Cyde Weys Musings

So, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has been out for a little while now. Has anyone here gotten a chance to play it yet? If so, what’d you think about it?

I’ve never actually played D&D in person. It makes me feel like I’m missing out on an essential part of my geek heritage. Even worse, most people I know have played D&D, even the ones who are now considerably less geeky than me.

We free software folk have been trying to warn people about the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management for a while, we really have. Yet you just aren’t listening to us! Well, here are two recent all-too-obvious-in-hindsight DRM travesties by Microsoft that might have you reconsidering. If Microsoft can’t even be trusted to do DRM correctly, then who can?

First, Microsoft decided to close down their MSN Music service, presumably because it was unprofitable. Unfortunately for any customer who ever bought anything from the store, they won’t be able to play their purchased music files on any additional devices come June because Microsoft is shutting down the servers. Each audio file is actually a file encrypted with DRM, and once the servers go away, so too go any of the means of being able to decrypt the files. Ain’t it great that “pirates” will be able to play their downloaded mp3s indefinitely, but people who legitimately purchased the music will be stuck with worthless files and no refund? But that’s what you get when you willingly buy something infected with DRM.

Microsoft also uses Digital Restrictions Management on all of its Downloadable Content for the XBOX 360. All downloaded files are linked both to the user account and to the hardware. Want to change accounts? You can’t take your downloads with you. Buying another XBOX 360? Can’t take ‘em with you. Buying another XBOX 360 because your old one broke? You’re still screwed! That’s right, this poor sap’s XBOX 360 broke, taking all of the downloaded content that he bought along with it, and Microsoft’s only response was “buy all your content a second time.” It makes you wonder why they even use the word “buy”, because when you actually buy something it implies that you actually own it. If this is really the future of gaming consoles, we gamers are in big trouble. Microsoft is trying to supplant a decent product (games on DVD that can be played in any console) with an inferior one, simply because they can make a lot more money with it, what with the duplicate downloads, lower distribution costs, no need to print manuals, etc.

And why shouldn’t they? By buying all of this content that’s infected with DRM, we customers are bringing it all down upon ourselves. Unfortunately, many people will only realize too late how evil DRM is — after they’ve spent thousands of dollars on music only to have the authorization servers shut down, or after they’ve spent hundreds of dollars on downloadable content only to have their XBOX 360 crap out on them. And Microsoft doesn’t care about fixing any of this. They already have your money, and they’re big enough they can just tell you to go screw yourself. Actually, I wish they were that kind, because tauntingly suggesting you pay again for everything you’ve already purchased once is worse.

So join with me and refuse to buy anything that’s infected with DRM. Support the EFF’s anti-DRM campaign. Support the Defective by Design campaign. Spread the word. Don’t be the poor sod who abruptly finds himself “owning” hundreds of dollars of worthless DRM-infected files that cannot ever be used again.

I’m just about ready to end my former blog, Supreme Commander Talk. It focused exclusively on the PC game Supreme Commander (don’t get bent out of shape if you have never heard of it; the game didn’t become nearly as popular as we had hoped it would). I stopped updating the blog about a year ago when I stopped playing the game. Since then, I managed to get a few other players in for short writing stints, but none of them stayed very long, and the blog has now lapsed after several months of inactivity. And given the game’s gradual loss of popularity since its release, even largely unstemmed by the release of its expansion pack, I think it’s about time to end the blog.

But ending a blog is hard. I, along with my friend Grokmoo, put a lot of effort into that blog. We were writing substantive entries in it every day. I would find myself playing multiplayer games just for the sake of having something to write about. I checked the forums and the other fansites constantly, so that even if I missed being the first to report to report on something, I would still be far from the last. It was damn fun, and it’s a real rush to grow a community around you. Oh yes, the relative “fame” was addictive. At its peak, SupComTalk was getting thrice as many daily visits as this blog currently gets. And on the aggregate, I’ve put a lot more time into this blog as well.

Ending a blog is hard, but sometimes, necessary. I don’t want to leave those loose ends hanging around perpetually, and getting overrun with spam is always a problem on a comment-enabled site that is no longer actively moderated. Of course, I’m not simply going to take the blog offline; that would be a terrible fate for something we spent so much time on (and I do despise linkrot). The simplest amenable way to end it would be to turn off commenting across the whole site, effectively rendering it static. There must be a WordPress plugin out there somewhere to mothball a blog. I’ll have to put up one final, melancholic post, allow a few final days for comments on it, and then lock it all down permanently. “This is the blog that was.”

I will miss SupComTalk a lot; don’t think this will be easy for me. I really enjoyed the experience, and I would love to do it again with some other game. Writing that blog was the closest taste of Internet fame I’ve ever had (admittedly, just a taste; not even close to a mouthful). And there was a lesson there that I quickly learned, yet have still failed to follow: single-topic blogs that focus on specific subjects are, on the average, far more successful than personal blogs that focus on whatever smattering of topics the writer happens to be interested in. Some day yet I might finally apply that knowledge to this blog — or perhaps create a new one. I’m still thinking about it. But as I draw close to finally pulling the plug on SupComTalk, it weighs heavier and heavier still on my mind.

Four computer science graduate students recently created fifty playable game prototypes in one semester. Each student worked alone, putting out around twelve games at a rate of one per week. And they were responsible for not only the programming, but also the graphics and sound. That is quite the Herculean effort, and their results are impressive. I’ve seen that Swarm game before (I guess it was linked on Digg or something), but I didn’t know to examine it in the context of this rapid development game project.

The idea of creating lots of simple game prototypes in rapid succession really appeals to me. Yes, not all of them will be great, but some will be good. Little enough time is invested in each one that even if only one pays off, it’s all worth it. Compare this to the traditional game development process, which takes longer to create one game than these guys could use to pump out 100, and often yields terrible results nonetheless. Yes, that’s right, some of these fifty games are already better than what professional studios spend man-decades creating.

Unfortunately, I just don’t have the free time at the moment to devote my attention full-bore to creating lots of neat games in short periods of time (what with work and all). But I do have enough free time to create a couple, so I think I shall have to try it. Flash seems like the obvious language to do this in, but I’m not experienced in it, and I am concerned by its closed, proprietary nature. I think I’ll do what I did a lot of in high school: making prototype-sized Java applets. I guess I’ll have to read up on some Free Software Java libraries, because I don’t want to have to code something as simple as sprite rotation from scratch.

And working on creating some fun little games will also give me the opportunity to try out the ultimate form of game loop which I expressed a desire to attempt a month and a half ago. Now, I just need an idea. Hrm, stats in RPGs are fun, why not try to play around with that mechanic? I’ll see what I can do.

Though I remain an active and proud gamer, I realize it probably doesn’t come across as such on this blog because I rarely ever talk about the games that I am playing. So this post should set the record straight. Here’s what I’m currently playing.

Team Fortress 2 is a team-oriented class-based first person shooter based on Half-Life 2’s Source engine. It’s a blast to play, and I’ve been logging regular hours pretty much since The Orange Box was released. I find it to be fun, mindless entertainment. I just drop into one of the many servers that are active at any given moment and get right into the thick of things. The soldier, with his slow but deadly rockets, is my favorite class. My subconscious predictive dead reckoning skills have gotten quite good, and I can reliably take out someone from a good distance by firing rockets at where I predict they will be at the time the rocket finally reaches them. It takes a bit of skill, and even some psychology if the opponent knows you are shooting at them and is trying to dodge, but that makes it all the more fun. I would recommend TF2 to anyone who likes team-based FPSs, or anyone who liked Team Fortress Classic. It’s a great experience all-around because it is polished to near perfection.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a real-time 4X strategy game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). If you’ve ever played Master of Orion, it’s similar to that, but real-time. I still haven’t quite figured out if I like Sins, though I have played it a fair bit. It has its moments of sheer brilliance, but thanks to the real-time nature of it, it also has its moments of sheer boredom. Sins lack the mercy of an “End Turn” button (since it has no turns), one of the features of Civilization that helps speed up the early game in which not much happens.

The midgame of Sins is the sheer brilliance part. When you’re marshaling your fleets and attempting to take enemy territory while simultaneously fending off other civilizations and pirates on your other fronts, it’s pure hectic fun. But alas, the midgame ends quickly enough, and if you don’t suck, you’re soon on your way to slowly but inexorably conquering the rest of the galaxy. Once you have a decent advantage, there’s no way for anyone to stop you, and it becomes a slog as you slowly capture planet after planet (planetary bombardment takes awhile). The outcome is never in doubt, and thus, it’s not exciting.

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Adopted with modifications from my other blog, Supreme Commander Talk

Chris Taylor, the game designer who brought us Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, and Supreme Commander, believes that “secure computing” is the future of the PC gaming world, which is getting absolutely killed by software piracy. Now he’s not so naive as to think that DRM is the answer (because SecuROM, pretty much the best in the breed, is about as airtight as a shot-up sponge). His version of secure computing involves playing games from a central server rather than on individual desktops.

Now there are all sorts of ways to interpret what he’s talking about, because the description given in the article is pretty vague, but I think what he wants is for essential parts of the game not to ship with the client. The only way you’d be able to play is while in constant communication with the server. Think World of Warcraft: anyone can make copies the client, but to be able to play the game, you need to be able to log in to one of the servers. To do that, you need to pay the monthly $15 fee for an active account. Only Blizzard has access to the World of Warcraft server software, so no one can run their own pirate servers (and although attempts have been made to reverse-engineer the communications occurring between real servers and clients, knock-off server software doesn’t achieve the full feature set of the real deal). World of Warcraft is thus effectively “secure computing” according to Chris Taylor’s concept.

Sure, it works for MMORPGs, because a central server is necessitated by the nature of the game, and users accept and understand it. But for other games, especially single player games? Are consumers really going to put up with an unnecessary net connection required for no other reason than anti-piracy? That would ruin the experience on laptops, which many people use in situations where net access is not available (think airplanes, buses, and trains).

And this brings up another problem: the gaming company now has to run and maintain an unnecessary server farm to service all of the requests from people playing single player. Keep in mind that these servers won’t merely be doing verification or validation; if they were, you could either spoof a verification server that would always send back “Valid”, or simply remove the verification code step from the client executable. No, these servers need to be constantly running a critical part of the game that the client doesn’t have so there is no way the server can be excised from the loop. That’s not insignificant. And of course, access to the servers will be controlled by some means of a serial number that comes only with legitimate purchases (the key space would have to be sufficiently large enough such that trying random combinations to find one that works would be fruitless).

The nice thing about computer games as they are now is you can pretty much play them indefinitely, so long as you keep your compatible hardware in operating condition. Not too long ago I went back and dug out my old copy of Dune II and played through the campaign for old time’s sake. Now imagine if that game had been programmed using the “secure computing” paradigm; what are the odds that, after all these years, those servers would still be running? Very slim! With this form of secure computing, the PC game purchasing experience isn’t like buying a game in the traditional sense; rather, it’s more like purchasing a license of the game that expires whenever the game’s publisher decides it no longer feels like running the server, or goes under.

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Last week I saw the excellent documentary The King of Kong and heartily recommended it to everyone who’s even moderately interested in videogames. You don’t even have to have ever played the titular game, Nintendo’s Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, to enjoy the film (I haven’t). Now, The Onion’s A.V. Club has an excellent interview with Billy Mitchell, the Donkey Kong champion portrayed as a cheater, coward, and all-around jerk in the documentary (as a foil to the hero of the story, Steve Wiebe).

Well I knew something about the characterization and framing of Billy Mitchell seemed off. The documentary isn’t close to impartial, though I suspect that’s only to make it even more entertaining. And now in this interview Billy Mitchell has fired back, confirming a lot of the initial suspicions I had about the film. Is Billy Mitchell quirky? Hell yes. But is he a bad man? No, I don’t think so. He still holds the Donkey Kong world record, and to my mind, he deserves it.

I saw The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters yesterday. The movie is about a challenge between two men vying for the world record score in Donkey Kong. The movie is exciting, of perfect length, and contains more real life plot twists than you would’ve thought possible. The basic structure of the movie is David v Goliath, where Goliath is Billy Mitchell, a slick-haired slimy dude who’s held the world record since 1982. His life revolves around playing videogames and making hot sauce. The part of David is played by Steve Wiebe, a family man who was laid off from his job as an engineer at Boeing and used his free time to get ridiculously good at Donkey Kong (he then later became a public school science teacher). You find yourself rooting for Steve throughout the film, especially because Billy bests Steve’s recently set world record within hours through a questionable video tape submission that shows the digits in the score flickering as they roll over to one million and VHS copy artifacts obscuring the majority of the left-hand side of the screen.

I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who’s into videogames (and even open-minded people who aren’t), because this is a fascinating side of the videogame world that you rarely ever hear about. My heart goes out to one of the world records reviewers at Twin Galaxies (the world authority in videogaming high scores), who watches videotapes of high scores on a voluntary basis nearly every day to vet them. If you agree that videogaming is culturally significant, and that it is worthwhile to track the performances of the absolute best players in the world, you see the necessity for his position; at the same time, I cannot ever imagine doing it. He says it’s worth it, though, because who else gets to see world records broken every day? You can sort of understand his excitement.

The movie ends on a note of disappointment, as Steve Wiebe fails to break Billy’s world record during four days of public play at a videogame arcade in Hollywood, Florida (which is within ten miles of Billy’s house). Despite Steve’s repeated requests for Billy to come out and play head-to-head, Billy defers, and only drops by for a brief visit. The tension in the air is obvious. During the whole film, we never see Billy playing Donkey Kong, which is amusing, because he repeatedly says that scores are only really significant if they are done in the high-pressure situation of a public tournament. It makes you wonder if he is just a cheater, what with his questionable Donkey Kong high score tape submission. The film implies that he is.

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A new study casts light on the (nearly) unique ability of higher order primates to use tools. It turns out it’s quite the elegant mental hack. So far as your mind is concerned, any tools you are using are literally part of your body. Scientists confirmed this by conducting an experiment on monkeys. They observed that the same group of neurons fired off in the same order when monkeys picked up a piece of food, no matter whether they used their hands, pliers, or reverse pliers that required opening the hands to close the pliers’ tip. The firing of the neurons thus had nothing to do with the movements of the fingers themselves when a tool was used, but rather, corresponded to the movement exhibited by the grasping end of the tool. It’s quite an amazing, revolutionary find, and as these things usually go, it makes perfect sense in hindsight.

Imagine swinging a baseball bat. You aren’t concentrated on your hands; once they are grasping the bat you don’t give them a second thought. No, you are concentrated on the sweet spot on the bat. It becomes your fingers by proxy, and the motion of swinging a bat is really just about extending your “hands” to meet an incoming object. That’s why we are so good at hitting baseballs coming in at even 100 mph. It wouldn’t work at all if you had to concentrate on the complex kinematic interactions governing how movements of your hands are translated into movement of the end of the bat. Thankfully, evolution has provided us with such an elegant hack that makes it all work — and a hack that is undoubtedly responsible for modern civilization, as well.

When I read this article I immediately started thinking about videogames. There’s a break-in period when confronted with a novel controller or control method before its use becomes natural. Before that happens, you’re still consciously thinking about pressing every button, rather than focusing on the effects those actions will have within the game. For instance, I played Guitar Hero for the first time over the New Year’s holiday. At the beginning I was playing easy level songs with only a modicum of success. But as I grew more familiar with the controller, as it became an extension of my body, I got better with it, and by the end, I was tackling medium level difficulty songs. Give me a few more hours with it and I’d be on hard.

My most familiar controller format has to be the standard for PC first person shooters: W,A,S,D (or rarely E,S,D,F) for movement and the mouse for looking and aiming. I’ve been playing games using that for so long it has become second nature to me. I’m not even focusing on my fingers at all. When I’m moving around in Team Fortress 2 I frequently detect spies trying to backstab me simply because I run into them. There’s no lag time at all between trying to move backwards and realizing I’m running into something, then within a fraction of a second I’m spinning wildly in place and firing my weapon before I even see the enemy. And the virtual gun on-screen has become an extension of my hand. That’s the amazing part of all this that I wish the experiment had covered. Not only does the tool become a part of your body as far as the mind is concerned, the tool doesn’t even have to be real at all. It can be entirely virtual. And why shouldn’t it? The cognitive hack thankfully doesn’t discriminate, so it will continue serving us well for decades to come as virtual reality becomes an ever larger part of our life.

The concept of virtual worlds has long appealed to me, ever since I first read about them in elementary school, then proceeded to see them in popular media. The idea of a separate reality with its own set of rules fascinates me. And although we haven’t quite reached the farthest reaches of what we were promised with virtual worlds, they are, for the most part, here already.

Second Life (which I’ve written about a lot) is currently the best example of a general purpose virtual world. In it, one can interact with other people, play games, create things, participate in a full-fledged economy, find love, etc. — basically anything one can do in real life. Yet Second Life’s popularity pales in comparison to pure-gaming virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Lineage II, etc., showing that we are still very much on the forefront of the field, and so far, it’s the gamers who are proving to be the bulk of the first adopters. But virtual worlds are inevitably on the way in and they should continue growing ever more popular over time, right?

Right?

Well, as it turns out with Second Life, this isn’t the case. Second Life’s player base peaked in July, 2007. Since then it’s been ever so slowly, yet inexorably, declining. What’s happening? Is this a problem with the entire virtual worlds concept? Maybe all that’s been holding it up is hype, and once people really start using one, they find it unnecessary? Or is it a problem with one particular virtual world?

My bet is on the latter. Second Life has significant problems that are directly harming it. It has many stability issues. Performance is inconsistent and prone to glitches and slowdowns in high traffic areas. The game is also nearly impenetrable to everyone but hardcore gamers (and despite having played games most of my life, it still took me a couple of hours after first playing around with Second Life to get the knack of things). And if you want to create some of the more advanced in-game objects (you know, the ones that actually do things), you’ll need to learn an entire programming language, complete with API.

In the end, I think Second Life’s interface is simply too idiosyncratic to appeal to the vast majority of the casual non-gamer types that it needs to truly burgeon. Compare that to the gaming-oriented virtual worlds like WoW which are doing just fine. The problem isn’t with the virtual worlds concept itself, it’s just that there hasn’t been a breakthrough general purpose virtual world like there have been breakthrough gaming ones. Yet. But that time will come. Who knows, maybe it will come in the form of an all new version of Second Life. But I kind of doubt it.

The same game-style interface that is so successful with WoW simply won’t work with something like Second Life. But it’s a deeper issue than interface design: the interface technology itself is there yet. Virtual worlds won’t be successful on a large scale until the interface itself evolves beyond the tired two-dimensional display, mouse, and keyboard. This interface is great for navigating the Internet (which will inevitably be the precursor to whatever virtual world ends up making it big). But it won’t see us through to the next revolution.

I cannot claim to know what specific future innovation in computer interfaces will allow the creation of the first breakthrough general purpose virtual world. I suspect anyone who knows would stand to be very successful off it. But I do have some guesses. Virtual worlds of the future will have to be more intuitive and accessible to the average person. Thus, they will need to map much more closely to the way we interact with the real world.

Rather than pressing a key to turn one’s view to the right, one should simply have to look to the right. This immediately suggests some kind of display set into glasses with motion sensors (or a full-fledged helmet if you want to be bulky about it) such that the view always tracks what you are looking at, and by turning once around you can see the whole world.

What I am describing is seemingly delving into the realm of science fiction. But it’s all completely possible with current technology. A decade ago at Disney World I played a virtual version of Pac-Man. They had me put on a helmet with two screens in it, one for each eye. To look around the virtual Pac-man maze, I simply turned my head to either side, and the view adjusted accordingly. The graphics weren’t so good, but that was a decade ago.

Technology has progressed very far since then, and is able to deliver a much closer simulacrum of reality. It’s now possible to get the feet into the action as well, using some sort of motion sensor or, even better, an omnidirectional treadmill, so you can actually walk rather than having to march in place. Imagine, a virtual world that you navigate through in exactly the same way as the real world. That’ll be much more easy for non-gamers than having to learn about WASD.

Looking farther down the line, I think eventually we’ll be able to interact with virtual worlds directly using thoughts, first with neural sensors worn on the head, and then later, using computers implanted directly in the brain. This sounds like science fiction, but it’s rapidly becoming science fact. Researchers have already developed brain implants that allow deaf people with defective ears to hear, or mute people with defective vocal cords to speak through computer speakers. For now this technology is limited to helping people with disabilities, but eventually it will be available to everyone, and not getting an implant will be as Luddite then as not using a telephone is now.

But I’m looking a bit too far into the future now. Virtual worlds don’t need brain implants to be as hugely successful as the world wide web is. They just need something along the lines of the non-invasive natural interface I first described. That will be good enough to put them over the edge and make them hugely successful. But until then, the way we interact with virtual worlds simply isn’t good enough, and Second Life is limited to being a fun novelty rather than the Next Big Thing.