Blogs of the Round Table: The Product of a Great and Terrible Designer

In January, Nerje from Ludic Thoughts wrote about bringing the relentless logic of Richard Dawkins to a game he titled Super God Delusion 64.

SGD64 challenges a player to question all manner of faiths. It provides a small handful of papercut-inconveniences as a push to discover a deeper world in the game of internal consistency and rational thinking. The core assumption of the game is that players might be lead by the game to attempt to realize that the logic of the game is based on sound empirical thinking that might equally apply to the real world.

There is some inherent irony in attempting to present an argument for a godless, empirical universe in the form of a game. The presence of a designer or designers in a game's sculpted world is often quite apparent. To some extent I'm fascinated by the conundrum of trying to suggest a world without a designer through a designed virtual world. One possibility would be to posit some sort of very procedural world, but such a beast is perhaps beyond the scope of current technology.

I've also been thinking quite a bit about the designer's voice in a game. Various conversations lately have been about the use of an unreliable narrator in a game and the extent to which a game can be "not fun" and still played. There have been people wondering how well a game might be received if it were designed particularly to be challenging in the literary sense; many books with high regard are hard to read, but benefit the reader in their own ways and ...

IF Writing Month: Week 1

Behold, "Amongst the Stars", my current work in progress for IF Writing Month and my writing debut in Inform 7. At the end of Week 1 I've gone subtly over the requirements for Week 1 and actually ended up closer to the goals for the end of Week 2. I wrote 1175 words about 3 rooms and 5 other things. There's the setup for a very simple plot event (scene) and even a rudimentary "puzzle". It should almost be entirely obvious to figure out from the genre context.

Code Snippet of the Moment: Inform 7 Lexer for Pygments

This is a silly hack that turns out isn't entirely useful, but I'm going to post it to preserve it "just in case" and because I probably spent an hour too much on it. Basically, I've been playing around with writing interactive fiction in Inform 7. Inform 7 is a unique natural language-based approach to interactive fiction. Because of that is has a deceptively simple subset of highlight-able syntax, with comparison to most other programming or even interactive fiction description languages. I use Pygments as a common syntax highlighter in a number of situations, including and particularly for syntax highlighting of fragments I post to my blog. Thinking ahead to wanting to post snippets of my works to my blog I set about creating a simple lexer for Pygments.

Unfortunately, it isn't all that useful. Due to the unique nature of the language it is best expressed in a non-fixed-width font with "word wrapping", both of which are entirely unusual for syntax highlighting and don't have existing support in Pygments. I think my best bet will be to attempt to use Inform's existing HTML output or to hand optimize some reST-based solution.

Here's the lexer in case it might find some use further down the road:

from pygments.lexer import RegexLexer
from pygments.token import *
import re

I7_HEADINGS = ['Volume', 'Book', 'Part', 'Chapter', 'Section', 'Table']

class Inform7Lexer(RegexLexer):
    """
    Inform 7 is a natural language-based approach to buiding interactive
    fiction. Because of the English-based nature of the language there
    is little overt syntax in the classic sense that might be highlighted.
    """
    name='Inform 7'
    aliases=['I7']
    filenames=['*.inform', '*.i7x', '*.ni']
    flags=re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE

    tokens = {
        'root': [
            (r'^"[^"]*" by ("[^"]*"|[\w ]+)$', Generic.Heading),
            (r'^(%s)[^\n]*$' % "|".join(I7_HEADINGS), Generic.Heading),
            (r'\[', Comment, "comment"),
            (r'"', String, "string ...

Episode of the Moment: Battlestar Galactica "No Exit"

Previously on Max Discusses Battlestar Galactica: I don't like BSG. I generally find it painful to watch, but I've often watched it out of a feeling that I need to watch it because I am supposed to.

I recently rediscovered Psych, which is actually fun to watch, rather than teetering somewhere on the edge between painful make-work and dull, lackluster mediocrity. So I've skipped over the last few episodes. In reading analysis of the "rebellion episodes" I didn't feel like I missed much. After some goading by this weeks analysis it seemed that I might actually be interested in seeing Friday's episode. So I took a trip to the neighborhood Hulu and spooled up "No Exit"...

I have to admit that I actually enjoyed the episode. John Hodgeman had an interesting, brief cameo, and Dean Stockwell had some awesome, wonderful moments. I want to hear X-Rays, as well, my friend. I think it might even be classifiable as my favorite episode of the series, but that isn't saying much about the episode's quality so much as what I think about the rest of the series. In fact, this episode was a single bottled hour of so many of the flaws that I disparage in the show's pacing and storytelling. In fact, the episode is good in spite of the series as a whole, because it finally wrapped around to the point of having enough flaws with enough interesting performances in a single episode to qualify it, in my eyes, for B-grade, interesting schlock (so bad that it is good). It's only taken 4+ years to deliver an episode I could see myself watching a second time, although probably with a finger on the fast-forward button for some of it.

I feel ...

Film of the Moment: Coraline

Went to the popcorn to watch Coraline. It was amazing, I don't think I need to say much more than that. If you at all like stop-motion animation, particularly Nightmare Before Christmas (and even if you prefer Aardman's work to Nightmare), you have to see it. If you at all like Neil Gaiman it should already be obvious that you have to see it. It's been a few months since I read the short YA novel, but I thought the adaptation worked well, capturing much of the book's wonders, and I liked the new character.

I do have one big recommendation, which I share with several others it seems: Do yourself the favor, scrounge out the money to hit your nearest multiplex popcorn stadium and watch it in 3D. The movie was stop motion animated specifically for 3D (no over-the-top "flying right at you" kisch, however) and the added depth gives the miniature sets even more wondrous life. (My eyes were watering after the film because I was afraid of blinking and missing some wondrous small detail.) It might make it to DVD/Blu-Ray in an anaglyph (color lense) format, but you really can't currently beat the polarity technology at a theater set up for so-branded REALD or IMAX3D.

Also, you owe it to small, creative studio Laika to go see it this weekend, because they deserve all the box office numbers opening weekend that they can get for over 3 years of brilliant, beautifully-detailed artistry. I'm certainly not being paid to say that, I really was floored by some of the animation.

Pondering the Opportunity Cost of a Graduate Education

All I seem to have right now are questions about ponderous unhappenings and perplexing uncertainties...

Last week I interviewed with some of the Windows Live team at Microsoft, but more on the side of the native client applications that fall under the Live umbrella (Live Mail neé Outlook Express, Messenger, ...). I got an almost immediate rejection when I got back, and I spent several days snowed in without internet or cable stewing on the interview. I've got some interesting take-aways from the interview, but I'm not yet certain how any of them help me.

I had hoped that the interview would narrow some of my uncertainty about the future, but that hasn't happened. There aren't any easy "action items" for my TODO list.

I need some sort of income or funding... there's nothing like being broke and packed with student debt in an inflationary economy. I keep wondering if I would have been better off if I had not gone for my Master's degree... I'm not sure if the extra degree that I earned was worth its cost, particularly including some of it's possible opportunity costs my mind has been taunting me with.

The jobs I most want right now: don't exist, are not hiring, or don't seem to be considering me. I am geographically disadvantaged and too opinionated and too picky about which jobs I want and possibly even not talented enough. Not that much of that is news to me, only that the current economy shines such a lovely magnifying glass to it...

Well, back to staying up too late working on projects that aren't currently generating income but might some day...