mrfalcon

05:45 pm: My New Digs
I just got a new weblog on gameblogs.org. So I'l lbe posting all video-game related stuff at this new weblog, called Grown-Up Gamer. Just give me a couple of days to set everything up. I might go back to using this as a personal blog. Or I might not. I have a cold right now, so I won't be doing much of anything.

11:50 pm: 2 Tiny Games
One of the things I loved about playing Deus Ex: Invisible Wars was the ragdoll physics used to model the behavior of dead bodies. I admit, I took a perverse pleasure in throwing bodies across the room and watching them bounce realistically off of things and generally splay their limbs everywhere. And I'm not alone! The Dismount is a physics-based game engine, the comes with a game where you have to push an unconscious man down the stairs and through a short obstacle course. Hilarity ensues. It has other games, but I haven't downloaded them yet.

While I'm on the topic of tiny games, Sweaty Palms by Ian Bogost is a neat little widget that simulates the act of trying to hold hands on the first date. Its meant to illustrate how anticipation can be modeled in a game. Its not as fun as Dismount, but being fun isn't really the point. Its more just to demonstrate an alternative interface idea - the kind of thing that be built into a game. But I found it really interesting, so maybe you will too :)

09:17 pm: Gamegirl Advance Boing-Boings Herself
I remember a time when there was so little activity on Gamegirl Advance that I thought it would die completely. That was before the Rez-Trance Vibrator
.

Between the fanboys cat-calling her and the "feminists" (male and female) calling her a whore, I'm amazed there was any room for the sane people to point out how idiotic both aforementioned groups are being. Anyway, the comments are disabled now, which sucks because through all the fracas about the pictures, I seem to be the only one to notice how similar this is to that Star Trek:TNG episode with the addictive sex video game. I mean, come on people!

And then there were the totally inexplicable comments:

"these japanese people are so friggin horny! maybe hiroshima wasnt such a bad idea after all :P"

Um... yeah, totally.

I'm actually really suprised that some pictures of a girl in her panties could really stir up this much attention and controversy. Apparently, there is still a large portion of the Internet-using public that is unaware of the existence of hard-core pornography sites. Or, if you really just like panties, you can get that too.

But in all seriousness, I doff my hat to the intrepid Jane, for going the distance in bringing us two news stories: "Rez is a fun video game" and "Women don't need to be ashamed of masturbating"

12:13 am: Ode to my Liver
On a non-videogame related note, I went to have a liver biopsy today because I have crazy-high levels of liver enzymes. At least, I almost got a biopsy, but as the procedure started, my body basically freaked out, causing a chain of events that led my liver to take refuge in my ribcage. The doctor said he could go through the ribs but there was a small chance that he might punture and collapse my right lung. I politely declined. So I guess I get to go through the whole thing again. Yay.

I'm feeling relaxed in spite of that, mostly because my chronic fatigue specialist, Dr. Tompkins, finally got off her ass and sent in the notice to the government that says that yes, I am still sick and please keep sending money. So I don't have to worry about that for another 6 months. Seriously, the fact that I have to get a chunk of my liver taken out doesn't bother me at all, but the very thought of dealing with beuracrats fills me terror.

12:02 am: The Marketing Within
So I just finished Prince of Persia:The Warrior Within last night. Afterwards, I noticed that some movies had been unlocked in the extras section. "great", I thought, "it must be one of those Making-of-the-Game movies". No, actually they were... previews. Trailers and footage of develpers talking about the cool features in this new game that I just finished playing. What's that you say? There's a dual weapon combat system? I hadn't noticed. Oh look, there's actual game footage. Yeah, I remember doing that.

WTF?

For those who don't know, Warrior Within is the sequel to Prince of Persia:The Sands of Time. Sands of Time was a charming game about the titular Prince who gets thrust into perilous adventure with a antagonistic, and modestly dressed, Princess. Throughout their travails, they trade witty barbs and eventually grow to love each other. This is played out through fantastic dialog that can heard while you are playing, and actually ties in with the things you are doing. This relationship features some of the best character development I've ever seen in a game. Near the end, when she goes missing, I really felt the sense of loss and confusion, which the game helped along nicely. Oh yeah, the game. Wicked fun. Revolutionary.

But I guess sappy romance didn't sell enough copies. So they replaced the Princess with countless bimbos with HUGE fake breasts trying way too hard to be sexy and saying things like "pain is so close to pleasure". The witty dialog was replaced by such winning lines as "Die you bastard!". The mystical Arabian Nights setting has been replaced with an atmosphere undoubtedly inspired by The WWE Smackdown. Oh, and there's blood and gore now. Sands of Time had no blood because the monsters were actually made of sand. Kill a monster, it turns to sand (The game is actually recommended by the National Institute on Media and the Family). In Warrior Within, they are still made of sand, but the also have blood. Why? Well, because if they didn't, then they wouldn't bleed, silly. I have nothing against violence in videogames, but the blood in this game is just stupid. Oh, and the plot makes no sense, and the time travel elements have already been done better (and to death) in the Legacy of Kain series.

The whole thing just seems to pander to this image of the stereotypical gamer and some lonely, horny teenager. Its the same feeling I got watching that intolerable videogame award show on Spike TV. These things aren't made for the gamers that I know. According to studies, the average age of gamers is 29. We have so much "dark edginess" in video games. Surely the market must be saturated with the stuff by now. Whats really frustrating is that Ubisoft broke away from that and made a game that catered to more mature tastes, only to betray their fans by making an utterly antithetical sequel.

Well, that and that the actual gameplay of Warrior Within is fanastic. It thought it was way more fun than Sands of Time, which was already a fun game. In this regard, it was very much the game that I wanted Sands of Time to be. It fixed everything I didn't like about the previous game. It didn't get bogged down with puzzles, it had a great sense of flow, and it didn't take away my powers at the end. In short, the gameplay was tight. Seriously. Masterful. It is the trappings of said gameplay that sadden me. They don't even offend me. They just make me sigh in resignation.

Oh, and for some reason, people (including the developers!) keep refering to Warrior Within as "Prince of Persia 2". Um, no. This is Prince of Persia 2. Its an actual game. It was made in 1993. Why doesn't anybody notice this?

09:11 pm: Indie Games!
I found this neat site called Game Tunnel, about independent videogames, which can be a lot of fun. Its just like independent film. Low-budget but sometimes delightfully quirky.

So anyway, they have a list of best independent games of 2004, and I was pleased and amused by the fact that Arkanoid-style games have their own category. Apparently there are so many of these breakout clones, that they could list the best 5 of them made in 2004.

They also listed Gish as the absolute best indie game of 2004. I played this game earlier in the year and didn't care for it, but I've heard so many good things about it, I had to try it again to see if I could figure out what I was wasn't getting.

Gish is a 2D platform scroller where you control a ball of black tar. The highlight of the game is the realistic physics engine that makes the blob really act like a blob and interact with other things like blob would. You have to do the usual game stuff: flip switches, open doors, kill enemies. But lest you think this isn't challenging, understand that when you are a black ball of tar, everything is challenging. In fact, the most mundane and simple tasks are transformed into... well, tedious, time-consuming chores. Its about as much fun as making tar crawl.

To be fair, this is a really innovative game. The physics is really impressive. Its got very hip comic book graphics, and character that is both likeable and A BALL OF TAR. I'm just not sure that its fun. After a few hours of playing it, I'm just not getting the "taking mundane tasks and making them difficult" philosophy. It seems to me that you could get the same effect by getting someone bind your hands and feet and then going about your daily business (incidentally, you can do the same thing with The Sims, and you don't even need the rope).

I think these guys are talented, and I hope they make more games. I'm really glad that other poeple are enjoying it, because the world needs more happy people. I'm guess I'd just like to say to anybody out there who doesn't like the game: You're not crazy.

03:54 pm: Violent Baby Steps
There's an interesting discussion going on at Game Girl Advance about the lack of depth of "girl-games" and I commented that the problem wasn't specific to any gender of games, but occurs in "boy-games" as well, in the form of an ovre-reliance on violence. We've just gotten used to it.

I think many people have come to think that there is something inherently violent about video games, or players, or developers, but I don't think any of those are the case. I think that video games are inherently interactive and violence comes naturally from the limited ways that we can simulate that interaction.

I cited the Game Girl Advance article, because the emergence of girl-games makes this more apparent. Having no preconceived notions about these games, we see a game based on, for instance, shopping, as a really shallow experience, maybe even insultingly so. And I find it interesting that people are up in arms about the effects of violent video games have on children, but would never think about a the effects of a consumerist video game. After all, if shoot-em-ups teach children to solve their problems with violence, surely shop-em-ups teach kids to solve problems by buying things (not unlike Bush's call for Americans to go shopping to support the war, which brings us back to violence), and I'm not sure that's much better.

However, I think that all of these problems are temporary stepping stones. Furthermore, they may be useful and neccesary steps towards making more sophisticated games. We have seen games go from twitchy Rambo-type games pitting a solitary player against armies of mindless drones, into squad based games where enemies work together and allies follow orders. These are the first fumbling steps towards rich character interaction. In Half-Life 2, there are giant insects that attack your character if you invade their territories. But they hate loud noises. So if you stand near a something loud, they will circle around you, attracted by you but repelled by the noise. I remember thinking that even this simple behavior is very similar to approach-avoidance conflicts in human relationships. Its simply being modeled in a more obvious way.

Although I think that the prevelance of violence in video games is a problem, and shouldn't be taken lightly, I think we should tolerate it. I think if we try to stamp it out, we may doom video games to different kinds of superficiality and mediocrity, and stunt the growth of what could possibly grow into an important art-form.

02:35 pm: COOL!(from <a href="http://www.boingboing.net>Boing Boing</a>) This is apparently not photoshopped. The artist converted each frame of an animation to a stencil, then painted the stencils in various locations, photographed them, and put the photographs back together into an animation. Of course, the same effect could have been created with photoshop with a lot less work. Does that lessen its artistic merit? Maybe, but it still looks cool.

08:30 pm: Counterstrike: Definite Cause of Alleged Murder
According to this story news.com.au, the popular computer game Counterstrike was the cause of a murder that may or may not have happened.

Two men stand accused of dressing up like terrorists and ambushing and killing a man in his own home. The accused are denying the murder and the case is still being tried, but the suthor seems sure of one thing: the crime was inspired by Counterstrike, a game "in which the accused had some interest and from which he derived some enjoyment". Well, that explains everything. Clearly, there's nowhere else that a person could come across images of terrorists these days.

Seems that video games are still guilty until proven innocent.

02:25 pm: This is a terrible example of a sentence, but it might be excellent example of entropy:

"The release of Kazaa Lite comes at a time when Sharman Networks was already in the midst of considering whether to take legal action to stop sites like the really good site such as kazaa-file-sharing-downloads which help Internet users into paying money for the Kazaa Media Desktop and other file-sharing programs."

Part of an otherwise coherent article that just went horribly wrong for a bit.

03:50 pm: I Heart BitTorrent
Ok I've finally jumped on the BitTorrent bus and I'm never getting off. Get a good BitTorrent client with an RSS plugin and you can pretty much cancel your cable service. You can just subscribe to the RSS feed of a Tracker that supplies Torrents of TV shows. Then you set up filters that say "I want shows with the words "Enterprise, Arcadia and Smallville in the title" and it searches the RSS field for those files and downloads them automatically. With the commercials cut out. In HDTV resolution. The way BitTorrent is set up, where partial files can be shared, means that shows get distributed through the network wicked fast.

I am drunk with power. I love this shit.

An interesting side effect of this is that it throws into sharp relief the effect that TV has on us. I'm living with my parents right now, so I download shows for my Dad. He also likes to download movies off Kazaa. So I walk into the living room and he's griping about how this movie on TV is being delayed by a Football game that won't end. Some Chris Rock vehicle where he dies and gets reincarnated as a white guy. You know, Oscar calibre must-see-TV. So I point out that there are much better shows piling up on his hard drive. And he says, "yeah, but they'll be there tommorow, this movie is on now". And that's really it, isn't it. Its the old sales trick: for a limited time only! I really don't think my Dad wanted to see the movie that badly. I mean, I don't think he would have rented it from Blockbuster if he had the choice. But he seemed to have this feeling that he'd be missing out on an opportunity if he didn't watch it. I could be wrong. I didn't press the matter.

I had a similar feeling at first. I would be in the process of downloading a show and realize that it was on TV right at that moment, and I would feel the urge to watch the show, not because I felt like watching TV at that moment, but because it was on right now as opposed to on my hard drive in an hour. But I would just slap myself and say "Bad Pavlovian dog!". After a week or so of watching what I want when I want instead of trying to organize my life around my favorite shows, and the feeling passed.

A few links for the interested-but-lost:

A BitTorrent client that can handle multiple files
RSS plug-in for aforementioned client
A site with lots of torrents of popular shows and NO ADS!

02:20 pm: Okay, I haven't totally forgotten about my blog, but I've been busy moving to Lethbridge. Yay.

Anyway, in lieu of a real post, here's a link to a funny school-house-rock-esque animation about the war in Iraq.

http://www.piratesandemperors.com/

Hi-larious

12:28 am: Half-Life 2 "Going Gold"
Okay, I'm not usually the type to drool over pre-release footage for a game, especially since I usually don't buy games until at least a year after they've been released. I'm just not easily impressed by the "latest thing". But since I finally got around to playing Half-Life, I've decided to check out what the sequel will look like at Gamespot.

Unbe-freakin-lievable.

I really urge anyone even remotely interested in the future of video games to head on down and take a look at this. Its more than just the graphics. Its how they've created a world that seems real and is filled with objects and people that behave realistically and react to the player. They've got tons of footage of people just playing the game. It really baffles me that people have been paying so much more attention to Doom 3 (well, aside from the fact that Doom 3 has actually been released).

Although apparently that's going to change, because Gabe Newell, the head of Valve Software, just left a forum post that said "We're going gold Monday...", whatever that means. But he doesn't seem the type to get everyone's hopes up for no reaso, so...

Anyway, I doubt any of my readers (Do I still have any readers?) are interested in the release date. I know I'm not :). I'm just thrilled that I got to report breaking news on my weblog!

12:20 am: Difficult Questions About Video Games...
...is the title of a project being worked on by Public Beta where get all kinds of people to answer a series of questions about video games, and then they make a book out of it, and everyone who participates gets a copy of the book. So I sent in my answers, and I thought I may as well post them here.

(Feel free to skim, its REALLY long).

1/defining videogames

Q. What is a videogame?
A. Well, looking at it etymologically, we can say that a video game (2 words for me) is a kind of game that's played on something like a television. I think that all video games fit this description, but maybe not everything that fits this description is a videogame. Most notably, there seems to be a tendency for people to seperate computer games from the video games that are played on consoles and arcade machines, even though many of the exact same games can be played on both platforms. I just finsished playing Indiana Jones and The Emporer's Tomb on my computer (as opposed to the identical version for the XBox). I played it on a 19" monitor, with a gamepad, while lying on the couch. Am I to believe that somehow I was playing a different kind of game than someone playing it on the XBox? Is it because the XBox version is played on an actual television? I have a video card in my computer, so surely my games must be video games too, no?
I think the answer is simply that the term "video game" has developed a connotation of childishness: kids play video games. Computer games have their own term simply because the older demographic that plays them doesn't want to say that they play video games. As for me, my love of computers is equalled only by my hatred for the word "computer" (we may as well refer to our fellow humans as "breathers"), so I refer to the games that I play as "video games", but I do so with more than a tinge of self-consiousness.
As for Furby's and AIBO, I don't think they are video games at all. Aside from involving visuals and audio, there is nothing video about them (and certainly, we can't expand our definition that much). They are toys. I don't know what self-concious adults call their AIBOs if not toys. Luckily, I don''t think there is enough comparable adult-toys to require their own category! Tamagotchis and other LED-based gizmos are a stretch, but I think their displays are TV-oid enough that we can include them without breaking my definition. I think they should be included (after all, would Gameboys ever have come about with Nintendo's classic Game&Watch series?).
I suppose there is also the matter of those novelty games that include video-tapes or DVDs, like the new Trivial Pursuit game. Its hard not to call them video games, although they're not what comes to mind when we talk about video games. I would call them an exception, since they don't really have any practical or useful connection to typical kinds of video games, and have no place in most discussions about video games, in my opinion.

Q. What is gameplay?
A. Gameplay is one of those words like "content" or "functionality" which is popular exactly because its definition is so vague that you can almost count on it being appropriate in any situation. I think that gameplay, as its used in articles and reviews, is simply everything about a video game that seperates it from other media, such as movies (a distinction that seems to elude many game developers who, I think, would rather be movie producers). Music, sound effects, characters, animation, plotlines, beautiful recreations of medieval castles - all these things can be found in movies and are, therefore, not gameplay. What's left are not so much things as questions: Can I easily control my character without having to think too much about the buttons? Do I feel like I'm in control of this experience? Do the decesions that I make matter? Is this challenging without being frustrating? As I get better at this game, do I feel a satisfying sense of mastery? Do I care whether I win or lose? Are there interesting things to do in this game? Most fundamentally: Is this experience more than just nice to look at or listen to?
I don't know if there are words that reflect the main ideas in these questions, and maybe that's why I can only define gameplay in terms of what it isn't. Gameplay is like a drawing composed of negative space; it is the wineglass between two faces in profile.


3/selling and buying

Q. What makes a game good value-for-money?
A. Well I'll say this: games that waste my time are worse less than nothing. So many games today are padded with really boring, repetitive action (nondescript mazes, endless fights with generic enemies) so that they can say "This game has 40 hours of gameplay" or some nonsense like that. When I was younger and had a lot of spare time, this didn't matter as much, as long as there was something interesting in the game. I think most kids are like that. Now that I'm an adult, I have other things that I want to do! I would rather be entertained for only 8 hours, than spend 40 hours trying to get to the 8 hours of entertainment. I think game developers are just starting to get that, and its going to allow them to open up the market to my generation, to people who grew up with games and still want to play games, but their time is more valuable now. On the other hand, I have friends who still play games just to kill time because they're bored. I'm just not one of those people.
Incidentally, I usually wait for games to hit the bargain bins and then pick them up for $10-$30. I just can't justify paying $70 for something that I might absolutely hate and can't return. I think that videogames are generally overpriced on release, but they tend to get marked down tremendously when they go out of fashion, so I guess the industry does a good job of catering to everyone in that sense, which is probably their best defense against piracy.

Q. Why do you buy videogames?
A. As opposed to what? Pirating them? Pirated copies of decent games are usually missing a lot of high-capacity content like movies and music and it really diminishes the experience of playing the game. I really have a hard time believing that these versions of games cut considerably into developer's profits. I think the only people playing pirated games of new releases are the ones who absolutely can't afford to buy them anyway.

4/playing videogames

Q. Why do you play videogames?
A. Mainly because they'r fun and entertaining. Also because they are facinating as a medium. I find all kinds of games interesting and I find it especially interesting to watch the development of a whole different kind of game. Its interesting to see new techniques develope and to see what works and what doesn't and why, and to ask questions like these ones!

Q. Where do you play? How often? For how long?
A. Everywhere! In almost every room of my home, on the bus, waiting rooms, public parks, boring social gatherings. I try to restrict myself to an hour or so at a a time, although I've been known to play for several hours straight. I go through phases where I'm really into it, then I'll lose interest or get fed up with the state of the industry and I'll focus my time on other things. Then later I'll come back to it. I've been sick for several months as I write this, and I spend a lot of time at home so I'm playing a lot lately and really enjoying it.

Q. Why is playing videogames fun?
A. That's probably the hardest question for me. I find it interesting that a lot of people (myself included) complain when they die and have to do a large portion of the game over again "Oh no, now I have to go through that all over again". Wait a second, isn't this supposed to be fun? Shouldn't doing it twice be twice as much fun? I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is more than fun involved in getting someone to keep playing a game. There's maybe a sense, however false, of accomplishing something, of making progress, and everybody likes to feel that. Its like knitting, but without the sweater at the end, which is maybe exactly what a culture needs when it decides that its no longer worth it to knit a sweater instead of just buying one.
But personally, I like my games to be fun, but I'm not sure what that is. I don't know why anything is fun.

5/playing with videogames

Q. Can you cheat in a videogame?
A. Yes, but its different because the rules of video games are different from the rules of traditional games. Rules have to be enforced in traditional games. For instance, in sports rules can be broken at any time, at which point other rules are put into motion that say what to do about it. Rules in video games don't need to be enforced, because the game is the rules. The code that the game is made of is just a big list of rules, and they represent the reality of the game. They restrict the very actions of the player the same way that the laws of physics restrict people in the real world. As long as they are in effect, they can't be broken. But they can be taken out of effect, by changing the lines of code, or "hacking" the game. So this isn't cheating in the usual sense of breaking rules, but in a new sense of remaking rules, and then following those new rules.
In an even muddier shade of grey, there are the "cheats" that are built into games by the developers, that are activated either by entering special words, or by doing certain things in the game that "unlock" them. In these cases, the developers are basically creating a set of rules (code) that allow us to cheat, which seems like a contradiction. How can you have permission to cheat?
I think what both of these actions have in common is that they violate the intended spirit of the game. When developers create games, they (hopefully) meticulously manage all kinds of seemingly insignificant details in order to create a very particular kind of experience. I think that anything that violates that intention in video games is what we call "cheating". I think that even when developers build cheats into a game, what they are saying is, "Okay, we're going to give the permission to do this, but you need to understand that you will no longer be playing the game that we developed, and if you don't have fun, then its not our fault". I think that calling them "cheats" is an easy, shorthand way to get that across.
Which is not to say that this kind of cheating is neccesarily wrong. I think with single-player games, cheating is a very personal thing. The only person you can really cheat is yourself, so you just have to be honest about why you're cheating and whether it will make it a more or less enjoyable experience, and I think everybody should be able to make that decision. I have a friend who doesn't like to "play to win", so when he plays games, he uses "cheating" as a way to create new ways of playing a game, and he's very creative about it sometimes. What he ends up with isn't really what you'd call a "game", but I think it does really embody the idea of "play" more than most video games do. I think that it really highlights the potential for video games to allow people to make a more custom tailored experience.
I also think cheating is important because video games still cater to a particular kind of audience. That's a big difference between video games and movies. If you buy a movie, you are gauranteed to see the entire thing. Video games, on the other hand, aren't usually designed to be beaten easily by just anyone. I always imagine non-gamers buying these games and bringing them home and realizing that the challenge that the game poses is just way beyond their level of skill. They just wanted to have some fun and try something new, and now they're faced with an insurmountable challenge, and there's no way to anticipate this by looking at the box. So they've put their money down and now they're not getting any entertainment for it. They don't get to see how the story ends or anything. I don't think that's fair, but if the player can make himself invincible or have unlimited bullets or whatever, at least they can get through the game. It may be a hollow victory, but its better than no victory at all!


Q. Who are walkthroughs and FAQs for?
A. Well, ME for starters. I think they're for most people. I think there's almost always a point in a game where a player will just totally miss something important, or fail to understand something about the game and have to look it up in a walkthough. Games are different from other media in that way as well. If you miss an important detail in a movie, you can keep watching the movie and maybe you can fill in the gap with other information, or maybe you just have an incomplete understanding of the movie but you enjoy it anyway. But if you miss something important in a game, sometimes you just can't move forward. The action just stops. So its important that people can look it up, because developers are still not always good at communicating these things to the player. Maybe you're supposed to climb a wall, but the wall just doesn't look like it can be climbed because it wasn't designed well, so you don't even try to climb it and you're just stuck. That's not good, and its not fun, and unless developers find some way to prevent that, walkthroughs will be important.
And of course, what I said about cheating applies, where it helps novices, who maybe aren't accustomed to the kind of thinking that video games require. They can use a walkthrough and still get some value for their money, and understand more about video games in the process.

6/forwards and backwards

Q. What will Videogames become?
A. I see single-player video games going in two directions. On the one hand, there are games that are narrative, that tell a story, and this story may become less linear or offer unique perspectives on the story, but mostly serve the same purpose as traditional narratives. I think right now, people get really excited about games like Grand Theft Auto 3 because its "just like a movie", but obviously it is not the goal of any medium to be "just like" some other medium. I think that the video game industry needs to figure out what is has to offer the art of storytelling. I think that what we call video games has the potential to evolve into a valid artistic medium, but in order to do that it has to offer some unique incentive to attract people with real artistic vision. We talk a lot about the negative psychological impact of video games, but it doesn't seem to occur to people that video games must also be able to have positive psychological effects on people, to teach lessons and new ways of thinking, the same way that other mediums do. Violent stories are just easier to tell!
The other way that I see video games going is in the direction of simulation, where the player has a world to interact with, and a story is also told, but it is a story written by the player, in the same way that your life is a story written by you. But most people can't write interesting stories, so these games will not be neutral simulations (I don't think there is such a thing). They will have the elements of interesting stories written into the game, waiting to be uncovered in a way that will be unique for each player. The simulations will be designed to make it more likely for interesting things to happen. We can see the beginnings of this in open-ended games like The Sims and in things like tactical strategy games, where there are a lot of variables and the action can unfold in unexpected ways. But there aren't a lot of interesting things happening, unless they are carefully scripted, which brings us back to the games I mentioned earlier. The only way that we can conceive of a story is as a series of events that happen one after the other. When game developers create stories like this, they are usually very reluctant to give any real control of the story to the player because then the carefully crafted story might be ruined. I think in the future, a different kind of author will emerge, for a different kind of story, one that is more a collection of possibilities, interesting things waiting to happen. I think this will be the product of a future generation of developers, people who have grown up immersed in the concepts of computer programming from a very young age, and the totally non-linear thinking that comes with that. Only when this kind of thinking is second nature will people be able to craft stories that don't try to bind the player's will to old-fashioned notions of what a story is.

04:10 pm: Amusing Vandalism
Saw a bus-bench ad for the "Stump Doctor - Affordable Removal of Stumps and Roots", only "roots" was changed to "foots".

Hi-larious

01:05 am:

Well, it looks like I'm stuck in Calgary for another month.  Turns out my lease isn't up until the end of September.  I know a number of people who will be happy about this, but so far I am not one of them.  Oh well, at least I can spend more time with my friends before I go.

On the plus side, I bought up a bunch of really cool games on the cheap at EB-Games: Legacy of Kain: Defiance, The Half-life addons, Dungeon Siege and Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb.  And much to my amazement, I'm really enjoying all of them.  A veritable cornucopia of guilty pleasure.

Oh, and good news on the Windows front.  Microsoft has released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, and its surprisingly cool, not to mention surprising altogether.  Microsoft was pulling support away from Windows XP to work on its next OS, "Longhorn" and there was a rumor that Internet Explorer wasn't going to be updated at all until Longhorn came out in 2005.  Luckily, they decided to reverse that strategy because so many security holes were opening up, so SP2 has a new mini-app for setting security options and adds pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer.   And the way that they integrate it with IE is actually really well done, not just hastily tacked on.  They also updated the wireless network wizard to make it easier to set up a secure 802.11 network.  I was just about to go out and buy an 802.11 router, so I'm just thrilled about that!

Never thought I'd say this, but, "Thank you, Microsoft".

02:04 pm: Mystery Solved
Okay, so it was my family doctor who called and made the appointment with me about my test results. The twist: I have a new family doctor, Dr. Lombard. Apparently Dr. Booyens moved to Medicine Hat and my file was passed on to Dr. Lombard, and just nobody told me, as if doctors are some kind of interchangeable units, like lego bricks. Like maybe I wouldn't notice or something?

Anyway, the results: The "quiver" in my heart is the result of SLIGHT pulmonary and tricuspid regurgitation. I guess there's a leak in my heart that causes a tiny bit of blood to flow backwards. Lombard is pretty sure that this should make absolutely no difference in my day-to-day functioning whatsoever. It might make a difference if I have dental surgery, although I still don't understand exactly why (and I don't think he does either). Anyway, he's sending me to a cardiologist to find out exactly what it means and make absolutely sure that everything's okay.

10:23 pm: Well, its beginning to look like I'm not so broken-hearted after all. Thinking that the phone-call I got from the radiology lab was pretty strange, I decided to check up on it. I called them up and it turns out they don't have me booked for an appointment, and never called me, which means that the call I got was from someone else.

I called Dr. Tompkins office, and the call wasn't from them either (They did have my results though, and they were mostly fine except that my heart has a slight "quiver", which they don't think is much to worry about). The lady that called me said something about a Dr. Lumbar or something. I don't know, she had a thick accent. I just found out that Dr. Booyens, my regular doctor, is away and another doctor is filling in for him, so maybe he's Dr. Lumbar. I'll check on Monday.

I also bought a new 300W power supply for my computer, which seems to be working fine now. The old power supply didn't take anything down with it. The new one seems to emmiting a very slight smell of burning electronics, but it might just be my imagination. Or maybe its that "new power supply smell" that drives women wild. In Bizarro world.

03:06 pm: Okay, so Dr. Tompkins sent me to get a chest x-ray and a heart ultrasound, and they said Dr. Tompkins would get the results in 4-5 days and she would let me know if anything was wrong. So 2 days later, today, I got a call from the radiology office asking me to come in and discuss the results.

This can't be good.

I'll find out what's up on Monday. Something tells me Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not my biggest problem anymore.

07:57 pm: Well, its a good thing I moved all my important stuff to my laptop. I woke up this morning and my computer wouldn't turn on! I'm pretty sure the power supply blew, which means there's probably no data loss and can be fixed easily. Probably.