QBlog

Jumping through Hoops

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

These Sainsbury's special offers get stranger and stranger:

Stretch gamification too much beyond its defining fiction and people are going to notice...

Old Printout

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Today, I had cause to take a photograph of a printout of MUD1 dated 12^th June, 1985. I think it's probably the oldest copy I have (I gave my oldest ones to Stanford University Library).

The .MAS extension is because it contains a bunch of files together. A program on the DEC-10 called SUBFIL was used to collect files and create one bug file with the sub-files in it; the same program could split them apart. It's a bit like a .ZIP file, except without the encryption (because if it were encrypted, you couldn't print it out). As for why we wanted to package files like this, well the main reason was because each individual file came with an overhead of 3 blocks (each block being half a kilobyte of 36-bit words). If you had lots of files, those blocks added up and you could easily exceed your storage limit. We therefore preferred to keep our files in .MAS format rather than as lots of smaller files. To this day, I still don't like creating programs that have separate files for each individual class or function or whatever.

Oh, the reason the job name is THIRD is because I printed out the MUD code itself and the MUDLIB library that interfaced it to the operating system. These were FIRST and SECOND. If I'd called the jobs MUD, the operators would have spotted what I was printing and told me off for wasting paper...

Non-Disclosure

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Here's a professional tip for those getting in the MMO consultancy business. If, after signing a non-disclosure agreement for a project, you feel that you wouldn't really have wanted to disclose it anyway, it's probably not worth taking the contract.

Not that anything recently has happened to trigger my mentioning this or anything...

Eliza

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Anatomy of a Star Wars: the Old Republic customer service ticket.

My Demographics

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

It's amazing how, merely by sniffing every search I do through Google and analysing everything I post about on Google+, such an uncannily accurate picture of me can be built up:

I dread to think what ads they might throw at me if they got the age right.

Ad Placement

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

This is the start of wikiHow's opening step in its explanation of how to overcome an MMORPG addiction:

Wow, some of these symptoms are more subtle than you might have thought.

Follows

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

This is the question for this week's Daybreak ~~lottery~~ competition:

The queen and the jack both follow the ("number") 10, as does the ace if it's high.

I think they're missing the word "immediately" before "follows" there.

1 Minute 32 Seconds of Fame

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

My elder daughter, Jenny, recently appeared on Channel 4's 4thought.tv programme, where she got to speak about her lack of faith in faith healing. Then they cut it down what she said to a minute and a half and added some creepy editing.

I'm sure I felt the same way that any father would feel upon seeing his daughter on TV like this: that ... dress ... is ... too ... short!

Overheard in Sainsbury's

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

He's bought a scratchcard and she's impatient to be going home.

Her: You won't win anything.
Him: Yes I will —look, £250!
Her: You did that deliberately...

Spare

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

You know how when you get a new item of clothing, sometimes they come with a spare button?

This is the spare button that came with a jumper my wife got at Christmas:

That's going to come in handy.

Tautology

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

From today's Observer:

So in other words: although he's agnostic, Attenborough is agnostic.

M25 Driving

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

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.

Sound System

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

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...

Full Tank

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

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...

Busy People

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

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.