled with a couple of college students and a huge gathering of "horse people"; jockeys and trainers and contingent staff. People that were making huge bonuses this week, compared to their generally meager blue collar lot in life, but they did it for love and they did it for fame and they particularly did it for Derby.

It was obvious that the couple, even amongst his stories of nearly blue collar grandparents and actual blue collar relatives, could be seen as disparate objects in this place. He suggested it, a known haunt from his own college days, because it was "quaint" and "real" and miles away from celebrité, even as it stood under the shadows of that weeks' most important place. She wasn't well enough known that the blue collar crowds would recognize her outside of her act, and she was happy to accompany him, to have a native guide on this small vacation ...

A User's Guide to Darcs 2

I've been slowly working to push all my systems to using darcs 2. Darcs 2 has some major new features and more importantly some great new ways to get more performance out of darcs. However, to truly make use of these improvements there are a few changes from a darcs 1 setup that are quick to make and well worth the effort.

$ mkdir -p $HOME/.darcs/cache
$ echo cache:$HOME/.darcs/cache > $HOME/.darcs/sources

Blogs of the Round Table: I Survived the Edutainment Boom of the 90s

It's very easy for me to unequivocally announce that I've learned a great deal from video games. Most obviously I've studied video games for years with an eye to building them, but even ignoring that and trivia picked up from game-like encyclopedias and trivia games, there is a wealth of knowledge that I've picked up from decades of game playing... To a large extent, I would not be the person that I am if it weren't for video games and the lessons they had to teach me.