Atrophy

I have a problem: I’m not wired to play games the right way. I don’t care about strategy or tactics or any of that. All I really want to do is find something cool and play with it. Portal was a dream for me — the entire game was about playing with cool things and making sarcastic jokes.

The real problem with this approach comes when I try to play real-time strategy games. Once I find a powerful technique or unit, that one gets used to the neglect of all others. It works for a while, but my other units become useless through atrophy. To paraphrase General Sline from Spies Like Us, my unused weapons were useless. If and when the opposition is able to defeat my super-unit, my remaining forces are quickly overrun.

It occurs to me that, with that admission, I have lost the right to mock B-movie supervillains with superweapons . . . or at least that I must acknowledge that doing so would be hypocrisy.

My point here is that groups of people tend to work the same way. If one person is a strong leader, the others may become indecisive when they’re not together as a group. It’s important to maintain independent thought even in a group that’s doing well, because you never know who will have to become a leader.

And really, don’t you want all the people you’re leading now to succeed and go on to lead other people? Well then, don’t let their leadership skills atrophy.

Using LAME on Ubuntu

Here’s another that’s mainly for my own future reference and may be useful to you. Actually, my main source is the first result for “ubuntu libmp3lame.so.0” on Google, so who knows if it’ll be useful.

Basically, even if you download the codecs certain media players need to play MP3s under Ubuntu, you still won’t have the proper library for exporting MP3s with, for instance, my favorite audio editor Audacity. The library you need to do this would be the open-source LAME library

To fix this, go into the Synaptic package manager and select the “liblame0″ and “liblame-dev” packages. Install them. This will put the file libmp3lame.so.0 in the /usr/lib/ directory, right where Audacity expects to find it.

You probably only need one of those packages, but it doesn’t hurt to install both. Enjoy your self-produced MP3s.

Out of Band Communication is Actually Good

When you’re starting a new website, it’s really tempting to get an email address set up for that site and plaster it all over everything. Ostensibly, this is so people see “how serious you are” about the new venture. Well and good.

But let me point out one place you absolutely do not want to use that fancy new email address: your registrar. Why? Because if your mail server or name servers go down and you forget your password . . . how exactly are you going to get that password reset email, hmm?

I learned this lesson painfully today when, in a fit of irony, the domain used by our nameservers for ActsII.org expired, meaning they no longer worked. The admin email address was an @actsii.org address. We forgot the password for the registrar’s web admin interface. And the answer to the secret question. Luckily our phone number hasn’t changed in forever, so we were spared from having to do something ridiculous like fax a change request on “company stationery.”

So the lesson is this: never use a channel you administer to administer itself. That’s like the oriental idea of the world-snake eating its own tail. And do you know what that forms? Zero. Nothing. Which is exactly what you’ll be left with eventually if you do that. Find something out-of-band and use it instead. Nobody’s going to know the difference except you — and it might just save your bacon.

Finding Images Using Images

So Google Image Search is great when you can express what you’re looking for in text, like “cat on roof” or “map of Kansas.” But what if you want an image similar to one you already have? Wouldn’t it be better to search using the image?

For content producers, it might also be important to search the Internet for images identical to images they own to protect against copyright infringement. Performing that kind of search using text would be difficult at best, and impossible to automate.

Where does that leave us? Well, if we want to make those types of searches possible, we’ll have to figure out a way to search using an image as the search parameter. I propose one method of large-scale image search, though there are other, more complicated schools of thought.

For the record:

@Unpublished{hanson_afis08,
        author = "Philip Hanson",
        title = {A Novel Use of Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems for Large-Scale Image Search}
        month = {December}
        year = {2008}
        note = {}
}

Ye Olde Prognostications

Let’s revisit the old times, shall we? We’ve all played Crysis now, or at least heard the PC-humbling tales of those who have played it, so let’s think about what Crysis actually accomplished in terms of moving games forward as a medium.

Did Crysis bring games to story-telling equivalence with movies? Certainly not; the story is the least promoted element of Crysis, and rightly so: there’s not a whole lot there. I’m not sure anybody was expecting a next-gen first-person shooter to break ground in the narrative department, so maybe it’s not a huge loss.

Interesting point – Patrick Redding talked about narrative in Far Cry 2 in a GamaSutra interview a while back as an area the team aimed to strengthen and even innovate on. Considering Far Cry 2′s lineage (sequel to Far Cry, the predecessor of Crysis), it’s rather surprising to me.

Did Crysis bring games to graphical parity with movies? It certainly broke new ground in terms of quality. Cutscenes were not even of the level attained by some scenes in Halo, a 1999 release, but that’s easily attributed to art direction and philosophy. Let’s answer the question this way: could you make a movie using the Crysis engine and convince people it was real? Not without stealing from a thousand disparate sources. Well, maybe. But definitely not on low settings.

Sadly, any analysis has to end there. The merits of a film can only be discussed on four axes: story, visuals, pacing, and audio. We’ve established that story is, well, irrelevant in this case. There’s no comparison. Audio is essentially the same process in both fields, which leaves us with only visuals and pacing.

I’ve talked enough about the visuals already, and pacing is a different animal with games – how long a level should be instead of how long a scene should be. There are analogies, but again, they relate to story. I would conclude, then, that games are becoming comparable to movies visually, but lack development in terms of story.

Oddly, games seem to be the only medium in which story is placed so low on the priority list. I’ve seen paintings that tell more of a story than most games. Given the huge investment being made here – millions of dollars for a triple-A title – why isn’t there more progress here? Why are there no speakers at the Game Developer’s Conference next year (2009) on storytelling in games? Hmm… I think I see a pattern here. Is anyone working on this? (That’s a serious question. I expected to see at least two listed.)

What do you think? Was Crysis lacking, or are games and movies just not destined to get together, like characters in some Greek myth? Talk back at me.

Images from a Word Document

This is kind of a self-help post. By that I mean it’s here to help me when I inevitably forget how to do this. Maybe it will be useful to you, as well.

The story’s a bit long, but it started when I downloaded a version of LaTeX for Windows. Innocent in itself, but somehow I got hooked. I actually treat preparing documents the same way I do video games: just one more footnote! Blame it on the day job.

Anyway, I wanted to convert one of my old research papers to LaTeX as a kind of exercise. Simple enough . . . except for the embedded images. Luckily, it’s a simple process to get them back if you know how.

Thanks to a tip on LaunchPad Zero (of all places) and some clarifying information on Graham Mayer’s website, I found the trick: export the Word document as a web page with supporting files.

This will save all embedded images – including their original forms, if they’ve been modified – to a folder in the same directory as your exported HTML file.

One mild annoyance here is that trying to move the folder independently from the HTML file doesn’t work. Windows keeps them together to prevent link breakage (I assume), which means that if you really want to keep the images for yourself, you’ll have to copy them somewhere else. Realistically you’d probably do that anyway, but it’s nice to know.

Hope it saves you some time when you, too, get hooked on typesetting.

Dude, Where’s My Impact?

Six people created Tomb Raider and changed the face of video games. Seven created Netscape and changed the world. Clearly, small groups of people can make a big impact. So why has your small group not had such an effect? What did they have that other groups lack?

For starters, they produced something new and innovative. Puzzle-solving acrobatic heroines were rare when Tomb Raider came out, and Netscape’s main competitor, Mosaic, was no longer under active development. (The real competitor was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but that came later.)

Another distinguishing factor is the purpose, or shared vision, of each group. In the book Netscape Time, co-founder Jim Clark describes the atmosphere of Netscape prior to launch as a hive of activity. Programmers slept in their cubicles, feverishly trying to outpace that someone, somewhere who had the same idea they did and worked faster.

How long would you sleep in your cubicle to get that product out the door? Maybe it’s not necessary, but is it important enough to warrant that? Is your idea or product game-changing?

If the answer is no, why are you surprised when there isn’t much of an impact?

The Bleeding Edge . . . Bleeds.

Right now I’m trying to install SQL Server 2008 Advanced Express Super Nunchuck Edition, or whatever ridiculously long name it actually has. First I had to upgrade to the .NET Framework version 3.5, which I should already have from installing Visual C# 2008 Express. Then I needed to install Windows Installer 4.5. But wait! I have Windows XP x64, which means that the Windows XP installer installer (no typo) I downloaded doesn’t work. After a few minutes of intense frustration, I remembered that XP x64 actually identifies itself as Server 2003 x64, and that installer installer (I can’t resist) worked. Three restarts and a half hour later, I’m finally ready to install the server, as long as some other dependency doesn’t crop up.

Honestly, Microsoft, why is it this hard to install your software? All the dependencies are listed on the downloads page. How hard would it be to automatically download and install them — with user permission, of course. Linux has been doing this for years. The community had to build up an infrastructure to do that, but you already have a structure! I’d certainly appreciate it, at any rate . . .

“Easy” Genres

Certain genres of movies seem easy to write for. For instance, action movies hardly need any writing at all. Guns, explosions, fight scenes, done. The audience will still connect with the movie because of the visceral response to, well, action. But someone who continually makes action movies will never advance at their art, because action movies are so formulaic. The same seems to hold for video games. Here’s a quick chart I whipped up:

Game Genre	Movie Genre	Hook
FPS games	Action Movies	Visceral
RPGs	Romance Movies	Emotional
Simulations	Documentaries	Cerebral
RTS games	Large-Scale War Movies	Scale & Power
MMORPGs	Soap Operas	Community

Documentaries and war movies get away with being predictable because people simply know what to expect from them and don’t expect any surprises. This is probably why RTS games and simulations (as well as their movie counterparts) have such enduring appeal – and why they have stagnated.

Notice that MMORPGs and Soap Operas both have no redeeming qualities in themselves: they are repetetive and unoriginal. However, the sense of community people gain from talking with other fans about the game or show is what those people find rewarding. There may be nothing to talk about, but at least they have an excuse to belong somewhere.

And Were You Dreaming?

This post from the Halo.Bungie.Org forums just kills me: Strange Halo 2 with Halo 3 weapons dream

First off, let me say that it is not my intention to embarrass this guy, or ridicule his dreams. That said, I would like to point out that this is pure slapstick comedy. In fact, any forum post that begins with “Okay, so I was dreaming i was on High Charity as the Master Chief …” should already be good for a few laughs. Take, for example, this line: “But what was shocking was that when I put them away …” Wait, it was shocking? Need I remind you of the part where you’re dreaming that you’ve possessed the body of an imaginary video game character? It doesn’t get much more shocking than that, my friend.

I especially like the detailed descriptions he (or she, I suppose) gives of the imaginary new weapons. At least they’re consistent!