All Around Us Are Shared Worlds

It's one of those gray Floridian days where you feel like just curling up with a book, here on my "working" vacation. [1] Today I got a bit of an earlier start than I might intend on such a gray day and have been working my way through Inside Straight, a Wild Cards mosaic novel. I got a paperback copy of the book out of LibraryThing's Early Review program [2], so I've got a review promised that you can expect to appear on this blog, but consider this a midway warmup to that review. I'm going to apply some of my thoughts on the novel to some of my recent ruminations about game and world design, so this post isn't exactly a review anyway.

I have a huge interest in shared worlds and Wild Cards is a shared world that I've spent a reasonable amount of time in. Wild Cards is a shared world series that is only a few years younger than I am and at this point encompasses 18 volumes, the shared effort of over a dozen writers and the steady editorship of George R. R. Martin, now perhaps better known for his high fantasy series. The basic premise is a world with super-powers (due to an alien virus referred to as the "wild card virus"). It's a (sometimes quite dark) funhouse mirror of our own history, but filled with heroes ("aces"), villains, a deformed under-class ("jokers"), plague deaths ("black queens"), assassinations and alien invasions.

The series has some of the seriousness in tone and literacy of the post-Watchmen era of comics, as if perhaps reading novelized excerpts from some post-modern comic canon. As much as it speaks of our own history, it possibly has more to say as what ...

Blogs of the Round Table: The Role of an Auteur in Games

Auteur theory, in films at least, suggests that a "creative visionary" can truly lead a team project and have an authorial influence on all, or nearly all, aspects of the project. Some people don't believe that an auteur can truly lead a creative vision across a project, particularly because a modern Hollywood film consists of work contributed by hundreds of people, many of whom never work directly with each other.

I certainly am a believer of a broader view of Auteurism. I certainly think there are Auteur directors that definitely leave an indelible mark of themselves upon the screen. But I also think that the definition of an auteur, of someone with an authorial impact on a film, expands to fill many of the creative roles in a film. At one point I had my film collection broken down by the Directors, Writers, Cinematographers and even Actors that I think bring something more to a film, and can elevate a film to greatness. The idea that these individuals leave indelible marks on a film's DNA, and to me that is a definition for "authorial".

I watch a lot of DVD special features. It's a habit of mine to try to watch most of the non-commentary special features on each DVD of mine. I also realize that it can be something of a rare habit, as not a lot of people care for special features. One thing that I have noticed in my special feature watching is something that should be practically common sense: good auteurs find talented people to work for them. Delving into special features you will find auteurs' love letters to the editors, costume designers, cinematographers, set designers, and what have ...

Darcs Tip of the Moment: Changes Since the Last Tag

I've been thinking about keeping better track of some of the cool tips and tricks for use in my source control system of choice, darcs. Here's a couple of quick tips for working with darcs changes:

It is quite common to want to know how many patches have been added to a repository since the last tag, for instance to review the changes since the last major build so that you can write release notes before tagging the next build. The --from-tag matcher is exactly what you need. To select the last tag you don't need to remember what it was, you can let darcs do that format. Keep in mind that the matchers accept regular expressions and that the --from and --to matchers select the first matching patch they come upon. To get the changes from the last tag is as simple as:

darcs changes --from-tag .

The dot is a RegEx that matches anything (and hence everything), but since --from-tag stops at the first tag that matches, it shall always stop at the most recent (thus last) tag. It might be useful to note the difference with:

darcs changes --tags .

If you run this second command, it shows that the RegEx does indeed match every tag in the repository and the output should look similar darcs show tags.

As with any other darcs changes call, don't forget that you can add --count to get just the number of patches rather than a change log and --interactive for patch-by-patch inspection.

Louisville as a Classic City of Vice

On the heels of my own post referring to Derby, I was referred to an article at The Urbanophile about Louisville marketing itself as a Vice City (via Broken Sidewalk) and in commenting chanced upon this spirited ad for Louisville. I certainly think "Just Add Bourbon" is a more interesting slogan than "Possibility City". Oddly enough, the ad appears to be from GLI's [1] Community Branding Project, or at least it's on one of their YouTube accounts. Needless to say, I think there is some benefit in chasing after a more Vice-filled "New Orleans of the North" campaign.

The Looming Derby Deadline: My Attempt to Kick Ass, Take Names, and Storm PAX

First of all, my alma mater's historied men's basketball team, the University of Louisville Cardinals, has just defeated the beast that is the Big East winning both the Regular Season Championship Title and the Big East Tournament Championship Title, and are the Big East Champions, without any more doubt left for naysayers. It's exciting and there's certainly more excitement to come.

Moving on to business: I'm really excited at the progress of my game. (I've been working hard to bring a fun card game to the monitors and HD screens in people's living rooms.) Other than sending out resumes, I've pretty much been working on the game full-time and things really started to show up this week. Programming can sometimes be frustrating because a lot of work can be done and very few visible results come from it (because "stable" and "conceptually clean" and "expandable for the project's next needs" rarely is directly visible). Programming can also sometimes be amazingly thrilling when one small change makes a project visibly sing stronger to its audience. This last week has seen a few long running rewrites hit right into a few tiny tweaks (leveraging the rewrites) to produce a build that I'm quite excited with.

Today I had two good friends stop by for a few good hours of playtesting. It was great to get feedback from fresh eyes to the project and played through a good chunk of the game content. I'm working on making these playtests at least somewhat regular from here on out. At least through the end of March, with (vacation) schedules the way they are we seem somewhat stuck to schedule on anything tighter than an ad hoc basis, but hopefully April will provide opportunities to ...

Film of the Moment: Watchmen: The Music Was Emblematic in the Wrong Ways

I liked Watchmen. It was good, but perhaps a hairpin shy of what I would consider great. It was certainly wonderful mimicry of the source material, but I don't think it ever rose to the challenge and attempted to transcend its originating source. It hit upon most of the major themes of the comic, and yet was simultaneously entirely too subtle about it and not subtle enough. Most of the major commentary about the necessity of violence was constrained to knowing glances. I'm not sure how many popcorn stadium visitors might come away with the realization that in a dark world filled with shades of insanity the most sane people in the film are the people that we (rightfully) in our own world see as relatively insane: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger [1].

I had to remind my brother, who read the comic, that when the Comedian refers to his atrocities during the Vietnam war as "That was war...", as if that excused things, that it was the Vietnam war, in our own timeline, where much of America regained its conscientiousness about war and realized that war does not and should not excuse atrocities. I don't see much hope for much of mainstream audiences putting that together, at least, not while watching Watchmen. Hopefully at least a few people might see fit to discuss it afterwards...

In the row behind my brother and I, a mother had taken her two young children to see the film. I'm not sure what the woman expected to see at an R-Rated superhero film. She pulled her children out with her about half-way through. The Dark Knight was PG-13 and some of its brutality may not have been fit for her young children (from the ages that they appeared; about ...

BSG versus Dollhouse: The Weird Car Analogy

For those that hate weird analogies or are tired by my inability to get over my dislikes and disagreements with BSG, I apologize beforehand.

I've decided that BSG is like a wood-panelled station wagon. It's not a van, it isn't a true serial show; it doesn't quite meet my expectations on a great family getaway. It is a car, an episodic show, pretending to be a van. I keep railing on the station wagon for not being a good car and particularly for being a worse van. Sometimes I forget that it still capable of transporting a good number of people and baggage. I keep marvelling at the poor quality grain of the faux wood-panelling and sometimes forgetting that some people like wood-panelling. I like cars and I like vans and I think I may hate station wagons. But at the very least BSG's station wagon isn't something that sings to me. It's a serviceable vehicle, but in the end it leaves me personally cold and upset and does seemingly little to ask for my love and help me cross the detachment divide of an obsolesced style of vehicle. [1]

Tycho over at Penny Arcade recently accused Dollhouse of being a station wagon and that struck me. I recognized some of my own complaints about BSG and I've somewhat struggled to explain why Dollhouse is not, or at least, not yet a station wagon. I'm hopeful that it will never become a station wagon. What I seem to think the Dollhouse is: a Gadget-mobile. Right now Dollhouse is an awesome pimped out police car. The thing is a little unsightly, function over form to some extent, but it has amazing pick-up and can just scream across an hour. It's got ...

IF Writing Month: Week 2

This week I had a heck of a cold and on the flipside of that cold I got some good work done on my game for my startup. So a few hours today for "Amongst the Stars" Release 2 I "merely" fleshed out the interior of the ship (the USS Rosser being the name chosen late last week). The game has expanded almost double to 2253 words, 8 rooms, and 13 other things. As far as Week 2's provided goals exploration is still the form of the "puzzles" and they aren't much by any definition. On the other hand I've prepared for Week 3's provided goals, which was the general direction I was already heading, by populating the ship with a few NPCs.