My little corner of the Internet

SOLVABLE ISSUES

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:10:51 -0500

This week was one of the most maddening ones I’ve ever had basically due to one factor. This in/out card. I won’t name the company publicly on this blog, but a certain company’s capture card has been causing such fits that has made onlining off of their capture software so absolutely maddening it at times caused me to doubt my own sanity. Easily said, I will not be recommending that companies capture cards to any clients down the road, and worse, my experience with it has put a black mark on that company for a long time as far as I am concerned.
It’s unfortunate, as I like the idea of what they are trying to do with their products but they’ve shown a lack of execution with their software drivers and updates that’s cause me to severely question any future product that they lay on the table.
I had called tech support with them the previous wednesday to report a problem, the card was occasionally dropping the audio signal for a frame intermittently, and only in the SDI output of the capture card.
This is the kind of problem that’s very difficult to troubleshoot specifically because it doesn’t show up in the other outputs on the capture card. We had been using this card because it worked with closed-captioning especially well.
After these issues it became clear that we would have to solely work with the work horse that the production house I was working with was lucky to have in the office, the AJA video KONA 3. I have had some minor issues with this card in the past, but I have never dealt with the same level of show- stopping bugs that I experiences with the previous card. It did not allow insert edits or cross conversions with closed captioning like the previous card did, but it worked. It did not cause dropped audio or cause garbage to be fed to the video when using the “edit to tape” function.
With only the minor, run-of-the-mill solvable issues ahead, (and a few more deck problems) I was help to make sure that this production did that one most important task. We made the deadline.

Demon’s Souls

Wed, 7 Oct 2009 22:43:44 -0400

I'll just start from the obtuse character generator. The default character is a sunburnt dragonball reject, so quickly you’ll dive into the more advanced settings. There you’ll find gender on a slider. It’s not a binary choice, it’s slider that gradients from Male to Female. Now, on the Male side of the slider your complexion gets darker (to a dark red) and your eyes get smaller. On the female side your eyes become saucers, your cheeks become chubby and your complexion goes to albino. I harp on this because this sort of obtuse, non-sensical design decision was completely endemic to my experience with From Software’s Demon’s Souls.
Demon's Souls presents you with your choice of characters classes. You have no sense whatsoever what each of the classes are supposed to do, or what any of these stats are meant to represent. The game throws you into a "tutorial" which simply re-iterates what what you learn from 30 seconds of playing with the controls over the course of a 10 minute segment, but fails to present anything actual useful information towards any sort of story or objective.
As soon as one get a hang of the crude controls, the game throws you into a fight with a large demon, which immediately kills you. You're then thrown into a nexus from which that you can get to some sort of action world through touching walls, the game doesn't really explain any of this, and you're now stuck with half life expected to return to your corpse, while the game gives you no indication whatsoever of where your corpse might be.
Heading into the next world is filled with enemies that provide no challenge, but filled with cheap traps. Boulders, grenades and exploding barrels are your enemies, not the cheap disposable knights and zombies that litter the hallways of this castle. The traps often spell instant death, without any warning, which sends you back to the nexus, except this time with half the health to try to return to wherever you were. The boring combat, soulless setting, and glitchy physics could be overlooked if the game provided any context or explanation of what you're actually supposed to do. The animations look nice, but that illusion is quickly dispelled once you first corpse gets stuck to your feet, and flails around unaffected by gravity.
The game's "feature" of leaving messages for fellow players or ghosts left behind by their deaths could perhaps serve as warnings to the killer traps, and exploding barrels, however the messages are usually useless drivel created by a word selector, spammed by players hoping for some sort of buff down the line gotten when you "recommend" their messages. The Messages combine with bloodstains which replay animations of other players dying (often jumping to their to their deaths off perfectly safe ledges) just compounds the game’s intense loneliness, it gives the game a sense of a Kafkaesque world where one is reduced to watching ghosts committing eternal suicide and communication through a concussed speak-and-say.
Demon's Souls might not be the worst game I've ever played, but it's definitely the one that's actively worked the hardest to get me to stop playing. So after about two and a half hours, I give up. Apparently there’s a world of systems, quests and 60 some odd hours of gameplay somewhere in there, but I’ll never see it. Maybe I should have given it more of a chance but if the first two hours of a game alternate between incomprehensible and boring, why should I continue?

Thoughts on ScribbleNauts

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:00:15 -0400

Note: This post assumes you have some working knowledge of video games.
Background if you’re not up to speed: Scribblenauts is a game for the Nintendo DS, you control you character with the stylus and at any point you can type in a word, and what ever word you type in appears as an object in that world. Scribblenauts was hailed as “game of show” by a few people around E3 despite being a small game on DS, and the idea that you could type anything (no alcohol/drugs, proper names, or obscenities) is something that immediately resonated with people. The game is essentially a Felix the Cat simulator where you have a bag of tricks from which you can bring out anything.
When you turn on the game you’re given an opening level where there isn’t a clear objective, you can move “Maxwell” around, use the typing mechanic to play with any thing you summon without any clear objective. This is where you’ve heard of all the stories of God fighting Cthulhu, Monorail Cat hunting mice, Zombie armies being fought, etc...
Unfortunately this is the best part of Scribblenauts, because once you turn the unique “Bag o’ Tricks” mechanic into a puzzle solving experience, all the ingenuity of the game completely backfires, because the incentives are all wrong.
The game introduces a ‘par’ which gives you a bonus for solving the puzzles by summoning the fewest number of items possible. So immediately, you’re no longer summoning a cavalcade of ridiculous items to solve your puzzles. The game is trying to reward you for being creative in solving problems in the least amount of steps, but ultimately, only rewards a very specific type of creativity. What compounds on this issue is that the items you summon don’t always have the exact properties you expect them to have.
Here’s an example, one puzzle expects you to get rid of the rats on a level without hurting the chef’s dog. So, I concocted a simple plan to put some poison on some cheese. Problems immediately arose, everyone on the level immediately runs toward the cheese as soon as you summon it (apparently gangsters and chefs love cheese), and it’s impossible put poison on cheese (gangsters and chefs also love poison, so they run to eat it as soon as it appears as well).
The problem is that you immediately stop to think, “oh, how is the game going to interpret my words?” and as opposed to the opening screen where you have a fun response when something strange occurs. You immediately have a negative response because you fail when the game doesn’t understand what you meant. Which happens quite often.
This is compounded by the further negative reinforcement because of the bonuses you get for using words you haven’t used before. This would be a great tool to get you to try to use more and more words, except you feel that you feel like you’ve wasted a word when it doesn’t work exactly like you need it to. But now that you’ve summoned it you know how it works. I understand why these mechanics were put in place, but they hamper the game rather than help it, and the game didn’t need them.
These mechanics, instead of coaxing you to enjoy the game’s occasionally absurdist internal logic, punishes you for not guessing it.
I could just ignore the ‘par system’ in the game and enjoy working out the puzzles at my own rate, and repeat words without regard to score. But at this point, anyone who regularly plays games is so conditioned against the concept of *missing* points.
Video games have (perhaps wrongly) completely overused rewards for ‘high ranks’ in tasks. “True” Endings, Unlocks and Rewards for ‘A’ or ‘S’ Ranks, Ninja Dog mode, all of these have reinforced the dopamine drop that humans get when think they’re missing out on something. So every time you go over par or don’t use all new words in Scribblenauts, many gamers will feel like they’re missing out. It’s not even that they’re really missing out its that the ghosts of games past will bring the question into the experienced gamers mind “Am I missing out”. That thought immediately quells the enjoyment of the magic toy box that is Scribblenauts.
The language that these games rest on isn’t codified like cinematic language is at this point, but it’s far more pervasive. Scribblenauts fail to properly hack into the language of feedback that experienced gamers are used to. Games are used to a state of play that is filled with positive and negative reinforcement, and are acutely aware of this feedback even if they’re not conscious of it.
The state of play of the opening screen is magical precisely because it doesn’t imply any risk, any points to be won or lost or fail states, which require you to re do things. One creates one’s own games, and doesn’t rely on the developer to create success or failure systems.
The question needs to be asked more often: What is the actual reward for these actions? The pleasure of pure play often works is the thought process of the baby/scientist: “What happens when I throw this toy car at mommy?” “Is fire hot?”.
That is why the title screen mode in Scribblenauts is wonderfully transgressive, There aren’t any meaningful repercussions for any of your actions, it’s just toys. The game modes asks “How do you get that star that’s behind the wall controlled by that lever” while the title screen answers “What happens when I shoot god with a bazooka?”

Well, that’s not nearly as easy as it seems

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:27:07 -0400

So, it the personal domain side of iWeb isn’t as easy as it’s purported to be. I don’t think that’s necessarily’s apple fault, but the fact that MobileMe can’t handle becoming a registrar or incoming mail to the personal domains.
It just seems counter-intuitive that if MobileMe wants to be this fantastic place where everything is easy, they force you to enter the world of registrars and “CNAME” registries. This isn’t super complicated stuff, but still requires a level of technical savvy. I’m also trying to set up google apps, to handle my domain name mail, but my registrar is not making it easy for me on that front either.
I was talking to my friend Pedro about this, and what makes apple products so seductive is that they’re often a good one stop solution for a lot of problems. Sure, if you need really specific things out of your apps, you won’t use Pages or iWeb or mail.app. But what’s the alternative? A steep learning curve or scouring the net for good reasonably priced alternatives? Apple software fill a niche that’s hard to find replacements for, is osx or windows respectively.
Which is why I don’t understand why MobileMe doesn’t provide such obvious features. Does apple want to avoid being in the business of being a domain registrar that badly? Is the necessary infrastructure that costly? I don’t know these are genuine questions.

You don’t always need the professional option

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 23:34:28 -0400

After playing with Wordpress, and not enjoying the process which which was required at the time to keep it updated, I feel that the first site I tried to put up failed in what it needed to be, and that I was spending more time trying to make the site look like I wanted it to rather than making content for it. I already run a podcast and work in post production, surfing through endless Wordpress themes and figuring out which one I could modify into something that fit the style of what I was trying to make was so time consuming I forgot about the real work of putting up content for the site.
I played with iWeb in 2006 a bit to try to get something up resembling a resume, but I didn’t really feel that it was giving me a robust enough solution to do what I wanted, and I felt that it wasn’t professional enough. At the time, you couldn’t set up your personal domain there, which was a huge strike against it.
Recently, I toyed with Squarespace for a month, but I found that the design elements really required a CSS background to make it look like your own doing. The drag and drop elements felt pretty limiting, despite that you could really play with quite a lot of stuff. Having to jump to the $15/mo. for the privilege of attaching my domain name to the service is something that I resented. Not to mention that the amount of bandwidth I’m likely to draw down doesn’t need that advertised cloud level support.
So, long story short I’m playing with iWeb again, and currently I’m enjoying it. I remember playing with dreamweaver in web design classes in the late 90’s. I’ll probably run into a few things that annoy me along this process, but for now, I hope it works out.
I know I may get made fun of from people I know who can parse CSS, but a nice WYSIWIG. But the #1 advantage to iWeb so far, is that I could start writing posts before putting the site up.
And hey, for some reason I keep giving apple money for .mac MobileMe. Might as well use it. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of things that I hate about iWeb real soon, but so far so good.