Entertaining Timewaster

This should be a doddle for USians, but not so easy for those of us who always confuse those square-ish states in flyover country: Know Your States.

I managed 90%, but I dropped New Jersey accidentally, which certainly messed up my accuracy.

H/T to "JtMc" for the link.

Hard to disagree with this

Austin Modine reports on a presentation by Jeffrey Kaplan, former lead designer for World of Warcraft:

Speaking at a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kaplan — who's now helming Blizzard's next unannounced MMO — said game makers often suffer from "medium envy", where they try to deliver a compelling story by writing reams of dialog and narrative without keeping in mind it's a video game.

"Basically — and I'm speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back — we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game because nobody wants to read it," Kaplan said, adding that he's as guilty of this fault as anyone else.

"We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game," said Kaplan. "We need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorcerse, Tolstoy, or the Beatles, the better off we are."

Kaplan said WoW has attempted to avoid drowning the player in dialog by limiting designers to only 511 characters in their quest descriptions.

Although I don't play WoW, I find the same thing in Guild Wars: as soon as the quest description is long enough that you need to scroll the dialog box to read all of it, the chances of just clicking through go way up. I read a lot, both on- and offline, so if I'm likely to click-without-reading, how much more likely is someone who has a lower tolerance for reading in any medium?

DMZ secured, for now

Just finished a gruelling game of DMZ (from the dark ages of 1977, by SPI). The combined Republic of Korea corps/US Army 2nd Division threw back an incursion from the north after heavy losses. A critical B-52 strike combined with a pincer attack against the two strongest formations was the key to eventual victory. Liam Il Mack conceded that the invasion was halted after a reinforced ROK brigade broke through on the right flank, threatening to envelop the bulk of the DPRK forces.

It's been a long time since I played a map-and-counters wargame . . . I've missed it.

Chinese censors ban "World of Warcraft" expansion

Apparently, it's not just because it's a World of Warcraft expansion, but because it shows too much bone:

Stupendously popular online game World of Warcraft's second expansion, "Wrath of the Lich King" is being blocked by Chinese censors for showing too much bone.

According [to] JLM Pacific Epoch, China's General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) has twice rejected applications from Blizzard Entertainment and its domestic operator, The9, because of the game's all-too-frequent depiction of skeletons.

The original release of WoW had required Blizzard to modify undead characters and enemies in the game to pass Chinese regulator muster. Among the changes were giving the walking dead extra meat and using graves to show where players have died rather than skeletons.

China had issued the usual People's Republic governmentspeak, stating this is it's way of promoting a healthy and harmonious online environment.

Yet another over-broad software patent?

Slashdot has a thread on the recent lawsuit filed by Worlds.com against NCSoft (producers of, among other multiplayer online games, Guild Wars).

The patent, granted early in 2008, was applied for in 2000.

Linux loves Microsoft, film at 11

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols pens a thank-you note to Microsoft on behalf of Linux and Mac communities:

You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will go ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You've given us the best shot we'll ever have of taking the desktop.

But it gets even better! Microsoft has also announced that it will be releasing Windows 7 on January 2010. They'll blow that ship date. Microsoft has never set a shipping date it could meet. But, who in their right mind would now buy Vista?

I mean, come on, I don't think anyone with their wits about them would buy Vista anyway. Vista is to operating systems what the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers are to the National Football League, the worse of all time. Vista was trash; Vista is trash; and now Microsoft, as expected, is throwing Vista on the trash dump.

It also helps that Microsoft has decided to go ahead and dump XP, the operating system its customers want, no matter how loudly they say they want to keep buying XP. Now that's showing your customers how much you really care about what they want.

It's a perfect example of disrespecting your customer base: literally millions of people have been avoiding switching to Vista from XP, and Microsoft's deliberate attempt to force them to switch will rebound back on them. People will remember for a very long time that they're being harassed and bullied for no good reason at all, and once they feel it's gone too far, the game is over.

I'm not even in the market for a new computer at the moment, but I'm already considering whether to switch to a Mac or go to one of the Linux distributions. I have exactly two applications that I still need Windows to run. If I can get Mac or Linux versions of them, there'll be little chance that my next machine will have a Microsoft operating system.

Update: Make that just one application that needs Windows, after all:

Applications? You can't live without your favorite Windows application and the mere thought of virtualization to get them gives you hives or switching to OpenOffice from Microsoft Office makes you sick to the tummy? The 15-years in the making WINE 1.0 project just came out, and with it you can run Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, and many other program like, ahem, Guild Wars my Windows-based online game of choice, on Linux. WINE, and its commercial big-brother, CodeWeavers' Crossover Linux, lets me run pretty much any Windows application I want on Linux without any hassles.

If I can run Guild Wars on Linux now, there's only Adobe FrameMaker left standing as an essential Windows application . . .

Geek Love, explained

Brian Reid sent me this link with the following comment: "Fascinating diatribe, interesting viewpoint, pretty funny diagram... What more could you want from the NY Times?".

Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of "Star Wars" from memory.

Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.

We live in Gary Gygax's world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you've sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax's creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.

As if I need another drain on my free time . . .

So much for getting anything useful done this weekend:

72 Hours of Early Access!

Immerse yourself in three whole days of exclusive action-packed early access to the entire Far Shiverpeaks region. North of the so-called civilized lands lies a region blanketed in snow and ice, rife with adventure. Home to the legendary Eye of the North and the fiercely independent Norn, this mountainous tract hosts untold challenges and riches.

Why James Lileks won't play

In today's Bleat, James Lileks gets to the real reason he's not willing to play Pokemon card games:

We got bales of paper in various form, a few Pokemon cards (I have made it clear I will not play the card game, because I do not understand the first thing about it. Seriously: Scrofulux is a psychic Pokemon Diamond and Pearl Dragon Master Platinum Level 90 Pokemon. Powers: can release horrible odors, give other Pokemons psoriasis. When played, the Scrofulux cannot wake a sleeping Pokemon but can turn a groggy Pokemon into a sub-level Anti-Pokemon Water Pokemon whose powers have a negative –20 effect on all subsequent cards played by the person on your left if their least powerful Pokemon card was purchased when you begged for 20 minutes on the way to the store in a high, singsongy whine, UNLESS the card has a shiny foil picture, in which case all play ceases while everyone looks at the picture because it’s cool and then you forget the game and swap doubles.)

Victor tried to get me to play the various -mon card games when he was a pre-teen. I couldn't get the handle on them . . . and I used to spend hours and hours playing complex wargames with arcane and mind-numbingly detailed rules, charts, tables, and matrices. Map sheets that covered several tables, and hundreds or even thousands of little printed cardboard unit counters (each with a plethora of numerical values to track). Clearly the ability to soak up arbitrary complexity and incomprehensible names peaks at age 8.

Firefly Returns! Well, sorta . . .

Wired News is reporting that Joss Whedon's Firefly will be returning in the form of a MMORPG:

Like Capt. Mal Reynolds stumbling in after a bar fight, the short-lived but much beloved sci-fi series Firefly will soon make an unexpected return, not as a TV show, but as a massively multiplayer online game.

Now that's shiny.

Multiverse, maker of a free MMO-creation platform, plans to announce Friday morning that it's struck a deal with Fox Licensing to turn the show into an MMORPG in the fashion of Star Wars Galaxies or Eve Online.

Update: The Slashdot thread is here if you're interested in more discussion of the topic.

QotD: Every FPS you've ever played

You've seen stuff like this a bazillion times before. Gears of War is yet another first-person shooter in which you blunder through the post-apocalyptic boneyard of civilization, repetitively slaughtering a bunch of hulking, gibbering aliens. Creepy things lurk in the dark; fresh ammo packs are scattered improbably in open sight; and as the guts paint the hallways red, your teammates curse like a bunch of Tarantino wannabes. Name every single war-weary cliché of the run-and-gun genre, and Gears of War dutifully ticks it off.

And the game really is awesome. Indeed, it is staggeringly, derangedly so. I popped Gears of War into my Xbox 360 and sat in a cybernetic haze for three straight hours, emerging with my stomach in fist-size knots, so emotionally and cognitively depleted that I had to consult the instructions on the side of the box before I was able to cook a bag of microwave popcorn -- which, come to think of it, was my only meal for the rest of the evening because I had to go back and play until I collapsed.

Clive Thompson, "Why Gears of War Rocks", Wired News, 2006-12-04

Overcommitment to gaming

Jon sent along a link which might be useful to those who haven't yet found out how addictive online gaming can be:

First off, let's go back to the time it takes to accomplish anything in the game. To really be successful, you need to at least invest 12 hours a week, and that is bare minimum. From a leadership perspective, that 12 hours would be laughed at. That's the guy who comes unprepared to raid and has to leave half way through because he has work in the morning or is going out or some other thing that shows "lack of commitment". To the extreme there is the guildie who is always on and ready to help. The "good guildie" who plays about 10 hours a day and seven days a week. Yes, that's almost two full-time jobs. Funny, no one ever asks any questions, though.

The worst though are the people you know have time commitments. People with families and significant others. I am not one to judge a person's situation, but when a father/husband plays a video game all night long, seven days a week, after getting home from work, very involved instances that soak up hours and require concentration, it makes me queasy that I encouraged that. Others include the kids you know aren't doing their homework and confide in you they are failing out of high school or college but don't want to miss their chance at loot, the long-term girl/boyfriend who is skipping out on a date (or their anniversary — I've seen it) to play (and in some cases flirt constantly), the professional taking yet another day off from work to farm mats or grind their reputations up with in-game factions to get "valuable" quest rewards, etc. . . I'm not one to tell people how to spend their time, but it gets ridiculous when you take a step back.

ESR on Eurogames

Long before personal computers were common, the board wargaming hobby was a big deal among the geekerati. I had a fair number of wargames in my own collection, and they occupied a fair bit of my spare time (rather in the way that blogging does now, I suspect). Eric Raymond takes a look at the gaming segment that not only survived the rise of the home computer, but is actually thriving: the Eurogame:

I enjoy strategy games. I'e been playing them since the heyday of the elaborate hundreds-of-tiny-counters hex-map historical-simulation wargames in the 1970s and early 1980s. But those games don't get played much any more, largely because they took so long to set up and learn; after 1985 or so younger gamers moved to computer simulations instead, and as the hex-wargame genre stagnated many old-school gamers eventually abandoned it in favor of military-miniatures gaming.

[. . .]

These became signature traits of a huge freshet of new games that hit the U.S. market in the new century. Other standouts have included Puerto Rico, Domaine, Power Grid, Alhambra, Shadows Over Camelot, and Ticket To Ride. Most of these games are imports from Germany, republished in English; the style is generically known as "German games" or "Eurogames" and I've heard it alleged that in Germany these games are a mass-market form of family entertainment rather than being confined to gamer-hobbyists, science-fiction fans, and technogeeks as they still mostly are in the U.S.

I've long thought that the Eurogame is in part a response to competition from computer games. Computers do the detail-crammed historical-simulation game better than you can with counters and a board, so they got steamrollered. Eurogames, on the other hand, do something computer games are poor at — face-to-face multiplayer games — and they do it with furniture that's pleasant to look at and handle.

TacOps

Major Holdridge has been doing some great one-person-programming for years now. His TacOps tactical simulation game is one of the very best I've ever found: it doesn't rely on gosh-wow-cool graphics or unrealistic-but-spectacular effects. It's a remarkably good simulation of a battalion-to-brigade level military operation:

I.L. Holdridge didn't intend to design a tactical simulation used by the armies of four nations. He just got tired of playing with tiny tanks. "I wanted to play armor miniatures without a footlocker full of manuals, dice, tapes, terrain boards and painted vehicles," he said.

Frustrated by lack of time, space and opponents, many war-gaming hobbyists have switched from board games and miniatures to computer games. Holdridge did one better and designed his own computer game. A decade later, "TacOps" is played by thousands of hobbyists. It's also an official training simulation used by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, as well as the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand armies.

This was more than serendipity. Holdridge is a retired Marine Corps major who started as a private, worked his way up to become an infantry officer, and finally spent a dozen years as an intelligence officer. In an era when militaries are increasingly using entertainment games, "TacOps" is one of a handful of hobby games/defense simulations designed by active or former officers.

"TacOps" is a platoon-level simulation that looks like a CPX map exercise. It pits American (or Canadian or Anzac) forces against opposing force units that tend to resemble the armies of the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea. Map scale is 10 meters per screen pixel. Icons represent one to 15 vehicles, squads, teams or individuals.

World War II as an online game

This got posted to a mailing list I belong to, but it had originated (without attribution) somewhere else. If I manage to find out who to credit, I'll do so. . .

If WWII were an online RTS game
-------------------------------

*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Churchill: i cant afford them
benny-tow: u n00bs know what team talk is?
paTTon: stfu
Roosevelt: o yah hit the navajo button guys
deGaulle: eisenhower ur worthless come help me quick
Eisenhower: i cant do **** til rosevelt gives me an army
paTTon: yah hurry the fock up
Churchill: d00d im gettin pounded
deGaulle: this is fockin weak u guys suck
*deGaulle has left the game.*
Roosevelt: im gonna attack the axis k?
benny-tow: with what? ur wheelchair?
benny-tow: lol did u mess up ur legs AND ur head?
Hitler[AoE]: ROFLMAO
T0J0: lol o no america im comin 4 u
Roosevelt: wtf! thats bullsh1t u fags im gunna kick ur asses
T0JO: not without ur harbors u wont! lol
Roosevelt: u little biotch ill get u
Hitler[AoE]: wtf
Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker
Churchill: lol no more france for u hitler
Hitler[AoE]: tojo help me!
T0J0: wtf u want me to do, im on the other side of the world retard
Hitler[AoE]: fine ill clear you a path
Stalin: WTF u arsshoel! WE HAD A FoCKIN TRUCE
Hitler[AoE]: i changed my mind lol
benny-tow: haha
benny-tow: hey ur losing ur guys in africa im gonna need help in italy soon sum1
T0J0: o **** i cant help u i got my hands full
Hitler[AoE]: im 2 busy 2 help
Roosevelt: yah thats right ***** im comin for ya
Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL
benny-tow: hahahh oh sh1t help
Hitler: o man ur focked
paTTon: oh what now biotch
Roosevelt: whos the cripple now lol
*benny-tow has been eliminated.*
benny-tow: lame
Roosevelt: gj patton
paTTon: thnx
Hitler[AoE]: WTF eisenhower hax hes killing all my sh1t
Hitler[AoE]: quit u hacker so u dont ruin my record
Eisenhower: Nuts!
benny~tow: wtf that mean?
Eisenhower: meant to say nutsack lol finger slipped
paTTon: coming to get u hitler u paper hanging hun cocksocker
Stalin: rofl
T0J0: HAHAHHAA
Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay
Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city
*Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.*
benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself
Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL
Stalin: OMG LMAO!
Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows
*Hitler[AoE] has left the game*
paTTon: hahahhah
T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs
benny~tow: shut up noob
Roosevelt: haha wut a moron
paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now?
Eisenhower: yah me too
T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol
Eisenhower: fock u
paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie
Stalin: go to hell lol
paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk
Eisenhower: yah this is gay
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*
Eisenhower: awesome!
Churchill: gg noobs no re
T0J0: thats bull**** u fockin suck
*T0J0 has left the game.*
*Eisenhower has left the game.*
Stalin: next game im not going to be on ur team, u guys didnt help me for ****
Churchill: wutever, we didnt need ur help neway dumbarss
tru_m4n: l8r all
benny~tow: bye
Churchill: l8r
Stalin: fock u all
tru_m4n: shut up commie lol
*tru_m4n has left the game.*
benny~tow: lololol u commie
Churchill: ROFL
Churchill: bye commie
*Churchill has left the game.*
*benny~tow has left the game.*
Stalin: i hate u all fags
*Stalin has left the game.*
paTTon: lol no1 is left
paTTon: weeeee i got a jeep
*paTTon has been eliminated.*
paTTon: o sh1t!
*paTTon has left the game.*

Hat tip to Martin Cracauer.

Another collossal waste of time, incoming

Civilization IV is coming out a bit later this year. Read the interview with Barry Caudill, the senior producer for Firaxis Games:

Long a favorite of turn-based strategy fans, Sid Meier's Civilization franchise has gone through quite a few incarnations since it was first released almost 15 years ago. Each new version of the game and each new expansion built upon the core premise of leading your civilization throughout history, from the founding of its first cities to its eventual colonization of other planets.

Though we've known about an upcoming sequel for some time now, the folks at Firaxis have been pretty tight with the information. Now, mostly because they're tired of me calling them every day and are probably worried about making me cry again, Firaxis's senior producer Barry Caudill finally consented to answer our questions about the game.

IGNPC: Sweet Civilization. You realize I have to quit my job once this game comes out, right?

Barry Caudill: Yes we do, that's why it's good we work here at Firaxis...or we'd all be on the dole J Oh...was that rhetorical?

I've spent many, many hours of time playing the various games in the Civilization series, although I have to admit that Civ III never grabbed me as much as earlier games. Perhaps it's just my basic lack of gameplaying ability, but I have never been able to get as involved in the newer game, despite its much better interface and better-developed concepts. Perhaps Civ IV will reverse that trend for me.

The one thing I've found with Civ III is that the game is much more blatant about cheating against the player: I've lost count of the number of times my country has stumbled for lack of critical resources. No matter how large my civilization became, I'd usually find that Saltpeter, Coal, and Oil resources were just outside my reach, typically in the territory of formerly friendly, but now hostile nations. The game tries desperately to force you to military solutions, just when the military balance of power has shifted dramatically away from you (you can't obtain gunpowder weapons without a source of Saltpeter, for example).

As a former wargame addict, I'm not averse to launching invasions or repelling 'em, but when the enemy is toting muskets and cannon and your forces are still swinging swords and using catapults, the outcome is rarely in doubt.

I can certainly understand why programmers take shortcuts like this: even today, the average gamer can easily out-think the program's strategy choices so that the program needs a simpler set of rules to compensate. But there have to be better ways of accomplishing it.

One of the most interesting changes is in the way governments are configured:

There are no set governments anymore. In Civilization 4, you can choose from various civics and combine them to make the type of government you want. For example, you may have a Theocratic Police State that also has Universal Suffrage or you may have a Pacifist Slave State with Hereditary Rule. The Civics are divided into five major areas — Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion — and each of those has 5 possible choices depending on what you have researched. In addition, AI leaders will have certain favorite Civics and they may ask you to either switch to theirs or stop using the one that offends them.

This will sound stupid, but I've always had issues using some of the more dictatorial forms of government (I think I've only ever used "Communist" once, and that was in a war I was losing from the get-go). This new concept sounds much more palatable.

Redmond Simonsen, 1942-2005

Thanks to a link from Napoleon Games (formerly OSG), I just learned of the death of Redmond Simonsen who was one of the most significant figures in wargaming in the 1970's and 80's. He died of a heart attack on March 8.

Simonsen, in partnership with Jim Dunnigan, took over the foundering wargame publisher Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) from Chris Wagner, and vastly expanded the number and quality of wargames available at that time. Dunnigan was an experienced wargame designer, while Simonsen became the art director for literally hundreds of wargames.

Simonsen left the wargaming field just as the hobby was entering its long decline (being superseded by role playing games first, and computer-based games later).

Political Simulation Software

For those of you desperate to re-fight the current election, or historical elections in the US, here is your chance: The Political Machine by Stardock Software.

I haven't tried this game myself, but I've been impressed by some of their earlier products, dating back to early OS/2 days. If you're both a political junkie and a game weenie, this is probably the ideal present to give yourself as the current presidential campaign grinds into the final few months. A demo version is promised "soon"

(Notice that I still didn't mention Brand D or Brand R candidates by name in this posting.)

Overview of WW2 Literature

Jim Dunnigan, who was the best known of Simulations Publications Inc. (a wargame company) employees, has a new book out on the best books about the Second World War.

Dunnigan, after leaving SPI, has become a very well respected historian and military analyst. While I haven't yet seen the book, I'd expect it to be well worth adding to your library.