Flirting: Where to Draw the Line

I'm not the jealous type, but I know my limits aren't other people's limits. In the case of extra-relationship flirting, there are several sets of limits in play, those of the direct participants, and those of their relationship partners if any.

Until there's evidence of the other direct participant's limits and interest, IMO it's out of line to flirt beyond smiles and eye contact and graceful language, not even flirting really but friendly polite interaction (which seems frequently mistaken for flirting). And keep the innuendo dialed down to zero.

If they seem interested, I'll add compliments and nudge the innuendo up to 1 or 2 out of 10. At that level, I feel like I'm not out of line at all, and I would think a partner who had a problem with it should self-examine to consider why. I'd place this firmly in the grey area between friendly and flirtatious.

It's hard to judge whether moving beyond that into outright flirting, perhaps with casual/innocent/not-so-innocent physical contact or increasingly explicit innuendo, is appropriate in a given situation. A partner objecting to this level of flirting is not necessarily being unreasonable, and everyone's comfort level will differ.

WW2.1: Beachhead

Father Weston droned on in Latin. Barry Grant had never learned Latin, but the rhythm of Mass was comforting. He glanced around at the other soldiers here to take communion and receive the blessing of the church. They would need all the comfort and blessing they could get when they reached their objective. He saw a few heads up like his, not bowed in reverence or prayer, but restless in the knowledge of what they were tasked to do all too soon.

The soldier next to Barry jerked his head up to look incredulously at Father Weston. Rob Harris was the smartest person Barry knew and taught biology at a college in Vermont before elisting. And he knew Latin.

"What?" whispered Barry.

"He's not giving Mass anymore."

Barry returned his attention to the priest. He was still droning on in Latin, but it wasn't the familiar patterns he'd grown up with. If Rob hadn't said anything, he'd have chalked it up to differences between English and American Mass, or even accent. Brits spoke English funny, why not Latin?

He listened a little longer before whispering again to his increasingly wide-eyed friend.

"What's he saying then."

"It's weird. He's charging us with taking the enemy's position and, well, forbidding us to die until we're done."

"Forbidding us to die?"

"It's weirder than that. He's talking about our souls and a power that transcends the grave and a sacred quest."

"What do you think it means?"

"I have no idea."

Three days later, Barry was wet and cold, huddled in a landing boat with his rifle clutched to his chest. He'd been sick enough times that he had nothing left to give. He was so numb with misery that he didn't care enough to be scared. What would happen would happen, and it would be a relief just to get out of the boat, even if he died in the surf without even stepping onto the beach. He'd long since stopped flinching at the sounds of the guns. One direct hit, and his ordeal would be over.

"Ready, boys!" shouted their section sergeant. "We're almost there! Run for your fucking lives and kill anything that tries to stop you!"

Barry automatically checked his kit. Everything seemed right. He could feel the fear creep back into him as the minute approached. He and his company would jump out of this tub and straight into the German defenses on Omaha Beach in Northern France, a faraway land from his New Jersey home, a place where you heard stories of men visiting in their youth to fall in love with beautiful women.

He was here to kill and maybe die.

Ahead of him, the gate dropped into the surf and the lead rank of men jumped out into the waist deep water. The rest surged forward, and now Barry could hear the machineguns as well as the artillery. Then he was in the icy cold water, struggling against the waves, and no longer caring about incoming fire.

Men, dead and alive, were already on the beach. When the surf rolled out, bodies were left on the wet sand. Absurdly, it struck Barry to step carefully.

Soon, the water was shallow enough that he could break into a sprint. He could see cover ahead, where men were catching their breath and counting their blessings. With safety in sight, Barry and a cluster of men pounded the sand, seemingly untouched by the bullets flying around them.

It couldn't last, and the man directly in front of Barry jerked twice and lost his stride, falling and tripping Barry into a heap with him. Struggling to get up, it occurred to Barry for a second to check the man, but there was so much blood, he had no doubt the man was gone.

Coming to his feet and stepping out to run again, pain lanced up his right leg, and he fell again. Struggling up again, he found a crucifix dangling in front of his eyes and then a hand offered to help him up.

He looked up to see the man he'd just written off as dead gesturing impatiently for him to take his hand, blood and sand matted across his shirt. Barry took the proferred hand and was practically thrown to his feet, but again his right leg would not take his weight and he fell again.

This time, he felt himself lifted and carried across the other's shoulder.

"Leave me," he grunted against the jouncing as the man incredibly broke into a run.

"Shut up," came the oddly deadpan answer, impossibly not showing the exertion that it should have.

And before he knew it, he was among the men huddled under the cover of a jumble of rocks. Only two had watched them arrive, and they were clearly shocked at what they'd seen.

"How did you..." one began.

"I don't know," was all his rescuer said as he pulled at his shirt to look at his wounds. "Shit. This is bad. I don't have much time. I don't know why I'm not already dead. I can't believe I can't feel it."

Barry tested his leg again, but it was hopeless.

"I can't get any further like this, but maybe I can cover you guys," he said and checked his rifle.

"You can cover us better with this. I'll trade you."

Barry looked up to see another man unstrapping his Browning automatic rifle and pulling off extra ammunition belts and pouches.

"I hate carrying this thing anyway. We lost Johnson on the beach, but March there has more of my ammo."

Another man handed over two belts and a large pouch, as the B.A.R. gunner showed Barry how to use the big gun.

When everyone else was ready to move out, Barry braced himself up with one leg and settled the gun on the rocks on its bipod, taking aim at the closest visible defensive emplacement. He squeezed the trigger and unleashed an extended burst at the openings.

Whether his aim was true or not, it would keep the Germans' heads down, and the American soldiers began to swarm up the rocks and debris. Barry watched for any movement in the enemy's cover, and showered it with bullets whenever he saw any.

The tactic was working, and soon the lead men were close enough to throw several grenades. While the grenades were still flying, one of them, his shirt covered in his own blood, charged ahead, unbelievably leaping up the slope toward the Germans. As he reached the low wall, he ducked just in time for the grenades to land among the enemy and explode, and then he vaulted among them and the screams started.

While the screams of the German soldiers continued, the most gruesome smell Barry had ever encountered reached his nose. He turned his head to look upwind, toward the sea, and what he saw made his blood run cold.

They were gaunt and grey, uniforms and clothes in various states of repair hung from their forms. They walked clumsily but steadily toward him, swords, knives, clubs, chair legs, and claw-like hands lifted in menace.

Barry pulled the B.A.R. around as quickly as he could and pulled the trigger. His hand clenched in panic, he couldn't stop firing until the belt was expended, and still they came.

He was trying to get the next belt started when they were on him. He fell beneath blows and stabs and slashes, and yet found a peaceful detached contentment that he had enabled his friends and fellow soldiers to reach better cover and closer to their objective. He very nearly smiled as his vision faded to black.

The sense of purpose that filled him chased away all other considerations. He was not done here, and he stood to resume his duty, cadaverous attackers still clinging to his limbs and body. With almost casual disregard, he tore them from him and flung them away, kicking them back down again when they rose to attack again. He stepped to where the B.A.R. had fallen, vaguely curious that his leg no longer pained him as he retrieved it. The weapon seemed very light in his hands as he calmly fed the next belt of ammunition, turned to the regrouping lifeless horrors, and methodically dismembered them with extended bursts of bullets.

When his grisly task was done he looked back up the hill where the other soldiers were staring down at him and the scene around him. He walked up toward them as he again changed the gun's belt, stopping at last in front of the man who had carried him from the beach.

"Something has happened to us."

"I know."

He stuck out his hand, "Name's Grant."

"Cecil Williams. Go by Will."

"Barry," he answered as Will took his hand. "I think we're dead."

"Then let's make it count."

That day, D-Day, as American blood was spilled on Omaha and Normandy Beaches on the North coast of France, faithful Catholic men rose from where they fell dead, filled with the strength of purpose and duty, and lead their fellows through a harrowing defense of artillery, guns, and mindless walking corpses. When the last Nazi flag fell, and the field was theirs, they finally succumbed to their mortal wounds and fell dead again.

Their bodies were carefully boxed by medical corpsmen with specific instructions, and they were loaded back onto one of the assault ships. They were taken to an undisclosed location where they waited to serve their country one final time.

WW2.1: Gestaponomicon

For a period after America's entry into the war, the Office of Strategic Services struggled to even comprehend that the stories of monsters and other occult phenomena fielded against the Allies by Axis forces might be real rather than exagerations or outright imaginings. Their culture simply didn't allow for belief in such.

As a result, once it began to sink in that the threat was very real, the OSS was far behind the SS and the Gestapo in occult knowledge and experience and began to recruit and study at a fevered pace. This rush resulted in initial failures, as the organization was unable to properly vet references and authorities. Their early understanding of the occult mysteries was contaminated by charlatans and bad fiction.

One such failed operation was a disinformation campaign aimed at creating false intelligence for Axis spies to intercept. The aim was to create the impression that the OSS had discovered that the Gestapo had acquired a valuable tome and was keeping it from the other German factions, thus sewing distrust in the German ranks. Unfortunately, the team based most of its misinformation on an uninitiated interpretion of HP Lovecraft's description of the Necronomicon.

The material developed for the project hopelessly transparent to any experienced occult scholar. To make matters worse, the project members had taken to refering to the fictional tome as the Gestaponomicon, and a newly recruited and poorly briefed transcriptionist had dutifully included the derisive title in several the false documents to be intercepted.

If the Germans had been inclined to be taken in by the ruse, unlikely given Hitler's well known obsession with occult references and blind rage on discovery that any had been denied him, and the intercepted material had been given to intelligence analysts of insufficient experience to spot the obvious falsification, the ludicrous title of the fictional book was enough to alert even the dullest of German analysts.

Unknowingly, the organization's bumbling resulted in an unguessed victory. A group of conspirators within the Gestapo had actually been concealing several occult references from Hitler and the other German factions, and this false intelligence spooked them into destroying the books rather than using them to increase their personal power and influence.

WW2.1: Note to Self

The immediate danger apparently past, Reich Chancellor Hitler stood up from behind his heavy desk to survey the wreckage of his office and the sole standing combatant. His personal guards lay dead not far from the ruined door to the main hall, their bodies broken by mighty smashing blows from his unknown assailant. Most of the furniture was destroyed beyond recognition. Only a bookcase in the far corner from the wall where his unknown rescuer had come crashing into the melee and his armored desk remained only lightly damaged.

He looked warily at the ten foot... man? contraption? ...that remained standing, still but emitting mechanical noises, whirs and clicks and the occasional gurgle. It was like nothing he'd ever seen, a vaguely humanoid construct of brass and steel with flashes of gold in places, but he did recognize the proud Swastikas on its chest and shoulders. After seeing it fight in his defense, the Chancellor was confident that it presented no danger to him.

The remains of the other combatant, while likewise strange, had struck him as somehow familiar. When his door had splintered open, he'd looked up in alarm to see an impossibly massive man bound in iron that seemed to conjoin directly to his body. Gunshots from his bodyguard either ricocheted off the iron bindings or found their mark in the invader's flesh without apparent harm.

Although slow, the thing had been strong beyond comprehension. Only the time taken to crush the life from his guards had saved the Chancellor from its titanic fists. Just as it had turned to face him, the wall behind it very nearly exploded with the machine's entrance. What followed had been a fist fight the likes of which could not have been seen since giants walked the Earth.

His attacker had been the faster of the two, despite its ponderous pace, for the defender had paused between each maneuver as though in careful consideration. But when it had moved, it was with swift power, and in the end, the outcome had never been in doubt. Although it had lost some external features in the melee, each blow had hit like irresistible thunder. Entire parts of the attacker's body had been torn away, and an arm had landed in the Chancellor's view from his shelter under the desk. In front of his eyes, the flesh of the arm had transformed into unliving, crumbling clay, though the iron bands at the wrist and along the fingers had remained.

Hitler now saw that the fallen body had suffered the same fate, laying in a heap of iron and crumbling clay. Knowing what to look for, he bent to the remnants and sifted through the pieces. When he found what he was looking for, it puzzled him only more.

A sharp whistle quickly fading to a harsh hiss of escaping steam brought him up in alarm, a large chunk of clay clenched in his hand, breaking off a piece in his panicked grip. The torso of the mechanical warrior was opening like a clamshell. In the steaming mist, a young man, Aryan of cast and soldierly of mein, extricated himself from a harness of some sort. When his arms were free, he saluted with his right arm outstretched.

"Heil Hitler! Are you unharmed, mein Fuhrer?"

"I am unharmed, thanks to you," Hitler replied. "Why do you call me that? My title is Reich Chancellor."

"Forgive me, Chancellor," the soldier said with a cheerful grin. "But not for long."

To hide his confusion, Hitler returned his attention to the clay shard in his hand. On it were arrays of Hebrew letters, arranged in forms similar to those he'd learned in his studies of the Kabbalah, but in unheard of complexity.

He looked back to the strange soldier and said, "This was a golem you've saved me from, but like nothing I would have expected."

"No, Chancellor, this golem was from the future, in a way."

"The future?"

"Yes, Chancellor, 51 years."

"51 years?" He was beginning to feel a trifle ridiculous, parroting words back to the man. "You need to explain yourself."

"Yes, mein Fuhrer. In 1984, Jewish sorcerers in America will send the mind and soul of their most knowledgeable crafter of golems back in time to possess his grandfather and create the mightiest and most thoroughly instructed golem possible. Although our agents will capture his co-conspirators, they will be unable to stop his ritual slaying and banishment into the mists of time. But they will obtain copies of the golem formulae, including the instructions to be inscribed in the clay of its forging. They will be very specific about the day of the attack, so we will know when to prepare your defense."

Hitler thought about the orders on his desk that he'd been preparing to sign and knew why this day had been... would be chosen. How did the man speak so consistently about times in the future but his own past?

"You will order an unsuccessful research project funded and restarted to create a time machine," the soldier continued, only to be interrupted.

"I am alive in 1984?"

Clearly uncomfortable and suddenly hesitant, the man replied, "You will order me not to give you any details, mein Fuhrer, but I am allowed to tell you that you will be ruling all of Europe, Western Asia, Northern Africa, and the Atlantic Coast of South America in 1984."

"I will trust for now in the wisdom of my future self."

"Thank you, mein Fuhrer. May I continue?" And at Hitler's nod, he did so.

"We will race to break the time barrier, build the actual conveyance mechanism, and create this specialized fighting machine, but it will take us twelve years to create a working prototype, and in the meantime you will repeatedly inform us that changes in our world spontaneously appear, although we will not notice them as we will be products of the altered timeline. Only you know, with your powerful mind, and much of your concentration will be consumed keeping yourself in existence."

Seeing the obvious question in Hitler's eyes, the soldier turned to his fighting machine.

"I do not have the words to explain that last, mein Fuhrer, but I will be given something to give you that does."

Opening a panel inside the machine, behind the harness he'd occupied, he withdrew several large notebooks.

"These are for this era's engineers. They are detailed technical diagrams and instructions to create this machine and larger, mightier machines. Sending me back will destroy the time machine, and our physicists in 1996 will believe that each method of time travel can only work once. That's part of why it will take twelve years to complete the project. Experimental results will never replicate."

He reached back into the compartment, retrieved a book and handed it to Hitler. It was a leather bound copy of Mein Kampf, stamped in gold with the title and the German eagle seal atop the Swastika. Hitler opened it to find every margin filled with his own handwriting. Some pages had writing between the lines of the text.

"You will order me to give you this, mein Fuhrer, your most favored possession. I know of no one ever allowed to read your personal notes of your voyage to conquer nearly half the world."

Absently realizing he didn't even know the man's name, Hitler was already entirely focused on the book in his hands. He had some very important reading to do.

WW2.1: The Beginnings of an Obsession

In 1909, a homeless Austrian painter stumbled through a magical picture frame into the courtyard of the College of the Arts Arcane for Young Gentlemen. Since the College could only be found by sorcery, arriving at the gates was considered sufficient condition to enroll. It was many months before the Masters of the College discovered that the determined new student possessed no magical talent whatsoever and that his arrival was purely the doing of the artifact he had unknowingly acquired to pursue his art.

Before being expelled and returned to Vienna, the young man witnessed many wonders at the College, and developed a fascination with magical workings of any type. While he had access to library, he read as voraciously as he had not while enrolled in his technical education at Realschule. His curiosity was insatiable, and his fervor delighted some instructors while disturbing others.

His rejection by the Masters upon the discovery of his lack of ability to wield the forces of thaumaturgy was too much. Compounded with the lingering anger over his previous rejections by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, this perceived betrayal kindled a fire in his breast.

If Adolf Hitler could not legitimately possess the power of magic, then he would take it. Whether by force or by guile, this new obsession would not be denied.

A Running Start

Hi and welcome to my new blog home. New URL, new title, same old challenge to myself to write more often. The old blog will stay open as an archive. Go read some favorites.

I'm kicking off the new digs with my Nanowrimo project, World War 2.1. Imagine World War 2 upgraded with 5000% more occult, mad science, and atomicpunk weirdness. Now imagine it written by some whackjob with ADHD and too much caffeine. The structure will be text snippets, or lexia if you've read Landow's Hypertext 2.0, in no deliberate order, connected by hypertext links by topical cross-reference. The goal of the project is to experiment with the form while re-painting a well-traveled narrative in more garrish colors.

World War 2 is imprinted into the consciousness of Western civilization. Most people don't know most of the events or actors, but nearly everyone has a broad idea of time and settings, or at least a picture distorted by time, aided by history books, novels, movies, documentaries, TV shows... I'll be building on this common imagining by replacing pieces of the puzzle, one at a time to create something familiar but bizarre. Changing all, or even most, of the pieces would be counterproductive. The real events of the war will serve as a framework to build upon.

The result is intended to be yet another framework, something for the reader to build upon. World War 2.1 should re-imagine the 2nd World War as a dynamic setting with a built-in, broadly arcing narrative, in which there is plenty of room for smaller scenes and stories.

As I write each piece, I'll post it here. There won't be any hyperlinks at first. I consider linking to be part of editing, and editing is verbotten during Nanowrimo. I'll edit it up and add the links in December, then find a permanent online home for the finished product.

So for now, sit back and enjoy the war that never happened...

...but should have.

Why the Hate for Misspent Youth?

I'm a big fan of Peter F Hamilton's books. I thoroughly enjoyed his Night's Dawn trilogy (though the three books are so huge that they had to be split into two paperbacks each for the mass market edition), read through the Greg Mandel stories in no time, and grabbed up his stand-alone novel Fallen Dragon. Then he launched his Commonwealth Saga and Void trilogy, and I've enjoyed all of those five books tremendously.

But somewhere in there, I discovered that I had missed one. Misspent Youth is part of the Commonwealth Saga, but not part of either main plotline. It's based in the mid-21st century on Earth, and tells the story of the first person to receive the Rejuvenation treatment central to the culture of the Commonwealth during Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, and thus functions as a prequel of sorts.

I looked in the bookstores, but it couldn't be had, out of print. That's surprised me a bit. I went looking for it on Amazon, and they were out. What the hell? The book wasn't that old. Then I scrolled down to the reviews. Hooboy.

There was a lot of haterade spilled in the reviews. People who otherwise adored Hamilton's books were up in arms. Others swore they could never read his books again after giving up on Misspent Youth. It just all seemed a little extreme, so I dug deeper.

One of the themes of Misspent Youth is the repercussions of Rejuvenation, returning a person to full bloom of youthful health. Hamilton glosses over the societal implications, which I found a little disappointing after the depth to which he'd portrayed the society of the Commonwealth, as well as that of the Confederation in Night's Dawn. He focused more on the impact to the rejuvenated main character's immediate relationships of the return on youthful hormones to man of seventy-plus years.

That's right, Misspent Youth could be considered chick-lit. Mildly smutty chick-lit at that.

After reading the reviews, the "mildly" portion surprised me somewhat. Misspent Youth was originally published in the UK, and his publisher didn't think it would sell as is in the US. So they toned down the smut for the US release, and the reading public still hated it.

I was having none of that, so I ordered the original unabridged edition from Amazon UK. After the uproar, I half expected something more at home in the pages of Penthouse Variations, wondering whether I should plan to read the book one-handed, if you catch my meaning.

Can you say anti-climax? Misspent Youth is mildly racy sure, but it's got nothing on mainstream romance novels. This book is about the relationships between the characters, not about what gets done in the bedroom.

Like I said, chick-lit. And yet, not entirely chick-lit.

For one thing, it completely ignores the proven formulae for successful romance novels. That makes sense to an extent. Hamilton's not a romance author; he's a speculative fiction author, and he's exploring repercussions so he's confined to a logical chain of events.

The other thing about Misspent Youth that keeps it off the romance shelves is its dual purpose. The novel acts as a prequel to the Commonwealth Saga, portraying the European Union in a state of political upheaval and scattering about elements that fans will recognize as precursors to elements of Commonwealth society. That's not the usual backdrop for a relationship piece, and readers of that genre would likely be put off.

So Misspent Youth is nothing like what I expected, except for one thing. It's an excellent book. Hamilton's engaging style kept me interested through a storyline so focused on relationship conflict rather than violent conflict that it probably woudn't have kept my interest otherwise. I was prepared for some smutty trash, but nothing has prepared me for how "touchie feelie" Misspent Youth would be. Aside from two major scenes and one minor one, there's no real danger faced by the characters, only implied by reference.

If someone had told me that, I might have actually skipped the book. Well, no. It was the last book of his that I hadn't read, so I was doomed from the outset. That's OK. As I said, Hamilton's writing kept me turning the pages.

So I heartily recommend Misspent Youth unless you're an uptight member of a Kansas school board. In terms of reading order, I suggest reading Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained first, but once you have those digested, it's not important whether you read Misspent Youth before, during, or after the Void trilogy.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-hate-for-misspent-youth.html.

Hegemony

Time to grab another three bits of random and see what can be made of them.

The Writer's Book of Matches. A woman with a terrible disease is offered an experimental drug therapy.

I at first thought this one might be tough to work into whatever I picked from the other sources, but the point of the exercise is not to make it particularly easy either.

From Archetype to Zeitgeist. Hegemony

Hegemony is the domination of one culture, or group, over another by nonviolent means. The book has a good 2-page entry that includes some evolution of the idea from Antonio Gramsci and mid-20th century feminism to expand the scope from one political body over another to cultural, class, gender, or ethnic dominance.

A Dictionary of Symbols. The Minstrel

This had me scratching my head a bit. The entry refers to the Minstrel Tarot card, but I didn't recall that card. Then I couldn't find the Tarot reference I thought I had in my library. To the Internet! Turns out, the Minstrel card is considered by some sources to be the original card that became the Magician.

In many interpretations, the Minstrel/Magician represents mastery, whether of a skill or the situation at hand. It can also represent teaching or learning.

It didn't take too much thought before these three fell neatly into place. In an intellectual hegemony, the dominance of a highly educated elite would be sustained in the long term by a system of education that confers the unstated implication that more education equals better. A fine message in itself, if somewhat simple in the blatant abstract, but can it be called hegemony, is it actually dominance, if the system is meant to bringing greater education to all?

It could be argued that maximizing every educational opportunity to every member of a culture is an economic non-starter. In some perfect system, it might be possible to make available all the education every individual cares to consume, but in the world's current model, it costs time and money to attend school. Investing time and money into a given vocation faces diminishing returns, sooner for some professional areas, later for others.

The education system in an intellectual hegemony would almost certainly be multi-tiered. There would be extremely basic schooling available for a labor class, teaching the absolutely necessary skills to get by within the larger culture. At the other end of the spectrum, a highly educated elite would receive every opportunity to expand their knowledge and skills.

But common to every tier of this education system would be the implication that the more education received, the more worthy the individual to make decisions and benefit from the best the culture has to offer. The elite class would be taught this to bolster their commitment to continue their studies and their confidence in their "rightful" place at the top of the hierarchy. The labor class would be taught this to convince them that others are more worthy to make their decisions for them and reap the benefits of those decisions.

This strategy is a multi-generational strategy, gaining strength with passing decades. How does such a hegemony start, especially in cultures that don't necessarily value a classic education, holding more dear the lessons taught by life experience?

One way it might do is via gifts of the fruits of intellectualism. Under the guise of a helping hand, another culture is wooed with surplus food, luxury goods, and medicines. While none can call foul that the hungry are fed and sick are healed, there is always the spectre of ulterior motive.

It's not always conscious. World history is full of examples of the hauteur of the more prosperous sowing the seeds of cultural destruction among a "less advanced" people. Sometimes the result is a thriving partnership, but it should be clear to the astute observer that the result is more often subjugation or conflict.

I'd originally intended to take this into a dark fictional setting for stories or a game, but instead it would appear that I've crafted more of a commentary on the current state of world affairs. Honestly, that wasn't my intent.

When the real world begins to resemble dystopian fiction, it might be time to reconsider the direction we're traveling, time to challenge our shared assumptions, time to make sure that our helping hand isn't really a fist.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2011/09/hegemony.html.

Last Resort Challenge #1

It's time for the first try at the Last Resort Challenge. So let's pull down three books and get cracking.

First component: from ISMs: A Compendium of Concepts, Doctrines, Traits, and Beliefs: Hyperpituitarism, the glandular condition that triggers growth disorders such as giantism and acromegaly. I need to look up that last one. [...] OK, it's like giantism but mainly in the extremities and usually adult onset.

Second component: from the Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions: Flying Ointment, made by a witch and smeared on the body to gain the power of flight.

Third and last component: from the Dictionary of Theories: Group Theory. This one is in the book twice, and I happened to stab my finger on the Politics version rather than the Physics version. In Politics, Group Theory states that individuals and whole societies are not significant political actors. Rather, groups of individuals interact and negotiate their priorities and platforms, and from this process emerges policy.

OK, this could be tough, but I already have the kernel of an idea.

The word witch is a loaded term with a ton of cultural baggage. In stories, witches tend to be separated from society, operating solo or in small groups, figures of fear and superstition. It's reasonable to assume that their impact on societal policy is minimal. But it's not as simple as that. As a feared or possibly hated group, they've been driven out of the main social groups, but not wiped out entirely. Why? Because witches are frequently portrayed as the source of counsel and aid not commonly available, such as the classic love potion or the secret answer to the troll's riddle.

Since I drew Flying Ointment above, you can probably guess that I'll focus on the specialty products of the witch's cauldron over their information services. Witches of folklore and other story turn out a varied array of substances to produce extraordinary effects. Unguents, potions, oils, philters, powders, and ointments from the hand of the witch cause the subject to fall in love, stride seven leagues in a step, breath underwater, or fly through the air.

These unusual abilities stay unusual in most stories, and there's typically a reason for it. Either the witch's price is dear, or powerful societal censure would result if anyone found out. Frequently, both of these cases are in effect.

So the witch's customers have access to the resources to pay the witch's price, meaning that they are likely the more politically powerful members of society. They are also secretive, though they always assume no one will ever find out. That makes them ripe for a blackmail scheme, but what if the witches had something else in mind?

The typical witch's product is ingested somehow, whether by drinking, breathing, rubbing on the skin, mixing with food, or what have you. So suppose the witch's craft were advanced enough to sneak in some side effects, such as a subtle glandular condition, something that takes a period of years and multiple applications to produce obvious symptoms, such as elongated extremities or some other easily noticed feature. Then it becomes obvious who the most frequent consumers of witchcraft services are.

If the condition can be suppressed with yet another product, the witch has the wealthy patron over a barrel. A high price can be demanded, perhaps changes in policy, or the suppression agent will be withheld. I mentioned above that political group theory holds that policy is the result of negotiation between groups of individuals, and this is a form of negotiation. But what if the witches have something else in mind?

Over time, consumers of a witch's services would find the services indispensable, an advantage over their rivals, a way to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles. The witch's services are indispensable, but the witch still lives in isolation. Suppose rather than blackmail, the witches have organized and have decided to pursue societal revolution. Rather than blackmailing their customers into acting as their political proxies, they force their customers to live with their new physical features as a brand, a scarlet letter, and obvious mark of the witch's services for all to see.

It's a risky scheme, and in the short term the witches are likely to weather some level of cultural backlash, but there is the potential payoff of making it clear to the larger culture that their services are highly valued by the societal elite, individuals that many wish to emulate. In time, the negative connotations of witchcraft may fade, and the witches might be accepted into mainstream society, just another group contributing the interaction and negotiation to create and establish policy.

---

So there's my first post on the Last Resort Challenge. I'd hoped to come up with a better title, but the post turned out to be at least somewhat about the process of combining the components, so the brute force title stays.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2011/09/last-resort-challenge-1.html.

Last Resort Weekly Challenge

At nearly a year since my last post, I am forced to admit to myself that I am not good at keeping up with this. Some people find blogging to be habit forming, but I am apparently not one of them. I did well when I challenged myself to post daily, but I didn't have much creative energy left for anything else, so this time I'll try a compromise. I'll give myself until midnight Saturday each week to post something, anything really. If I post earlier in the week, I'm off the hook.

That's the Weekly part. Now the Last Resort part. If I come up with a topic, all well and good, but if I'm stuck, or if the topic I'm working on isn't coming together on time, then I engage in an exercise I've been meaning to start anyway.

I have a shelf of books that I think of as my Brainstorming library. They're a fairly random collection of short-entry dictionary/encyclopedia-style books such as Archetype to Zeitgeist and The Encyclopedia of Dreams. Occasionally, I grab one at random to browse for something interesting to think about.

The exercise I envision is to grab three of these books, either at random or by whim, open each at random, blindly stab a finger onto each open book, and combine the three concepts thus chosen into a post somehow. It doesn't matter what it's about, just something to post. It will probably be something consistent with my existing interests and posts, but no guarantees. The point of this blog is to get and keep me writing, not any kind of consistent topicality.

So stop by for your weekly does of vitamin WTF. Or don't. As I've said before, this blog is not for you, it's for me. If anyone else gets any value out of it besides me, that's just a bonus.

Btw, this post doesn't count for this week, so look for the first challenge post by next Saturday.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2011/09/last-resort-weekly-challenge.html.

Something Precious

My original intent was to resume the blog with a post in the normal theme of game dev interest, but in the meantime, our family has experienced a disruption that has given me several thoughtful moments.

My wife and I have been married for almost 20 years, and for almost 19 of those years, we've shared our home with Arrow, our cat. As you might imagine, she has become a fixture of our relationship, having outlived career choices and other cats. (We lost a younger cat, Dusty, to breast cancer a few years ago.)

I'm not saying it's been without its tribulations. She occasionally gets it into her head to poop in odd places, especially if we leave her litterbox for too long. She loudly wants breakfast on days I'd rather sleep in. She's knocked over and broken any number of things I wish I still owned in one piece.

But she kept Doni company while I was serving my country. She's a loving animal that we both care for deeply. She makes our apartment a home. Most importantly, we voluntarily took this little being into our care, and she is very much a part of our family.

Last week, there was an accident, and she suffered a broken humerus. It was a completely separated fracture, too high on the leg to splint. The emergency consult at the 24-hour vet clinic didn't paint a hopeful picture. The leg was useless weight that was only going to cause her pain, and her age did not make her a good candidate for orthopedic surgery. Osteoporotic bones do not take pins and plates well, and the mending would have been long, painful, and not guaranteed. There was every chance we would have to put her down.

I'm the man of the couple. There are cultural expectations that I will be the strong and practical one. Right or wrong, my culture has left an imprint on me, and I strive to be the strong and practical one.

This wasn't the first time I've dealt with end-of-life concerns for animals in my care, but none of those prepared me to deal with something as central and long-lasting to my life as this cat. I did OK at the clinic. I reassured Doni that we would make the best decision for Arrow and consoled her when she blamed herself for the accident. I was even supportive for the vet when she had to deal with what turned out to be a DOA cat brought in by a tearful owner.

We got Arrow home with a referal to a surgical clinic for the morning, but not with a lot of hope, before I reached the end of my emotional rope. Doni was out of the room, and I hadn't put Arrow down yet. I sat down with her and had a good cry.

Until that dam broke, I hadn't really been aware of how backed up my grief was. I didn't see much chance that a close friend who relied on me for everything wouldn't have to be killed in the morning on my say. That hurt, and I selfishly took several minutes to wallow in the pain. I'd like to say I thought it would make the goodbye to follow easier, but there wasn't any kind of purposeful intent like that. I just hurt.

Early the next morning wasn't any easier. Arrow still wanted breakfast, and she had stumbled to the food bowl. Watching her try to walk was misery. She'd try to step forward onto the useless leg, it would crumple, and she'd fall on her face. Then she'd try again, and finally she got there, only to fail to figure out how to eat or drink from the dishes.

Later that morning, as we sat in a consult with the surgeon, we felt pretty dismal. When he mentioned amputation, I almost smacked my forehead. I carefully didn't look at Doni, whose face I could just imagine picturing her first personal pet being maimed, but hope surged in my heart. Of course, there was a rollercoaster of emotions left to experience. Doni had to be convinced, blood work had to done to make sure Arrow was likely to survive anesthesia, the procedure had to be completed successfully, she had to convalesce without infection or further injury. Further, was I grasping at comfort for myself or thinking of the best for my tiny charge?

The next morning, the blood work had come back positive, and I gave the order to proceed. Knowing she was cut open that afternoon, with the intent of making a part of her into medical waste, was a lot more distraction than I thought it would be. I didn't get much work done that day.

That afternoon, I got the call that she was conscious and enjoying some morphine derivative or another. My relief was palpable.

Arrow is home now, in many ways normal, but in some important ways, not so much. She still loves a good lap, but we have to be careful of her staples and the cone of shame. She's pooping in some new odd places, but I'm pretty sure that's caused by having to flex completely different muscles as she learns to get around on three legs. Bunny hopping for the litterbox, leaving a trail of poop pebbles, is funnier than it has any right to be.

And she still wants breakfast. Some things are just constant.

All of us have come out of this ordeal closer together. We were lucky. Lucky she's healthy for her age and could survive surgery where some cats would not. Lucky to find a good surgeon where we might have stumbled on a quack and not known in time. Lucky we have decent jobs to pay for the not inexpensive surgery where many families might not have had the wherewithal in today's economy.

Years ago, we accepted something precious into our care, a tiny life that would depend on us for everything it needs to continue, and depend on us to make the best decision when the chips were down. This week, I feel like we lived up to our responsibility. I feel good.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/10/something-precious.html.

If You're Not Part of the Solution

Ubisoft...

/facepalm

For those who don't know, Ubisoft has implemented a new DRM scheme that requires a continuous Internet connection in order to play their games. If you lose connection for whatever reason, the game stops working and any progress since your last save point is lost.

Yeah, you heard right. Single-player games running on your PC with no otherwise valid requirement for online features will shut down if you lose your connection to Ubisoft's servers via the Internet.

Does anyone at Ubisoft understand the word Internet is ancient Atlantean for "Thousands of Laggy Routers"? The ability to use software you've paid for honestly will be subject to loss of use because a key router gets overloaded with Torrent downloads, or any one of the myriad ways to lose connection.

And not because the connection is required for gameplay reasons. No. It's because Ubisoft is concerned with piracy.

OK yeah, I get that piracy is a problem, but this is absolutely not the way to solve it. All this does is increase the effective cost of Ubisoft games, not by monetary measure, but by Pain-in-the-Ass factor. By increasing the cost of their games, without doing anything to increase demand, the quantity demanded by the market will necessarily decrease.

Yes, I've heard Ubisoft's arguments that the online features provided will benefit players. I call Bull. These are very small bonuses, like not requiring discs to install, or the ability to install to multiple PCs, or to save progress on the Internet to resume play on a different PC. These features were already available in the marketplace for little to no cost.

The best part? I predict that this won't reduce the number of pirated copies of the game played by even one. Hacked versions of their games without the DRM code will appear shortly. In fact, this will likely drive up instances of piracy of their games.

Let me be perfectly clear here. I absolutely do not condone software piracy. Being mad at Ubisoft does not justify theft.

That said, people who would not ordinarily have stolen this game will end up stealing it just to play a hacked version that doesn't stop working for stupid reasons. They'll be wrong for doing it, but that doesn't make Ubisoft right. Neither party is being part of the solution.

One of Murphy's Laws of Combat applies here. Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you won't be able to get out. You cannot possibly close every avenue of exploit utilized by software pirates without overburdening legitimate users of your product. This is simply fact, and no amount of overreaction by a clueless studio will change it.

I'm not angry at Ubisoft. There's plenty of impotent rage being directed at Ubisoft right now, so even if I were so inclined, my efforts are unnecessary. No, my feelings regarding Ubisoft are arguably worse from their point of view.

I pity them. They're being stupid and hurting themselves. That's worth my pity. But I don't pity them enough to buy their games with their ill-conceived DRM scheme. I'm not going to steal their games, but I'll do something worse.

I'm not going to play them.

It's a simple economic decision. The cost is too high. So many games get released every year that I don't have time to play them all. If one of them has an inordinately high cost to me, there's always the next by a studio that's not doing something dumb to arbitrarily drive up the cost of their games.

Each person who makes a similar decision is one more voice that won't be talking about Ubisoft's games, won't be telling friends, won't be making recommendations to random strangers in GameStop. That silence is a deathknell to a game studio.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-youre-not-part-of-solution.html.

Focus

Focus. It's the point of convergence of rays of light. It's the concentration of attention. It's the active element in a user interface. It's the key word or phrase of a sentence. It's the clarity of an image.

It's about emphasis at a single point.

Interestingly, at least to me, it's not only tonight's topic, but it's ultimately the reason for tonight's topic.

The plan for the Dynamo Dave blog following the January Challenge was to relax the posting rate, while continuing to write every day. Each day's writing wouldn't necessarily be for public consumption, though ultimately the goal was to use much of it for future blogs as I work on my skills as an essayist.

I figured that by the end of the first week, I'd have enough words about a single topic to assemble most of a post. Maybe I should have thought that through a little more.

Let's take a peek in my pocket notebook. Therein, I've scribbled several ideas for blog posts with a bit of brainstorm for each plus some research directions to develop more.

Here's the list of new topics since the end of the challenge:

• Gaming & the Law
• Magical Jargon
• Word Hacking
• Are We All Playing the Same Game?
• Group Identity
• A Culture's Psychology Through the Lense of Its Vocabulary
• The Internet Is People!
• Commandments of Game Development
• Racism in Game Settings
• Game Industry Weaknesses: Onboarding and Retention

OK, nice list, but with a little bit of work on each, I hit the weekend with not nearly the work into any one of them that I would have liked. Not that I'm really upset about it. I assumed I would have had more trouble with doing anything at all, even with a month of building a habit of daily writing, which turns out not to be the case. Or maybe I'd have trouble having a topic for every week, given that topics were sometimes a struggle during the Challenge. No, I'll take this problem any day. If I can do justice to even half of these, I'll have some solid essays done.

Still, there's a lesson here. Most of my life, I've struggled with focus. In my first attempt at college, I changed majors like I changed socks. As a result, after six years of full and part time study, I ran out of money and burned out on school without a degree. I had a lot of what academic planners call breadth, but not enough depth.

I rarely finish personal projects. At any given point in time, there are about five to seven projects in various degrees of disarray scattered about my apartment. More often than finishing one, I'll decide one has gone too long without attention, and I'll pack it up with notes about where I left off.

I've switched career fields a few times now, from military to manufacturing to technical analyst to programming. Fortunately, I think I've finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. Game development has been the most fulfilling thing I've done with my life. I make my living as a game programmer, but the supplementary pursuit of topics in game design, testing, production, game studies, and community building are endlessly fascinating.

It took me a long time to reach this point, just like it takes me a long time to complete a personal project, because my customary lack of focus spreads my effort thinly across a wide field. But that thin spread builds up over time, and now the very complex personal project of *me* seems to be coming along nicely.

I am, like my blog, a work in progress.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/02/focus.html.

January Challenge #31: Flawless Victory

So what do you know? I did it. A blog post every day for the month of January. I'm pretty happy with the results, 31 fairly meaty posts, mostly of decent essay length. Only #23 was super short, but I couldn't resist the gag, and when it was done, it was done.

Observations

Writing an essay for public consumption every day is not easy. When I put together the two separate exercises of write daily and write for public consumption, I didn't really think about what that would entail. I was worn out creatively after each post, and there wasn't much time or inclination left for other creative pursuits.

Freeform essay writing is easier and more fun than structured technical writing. When I tried putting together the skeleton of a post and then working on each section individually, the results didn't seem as good as when I just started blathering and hit Post when it felt done. Some of that was time pressure. Building the skeleton takes time, and while it helps in the long run to make the work easier to organize, the daily 2-3 hours I gave this task wasn't sufficient to see the payback in time saved.

Writing actually did come easier each day. As promised by many of the writing gurus, the habit builds on itself. Topics came more easily as well. Early in the month, I sat down to the keyboard a few times and just stared dumbly at the monitor for a while. By the end, I didn't need to cop-out with a post about Writer's Block, my last emergency topic, but some of the material for that wound up in the post about Thinking Outside the Box.

Making promises about what to write later was not a great idea. That was pressure I didn't need. Ideas in my journal grew easier without the deadline of wanting to get them posted this month.

Next Steps

First off, the posting rate gets to drop. I have some projects on the backburner that need some attention, including a demo game for Zynga. I don't intend to drop below a post a week.

I want to try again to integrate subskills from technical writing. Blogging once a week will allow more time for document planning and design, and the effort invested in working up a skeleton for each post will have time to pay off.

I have a few ideas for shorter bits to turn into regular side features. Book and game reviews, limited-scope game design thoughts, a more personalized weekly "status report", and assorted similar miscellany.

Thank you, everyone who took the time to drop a note. Your words of encouragement (and criticism) made this experiment easier and more fulfilling.

Thank you, everyone who took the time to read one or more of my idiot ramblings, whether you took the time to comment or not. I wasn't writing for you; I was writing for me. But knowing that you were out there reading my words drove me to make my thoughts as cogent as possible.

Watch this space.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-31-flawless-victory.html.

January Challenge #13: Internet Resources

The Internet is overflowing with useful info for game developers, useful info for everyone else, and info that's useful to no one. Today, I'm sharing some sites I've stumbled across that you might find useful.

Obligatory disclaimer: Unless I mention it specifically below, I do not endorse any products or services offered on these sites.

Advocacy

To roleplayers from the 1980s, it's old news when some religious or political leader tries to pin the world's woes on gaming and gamers. To younger folks, sometimes it's a little surprising. Either way, it can be challenging to marshal a moderate response. Sites like these aggregate relevant news and provide tips for holding your own in a debate on the merits of gaming.

Game Politics
Video Game Voters Network
Commitee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa) - This site focuses on pen & paper roleplaying games, but the info provided is no less useful in the defense of video games.

Free Stuff

Looking for code libraries, graphics, audio, development tools, emulators, or just about anything else? Looks at these sites. Take note: A lot of these goodies are not in the public domain. There are actually limits to your license to use them. Some are freely usable in any non-commercial project but require a license fee for commercial use. Other may require only attribution. Still others have a viral license that requires that a project that incorporates them be release under the same license. Do your homework first!

thefreecountry.com
www.freeprogrammingresources.com
Allegro
Lua
Game Creation Resources
Blender - I can't get over how many professional 3D artists have never heard of Blender. Then they claim that if it's free, it must be crap. This is only my opinion, but... Blender is better than anything Autodesk makes. Don't believe me? That's fine, but see for yourself.

Organizations

If you're a professional, you owe it to yourself to check these out.

Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences
Entertainment Software Association
International Game Developers Association
Serious Game Institute
Project Horseshoe
gamedevmap - Not an organization itself, but this site will help you find them.

Conferences

Go, play, socialize, network, learn fun stuff, score swag.

DICE Summit
Game Design Expo
Game Developers Conference
Games Convention Online
Penny Arcade Expo

Jobs

In this economy, we need all the help we can get.

Game Career Guide
Game Jobs

All-In-One Sites

These sites cover so much territory, that they're impossible to categorize (even though I just did).

Gamasutra - Don't know about Gamasutra? Shame on you. Click. Now!
GameDev.net

That's all for tonight. Later this month, I'll give up URLs for some industry luminaries.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-13-internet-resources.html.

January Challenge #12: Mashups

Who doesn't love a good mashup? Discovering two otherwise familiar experiences combined in an unexpected way can be delightful. A sweet synergy makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It could be argued that the core concept of the mashup, putting two elements together in a new way, is the root of creativity. Our conceptual space is the sum of our experiences, and we can't discern with any accuracy where any new idea that springs into our head actually originated. Did we think a totally new thought, or did a combo of two things we've seen, one last week and the other twenty years ago, suddenly fit together in our consciousness?

"There's nothing new under the sun" is frequently interpreted at the macro level to dismiss a seemingly new phenomenon as something someone else did earlier (and better). I prefer to interpret the phrase at the micro level; when we break a new idea down far enough, it turns out to be constructed of existing atoms of experience.

Games are similarly made up of atoms, elements of design that combine to form the experiences that obsess us. More broadly than individual games, game genres are made up of established complexes of game atoms to create a recognizable type of game experience.

Examination of these established complexes, taking the time to deconstruct them into their atoms, enables us to consciously find compatibilities between genres that maybe haven't been joined before. A particularly good combination might form the basis for a new genre. MMORPGs are simply sandbox social RPGs, but they caught on as their own phenomenon. The next big revolutionary genre of gaming will probably be a similar mashup.

So let's try a couple.

A-Life Strategy. There are games that use Artificial Life concepts as development or programming tools that the player never need experience directly, and there are those that feature it as the core game. Conway's Life is the earliest example I'm aware of. A-Life games derive emergent behavior from the intersection of simple rules, frequently by use of genetic algorithms to select for successful combinations of attributes. A strategy game could make use of this in two ways simultaneously. The player uses an A-Life studio to specify success criteria, combine successful genomes, and introduce random change in order to improve friendly units between deployments. At the same time, initially random enemy units are selected for success, have their genomes combined, and mutated. The next generation of units then meet on the battlefield. Rinse & repeat. The beauty is that the genetic algorithms should slowly converge into enemy behaviors optimized to fight the player's style. Does the player tend to turtle? The enemy should eventually develop hard-hitting fighters with little defense. The advanced player may adopt a given tactic for several rounds to encourage the evolution of behaviors that can be exploited with a change of tactics. Like in Spore, the enemies and friendlies that the player evolves through play could then be shared with other players of the game.

Multiplayer Serious Sports Resource-Management. Serious games, an example of genre of purpose, have a goal other than strictly entertainment, usually to teach a skill or preach a position. In this mashup, the player takes on the role of the coach and/or owner of a sports team. The challenge is to manage salaries, training schedules, media exposure, team member egos, endorsements, contracts, and the like to produce a winning team. Winning is measured in many ways: winning games, maintaining popularity, keeping great players on the team, and all the other ways that sports teams are seen as winners in the real world. As a multiplayer game, teams are pitted against one another in games that the players may or may not be able to affect during play, at least directly. If the team members are fully developed AI NPCs, they might play out the game independently, while players perform actions more appropriate to their role, like yelling at referees, dealing with media spin, or just enjoying an emergent game experience like one might watch a game on TV. The multiplayer aspect also makes for interesting play in the form of bidding for contracts and competing for draft picks.

Try one yourself. Find a handy list of game genres, pick two or more, blend, and serve.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-12-mashups.html.

January Challenge #11: A Powerful Alchemy

I socialize mainly with other game developers, people who speak the common lingo of games; genres and 3D art and gameplay and revenue models and playstyles and and and...

So for the most part, when I refer to a game as casual, social, or viral, I have a reasonable expectation that the listener knows what I mean. The game industry is in its infancy, relative to comparable disciplines, but our jargon is coming along nicely, thank you.

It's easy to forget that not everyone has an easy referent to derive meaning from our funny little words.

Except in the case of casual games, social games, and viral games. The gaming press seems to have no idea what these words mean, so every time I see an article with one of these in the title, I know the actual topic is going to be a crap shoot.

Casual games are misinterpreted the least. That makes sense, given that they spent quite a bit of time in the headlines before social games and viral games made their combined splash. Casual games are typified more often by their contrast with video games as they are more generally understood. They require less commitment to play successfully. It's easy to get there from the word casual.

Casual games can be played for a few minutes as often as you like, whether killing time between tasks at work or each night before dinner. They don't require you to plan your level progression or study a strategy guide or drill your hand-eye coordination. Not that these activities aren't useful or won't lead to improved performance. But a casual game won't feel like it's punishing you for not engaging in them.

It's worth noting that in gaming, the word casual is heavily contextual. Though some would disagree vehemently, World of Warcraft is commonly described as “casual friendly.” You heard me. The intent of the statement is that it's possible to play intermittently for short periods of time, without grinding for elite gear or waiting around for 2 hours for a raid to get started, and still have a good time.

Soapbox
Sure, it's possible to play the game that way, but be aware that the common denizens of World of Warcraft will treat you like a second-class citizen for not having the best available gear for your level or not tolerating the mind-numbing boredom of getting a raid going. If you can find or make a group of casual players who like to play together, choosing gear for a cool look over uber stats, not sticking to over-analyzed optimal builds in order to play an interesting combination, and frequently having to fight green mobs at higher levels because of it but not really caring because less XP means experiencing more content before out-leveling it, treasure them.
/Soapbox

Social games are actually exactly what they sound like, a game which features social interaction with other humans. No matter how intuitive this sounds, it is the most frequently misused genre name in the industry. World of Warcraft is a social game, but you'll rarely hear it described as such. Mafia Wars is not, and neither are its gajillion skinned clones, but the gaming press persistently calls them social games.

And you can't just throw a chat client on your game and call it social. If the gameplay does not feature meaningful interaction with another human, then it's not a social game.

Traditional board games and card games are nearly all social games, and not just because you usually play them face to face with your opponent. Every action you take within these games affects efforts of your fellow players. That's what I mean by meaningful interaction. On the other hand, eight people each playing their own game of solitaire around the same table might be socializing while they do it, but they're not playing a social game.

Viral games are sort of a misnomer. Usually the game itself isn't viral, but the marketing efforts are. The term viral comes from epidemiology, referring to person-to-person spread, or cell-to-cell within a single organism. It thus has to due more with vector of transmission than with symptoms, that is more to do with marketing than with game design.

Viral marketing campaigns aim to encourage players to recruit their friends, who recruit their friends, who recruit their friends, etc. This is typically encouraged with in-game advantages and abilities that can only be earned by recruiting other players.

If an adoption rate significantly greater than the departure rate can be sustained, the player base expands extremely rapidly. Of course, much like a good restaurant might lose its charm and quality of food or service in the face of extreme popularity due to scaling problems, an otherwise good game might lose its appeal as the servers bog down with the load, or the enemy spawn rate can't keep up, or any of the woes of overcrowding become more annoying. These things increase the departure rate, which will directly decrease the adoption rate, and both will negatively impact the growth rate. The game has hit its peak and will steadily decline into obscurity.

That's OK with the typical viral game studio. They're already onto the next five or six games. A demonstrably successful business model is to madly throw lightly developed games at the target demographic until something sticks and devote resources to further developing that game, but still keep throwing games at the target in the hopes that the next winner will be found before the last one dies.

Occasionally, the game itself goes viral by its own merit. I've heard marketeers say things like “Let's make that go viral!” Rubbish. In my opinion, there's only one thing you can do to spontaneously “go viral”: make an awesome game. Simple phrase, not so simple execution. Playing your game must make the player want share it with their friends. Seeing your game being played or trying it out must make the friends want it more than they want the money it costs, a lot more. You can't measure that sort of thing, except maybe in couch multiplayer high-fives per unit time.

Think about the things I've said about casual, social, and viral games. Now think about this: these descriptors are not mutually exclusive. Let that sink in a moment. There are a lot of very smart developers thinking hard about this very fact. A great deal of creative energy is working toward a game that can be played a few minutes at a time as often as you care to participate, features meaningful interaction with your fellow players and tools to facilitate various channels of communication with friends, has gameplay that encourages you to bring your friends along for the ride, and just might be totally awesome.

That's a powerful alchemy.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-11-powerful-alchemy.html.

January Challenge #10: Ethical Considerations

I had planned to make an entry about ethics in game development, so I've been reading and brainstorming the topic on and off for a week or so. What I've discovered is that no single post could ever do the topic justice. Depending how far you stretch the definition of the word Ethics, and the word has seen some serious stretching, the topic is HUGE.

I'll probably make some more focused entries on the subject later in the month. Today, I'm running down a partial list of the areas of ethical concern in game development, with a few words about each. I won't try to get any depth on any of it, just a view from 50,000 feet.

Early in the process of making a new game, even choosing your target audience is potentially an area of concern. There may be a conflict between what demographic your marketeers are selling to and the age-appropriateness of the content envisioned by the designers and artists. What rating are you going to aim for? Will you choose to push the boundaries of your target rating? Will you sacrifice your artistic vision to make your game a better fit for the rating?

What will your revenue model be? If you're going to experiment with micropay, where do you draw the line between driving legitimate traffic to the company store and predatory marketing tactics? Are you determined to see that players get good value for their money, or will you resort to whatever it takes to get their cash?

Will your game collect personal information about players? If you have their credit card on file for subscription or micropay, there are legal requirements to both collect and protect this information. How far will you go to keep this information out of the hands of potential stalkers and pedophiles?

How rigidly or loosely will you define harassment and griefing? What will the penalties be to the player who engages in these behaviors? What recourse will the victim of these activities have within your customer service system?

What recourse will players have when they feel they have been treated arbitrarily by your customer service department? Will this recourse be handled within customer service or from outside the department?

How will you handle credits to the team? Egos and careers are at stake here. I've spoken to an industry professional who was left out of the credits after working for 18 months on a project, but an admin assistant at the publisher that no one at the studio has ever met, and probably did zip-nada, made the cut.

Will you pursue the latest psychological research into engaging gameplay, engaging to the point of addictive? What about using your game to express an opinion, maybe an opinion that you think is important, but parents might object to?

Law enforcement rears its head from time to time. How would you handle a subpoena to release a player's private information? From a foreign government? That is known to engage in political oppression?

Where do you draw the line between homage and derivative? Willingness on the part of the IP holder to sue is just part of the equation. Some IP holders will sue over non-enforceable similarities. Some IP holders are happy to see very derivative homages in other media.

How about production values? Are you knowingly creating shovelware to get boxes onto the shelf? Do any of your managers hide problems from test to make a milestone date and end up shipping a shoddy product?

Are you out to make a difference or make a buck? Are they mutually exclusive? Will you tackle issues of gender or minorities head on in your game, or find a way to whitewash them?

I've drawn from the top page of my notes on the topic to make this post. I've barely scratched the surface of the relevant books and articles I've found. There's a lot to say on the topic, and I don't know how much of it I'm up to. Watch this space, and maybe we'll find out.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-10-ethical.html.

January Challenge #9: Tic Tac Toe

I kicked a co-worker's ass at Tic Tac Toe this week. Until he threw four orthogonal lines on the whiteboard while waiting for a program to install, I wasn't aware that any adults still play the game with any seriousness.

It didn't go well for him at all. After a few rounds of making him choose which of two winning plays to block, I admitted that I had over-analyzed the game long ago when I wrote a Tic Tac Toe AI that could consistently win or tie unless you knew exactly how it would react to a given game state. It only predicted outcomes one move out, so by manipulating it, you could force it to choose which of two winning plays to block.

Tic Tac Toe is a great learning tool to understand game states. In theory, there are 9! (factorial) ways to place X's then O's onto the game board, but in reality, there are a lot fewer potential game state sequences. First thing, you can remove two thirds of them by realizing that there are only three meaningful opening moves: center, corner, and edge. In response to a center open, there are only two meaningful second moves: edge and corner. And in response to an edge or corner open, there are five meaningful second moves: adjacent corner, non-adjacent corner, adjacent side, non-adjacent side, center.

After that, it's harder to get away with that kind of abstraction, so we're down to 7!*(2+2*5) possibilities. Right? Wrong. Most of these lead to wins before all the tokens can be placed. For example: X upper-left, O center, X lower-right, O upper-right, X lower-left. X wins on its next move, barring catastrophic aneurysm or some other act of god.

Most games descend into reactive play by one or both players by the fourth move and will end in a tie, assuming basic competence on the part of both players. This is why most people lose interest in the game by late childhood. It has two possible avenues to rekindle interest, as a teaching/learning tool to master the concept of game state, or as an exercise in manipulating your opponent.

As I mentioned above, the only way to beat the Tic Tac Toe AI was to know how it would play. The same can be applied to human opponents. I guessed that my co-worker would employ the common wisdom of preferring the center and then the corners, so I made my moves accordingly and won. I then guessed that he would learn from his mistake and alter his approach, and I won again.

In this, Tic Tac Toe shares some characteristics with Rock Paper Scissors, which has a serious following with world championships. I kid you not. In the abstract, RPS is about random choices which should result in even odds of win, lose, or tie. Not so much. It's about reading your opponent, and manipulating them as they try to read you.

Getting seriously stomped at a strategic game can be a valuable learning experience, especially an extremely simple one where you can almost instantly grasp the entire game state, but the fun goes away pretty fast, so I didn't wait long to explain to my co-worker what I was doing. Much like learning how you were fooled by stage magic, the fun was quickly restored. Not a game developer, he might not derive any professional usefulness from the experience, but I hope he learned enough to clobber another co-worker at Tic Tac Toe somewhere down the road.

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-9-tic-tac-toe.html.

January Challenge #8: Burbs

Last year, casual games were all the buzz. Everyone was talking about getting into the casual market. Casual this, casual that.

Now casual is last year's news.

Social games are the new casual games. Social this, social that.

Except, upon examination, there's not a lot of social to be found in the social games. They are, for the most part, single-player games with a few features to aid viral marketing. They mostly live on social network sites, but that doesn't make them social any more than Darksiders is a retail chain game because I bought it at Game Stop.

So how do you make an actual social game? I've been thinking about that for a bit. What is a social game? By definition, it needs to involve more than one player, or there's no social. Duh. They also seem to be an outgrowth of casual games, that is, not aimed at the hardcore gamers. Play for a few minutes, that was fun, done now. Importantly, I think there needs to be meaningful interaction between players of some sort. One-on-one basketball is a real world social game. Two people shooting hoops on opposite baskets on the same court is social, but not much of a game.

Multiplayer. Casual. Meaningful interaction. Doesn't sound too hard until you start thinking about how to be casual and still have meaningful interaction. Are we still casual if we have to arrange a time in advance to play online? Maybe for two or three or even four people, but how about twenty? Forty? Somewhere in there, it stops being casual and turns into planning a WoW raid.

So let me toss one more descriptor into the mix: asynchronous.

Most if not all social games live on social networking sites, such as Facebook. Facebook is an asynchronous social platform. It allows users to interact at different times, spread out as they are across the global village. It's an amazingly successful model, so why not build on that idea? What kind of game can be created to allow players to interact meaningfully within the context of the game and yet not need to be playing at the same time?

To serve as an example, I present to you Burbs. Think of it as collaborative SimCity. Each player takes control of a neighborhood, zone, borough, suburb (see what I did there), or whatever within a larger municipal entity. Players make decisions about how their burb is developed, such as zoning and density, public works, schools, markets, police funding, community support, etc... These decisions directly and immediately affect primary metrics concerning their burb's pollution, happiness, and crime rate.

The meaningful interaction comes when other players are making their decisions. A given burb can be connected to other burbs in a number of different ways. The most intuitive, and most tightly bound together, is geographic connection. The two burbs are directly adjacent; citizens can freely walk from one burb to the next, and so can police, criminals, traffic, pollution, community organizations, etc...

So if you build a library, nearby burbs will also reap a somewhat reduced benefit from it. It works in reverse as well. If you make a bad decision that increases the crime in your burb, surrounding burbs will also suffer. Or it can be somewhat more complex. Building a police station will reduce crime in your burb but may drive criminals into neighboring burbs.

The game population could occupy a single massive game universe, a megapolis of gigantic proportions, or be split into smaller game worlds representing smaller cities, but aside from technical restrictions, this isn't really all that important, as the "map" of the city would be completely abstracted, allowing for any number of burbs to participate and potentially neighbor any other.

There are plenty of other ways for burbs to be connected. A burb zoned residential can be a bedroom community for burb zoned industrial. If the player of the industrial burb does a good job of attracting good employers, the player of the residential burb will benefit from high housing demand. If the residential burb can't build housing fast enough, the industrial burb may suffer a labor shortage.

Two burbs can decide to link by rail, enabling easy transportation of people but not pollution or other largely stationary features. Two or more burbs can cooperate on a highway project, or jointly fund a homeless outreach program.

The players need to have a lot of interesting choices. Making some choices of more benefit to the individual player and other choices of more benefit to the larger community unless a threshold number of players participate introduces a flavor of the prisoner's dilemma. As in any good game design, optimal strategies should be avoided. Collaborative and competitive playstyles should be supported, and maybe even griefers can be made useful as a part of the landscape. The real world has crooked politicians and other malevolent actors, why not here?

So that's the multiplayer part. How about the asynchronous part?

When a player takes an action, there are immediate first order effects on their burb. A player has a limited number of actions that can be taken in a period of time. This number might be affected by development choices, such as building an extensive bureaucracy, or by buying action tokens at the micropay store. (Hey, social games are already doing some things right. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.)

Once every predefined period of time, say 24 hours (or 25 hours or some other odd time so that everyone around the world is periodically inconvenienced rather than players in one region all the time), the game will "tick". That is, all relevant game variables are accounted, all second order effects of player choices calculated, and a new game state created.

This allows all participants to spend their actions at their own pace throughout the day and deal with the impact of other player actions on the next. Rinse and repeat.

Obviously, there are a huge number of additional considerations to be made before this could form even the most rudimentary game design document, but I think the seeds of an actual social game have been sewn here. What do you think?

Originally posted at http://davedynamo.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-8-burbs.html.