Desert of My Real Life | Technology, Society and Me

{May 1, 2011} Tumblr Review-Part 1

As I wrote in a previous post, I have been testing Tumblr as a way of consolidating my web contributions in one place. After using the site for a couple of weeks, I’m ready to write a review of it. My review will come in two parts. In this, the first part, I will review the site regarding the intentions of the designers of the site and how well (or not) those intentions have been implemented. In the second (future) part of my review, I will explain what I wish the designers would change regarding how the site is supposed to work.

Tumblr bills itself as a micro-blogging site, which would make it a direct competitor of Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Tumblr provides two interfaces for each user. The first is the page on which the user can post short statements. This page is called a tumblog. This interface can be customized with a variety of themes that determine how the page is to be organized. Twitter has no interface that is equivalent to this so this portion of Tumblr is really more of a direct competitor to WordPress or Blogspot, a more traditional blogging platform. The second interface is a dashboard, similar to Twitter’s interface, providing a mechanism for the user to post items that will then appear in the newsfeed portion of the dashboard as well as on the user’s tumblog. The user also has the option of following other Tumblr users so their posted content will also appear in the user’s newsfeed, again in a manner very similar to Twitter.

One of the most obvious ways that Tumblr differs from Twitter (besides the use of a tumblog) is that in Tumblr, it is very easy to post content of all different types. In Twitter, for example, there is no easy way to post a photo while in Tumblr, it is quite easy to post a photo. This is a welcome development and the tumblog themes integrate the variety of content types quite nicely to create a nice-looking blog site. This means that people can follow you either through Tumblr, in which case your posts will show up in their newsfeeds on their dashboards, or by checking your tumblog, which is given a unique URL so it can be easily viewed outside of Tumblr. My tumblog, for example, has the address of http://cathieleblanc.tumblr.com.

The thing that excited me most about Tumblr when I first began my investigation is that a user can easily import RSS feeds into her tumblog. I immediately saw the potential for this feature for integrating my web contributions into one location. For example, I have a Flickr page for my photos and every Flickr page has an RSS feed. So I figured I could easily set up my Tumblr account to post any new photos from my Flickr RSS feed on my tumblog. In addition, Tumblr has built-in support for Twitter so that any tweets a user posts can automatically be also posted on her tumblog. I immediately set my Tumblr account up to post from this blog, from my Flickr account, and from my Twitter account. I then posted a blog entry here, posted some pictures on Flickr and wrote some tweets. And then I waited for those posts to appear on my tumblog so I could how everything looked. And I waited. And waited. And waited.

This is where my issues with Tumblr arise. It doesn’t work as advertised. I read the (pretty pathetic) help files on the site to discover that Tumblr tries to check the feeds from which it is supposed to update every hour or so. But, they go on to say, they recognize each feed’s “need to live.” And by the way, now that I go back to their help files to get an exact quote, I see that they’ve removed all references to their RSS feeds and how they are updated. I engaged in an extended email conversation with the tech support folks at Tumblr and found them to be pleasant but pretty useless in terms of giving me help. They had a lot of (illogical) suggestions for things for me to try to get the updating to happen in a timely manner. Eventually, when I pointed out that they were being very illogical, they admitted that there is a problem with the automatic updating of RSS feeds. In other words, it doesn’t work.

A second problem with Tumblr is that they say you can set things up so that your posts automatically appear on Twitter and Facebook. This also doesn’t work. So right now, Tumblr is having significant communication problems both coming into and going out of the application. As I did more research into this, it appears to have been a problem for at least a year. And still no resolution.

In my email conversation with tech support, I found out that Tumblr is designed so that if a user does not update within the application at least once a week, the automatic updating of RSS feeds will stop (if they ever get that working). In answer to my question about the rationale for that design decision, Danii (from tech support) told me that they want to make sure that people don’t just use Tumblr to recycle material that has been posted elsewhere. The problem with this answer is that their solution doesn’t ensure that original material will be posted on Tumblr. As long as I don’t use the RSS feeds to post the material to Tumblr, it will be seen as original material even if it is really a reposting of material from elsewhere. My guess is that the Tumblr folks want to make sure people sign into the application for some other reason, likely related to whatever plan they have for eventually making money.

My experience with Tumblr so far has been less than satisfactory but it has helped me to articulate for myself what my ideal application would look like. I’ll write about that in part 2 of my review of Tumblr.

{April 25, 2011} New Tumblr Site

Because I spend my time thinking and writing about today’s online media, I have a fairly significant web presence. I write this blog. I have a web site and a PSU web page. I use Twitter and Flickr. I’m on Facebook, Linked In, and My Space. I use a variety of Web 2.0 tools, some of them often, some not so often. I have been experimenting with a variety of tools, looking for something that will consolidate the content I create in one place. Ideally, this tool will allow me to easily customize the look of the page that my followers will see. I’ve tried a number of tools and have not found any that I really like (for reasons that I will explain in a future post) but, based on a tip from Ann, I recently came across Tumblr, which has some of the features that I want but contains some annoyances and is based on a mental model that means it really won’t do exactly what I want it to do.

What is Tumblr? It is a micro-blogging platform, similar to Twitter, Plurk and so on. These sites allow users to create short content and share it with their followers. Since I’m already a Twitter user, the micro-blogging aspect of the platform was not what I was excited about. Instead, I was excited about the fact that Tumblr makes it really easy to share content of all types, not just text. In addition, Tumblr has a feature which allows the sharing of RSS feeds, that is, content from other sites. So I thought that perhaps Tumblr might be the simple solution to the problem that I’ve been trying to solve for a while now–how to aggregate all of the web content that I create into one site. Here‘s my tumblelog (yes, that’s what Tumblr sites are called and yes, it’s dorky).

There are a couple of annoyances that come with using Tumblr. It is indeed easy to set your site up so that it reposts feeds from other sites. So, for starters, I set mine up to automatically repost anything I put on this blog, my Twitter feed or my Flickr photostream. The first annoyance is that there is no way to force Tumblr to go out to your feeds to determine whether there is anything on them that should be posted to your tumblelog. The documentation says that when Tumblr searches your feeds, it will automatically repost anything that is less than two days old. So I have a fair amount of content on these sites that should be showing up already on my tumblelog. But only the content from this blog is currently showing there (I hope that changes by the time you’re reading this post). When I first set up the feeds, Tumblr told me they would be updated in an hour. But that hour counted down on the site and no update occurred. Further research suggests that perhaps these feeds will be updated soon–one source said it sometimes takes 12 hours–but I’ll just have to wait and see. That leads me to the second annoyance of using Tumblr: there is no way to test how your feeds will look on your tumblelog. I can test out how each media type will look but I can’t test an actual feed because there is no way to force an update from that feed. This seems as though it would be a simple coding change from the folks at Tumblr so I’m putting in my request right now.

Beyond these annoyances, Tumblr still doesn’t solve the problem that I want solved because there is a fundamental mental model behind the way Tumblr works that is an obstacle to solving my problem. I’ve encountered this mental model and its limitations in the past–actually, I encounter it just about every time I try out a new Web 2.0 tool. I’ll write more about that in my next post.

In the meantime, enjoy my new tumblelog.

{April 24, 2011} Games and Lessons for Life

I am a sucker for stories about the relationship between games and life. When I was a graduate student, a story in the Tallahassee Democrat about the life of Warrick Dunn, a star football player whose police officer mother was killed in the line of duty while he was in high school, brought me to tears. I love movies like Sea Biscuit and Brian’s Song. I have myself written blog entries ruminating about what we can learn about life from playing games.

So you would think a story that I heard on NPR this morning would be right up my alley. Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen interviewed Dan Barry, author of a new book called Bottom of the 33rd about the longest baseball game ever played in the history of US men’s professional baseball. This particular game was played in 1981, between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, farm teams of the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles, respectively. The teams played 32 innings in 8.5 hours before the owner of the league called the umpires to tell them to halt the game. That was at 4 in the morning on Easter Sunday and there were 19 people left in the chilly stands in Pawtucket, RI. When the teams reunited 2 months later to finish the game, nearly 6000 fans showed up and over 140 reporters from all over the world came to cover it. Pawtucket won the game in the bottom of the 33rd inning, a mere 18 minutes after the game resumed.

The subtitle of Dan Barry’s book is Hope, Redemption and Baseball’s Longest Game. I expected the interview on NPR to touch on hope and redemption and perhaps something about how this longest game can teach us something about perseverance. Instead, the interview focused on the facts of the game, including the fact that Cal Ripken, Jr., who went on to set the record for consecutive starts in the Major League, played all 33 innings and that Wade Boggs, future Hall of Famer, tied it up for Pawtucket in the twenty-first inning. Barry also told us that the original 19 fans who stuck it out for those 32 innings in April were annoyed that nearly 6000 people could now say they saw history being made when they really only had seen the last inning of that historic game.

But nothing in the interview touched on hope or redemption. Or perseverance. Or anything of importance. Which annoyed me. Not every sports story is a story about life, about issues larger than the game itself. A book about a particular game that is the longest in professional history is probably of interest to baseball fanatics. The fact that NPR picks the author of that book as someone deserving of an interview implies there is more to the story, something that we can all learn from. As far as I can tell, that is not the case with this particular game or this particular book, the hyperbole of its subtitle notwithstanding. Adding the words “hope” and “redemption” to the subtitle of a book will not make that book interesting for a general audience. I realize I’m judging the book by its interview. Maybe that’s not fair. But neither is it fair to promise us a discussion of what a game can tell us about hope and redemption and instead waste our time with the facts and statistics of a particular game. Come on, NPR. With all the real, inspiring sports stories out there, we deserve better. Did you choose to tell us about this book simply because the game went into the wee hours of Easter morning, 1981, which happens to be 30 years ago today? That coincidence also doesn’t make this story interesting for the general reader.

{April 14, 2011} Amazon’s Android App Store

I received this open letter from the International Game Developer’s Association. I think it’s a very reasoned, educational letter and points to a dominant theme of our times. Corporations are demanding more and more “rights” in their strive to make higher and higher profits. Amazon’s distribution terms take away all control of developers for their own content. This is just another step in a long trend. I think the IGDA’s focus on educating its members is right on target. Game developers may still choose to distribute their products through Amazon but at least they will know some of the implications of what they are agreeing to.

To all members of the game development community:

Two weeks ago, Amazon launched its own Android Appstore. We know that many developers have been eagerly looking forward to that launch in hopes that it would represent a great new revenue opportunity and a fresh take on downloadable game merchandising. The IGDA applauds Amazon’s efforts to build a more dynamic app marketplace. However, the IGDA has significant concerns about Amazon’s current Appstore distribution terms and the negative impact they may have on the game development community, and we urge developers to educate themselves on the pros and cons of submitting content to Amazon.

Many journalists have noted the unusual nature of Amazon’s current store terms, but little has been said about the potential implications of those terms. In brief: Amazon reserves the right to control the price of your games, as well as the right to pay you “the greater of 70% of the purchase price or 20% of the List Price.” While many other retailers, both physical and digital, also exert control over the price of products in their markets, we are not aware of any other retailer having a formal policy of paying a supplier just 20% of the supplier’s minimum list price without the supplier’s permission.

Furthermore, Amazon dictates that developers cannot set their list price above the lowest list price “available or previously available on any Similar Service.” In other words, if you want to sell your content anywhere else, you cannot prevent Amazon from slashing the price of your game by setting a high list price. And if you ever conduct even a temporary price promotion in another market, you must permanently lower your list price in Amazon’s market.

These Amazon policies could have far reaching effects on game developers. The IGDA has identified five potentially problematic scenarios in particular:

1) Amazon steeply discounts a large chunk of its Appstore catalog (imagine: “our top 100-rated games are all 75% off!”). Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers — most likely, those near the bottom of the list — will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale. Amazon benefits the most, because it captures all the customer goodwill generated by such a promotion.

2) By requiring all developers to guarantee Amazon a minimum list price that matches the lowest price on any other market, Amazon has presented developers with a stark choice: abandon Amazon’s market or agree never to give another distributor an exclusive promotional window.

3) Other digital markets that compete with Amazon (both existing markets and markets yet-to-be-created) may feel compelled to duplicate Amazon’s terms, and perhaps even adopt more severe terms in an effort to compete effectively with Amazon. In essence, we’re looking at a slippery slope in which a developer’s “minimum list price” ceases to be a meaningful thing.

4) Amazon steeply discounts (or makes entirely free) a game that has a well-defined, well-connected niche audience. The members of that niche audience snap up the game during the promotional period, robbing the game’s developer of a significant percentage of its total potential revenue from its core audience.

5) Amazon steeply discounts (or makes entirely free) a hit game at a time when the game is already selling extremely well. This sort of promotional activity may attract consumers away from competing markets and into Amazon’s arms. But it might actually represent a net loss for the developer, which was already doing quite well and didn’t need to firesale its game at that moment in time.

The IGDA’s bottom line is simple: under Amazon’s current terms, Amazon has little incentive not to use a developer’s content as a weapon with which to capture marketshare from competing app stores.

The IGDA does not have the power or inclination to dictate how others conduct their business. However, the IGDA is permitted to express its views on business practices that affect the developer community, and it is the firm opinion of the IGDA that:

1) A developer’s permission should be required by any retailer seeking to pay less than the standard percentage of a developer’s minimum list price. This could be automated and even “opt-out” with a reasonable period of notice, but ultimately, a developer’s permission should still be required.

2) Developers should have the freedom to set a minimum list price of whatever amount they see fit, without regard to pricing in other app stores.

The IGDA has formally communicated its views to Amazon, and while Amazon has been very willing to engage with the IGDA, it has thus far expressed zero willingness to adjust its distribution terms. We believe that the people currently running Amazon’s Appstore may have the best of intentions and a desire to make their development partners successful, in general. The problem, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, is that things tend to change when a marketplace achieves any degree of dominance. The terms of Amazon’s distribution agreement give it significant flexibility to behave in a manner that may harmful to individual developers in the long run. Any goodwill that Amazon shows developers today may evaporate the minute Amazon’s Appstore becomes so big that Android developers have no choice but to distribute their content via the store. It would be foolish to assume that because Amazon’s Appstore is small today, it will not become the Walmart of the Android ecosystem tomorrow.

If Amazon responds to this open letter, it will likely invoke the success of games that have already been promoted in its Appstore; for example, games that have been featured as Amazon’s free app of the day. The company may claim that the success of those games is proof that Amazon’s model works. The IGDA believes that this argument is a red herring. Amazon does not need the terms it has established for itself in order to give away a free app every day. Nor does it need the powers it has granted itself to execute a wide variety of price promotions. Other digital games platforms, such as Xbox LIVE Arcade and Steam, manage to run effective promotions very frequently without employing these terms.

Amazon may further argue that its success depends on the success of its development partners, and therefore, that it would never abuse the terms of its distribution agreement. Given that Amazon can (and currently does) function perfectly well without these terms in other markets, it is unclear why game developers should take a leap of faith on Amazon’s behalf. Such leaps are rarely rewarded once a retailer achieves dominance.

We respect Amazon’s right to stay the course, but as part of our mission to educate developers, we feel that it is imperative to inform the community of the significant potential downside to Amazon’s current Appstore terms. If you feel similarly, we urge you to communicate your feelings on this matter directly with Amazon.

Sincerely,

The IGDA Board of Directors

{April 11, 2011} We Are STILL Playing a Game

I recently wrote a blog entry in response to Caroline Bender‘s question about the Scrabble game we were playing online. Since we have different motivations for playing Scrabble, Ms. Bender asked whether we were actually playing a “game.” My short response: yes. After reading that response, Scott commented about the difference for him between playing Go and Scrabble on FaceBook. He observed that Go is a more interesting game for him and he tried to explain why. His reasons were: 1. He plays LOTS of Scrabble and so it has become less exciting for him. 2. Scrabble on FaceBook has a built-in dictionary and doesn’t allow you to play a word that is not in the dictionary so the game is less about vocabulary and more about the strategy of how to place words for maximum score and blocking his opponent’s potential moves. 3. Scrabble has an element of luck while Go is all about skill which means that in Scrabble, luck can sometimes overcome superior strategy and skill. 4. Go allows for deception. 5. Each move in Go is very clearly part of a larger battle so each move has both short-term and long-term consequences which makes it feel like every move has high stakes attached to it. 6. Finally, Go has a long history with significant implications in East Asian philosophy, society and politics so that when he plays Go, he recognizes that it is more than “just” a board game. He then goes on to ask how these elements fit into Costikyan‘s six elements that every game must have. In particular, Scott wants to know whether the historical and cultural context of a game important. He makes some interesting points and asks a very good question.

Before I discuss Go and Scrabble in particular, I need to explain a bit about Costikyan’s article that may not have been clear in my previous blog entries where I’ve used his framework to analyze a game. Costikyan wrote his article for game designers. That is, he intended his framework as a tool for game designers to use when they have created a game that is pretty good (or maybe even pretty bad) and they want to figure out how to make the game great. And so he spends a lot of time in the article discussing the importance of decision-making and how that relates to management of resources and the type of information given to the player. For example, in Go, the player has perfect information which means that there is no information hidden from the player. The player doesn’t have to worry about chance or any hidden resources that her opponent might have. In contrast, a Scrabble player has imperfect information which, in this case, means that some information about the game state is known to the player while other information is hidden from the player. In particular, the letters that the opponent has is hidden from the player. In addition, there is the element of chance in Scrabble coming from the random draw of letters. If a player happens to get all vowels or all consonants, for example, it may be quite difficult for the player to make any word so she may need to trade in her tiles which amounts to skipping an opportunity for scoring points. The different information structures in the two games significantly affects the kind of decision-making in the game. In Go, the better player will always win (unless she makes a stupid mistake) because there is no element of chance and no hidden information. Chance and hidden information gives the inferior Scrabble player more of a chance to win. I believe this is part of the reason that Scott prefers Go to Scrabble.

There is a large section of Costikyan’s article that I rarely talk about in these blog posts but which we discuss in detail in my classes. After specifying the six elements that every game MUST have, Costikyan discusses many more elements that a game may or may not have. In this section of the article, he is writing to the game designer who has created a good game that needs something extra to make it great. Interestingly, one of the things that Costikyan suggests the game designer consider adding is more chance. It’s one of the suggestions that is problematic in using this article with beginning game designers–their games often have too much chance so that the decisions the player makes do not feel significant or meaningful to the player. Adding more chance to such a game makes the game worse, not better. Another thing that Costikyan suggests the game designer pay attention to in order to make her game great is narrative tension. I think this is what Scott is talking about when he says that in Go, he feels like there are mini-battles that make a difference in the larger war that is the game. Every single move matters in this situation. No single move can work alone to capture the opponent’s stones. This idea of narrative tension is why Scott and I each sometimes just want to throw in the towel on a game of Go. We both know who has won the game and so there is no more narrative tension. We sometimes continue to play, however, because the mini-battles can themselves be interesting and allow for a sense of tension. When I’m losing a game, I get great satisfaction from playing and winning one of these mini-battles, even when it won’t make a difference in the larger outcome of the game. Ultimately, I think Scott understands his game-playing preferences pretty well and he’s done a great job analyzing why he prefers Go over Scrabble.

I find his final question really interesting. He asks about the tradition of Go, wondering what Costikyan would say about this sense that game is more than “just” a game, that it is an expression of a larger, mystical tradition. I don’t think Costikyan really has much to say about this particular topic. But I recently took Ann‘s Postcolonial Literature course and I think a lot of what we read in that class relates to Scott’s comments about the mysticism of Go. Go really is an ancient game–Wikipedia tells us that the game is more than 2000 years old. But the sense of mysticism that we in the West associate with the East and with artifacts of the East (like Go) stem from Orientalism, a set of assumptions that stereotype the East in way that Edward Said finds damaging because those stereotypes allow us to think of Asians as “other.” That is, these stereotypes allow us to think of Asians as somehow fundamentally different than us, the white, Western majority. As a comparison, we can think of Chess, a game that is nearly as old as Go. We in the West don’t ascribe the same kind of mysticism to Chess as we do to Go. Both games are ancient games of perfect information that require significant study and play to master. But Go is viewed with a sense of awe that is rarely present when Chess is discussed.

This discussion of the history and tradition does, however, make me think of something that is important for game designers to understand. A game designer can never control what a player brings to the game. In other words, if a particular game taps into some aspect of player psychology that is completely external to the game itself, the game may or may not be successful on that basis alone. This particular aspect is completely outside of the game designer’s control. I think remembering this probably will help a game designer not take the reception of her game too personally. And it helps us understand that, like many things, there is some “je ne sais quoi” in the art of game design, that helps to keep it perpetually interesting.

{April 1, 2011} 3D Eye Surgery (or I am a Fool)

Media outlets of all types see April 1st of each year as a time to play with their audiences. These stories rarely “catch” me because they typically have to be so outrageous that it’s clear from the outset that they are April Fool’s Day jokes. This morning, however, National Public Radio ran a minute and a half long story that totally caught me. I spent about 60 seconds planning my blog response to it.

The story is about the fact that 3D viewing technology has really exploded in the entertainment market but the technology still requires us to wear cumbersome 3D glasses. An opthamologist claimed to have pioneered an eye surgery that would allow us to watch 3D entertainment without having to wear those glasses. They even had one of the first people who had the surgery talk about how great it was to watch Gnomeo and Juliet in 3D without those glasses. The line of the story that really made me want to respond was about how this surgery would allow us to live in a 3D world. In my head, I was yelling “We already live in a 3D world!” And that was the moment that I knew it was an April Fool’s Day joke. The beauty of this story is that it mimicked real stories of this type, where people do crazy things to further immerse themselves in online entertainment. I’ve been reading a bunch about how Reality is Broken and what we can do about it so this story didn’t seem particularly far-fetched to me. Good job, NPR!

{March 24, 2011} Moving to Apple

I got a new “toy” today. It’s an 11.6 inch Mac Book Air. I have never owned an Apple computer although in the last few years, I’ve become a fan (mostly) of Apple’s iPod products. A few months ago, my friend Julie showed me her new Mac Book Air, which she had gotten for Christmas. I am not usually someone who gets particularly excited about new technology. I’ve seen (and purchased) too many “solutions” to think that any one tool is going to change anything about my life. I did, however, get really excited about the Mac Book Air. I have never thought that it is going to “change my life.” But I thought it was pretty cool and could see that it provides a level of convenience that I haven’t seen in other products yet. I was particularly excited about its use of flash technology for storage. There are no moving parts for the hard drive of the Mac Book Air. Instead, it has a large flash drive, similar to the thumb drives that have become so ubiquitous, as its hard drive. The lack of moving parts in the hard drive means that the computer boots almost instantaneously. It also means that the hard drive doesn’t generate much heat, reducing the need for large cooling fans. All of this leads to the thing that excited me most about this new computer. It is SMALL!

There are smaller computers available. My iPod Touch, for example, is a much smaller computer than this new Mac Book Air. But the iPod Touch does not include a full-sized keyboard. Instead, it uses a touch pad key board which I find somewhat cumbersome to use. I would never try to write a blog entry on my iPod Touch, for example. It would be much too tedious. I could get a Bluetooth keyboard but then it seems stupid to carry the iPod Touch AND its Bluetooth keyboard around with me. The Mac Book Air, on the other hand, is an actual laptop with a full-sized keyboard and an 11.6 inch screen. So it feels much more like a computer. But because of the lack of a regular hard drive, it is much smaller than an ordinary laptop. The main thing that excited me about this computer is its weight–it weighs less than 2.5 pounds. What does that mean? Go find a 5 subject spiral bound PAPER notebook. That is about what this laptop weighs. And its dimensions are smaller than that. It is significantly less than an inch thick. And its height and width are smaller than an 8.5X11 inch piece of paper. In other words, this is a computer that I can see carrying with me and using in a lot of situations where I have used paper up to this point. And that excites me.

Although this is probably not a laptop that can completely replace every computer you use (mostly because the flash drive on the 11.6 inch version is only 128GB), there are some other nice features that Apple provides that will make it extremely useful. The main tool to help with the small flash drive size is a product called Mobile Me. This product also solves the problem of having multiple devices and wanting access to the same set of files, an issue that anyone who has both a personal computer and a work computer has probably encountered. Mobile Me is Apple’s “cloud” solution which provides space on the Internet for you to store your files and folders. It also provides a syncing function so that when you change something with one computer, it automatically updates your space in the cloud so that your other devices have access to the changes. I just signed up for a 60 day free trial, after which it will cost me $99 for a year’s worth of access to 20GB of space in the cloud. I’m still loading my space with files from my PC so I can’t review how it works yet. I will say that Apple was having some major technical problems with new users and Mobile Me just when I was signing up for the service. Although I wasn’t happy with those glitches, everyone at Apple’s customer service was great and didn’t make me jump through stupid hoops when I made it clear that I had already tried a whole bunch of stuff to fix the problem. Within about 3 hours, they had the problem resolved. Although I think the idea for Mobile Me is brilliant, I’ll reserve judgment on this particular implementation until I’ve had time to use it.

So, I’m a happy geek with a new toy! Now I just have to figure out how to use this Multi-Touch trackpad with no right or left mouse buttons.

{March 9, 2011} We Are Playing a Game

One of my blog buddies, the fabulous Caroline Bender (she of Drawing In fame), wrote an entry yesterday about the “game” she and I have been playing on Facebook. I put “game” in quotes because one of the questions she asks is whether we are actually playing a game. So here is my response to her opening move in this blogscussion.

Several weeks ago, Ms. Bender made an off-hand comment on Facebook about having started to play online Scrabble. This is one of the two games that I continue to play on Facebook (the other is Go). She had warned her potential Scrabble opponents by posting a status update that she “knows you all thought I would better at Scrabble. (Well…all but 2 of you, I think).” How could I resist? I challenged her to a game.

We’ve now played several games and she does not get very high scores. We have had a couple of snippets of conversation concerning the differences in our styles of play. My style of play typically leads to high scores while hers does not. All of that is fine with me. Whether I win or lose, I just like to play. So, to get back to her question, are we playing a game? To answer it, I’ll look at what I think are her reasons for asking the question.

I’ve written a bunch about definitions of games and analyzing various activities to determine whether they are games. I most often use Greg Costikyan’s definition, with its six elements that every game must have, as my framework for analysis. Ms. Bender does an impressive analysis (which I won’t recreate but which you should go read) of Scrabble using this framework. I think some of the things she discovers in her analysis lead her to question whether Scrabble is a game. The most interesting item that she raises has to do with goals. She also raises an interesting possibility of a seventh criterion for making an activitiy a game and I’ll talk about that possibility in relationship to goals.

Ms. Bender rightly points out that Scrabble does indeed present its players with a goal. But I would state it a bit differently than she does. She says that the goal of Scrabble is to get the most points and use all the letters. I would instead say that the goal is to play your letters in order to score points. The difference is subtle and yet, critical. Ms. Bender has made the assumption that everyone plays games for the same reason–to win the game. But I have written a couple of papers (and blog entries) in which I argue that this common assumption is a problem in game studies circles. My argument has been controversial. Anyway, here’s the basic idea.

First, when Costikyan talks about goals, he is not talking about player motivations. He really means the objective that is set up by the game for the player to achieve. So in Scrabble, the objective is to score points by laying your tiles on the board. Some players will be motivated to engage in this activity because they want to win the game. Other players will be motivated because they want to hang out with their friends. Yet other players will be motivated because they get pleasure in finding particular types of patterns. This is what Ms. Bender refers to when she says, after showing that in our current game I am beating her quite soundly, “It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just not what I care about.” Her motivation for playing is something other than getting a higher score than her opposition. And by the way, so is mine. But more about that later.

So there’s a difference between player motivation and the goal of the game. What do we know about player motivation? There is an old, simple media theory called the uses and gratifications theory that is helpful in understanding motivations for using media such as games. It is one of the first theories that focused on the recipient of media messages. One of the most famous quotes about the theory comes from a paper by Blumler and Katz in which they say the theory explores

1) the social and psychological origins of 2) needs, which generate 3) expectations of 4) the mass media or other sources, which lead to 5) differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities), resulting in 6) need gratifications and 7) other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones. (Blumler J. G. & E. Katz (1974): The Uses of Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. p. 20.)

In other words, people have needs that they seek to gratify by consuming media that they expect will gratify those needs. The theory goes on to articulate a large number of needs that people seek to gratify by consuming media messages.

What does this have to do with games? It means that people play games for many, many reasons, to gratify a large number of needs. We in the game studies field have primarily focused on the need to beat the competition, that is, to win. But I think the popularity of Farmville, especially among a non-typical gaming population, should make us question this assumption that people play games in order to win. (And by the way, it was this argument about Farmville in particular that was so controversial at an awesome video game conference in Oxford this past summer–the counter-argument is that there is nothing redeeming about Farmville.)

So when Ms. Bender says that she sees Scrabble as “verbal sudoku,” she is saying that it gratifies a need for her other than the need to win. The interesting thing is that I feel exactly the same way about Scrabble. For me, it is all about finding patterns. It’s just that the patterns that give my brain a little jolt of pleasure are different than the patterns that give Ms. Bender her gaming high.

Ms. Bender also asks: “I am interested to know if #7 criterion should be that we have to be playing the same game, or is it still a game anyway?” I think my analysis above makes it clear what I think about this. But in case it isn’t clear, here goes. We ARE playing the same game. We simply have different motivations for playing that game. And that, to me, is fun. The fact that we have different motivations is indeed PART of the game. She said that I am not her opposition because she has a different motivation, something other than winning that she cares about. But I am indeed her opposition because opposition is anything that puts obstacles in the way of the player achieving her goals, both the objective presented by the game and the goal of having her needs gratified. So everytime I block an area so that she can’t use it to create the word BARGAIN, I present an obstacle. And THAT is fun.

{March 7, 2011} Northern Pass–Weeding Through the Hype

There is a huge controversy raging in NH this year involving the Northern Pass Project. According to the project’s web site, the Northern Pass is “a transmission project designed to deliver up to 1,200 megawatts of low-carbon, renewable energy (predominantly hydropower) from Québec to New England’s power grid.” Despite the apparent “greenness” of this project, many people in the state (including many environmentalists) are fighting this project.

I’ve been having some difficulty separating hype from truth when talking to people and reading articles in the newspaper about this topic. So I decided to do some additional research about it to see what I think in advance of voting on a resolution about it tomorrow on election day.

Here is the proposed path of the power line. You can see that it goes right through Groveton, Lancaster, Lincoln, Campton, Plymouth, Ashland and Bristol. These are towns that depend heavily on tourist dollars for their economic vitality. And much of the argument against the project focuses on the impact of the project on tourism. According to the project’s own web site, the towers along the project’s path will stand between 80 and 135 feet in the air. The web site compares these towers to a typical cell phone tower, which stands 180 feet tall. This seems to me to be an irrelevant comparison since cell phone towers are typically singular whereas the criticism of the project’s towers is that there will 140 miles of them. These towers will run through some of the most scenic areas of the state and the fear is that this will detract from the beauty of the state, meaning that tourists will not want to vacation here anymore.

Another criticism of the project is that the electricity originates in Quebec, which means that we will be purchasing this power from Canada. I was in a local business recently where the owner was expressing his discontent about the project with an official of the project. I overheard him say that this project represents a “wholesale invasion of New Hampshire by Canada.” This seems a bit overblown to me but the answer to the question of why we should buy power from Canada on the FAQ of the project seems to be a non-answer. They say that the New England states must buy renewable energy in as cost-effective a manner as possible. There is nothing in the answer that explains why this is the most cost-effective manner possible. The answers in the FAQ do, however, make it very clear that we are indeed buying this electricity from Hydro-Quebec. We are still relying on foreign energy. This is not necessarily bad but I don’t really see how it helps New Hampshire to do so.

Another of the arguments in favor of the project is that it will create jobs in the North Country of New Hampshire. But if you read between the lines, it’s clear that these jobs are construction jobs. Once the transmission lines are built, those jobs disappear. So this is a very short-term benefit with a long-term negative impact.

I have just relied on the information provided by the people involved in the Northern Pass project and they really have not convinced me that this is good for the people of New Hampshire. I haven’t even spent any time reading the web pages of the critics of the project. They are planning to deliver this electricity to the southern part of New Hampshire and south of that (Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island), where the largest population base is. And yet, it seems that the largest negative impact will be on the people of northern and central New Hampshire. How is that fair? Unless someone comments with a compelling argument, I am going to have to vote in favor of the resolution against this project. What do you think?

{March 4, 2011} Game Design Education

I belong to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) which has a fairly active listserv. The most recent discussion on the listserv was prompted by Brenda Brathwaite‘s rant at the most recent Game Developers Conference, which ends today. Brathwaite is a well-known game designer, educator, IGDA board member, and author. She wrote one of my favorite game design books, Challenges for Game Designers. So people pay attention to what she has to say. And what she had to say in this latest rant has been quite controversial.

The title of her rant is Built on a Foundation of Code. Her basic point is this: “Game design programs must be firmly rooted in a foundation of code.” What she means is that students graduating from a game design program must be good programmers. They must learn to create digital games from scratch. Code is the tool of the trade and if we game educators do not teach our students to program, we are doing them a huge disservice. She makes this point as a game designer who started in industry, went to academia, and is now back in industry. She sees thousands of resumes and wants us all to know that she will not hire entry-level game designers who have not created their own digital games. That is, she will not hire game designers who can’t code.

I’ve heard this kind of argument before but it usually comes from computer scientists who think that their discipline is the most important one for the multidisciplinary field of game development. But Brathwaite is not a computer scientist and so her argument is a bit surprising. And it’s also why no one is simply dismissing what she is saying–she’s not saying MY discipline is the most important.

At the risk of sounding discipline-centric, as a computer scientist, I think that the training that computer scientists go through is extremely important for anyone who wants to create any sort of procedural content. What do I mean by that?

Procedural content is any artifact that is executed by a computer, any artifact that is comprised of a series of instructions that are to be run by a computer. For example, this blog entry is digital content but not procedural content–it does not contain instructions for the computer to execture. The blog software that I’m using (wordpress) IS procedural content–it is comprised of instructions that are executed by the computer as I write my blog entry. Creating procedural content requires a particular way of thinking about that content. Creating procedural content also requires the development of debugging skills because no one writes procedural content that works perfectly the first time. Making this content work properly can be tedious and frustrating and the developer needs to be persistent and detail-oriented, while also being able to take a step away from the content to think about the obstacles in new ways. It takes practice to implement this cycle of creating the content, testing to find bugs, planning a fix for the bugs, implementing the new content, testing to find bugs, planning a fix, and so on. And the ability to think in a way that allows you to go through this cycle over and over seems important for anyone who wants to work in game development.

Notice that I’m saying something a bit different than Brathewaite. She says she wants all game developers to be able to code. I’m saying I think game developers need to be able to think like coders. But perhaps it boils down to the same thing, perhaps the only way to teach someone to think like a coder is to teach them to code. In any case, I think this is an interesting question, one that I’ve thought about quite a bit as I’ve tried to teach game design and development to non-computer science majors. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to teach this kind of thinking.

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