QBlog

Away!

I'm away tomorrow for a lightning trip to Visby in Sweden, where I'm giving a talk on computer games and human rights. Well, I am if I can ever check in — the BA web site has been giving me this continually for the past hour:

I'm looking forward to this, for obvious reasons.

Back on Friday!

The THE

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by the Times Higher Education magazine regarding my formally becoming an online games legend (I did mention I was becoming an online games legend, didn't I?). Last night, I woke up at 4:45am and couldn't get back to sleep, but in the sugsequent hour and 20 minutes until my wife's alarm went off I did remember that I ought to check this week's THE to see if I was mentioned.

I was indeed. Here's the piece:

Ordinarily, I would have been worried about making the last statement reported there, on the grounds that if you look like you're angling for an honour then you're regarded by those in whose gift such awards reside as an unsuitable candidate. However, as there is zero chance of my getting any kind of honour anyway, I didn't feel I was losing anything by ranting about it at the poor reporter. If it marginally impinges on the consciousness of someone who in twenty years will be in a position to recognise those who have shaped the computer games industry, it will have done its job.

As for which industry figure does best stand a chance of being elevated to the House of Lords two decades hence, my money is on Ian Livingstone. Unlike me, he actually deserves it.

Telubuxiao

I wonder what language this was translated from English into before being translated back into English?

Telubuxiao after leaving the University of Essex, to work to maintain MUD1 transferred to Richard Bartle, Battle MUD using Telubuxiao developed special language — "MUDDL" continue to improve the game, he the number of rooms increased to 400, to further improve the database and chat system, an increase of more tasks, and every player produced a scoring procedure.

I'm guessing Mandarin Chinese, given the way Trubshaw has turned into Telubuxiao (which, thanks to the removal of tonal marks on the syllables can happily be translated as "special cranium not small" — and at least a hundred other possibilities).

Making a Meal of it

Having decided to go out for lunch to celebrate our younger daughter's exam results, we thought it would be nice to try somewhere new. I looked in the Yellow Pages and spotted this piece of old-fashioned search-engine optimisation:

The pub is The Cricketers, but those spurious leading As get it the prized first slot in the listings... I found another approach in the Thompson Local directory:

The room may be green, but its owners aren't — doubling their exposure by a simple juggling of the definite article.

Neither directory had much in it, so my wife spent an hour and a half on the Internet seeking alternatives instead. She didn't find anything she liked the look of there, either, at least not that wasn't already booked up. Worse, she hits search engines so hard that I'll be seeing restaurant ads on every page I visit for the next three days (which is how long I was looking at kettle ads following her last piece of research).

Oh well, Frankie & Benny's it is, then.

Destiny

Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, was a famous Soviet spy. He happened to be gay.

Quentin Crisp, writer and raconteur, was a famous homosexual. He happened to be gay, too.

That's why this headline in today's Guardian should have come as no surprise to anyone:

Screens Shot

Damned programs that don't let you capture the screen...

Earlier, I was playing the Britannia campaign of Medieval II: Total War and one of the randomly-generated rebels characters was called Captain Kirk. I took a screenshot, killed the guy, then opened up my graphics program to crop the image to a bloggable size. Except, it was a completely blank screen.

I knew there were programs that don't respond well to screen shots on XP; movie-style ones were particularly annoying in this regard. However, I didn't know there were any in Windows 7. If I did, I might have looked at the image before killing the guy, and taken a photograph of the screen when it turned out to be all black.

Still, I should have expected some annoyances from a game that has a victory condition for the English faction of controlling 46 provinces and eliminating the Welsh faction when there are only 46 provinces in total so you have to eliminate all other factions anyway, not just the Welsh.

Where I Work #19

Continuing the occasional series...

At the bottom of the rack of shelves to my left is the lower computer games shelf. Here's what it looks like:

This is where I keep all my games that are so old they didn't come in DVD cases but actual cardbard boxes. Many of them have floppies in instead of CDs. I did used to have a lot more such games, but I sold them to Cash Converters in about 2002. I kept the ones that were my favourites, or that had something else going for them (such as that Vikings: Fields of Conquest game that I bought at GenCon once which was real time almost literally — things happened so slowly it was hard to tell if anything was happening at all). This is why you'll find things there such as the Baldur's Gate games, Ultima IV (plus V and VI), Gangsters, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, The Patrician and Master of Orion and Master of Orion II, which was flawed by playable if you didn't exploit those flaws) (unlike Master of Orion II, which might as well have been a spreadsheet). The box on the floor in front of the shelf belongs to Darklands; it's open because I started playing a game while on holiday and wanted to check the saints list.

Some of the games I kept rather than sold are computer implementations of board games: Diplomacy, Kingmaker and Advanced Civilisation. The Diplomacy one has laughable artificial intelligence, the Kingmaker one cheats and the Advanced Civilisation has an AI so xenophobic that alliances are next to impossible and the only way you win is by luck.

I doubt many of these games would run on my PC nowadays; I know that the version of Daggerfall I bought on eBay doesn't, but I can hope. Some day, someone will write a workable Windows 95 emulator...

At the right end of the shelf are some boxes for mobile phones and things. There are also some old mobile phones, including a bricky-heavy analogue one that I'm hoping will be worth a fortune by the time I retire.

There's also a CAT5 ethernet cable down there in case I ever need to plug something into the router, plus a socket slab so I can run up to four things off the wall socket instead of one (I actually only use two of the sockets, though, one of which runs to another slab socket with four things plugged into it and the other of which runs to my uninterruptable power supply that stops my PC from dying when a kettle puts an end to our house's electricity or something).

With that, we finally reach the end of the wall to my left. Next time, we start with the wall facing me. I bet you can hardly wait...

I Give Up

It used to be that I'd read every paper about virtual worlds because I'd written them.

Then, other people started writing on the subject. I eagerly tracked down and read every single piece of academic work I could find. Even in the late 1990s, it was possible to do this: a newcomer to the field could sit down for three or four weeks and read pretty well every major piece of work on the topic.

Well, in English, anyway — I had some foreign-language papers too but I couldn't make head nor tail of those.

Books started to come out as well. I bought and read each and every one of them that I could find. Every couple of months, I would spend a few hours in the largest London bookshops looking through the indexes of anything promising, to see if there was a mention of MUDs, MOOs or (sometimes) me.

By the time my own book came out in 2003, though, things were starting to change. I could keep up with the books, but I had a backlog of papers starting to build up, mainly because of a few lengthy MA and PhD theses that took ages to read.

Shortly after, I started to discover areas of research that, worryingly, I hadn't come across before — whole seams of it, waiting to be mined. The reason I hadn't heard of it earlier was because the researchers involved hadn't heard about what the rest of academia was doing either. They had their own names for what at the time we were calling "virtual worlds", and were miffed that no-one would adopt theirs.

Five or so years ago, the floodgates started to open. Partly because academics were writing more papers, but mainly because Second Life and World of Warcraft garnered so much attention, papers started to appear faster than I could read them. Some areas, such as Serious Games, really rocketed. The quality of the papers went down, though; I was reading material that treated what we'd known for years as if it were a new discovery, or that made claims on flimsy evidence, or that had poor scholarship, or that misinterpreted facts, or that was just plain wrong. My pile of papers to read got higher and higher. I started to get a pile of books, too.

Still, I kept collecting every article on virtual worlds that I could find. If I couldn't read it right away, I might get time later. Often, I did get time later. The pile of "read papers waiting to be filed" I have next to me is about 35cm tall, whereas the one with unread papers waiting to be read is about 25cm tall. I keep a hard copy of everything because it's harder to lose. Also, because my collection started when hard copies were all there was, I'd have to scan everything I've already read to keep it in a consistent format.

I make an exception for theses, though. Some of those are hundreds of pages long — no way can I afford to print those off.

As of this morning, whenever I came across a bunch of papers, I would print them off and put them in my pile to read. Today, though, this arrived:

It's nothing out of the ordinary — it's Learning, Media and Technology vol. 35(2) — and it contains some papers that I do actually want to read and probably will. However, no fault of its own, it's the straw the broke the camel's back: I've lost the will to print off every single paper in it to add to my archive. Merely being about virtual worlds isn't enough of a reason to collect papers any more. I just can't keep up.

I'll try get hold of books still, but those are going digital these days. Twenty years from now, there'll be no need for someone to have collected them because they'll all have been scanned and searchable and, most probably, neglected. A couple of hundred years from now, historians will sit at a computer searching for articles to make whatever point they are trying to make; they won't know the good papers from the bad, and they won't necessarily care so long as what they find supports their argument.

Still, I wasn't ever collecting papers for posterity, I was collecting them to read. Now, I've finally had to recognise what's been obvious for some time: I don't have the time to read them, and a good deal of what's out there isn't worth reading anyway. I'll just have to be selective instead.

Besides, I've run out of shelf space in my office at the university.

Waiting a While Longer

In the mid-1990s, MUSE Ltd did some work for the games company Interplay. I was working on MUD2 with them and Roy Trubshaw was programming for Dragon Dice. Or maybe it was Spellfire. Anyway, we were on Interplay's stand at GenCon in 1995 or so when they were giving out promotional dragon dice. As a result, I have two promotional Dragonlord dice still in their packaging. They live in the top drawer of my bureau, which is hard to get into because it has a stack of books on top of it. There, they wait to be worth something.

Every once in a while, it occurs to me to see how much they sell for, in the hope that Dragon Dice's time will come again and they might rise in value above "worthless". Well, I've just taken a look on eBay and there's currently one for sale at $8.

So, they can stay in the drawer a while longer, then.

No, I'm not showing you a photograph of one — I just told you, that drawer is a pain to get into! It looks like the one on the left here...

Facing the Music

My younger daughter got her GCSE results today. She got 6 As and 5 A*s.

She also got a B in Music, which was the highlight of the bunch because she thought she'd utterly flunked it.

Bad Pun

Sometimes when I read the local paper, the headlines are so forced as to be distracting. I know sub-editors like to put puns in wherever possible, but the way they convolute the circumstances so as to dredge word-play out of them can be very irritating. Football matches that are lost when someone scores a penalty are invariably headlined "<someone> pays the penalty", for example.

National newspaper are not above this, but they occasionally have the added bite of a complete disassociation with reality. This was in today's Daily Mirror:

A guy gets eaten by a bear, and they make a pun on it? It KILLED him! Some poor family is mourning his loss, and the Mirror reports it with a light-hearted headline.

Write too many headlines and you start objectifying the news, I guess.

Verdict

Having now spent several weeks writing PHP and MySQL code, I'm now in a position to state the view I have formed regarding what they're like for programming.

That view is: bleah.

On-Air

So, I've just got off the phone from a live interview on the BBC World Service regarding the up-coming release of the latest version of Medal of Honour in the UK.

Actually, I finished my lunch first, so it was more like 15 minutes ago.

This release of MoH is controversial because it's set in Afghanistan. In single-player mode, you play a member of the NATO forces dealing with Taliban insurgents. In multi-player mode, well, someone has to play the insurgents. Given that this is an on-going war and real people are getting real killed in it, it's clearly in quite bad taste. The Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, was so outraged by this premise that he asked that shops ban it from their shelves.

I was in discussion with Conservative MP Patrick Mercer. It was only four minutes long, so neither of us got to make many points. The presenter spoke to me first, asking me to explain why it shouldn't be banned; I countered that he had it the wrong way round, and he should be explaining why it should be banned. My basic point was that yes, it's clearly distasteful, but there are plenty of other things that are distasteful (many people regard the war itself as distatseful, for example) and they don't get banned. Patrick Mercer was actually quite fair, I thought; he seemed disappointed that the game had been released featuring this option, but he wasn't calling for heads to roll. He mentioned that a boardgame 20 years ago about bomb disposal had been taken off the shelves for being in bad taste; I pointed out that two years ago The Hurt Locker won its director an Oscar for tackling the same subject in an ongoing conflict. I also tried to make it clear that many gamers are mature and intelligent individuals who could gain insights into the nature of conflict this way that they wouldn't have got if they only played as the Americans, although I don't think I succeeded in that regard as we ran out of time.

It was all a bit surreal, because I only received the email asking me if I could speak about an hour before they wanted me to speak. They were hoping to get me to go to the Chelmsford studio in that period, but as my wife had already started cooking lunch I wasn't going to put my life in danger by accepting.

I really ought to record these things so I can discover afterwards what exactly it was I said...

Places I'm not all that Fussed about Visiting #9

Continuing the occasional series...

Bali.

Yes, it's a preserved gem of Hindu culture secreted in an Islamic country, it's full of spectacular temples and fetching dancers, it has exotic wildlife and coral reefs; I don't feel any burning desire to go there, though.

Sure, if I happened to be in the vicinity I'd take a look. I'd probably like it, too — I'm just not so eager to see it that I'd fly for 16½ hours to get there. It seems to be defined by what it isn't (ie. the rest of Indonesia), rather than by what it is; this isn't generally a good sign. It's not the commercialisation that would bother me; rather, it's the lack of self-confidence and authenticity that arises from this kind of situation.

So yes, if I found myself attending a conference there or something I'd head off and have a look at the place and in all likelihood find what I saw there special and interesting. It's just not so special and interesting that I can be fussed to go out specifically to see it.

That said, 2,000,000 tourists a year disagree with me.

Changing Times

Something that regularly crops up in conversations my younger daughter seems to have with her friends is whether particular boys are gay or not.

It was much simpler when I was a teenager in 1970s East Yorkshire. You could tell if a boy was gay if either of the following was true:

He was beaten up for being gay.
He organised the beating up of someone for being gay.

Simpler, but not better...