Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Self-aggrandizement

[Edit: Pictures added]

As a rule, I don't use this as a "what i did today" type diary.  Looking at the server logs, I only know about a tenth of the people who come here, and I have grave doubts over the interest-value of scenes from my life.  Or at least the scenes that won't get me blocked from my own site by Websense.

And if I were to populate this blog with scenes from my life, it is highly unlikely that I would include my rugby games from Saturdays: a minority sport even here, and about on a par with Kabbadi in terms of US awareness.

However, Saturday had some fun moments, one of which I can't help but mention.  In brief, leaving out as much technical language and extraneous detail as possible, it went like this:

The opposition scored, to move within one score of us.  They failed to kick the ball over the posts to get the extra points, and I caught the ball above my head and started to run back to the halfway line.  At this point, I should have waited for the rest of my team to run to the line, given the ball to a kicker, and gone to my position.

Instead, egged on by a crowd that fell silent when it saw from my grin that I was going to actually do it, I decided that I - by myself and with the rest of my team stil 40 yards behind - could take on the 15 opposition players who were lined up to receive the kick.  I kicked the ball for the restart myself towards the opposition goal line, and tore after it.

This is, by the way, a very stupid thing to do.  The odds of success are as bad as they sound.

Four of the opposition got back to the ball first, and turned to face me.  The one with the ball is having a laugh - where is the possible danger? - and jinks left and right to dummy me.  I just hit him, doing almost 30 miles per hour.  The ball goes flying back to the next player, who - carried by my own momentum - I also hit.  He drops the ball forwards, which means I've got a guaranteed 95 yard gain: the worst that can happen now is we get the ball five yards from their line.

Unfortunately, that was the very worst thing that did happen.  I pick up the ball and run between the posts to score the try (touchdown-type thing) of my career, only to hear the referee, who should have given us the advantage and let play continue for the score, whistle for the scrum from his position, panting 40 yards behind the play.  He thinks he is being kind.  He hasn't seen me score.  For the second time that game (I'll spare you the first) he has robbed me of a try.

For those who know me - and who are aware of what might charitably be termed my over-developed sense of personal justice - the astonishing thing is that I grinned at the ref.  I have yet to punch an official of the game and if that didn't provoke it, I guess I never will.

I'm Brian the Explorer.. and so's my wife...

The One True Way(TM) of exploring is being contested over at Terranova, in more than one discussion.  Some feel it is wandering maps.  Some feel it is discovering game mechanics.  The latter group then become schismatic about whether this still counts if you actually intend to make use of this knowledge, or if that makes you an achiever.

How dumb.  There is no such thing as a "pure" explorer.  The other tendencies in our make-up will dictate what we use our information for.

Without wishing to come over all John Finnis (well, just about any neo-platonist you care to name, in fact), there are bound to be central and peripheral cases of the "Explorer" type.  But the peripheral cases are still Explorers.

I enjoy wandering around virtual worlds.  To be frank, I even get annoyed when the world design puts arbitrary blocks in the way of my exploration: I like to find things, and feel no desire to have to solve puzzles to do so, whereas another Explorer might enjoy discovering how to defeat such blocks.  I like places to be dangerous, but I like having the knowledge to be fairly safe there.  I am less worked up about having a character who is safe there because nothing can challenge his uber l33tness.

But yes, I like to be able to advance more rapidly due to my knowledge.  Does this make me an achiever?  Of course not.  It makes me an Explorer with a bit of Achiever in me too.  I also like to be able to help others who haven't the patience or player knowledge to find out the same things about the world that I can.  But that only means that I have some socialising tendencies, not that I am driven to stand in a cantina all day chatting with fat soccer moms presenting as Twileks.

Incidentally, this is one reason i am not hugely looking forward to D&D Online, despite decades of P&P gaming: red line travel from town to dungeon means no arduous trek cross-country; no wilderness to be explored; no knacks to avoid dangerous foes in the wild.  Middle Earth Online, however, looks more "worldy". 

If you want a world, you're probably an Explorer at heart.  If you want a game, then you're at most going to be a Hacker (as Bartle points out in the comments, he expanded the archetypes to 8 in Designing Virtual Worlds, which I am apparently surprisingly rare in owning, let alone having read): driven by finding ways to find in-game tricks and to work out the underlying structures of the world-system, but immune to the charms of, say, SWG's huge, but mostly-harmless gameworlds.

God bless the free market...

So SOE are providing content for the soloist and "couple-ist" gamers.  They'll say that it lets people drop in and play with less time available, but of course what it really does is remove the need to group with the sort of morons you inevitably find sprinting out of your camp mid-recuperation to accidentally train Krayt Dragons onto your ass.

Now SOE (mainly, I understand, thanks to the Talented Mr Koster, who I actually do admire despite his urge to experiment with me) are the high priests of forced grouping.  Grouping, they say, builds intra-personal relationships.  Intra-personal relationships make you keep paying SOE money.  Except that those bonds tend to be with people so immature that if you spoke to them in any other online forum you'd be suspected of grooming them.

Now the vision is gone.  Soloing is the new grouping.  My wife and I can try EQ2 (and might do so) without the knowledge that we'll have to deal with the great unwashed - yes, I mean the French - if we want to progress beyond rat-genocide.

And why?  Competition.  While EQ was the dominant kid on the fantasy MMO block, they could set the rules.  Now they have WoW kicking their collective derrieres, and they feel forced to say "you know, maybe if people want to solo we might have to let them."  Competition has bred a sudden urge to drop the proscriptive rules about how we are allowed to play. 

All I need to end the week on a more upbeat note is to hear that the entire management structure of EA Games have been killed in a joyously horrendous wood-chipper incident, throughout which they had each been entirely conscious until the very end of their coke-fuelled, liquid-lunch-addled, monopolistic, egoistic, repulsive, saurian existences.

Star Wars galaxies: my old nemesis. Or my ex-mistress. Or something.

Leaving an MMORPG is like dumping a girlfriend.  Both probably come after spending scores, perhaps even hundreds of hours with the now-unwanted companion, knowing it was over but unable to bring yourself to make the break.  There is a sense of sadness, but also of tremendous relief; of potential.

And, of course, you keep a vague eye out, just in case they've lost a few pounds, changed their attitude, learned some new tricks and are dangerously low on self-esteem.

Erm, forget the last bit.  But the point is that I keep a vague eye out to see if Star Wars Galaxies has learned from the constant player haemorrhaging and fixed their game.  There were things I liked about it: you could solo - useful when I detest a great many MMO players - even if this was only despite Raph's normal modus operandi and because of the broken combat system that let me Teras Kasi my way through Fort Tuskan on my lonesome.  It was a grind, but you could macro almost everything in the game except bounty hunting (my last, incomplete profession and the straw that shattered the camel's backbone into tiny jagged shards).

The uber macroing abilities, by the way, may or may not have been planned, but I do remember either Vogel or Koster saying something like: look at what aspects of your game your players macro, and those will be the broken bits.  Wise words.

Aaaanyway.  The developers of SWG have been promising the "combat balance" for at least two years.  Basically, combat in SWG is broken.  It's a horrible system, and so transparent that I hear tell of isolated groups of West African pygmies who have managed to munchkin it.  For all but the most mundane shots, weapons like carbines hurt their users more than their targets (no, seriously: the user would be better off just punching himself in the head).  Certain races could be insta-killed with one shot to the foot.  Eugh, it was more horrible than you could ever know.

As N3rfed pointed out, the first real meat on the new subject is available in pictures and text, and deals with the armour situation.  Well, it needed doing.  But does it have to be quite so paper-rock-scissors?  I mean, three weapon types, three armour types, and each good, vulnerable or neutral against each of the others.  Did it have to be so obviously 3? With a similar treatment of damage types (acid, stun, kinetic etc).

And the line that actively annoyed me was "We wanted to ensure people do not try and beat the system by mixing and matching high and low hindrance items".  Why not?  Does player knowledge have to count for nothing?  Can't one balance risks if one wishes to take less protective, lighter armour in rarely-hit locations?  This is the ultimate in paper-rock-scissors design: it's mandatory.

Except that one group will probably be able to beat it: those who - like me - can macro.  So in PvP you'd see me in one armour, choose the right weapon to defeat it, fire, then see my entire armour instantly change as I macro a complete new set on in a fraction of a second with a quick keystroke.  Wax on, wax off.  Oh, and in-character knowledge out, out-of-character player knowledge in.

Gratuitous linkage

A propos of yesterday's posting, and because I haven't posted anything from Alan Greenspan fan-site *** Economist for ages:

 

Uncheating in Virtual Worlds

I refuse to term my metagaming in Virtual Worlds as "cheating", but when no less a personage than Richard Bartle suggests that they are not quite kosher, then I have to cede some ground.  So, just as the (walking) recently-slain are not dead but undead, so I do not cheat but uncheat.

In Terra Nova today, Bartle links to the New York Law School Review's latest issue, which publishes a series of papers from this year's State of Play conference.  In his article Virtual Worldliness: What the Imaginary asks of the Real, Bartle asks:

"In a virtual world, what can one player do if another player is suspected of bribing a third player or otherwise stepping outside the boundaries of “play”?"

He gives the example (p23-24) of playing Cluedo with someone who bribes another player to let them see their cards, thus gaining an advantage neither allowed nor explicitly disallowed by the ruleset.

I am that player.  I hate Cluedo, but my friend Lesley refuses to play Monopoly with me any more, after I used my usual technique to advance: taking other players out of the room and building cartels to divide up various concerns with each.  I see Monopoly as a fairly "open" world, which allows such behaviour.  Lesley (and, I admit, almost everyone who has ever lost to me at Monopoly) disagrees, seeing this as tantamount to buying platinum pieces on Ebay.

Bartle has this as stepping outside the "Magic Circle" of gameplay.  In using the word "suspected" above (along with "miscreants", "disgust" and others) he makes the point that many see such behaviour as reprehensible, even as something to be stamped out.

If asked, I would, as a knee-jerk response, say that I wished I could "live the world": that someone would design a world so rich and internally consistent that I neither desired nor was able to gain advantage by my uncheating behaviour: by reading message boards, by testing odd responses to game commands, by learning macro languages and the like.  I would claim to want to learn all I need about the game by interacting with others in third spaces within the magic circle's bounds.

But I'd be lying: I want to know the tricks and I want to get to the fun.  And, of course, I enjoy being "that guy Endie [who] told me how to work the harvesters, speak to him...".  I will go further than most in my quest for advantage.  I don't just read bulletin boards.  No, I buy and read Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds, Mulligan's Developing Online Games, Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Games Design and many more.  First, know your enemy (after all, the client is in my hands).

I don't think I am "subversive" (p.25).  I don't want to break anything (and haven't ever done so, purposefully, though I kinda didn't help some systems back in the mid-80s, but they weren't worlds and that wasn't really on purpose, officer).  I don't "'sploit".  But while I lean heavily towards enjoying worlds, not games (I look forward to Turbine's Middle Earth Online, but sense I will not enjoy their other biggie, Dungeons and Dragons Online, for nearly as long), the world itself is the game to me.

And yes, I *know* my Bartle playstyle.  I am so beyond cliche.

Greedo Shoots First While Jumping Shark

"I mean, I don't think I'm alone in the world in imagining this ... may be the worst idea since Greedo shooting first." [Holden, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back]

I don't think I could come up with a game concept less appealing to a very important gaming market segment (me) than one based on "Star Wars" "Episode '1'" (I want an air-quotes emote) with all the characters portrayed as lego (some TM-type stuff probably goes after that bit), which includes Jar-Jar.

I mean, look at them.  They look funny.  They look like the sort of well-done internet fan project done to take the mickey out of Lucas. I'd forward a link to such a quicktime movie with a sarcastic note to my mates.

They're from a horrible film (sorry, "film") with a terrible set of characters, each of whom is only redeemed by their convenience as hate figures.  But making Jar-Jar in particular appear as a children's toy is just so horribly self-referential.  We all know that's his purpose, his reason for existence.  Don't cram it down my throat!

And I'm not even that worked up about Star Wars.  You can tell I'm not a real fan because I like Return of the Jedi best.

In other news, water declared 'quite wet'

I was today forwarded the story Journalist: U.S. planning for possible attack on Iran by an American colleague today. His view seemed to be that this was dumb and apalling. Say what?

The story seems to reveal that hawks in the Bush administration are pushing for strikes on the ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons development program. The journalist suggests that perhaps his sources are liberal administration members trying to head this plan off at the pass by exposing it. I don't believe Hersh actually believes that for a second.

As a side-note, I for one would be a combination of appalled and amazed if the US didn't at least have plans for taking out these nuclear- and weapons- program sites. I actively want them to have done their reasearch. To have looked at the difficulties and consequences. To have more feasibility studies than they know what to do with. The alternative is, after all, to have the only power in the world capable of stopping Iran find itself having to make a snap decision on the basis of what Colin Powell thought of their airport security last time he visited.

Anyway, the point is that the Iranians are locked in a confrontation with the US at the moment, and the US is letting them know they're, frankly, well up for it should the Iranians press on regardless. They know that the Iranians tend to react well to *real* strength (notice their reactions to the US at the time of the Afghan strike, and again during the liberation of Iraq). If the point of this leak was to prevent a US strike, the audience was Iran, not the US public. And the authors were at State, not Defense.

Of course, there are people in the administration who are far from averse to the idea of direct action (Feith, Wolfowitz...), but this isn't directly associated with them. And if Herth believes that '"
Of course, there is a another issue here, which is that the elections in Iraq are, hopefully, just a couple of weeks away. The US is keen to send some very strong "hands off" messages to the Iranians over this as well (I apologise for referring to the Iranians as if they had a single government. Of course, they have at least three).

As regards the claims by "the international community" that the UN and the IEA should be in charge of the Iranian negotiations: well, the strongest voices are France, Germany and Russia. If they (along with the more cautious Chinese) hadn't been responsible for the production and installation of the bulk of the Iranian nuclear program then this might seem more credible.

The Russian weakness over Iran strikes me as the oddest thing of all about the whole question. The Iranians border their "hot south" region, and a nuclear Iran would be a terrifying neighbour, with major Russian, Khazak and Ukrainian cities easily within range of a silkworm launch site.

When geeky becomes nerdy

Alright, after several attempts to be all political and grown-up, I revert to type.  Filled with childish glee, I unwrapped my ebay purchase yesterday: the original, hand-drawn elevations and deck plans for the Xenophon class mercenary cruiser for Traveller, which became the Broadsword class by the time it was released.  Sold to me by Marc W. Miller himself, who is unto a gawd, being the creator of the game.  It could only be better by being the Suleiman class 100-ton scout.

It was pretty cheap, to be honest, and came with a reassuring certificate of authenticity, signed by the great man himself.  It's on graph paper, and looks touchingly like the sort of things Cakes and I were doing back then in the 70's.  I shall sign it and hang it on the wall of my den.  Just as soon as I return to having a den, that is.

Apologies to anyone who read this far thinking it would become less impenetrable.

Shock news: Wachowski Brothers almost certainly not bankrupted by Sophia Stewart

As the internet changes, so the nature of its urban myths adapt.

Search google for a phrase like 'Wachowski brothers court' and you will get tens of thousands of hits, mainly detailing how Sophia Stewart, an independent scriptwriter, has recently won a record settlement against the Wachowski brothers, with the court deciding that she had written a script which the Wachowskis had plagiarised.I

ncidentally, most articles mention that further damages are forthcoming from James Cameron for all three Terminator movies, and from Time-Warner. Many articles complain about Time-Warner's domination of the news media, which has prevented the news becoming widely known. Most cite the Salt Lake Globe article "Mother of the Matrix" Victorious, while rather fewer cite the Pirates of the Third Eye article at www.daghettotymz.com, which has been pushing the story.

It all sounds wonderful: the cheated victim triumphing over the evil multi-media combine and a variety of billionaires. This is compounded by the fact that Ms. Stewart makes a *very* big deal of her race (she is black) and has been painting this as the white devil stealing from her *because* of her colour (a lot less convincing than "because of money" would be, to me).

Of course, it's all nonsense. Ms. Stewart, as Neil Gaiman points out, is almost certainly a complete wacko, and is certainly following the money. A look at the court documents shows that Judge Morrow threw out most of the case at pre-trial, and has allowed certain other elements to proceed to a trial. Even *I* could get a case to trial that they plagiarised *me*. I wouldn't win though. Nor, if you look at the treatment on the daghettotymz site, will she.

This is the sort of urban myth that is increasingly cropping up thanks to the internet. These dumb ideas, fuelled by the gullibility of many people when it comes to "it's on a website" as a citation, are perfectly suited to internet propagation. It used to be virus warnings. Oddly, I've not had one of those post-Good Times chain letter virus warnings for a couple of years, but I am sure they're still out there.

But internet myths started off as virus hoaxes. Their next jump was still kinda self-referential: myths about stuff you find on the web. The Darwin Awards required proof, but emails about "this year's Darwin Awards" would list grisly, grotesque, comic and utterly unverifiable storied from "The London Times" or "The Canberra Herald" or the like.

Now, we have wider, more outwardly-focussed forms. One is the well-known quote by Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." In that and dozens of other forms you will find it cited tens of thousands of times through google. It has become so unquestioned that senior politicians quote it. And yet Burke probably never said it. Everyone accepts it without ever seeing a valid citation.

The internet is full of lies and innaccuracies. Thanks to the rise of blogging, the prevalance of nonsense returned by google has never been higher. But people see "479 hits returned", check a couple, find what they expected, and believe it. Because "I read it on the internet" is the new "they say".

Obersturmbannfuhrer Harry

Oh puh-lease. Let me re-establish my republican credentials here in some suitably pithy manner: erm.. the royal family are parasites and leeches.

There. Now, that done, let me say that the furore over Gauleiter Harry digging his great-uncle's uniform out of the attic and attending a fancy-dress party as a nazi is depressingly typical of a media desperate for a story in collusion with interest groups wanting to be victims.

Apologies are demanded and provided (albeit by private offices). Jewish groups are outraged. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, presumably running low on real high-ranking officials of the NSDAP to hunt, jump at the chance to insist on the ginger aryan being shipped to Auschwitz as punishment. Really.

It was a fancy dress party. His brother went dressed as a lion. I rather doubt anyone is accusing him of being a closet carnivorous feline this morning. Presumably the relatives of attacks by lions can complain that they feel victimised. In the wake of the Boris Johnson incident I can only imagine that Jewish Liverpudlian Antelopes are in a tumult.

These people haven't been hurt.  Veterans of World War 2 who fought against the Germans haven't been hurt by this.  This is the news-world equivalent of a Brazilian footballer diving after a tackle and rolling four times before clutching his ankle in agony.  We love to be victims.  I'm a victim.  I'm more of a victim than you.  I demand apologies and that anyone who slightly annoys me by their sense of humour be abased.  Or, even better, shipped to a concentration camp.  Anyone who jokes about my religion should be sent to jail.

I somehow suspect that Allo' Allo! might not get green lit these days.

Gimme a break.  Why do the French plant so many trees by the road?  So the Germans can march in the shade.  There, I await prosecution for incitement to laugh at the French.

Politics again

I see that one of the Plaid Cymru members of the Welsh assembly has been thrown out of the chamber and suspended for the day, after referring to the English queen as "Mrs Windsor".

In other words, the democratically elected representative of the people was expelled from the assembly for calling Mrs Windsor by her correct name. Apparently it is mandatory in law to call the unelected, parasitical Mrs Windsor by whatever title she sees fit to call herself.

In other news, I have restrained myself for several days from posting about my ardent desire to see Biometric Blunkett given his jotters. I don't believe that the man has any sense of honour whatsoever; if he had, he would have resigned his post several days ago. So I desperately hope that he is humiliated and hounded out of office.

I should be clear that I don't give a monkey about his affair. In fact, on reflection I may be in favour of it. The best rulers are so often alpha males: Churchill, Reagan, Clinton, Kennedy, Napoleon, Alexander, Wellington and many others had strings of liaisons with one sex or the other, and the idea that their taste for illicit sexual relationships disqualifies them from office is facile. Look at the alternatives: Stalin, Hitler, Dzherzinsky...

The reason I hope Blunkett is set for a long walk off a short pier is that he is the interventionist who wishes to rib me of my privacy. The fact that the loss of his own privacy may cause his own destruction has a wonderful, Dante-esque symmetry to it. And the fact that it happens scant days after his triumph in being made the centre-piece of the pre-election legislative campaign in the queen's Speech would only intensify the joy. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make home secretary.

Geeky Theme Developing

With my third submission to irresponsible geekfest Need to Know, I become almost a regular contributor. I admit, it's only a cheap Amazon mis-spelling, but they rank above typos and missing zeros for govt. spending, the common staples thereof. Anyway, it's at Doh the Humanity, which is NTK's new site for such hilarity, and even gets on the front page this week (will change). It probably owes such prominence to the quality of extreme nerdery it possesses: Amazon's synopsis of a book on Doom describes the Johns Carmack and Romero as the "Lenin [sic] and McCartney" of the games industry. They even used my joke...

Oh, and this

Coffee and Cigarettes

I went to the Cameo to see Coffee and Cigarettes last night. It was directed by Jim Jarmusch, so I should have known what I was letting myself in for. Well, actually I did know what I was letting myself in for, so I suppose I was just dumbly curious.

In summary, it was a series of vignettes of people talking while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, although by the end some people were drinking tea and not smoking at all. This was as far as the action and plot elements went.

Jarmusch fancies himself as quite the auteur. Which is ironic given his tendency to churn out lazy, improvised pieces where he acts as little more than a stage designer with only two or three viewpoints to worry about. This is a fine example.

Don't get me wrong: I thought that Night on Earth was an interesting movie. But this is Jarmusch at his laziest. It is the terribly clever arthouse, jazz-loving equivalent of the music video. Plenty of oh-so-cool ingredients (Iggy and Waits, the White Stripes, the Wu-Tangs, black-and-white stock, improvised dialogue, chequered tablecloths, coffee, cigarettes, French dialogue etc...) but no point. I tend to dislike improv movies because I wonder why I should pay to listen to lines that are worse than dialogue I could write myself. And I am no scriptwriter.

Improv film worked in Smoke and Blue in the Face. Paul Auster and Wayne Wang were prepared to work hard enough to carry it off. And maybe Lou Reed has more to say than Iggy Pop.

To be fair, some bits were ok. The scene with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits as the characters was not bad. Cate Blanchett played both characters in her scene, and she was ok. Jack and Meg White from the White Stripes had a good idea (and clearly a script), although she in particular is no actress. No sir.

Steve Buscemi rolled along being his usual character, and the Steve Coogan/Alfred Molina pairing entertained the rest off stage. Bill Murray and two of the Wu Tang Clan were very funny indeed: clearly all three were happy in improvisation, an area where each had their roots. But basically, it was poor quality, dreary, improvised awkwardness.

Miscellany

Should I be mentioning stuff like rugby games I have played and the like? I rather think not: this is not a diary. But they happen nonetheless.

Anyway, last night (when I should have been at rugby training but, hey, you saw the weather, right?) I watched the second part of the BBC's Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets. The first part was enjoyable light science. Last night's was enjoyable space opera.

The biggest problem was the almost complete disregard for the time-lapse in communications. When ground control saw dramatic events occur they would scramble to send messages, ignoring the fact that at Jupiter their responses would occur 3 hours after the initiating event. At one point - still well outside of Jupiter orbit - ground control took over the attitude controls of the craft. This despite not just the huge delay but also the fact that we were shown a shattered antenna preventing even communication with astronauts on EVA.

And don't get me started about the physics of the cometary "explosion" and the accompanying lack of damage to the ship from repeated blows by kiloton-sized fragments (and suddenly accelerated micro-meteoroids, which despite their vast speeds arrived at the same time as the slow, lumbering, bus-sized ones. Lets just say it was a fun, non-science drama.

In other news... Nicole and I played co-op through the first half-dozen or so levels of Halo 2. Pretty good fun. The knowledge of just how bad the ending will be is a bit off-putting, though.