Blogs of the Round Table: I Want to be a Mighty Pirate
May's Topic
This month's round table discussion is on character flaws in games, or the lack thereof.
There a few Secret of Monkey Island spoilers, but none too shocking and certainly not the titular secret. I manage to be primarily spoiler free, but the same cannot be said about referenced Wikipedia articles.
To be honest, I've been quite intrigued by posts so far in this round table. There's something of a early lament that so many characters in gaming are of the nameless hero sort, immortal dimensionless shells, created as disguises for a player to crawl into and eke out fantasies of heroism that don't seem to involve any real character building (story-wise or otherwise, perhaps). I think that there is a deep tie between a protagonist and the interface to a game, and a character's flaws are a meaningful part of that relationship.
I'm an primarily an Old School Graphic Adventure fan and to me, most of my favorite characters to play have been anti-heroes and characters with flaws. There's certainly a wealth of them, for me. There's Larry, whose attempts to get laid are so laughable and whose flaws redeem the character from the precipice of insensitivity and bad soft porn. There's Roger Wilco, space janitor and accidental saviour of the galaxy. What about Freddy Pharkas, the gunslinger who retired to become a pharmacist?
I've spent several replays with Ben, born rebel biker that can lead an entire gang of fellow bikers but doesn't know ...
Doing Crazy Things for the Science of it: The Great Wikipedia Project of Ought Eight
So I'm working with a partner on an already belated project for our Web Mining class and we decide, why not mine the textual data of Wikipedia? I mean, a dump of current revisions of Wikipedia pages as of March this year is just 3.5 GBs in one massive compressed XML file. It's supposed to be a learning project, right? Why not go whole hog and do some massively distributed programming and see if we can pull of something that seems like a real project, huh?
Yes, I certainly do think that I'm insane, but I have indeed been learning things. For instance, I've been learning how I might deal with huge compressed bundles of XML 'joy'. Right now I'm streaming that file in RAM and splitting it into individual articles that I'm storing in a bucket under my S3 account. First of all, I'm a little bit surprised that no one has bothered to keep a public Wikipedia bucket. I would think that it would be quite useful for academic projects running on EC2. (Considering that S3 bandwidth is free between EC2 and S3 and that with Wikipedia's strict robots policy S3 is the best place to host a distributed computing-accessible mirror.) Like what we're crazy enough to be trying... If anyone wants to take over ownership of this bucket that I'm building I'd be happy to chown it to some other group interested in using it for research or for making it publicly available. I'll probably just delete it if no one seems interested, but considering that I seem to have already spent $5 or $6 on PUT requests alone, I wouldn't mind seeing someone make good use of it.
Below I'm including ...
