(Ln(x))³

The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.

7:00pm on Saturday, 28th January, 2012:

M25 Driving

Anecdote

I've just got back from Brighton, where I went today so my daughter could look round Brighton University's Pharmacy department. The trip back took about two hours, which is roughly how long it's supposed to take if you stick to the speed limit.

Contrast this with my trip back from Cardiff yesterday. It took me 4 hours to get to Cardiff, but 5½ hours to get back. This was due to the section of the M25 between Heathrow (M4) and South Mimms (A1), which entirely accounted for the 90-minute delay. Although it did have some roadworks, it was still three lanes wide; the problem was what I believe is officially termed "sheer weight of traffic".

The M25 may be one road, but the driving experience is different depending on which direction you're going at which time on which day. If I find myself near Heathrow on a Friday at 5pm again, I'll drive 40 miles further and head anti-clockwise rather than go clockwise and sit in a lien of traffic that moves barely faster than I can walk.

8:20pm on Friday, 27th January, 2012:

Sound System

Miscellaneous

It's years since I smelled the smell of a burned-out amplifier, but I did today. I'm at the Preservation of Complex Objects (POCOS) conference in Cardiff, and the amp burned out while they were trying to attach it to Ian Livingstone's laptop.

As an accidental metaphor, this is pretty good. What Ian was saying was more important than established views of games and society are able to cope with. He gave a talk mainly about his own history in the UK games industry, but in doing so he described the history of the UK games industry as a whole and much about its imminent future, too. It was fascinating stuff — the kind of thing that would make an excellent TV documentary. From his perspective, it was just anecdotes and predictions, but from the perspective of preserving games and their culture for future generations it was prime source material.

This is a much higher-calibre conference than I was expecting. There are maybe 40 or 50 people here, but on the whole they're surprisingly high-powered. There are people from major libraries and national collections as well as from some of the better UK games-teaching universities and a few from industry. There were some from overseas, too. Things may actually get done as a result of this.

I'd tell you what my own talk was about but I'll just put the slides up on my web site some time instead, it's lazier...

7:41am on Thursday, 26th January, 2012:

Full Tank

Anecdote

Because I'm driving to Cardiff later today, I thought perhaps I ought to put some fuel in the car. I was intending to go to Asda near the train station (where the petrol is as cheap as the customers), but naturally didn't remember this until the moment after I had committed to turn the car in a direction that took me away from Asda. No matter, though, because there's another petrol station I pass on the way home.

Well, I stopped there and decided to pay at the pump rather than walk inside the shop where an alarm was going off. I put in my charge card, pressed all the right buttons and it told me I was clear to pay for £59 of fuel. As it happened, I managed to get £59.13 out of it:

The thing is, that wasn't enough to fill my tank. This is the first occasion I've encountered in which the limiting factor on how much fuel I can put in my tank is not the capacity of the tank but the level of suspicion of the petrol station. My tank was nearly full, but it wasn't actually full.

Damn put petrol is expensive these days...

11:29pm on Wednesday, 25th January, 2012:

Busy People

Anecdote

I'm sitting on a train to London as I type this, as tonight I'm giving a short presentation then sitting on a panel about games at the London Business School. I'm hoping I can catch a train back before 10:30, because that's when they magically change into buses so that the rail line can be worked on overnight in an ongoing effort aimed at fooling foreign visitors to the Olympics in the summer into thinking that all the UK's railway services are fast and modern.

After my lecture tomorrow, I'm driving to Cardiff where I'm attending a conference on Friday. After the conference finishes, I'll be driving back.

Saturday is when I drive my younger daughter to Brighton for a visit-cum-interview that's part of her quest to go to university next year. It's also when my elder daughter will be arriving for a weekend at home before she heads back to the over-priced accommodation she lives in in Bristol (over-priced as in you could get a whole house round here for the price of the small room she occupies).

This means I shan't be able to hook up with Jesse Schell, who's in the UK right now and with whom I had been hoping to hook up. (Er, I guess to be truly pedantic that should be "up with whom I had been hoping to hook"), It also means an end to my nascent career as guild operations healer in Star Wars: the Old Republic.

Oh well. I suppose it's better to be busy than not, although in truth I'd prefer not to be busy but to be paid as if I were busy.

Urr, the person who just got on at Witham and sat in front of me stinks of cigarette smoke.

4:19pm on Tuesday, 24th January, 2012:

Republic versus Empire

Comment

In Star Wars: the Old Republic, the NPCs on the Republic side are fighting for the Republic because the Empire came and slaughtered their families, whereas the NPCs on the Empire side are fighting for the Empire because the Empire came and slaughtered their families.

4:15pm on Tuesday, 24th January, 2012:

With Hindsight

Anecdote

Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to paint myself into a corner such that I had to tell the "what is the motto of the French navy?" joke to a class of students, a quarter of whom were French.

8:38pm on Monday, 23rd January, 2012:

Old Business

Anecdote

I found a handful of my old business cards today. I don't know how old they are, but they have my email address as 76703.3042@compuserve.com . They're in pristine, good-as-new condition (unlike most of the cards I carry with me), the reason being that they're laminated. This gives them a really nice, thick feel but is quite unusual — I used to get complimented a lot about them back in the day. To be honest, though, this would have felt a lot better if I'd deliberately ordered them to be laminated instead of just ordering them and getting them back to find oh, they're laminated.

I used to joke that the reason I got them laminated was so people couldn't rip them up in front of my face while snarling menacingly. They're fairly hard-wearing as business cards go, not that this will save them when I bin them.

Hmm, I wonder if they recycle as paper or as plastic?

11:46am on Sunday, 22nd January, 2012:

Very Accommodating

Comment

My younger daughter applied for university this year (to study Pharmacy, if you must know). One of the universities on her list, the University of East Anglia, is making more of an effort than the others to try sell itself. This means that it's either: a slick, corporate machine; following a plan formed by some high-flying committee member who read an article on "consolidating the sale" in an in-flight magazine once; or desperate. As the Pharmacy course arrived in 2003 as a save-the-Chemistry-department wheeze and (probably as a total surprise) shot to the top of the UK's Pharmacy course rankings, I guess they don't want to risk its all going wrong so they're aiming for consolitating the sale.

Anyway, in line with this they sent my daughter a booklet about accommodation at the university. It's full of pictures such as this one, which is so good it appears twice:

Gosh, the floors are so clean you don't need to wear shoes! Except, in the second use of it they crop her feet off.

It also has maps of accommodation, of which this is an example (for the "Ensuite Premium 1800 rooms" — not "En Suite Premium 1,800 rooms", but let's evolve the written language):

It's like reading a cruise ship brochure.

Now the thing is, we could do this at Essex University too. In fact, for all I know we do do it. We built some pretty good new accommodation across the river about 6 or 7 years ago and there's more on the way with the new Knowledge Gateway (a business park being built in partnership with a house-building company that's also building the university and itself some houses).

What isn't obvious about Essex University's accommodation, however, is that it's (one could say racially) segregated. Some accommodation is reserved exclusively for overseas students. This means that students from China or India or Saudi Arabia or wherever come to the UK to study but find themselves living primarily with other people from China or India or Saudi Arabia or wherever. They don't pick up much English, because they speak their own languages the whole time except in lectures. I suspect that they don't participate as much in (non-ethnic) student societies either, because they have homes to go to after lectures rather than having to mooch around on campus.

Anyway, the social consequences of giving housing priority to overseas students aside, what this means is that Essex University's accommodation guide would be packed full of attractive rooms, many of which prospective students such as my daughter would never be offered. It doesn't matter that the University Quays is award-winning if you don't get to live there.

The reason for this segregation is entirely practical: the university is limited in the number of UK undergraduates it is allowed to have on its books and can recruit more than apply anyway. It is not limited in the number of overseas undergraduates it can have, therefore it tries to attract as many as possible. An overseas student who finds they will be spending their first year on campus and their second and third years living in whatever digs they manage to find in the rush at the end of their first year is less likely to choose Essex University than they would be if they were guaranteed accommodation for all three years.

I'm not sure how sustainable this is going to be once home students paying £9,000 a year in fees start arriving. If you're spending that kind of money, you'll want a better service than "live in the back bedroom of this 85-year-old near-blind Scottish widow with a short bed that has a mattress dented by the shape of someone who died in it" that I got when I was off campus in my second year as an undergraduate.

I'm also wondering just how well this kind of discrimination would stand up in court, too. I'm sure the lawyers have it covered, though (after all, we do have a Law department specialising in Human Rights).

4:00pm on Saturday, 21st January, 2012:

Game Talk

Miscellaneous

I like to talk about game design. Unfortunately, it's not something I get to do very often. Well, I do get to talk about it, as I lecture on the subject twice a week — I just don't get to discuss it very often. Even the two-hour discussion classes I have usually involve my talking to the students rather than having any meaningful dialogue with them. There are students there with whom I could have a good discussion, but they would rather not speak than look bad in front of their peers (note: saying anything when a lecturer asks a question of the whole class is considered the primary definition of making you look bad). One-on-one we might get somewhere, but it never is one-on-one.

This means that when I do get to have a conversation about games, it's something of a treat. I envy my colleagues at places such as Brunel, where they can not only discuss games with motivated and non-embarrassed students but there are members of staff with similar interests too. It must be marvellous! It's what a university should be like.

This week, however, I have had two good conversations about game design, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

The first was with a prospective student, whom I was interviewing to see if he was the kind of person we wanted to come to Essex. He was all potential, but had already thought more about games than 75% of my third-years. He was real fire-to-be-kindled rather than vessel-to-be-filled stuff. I said things, he got what I was saying and asked something back in return that showed he'd understood what I'd said and understood the consequences. In my view, the interview wasn't so much a question of my finding out whether he was right for Essex as his finding out whether Essex was right for him. It probably wasn't, but then again there isn't really anywhere in the UK at undergraduate level that would be right. The best he can hope for is that we give him a grounding so that he can go on to do a postgraduate degree where he can flourish.

The other interesting conversation I had this week was today with an old friend, Eric Goldberg. As Eric has been involved with games for as long as I have and has been thinking about them for as long, too, we don't have to waste time educating each other in our chats — we can go right to the cutting edge straight away. I love our discussions, which is why I'm willing to go into London on a Saturday just to have one. I think Eric enjoys them too, given that he dragged himself off his sickbed to see me (food poisoning). Following one part of the conversation in which he played devil's advocate, I managed to verbalise a way of thinking about player type dynamics I'd not really latched onto before, to do with how they relate to different concepts of fairness and thence different reactions to free-to-play business models. I wish we could have talked for longer but Eric started to die again so we had to stop after only 2 hours.

Ah, what it must be like to be able to have such discussions every day.

Sigh...

Aside: I'm typing this in on my new mobile phone on the train home and now, for the first time in my life, I have motion sickness on a train.

2:28pm on Friday, 20th January, 2012:

CC

Anecdote

One of the non-design things I've observed while playing Star Wars: the Old Republic is the startling number of its players who are new to MMOs. On at least half of the occasions I've seen the term CC used in a flashpoint (SW:TOR's version of dungeon instances), someone has asked what CC means. If you've played MMOs before, you know it means "crowd control", but if you haven't, well, why would you know that?

I see it most in mid-game flashpoints such as Mandalorian Raiders, which have some encounters that are quite tough without CC. This is the sort of level range at which people who haven't come across the term before will first do so. I even spotted it when I was zooming through content over Christmas, which would indicate that the people who were asking what it meant had good experience of RPGs (or they wouldn't have got that far that quickly), they just didn't have experience of MMORPGs.

Other things that experienced MMO players might do, such as abbreviating the names of instances ("MR" instead of "Mandalorian Raiders", say) just isn't happening yet. I'm seeing calls such as "LFG Esselles" picking up, but there's still a majority of less formal approaches to looking for group ("anyone up for Esselles?", "Esselles, anyone?"). All players seem to have some idea of what a healer does and why one might be necessary, but not all appear to know what a tank does (or is).

I didn't see this when I played Rift. I therefore deduce that SW:TOR has brought new players to MMOs in a way that Rift didn't. That's good news, because having more MMO players in the world is intrinsically a good thing. However, it's bad news for the developers of later MMOs, as people tend to judge future MMOs by the one they first got into. Making something sufficiently like SW:TOR to satisfy those who "grew up" playing it might be a tall order unless you have money to burn.

4:26pm on Thursday, 19th January, 2012:

Coincidence

Anecdote

Unlike many people of my acquaintance, when the Costa Concordia ran aground off the coat of the Italian island of Giglio, I actually knew where Giglio was (just south of Elba). The reason I knew was, for a change, nothing to do with games: it was because the school play when I was 10/11 was The Rose and the Ring, in which I played the leading man, Prince Giglio. Consequently, many years later when I saw the name on a map, it stuck.

I wouldn't say that it was a coincidence that a cruise liner ran aground on an island with the same name as a character I played in a play 40 years ago. However, today I came across this piece in the university's official mouthpiece, Wyvern:

That does make it a coincidence.

Our version wasn't a musical one, though, thank goodness...

4:45pm on Wednesday, 18th January, 2012:

Concatenation

Anecdote

I saw this van in the Sainsbury's car park this morning:

I guess they put the words web and light together for that. Maybe they illuminate rooms over the Internet or something. Unfortunately, the same word could be created by combining the words we and blight. This makes it sound as if using their lighting forever devalues your house.

OK, so it's not in the same league as pen island but still...

3:03pm on Tuesday, 17th January, 2012:

Untalking the Talk

Anecdote

I'm often asked to give presentations at events, and on many occasions I accept. I always ask them what they want me to talk about, and we negotiate until we find something that works for both of us.

The single worst thing that people say when I ask what they want me to talk about is "whatever you like". I tell them that this means I'll be giving them a talk about 1869 maps of Europe or pagodas and they say "whatever you like that's games-related". This is where I enthuse about my collection of antique playing cards. Finally, they'll tell me to talk about "whatever you think the audience will like".

The reason I don't like this open-ended approach is because I thereupon put together a talk on some subject that I think the audience will like, only for the organiser to say they don't like it for some reason. It happens every time.

Anyway, we went through this rigmarole for an event at London Business School I'm talking at next week. I was given a completely open agenda with the proviso that the audience should like it. I wrote something I thought I'd like. The organiser told me he thought they'd like a cut-down version of my gamification talk from last year instead.

Really? So why didn't he tell me that when I asked what he wanted me to talk about? Why did I have to write a completely different talk before he'd tell me?

So, rather than waste a good talk, here it is. It's only a handful of slides because it was for a 15-minute time slot.

2:02pm on Monday, 16th January, 2012:

Sunrise

Anecdote

I took this photo of a brilliant red sunrise at around 7:30 this morning:

As you can see, it's pretty impressive but it's not red. It's yellow. There was no yellow there when I took it, just red. I took several photos over the course of several minutes, but no matter what I did the red came out yellow.

Sunrises always look better in real life.

7:29pm on Sunday, 15th January, 2012:

British Made

Anecdote

I was at my mother's today for a late birthday meal. I'd taken the precaution of not having breakfast, knowing that she would prepare enough food for 10 people instead of the 5 of us present; however, anticipating this, she made enough for 15. I'm fit to burst.

Anyway, one of the things she pulled out to show my wife was the name tag I'd had in hospital when I was a baby. Back then, they made the tags out of little blocks of letters and threaded them onto a piece of elastic. She's kept them in a matchbox ever since:

These days, they wouldn't be allowed within three metres of a child because they'd be regarded as a choking hazard. Instead, they put bands round their wrists and ankles that have to be cut off, like when you go to a theme park. Not that this stopped my elder daughter from removing both of them when she was in hospital...

The matchbox says: "British Made", which I've always thought was a nice touch.

Latest entries.

Archived entries.

About this blog.

Copyright © 2012 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).