Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Refereeing vs Playing

My rugby team didn't have a league match on Saturday, so we arranged a friendly against a team that used to be local rivals, but who we're now several leagues above.

Unfortunately, they didn't just turn up short of a couple of players, but short of the referee they were supposed to arrange.  The former problem was easily solved - we had players to spare - but the latter is more of an issue: technically, if there is no certified referee available, the game cannot go on for insurance purposes.  In a bending of the rules I was asked to ref: I've refereed half a dozen games in the past - a clearer case of poacher turned gamekeeper you'll be hard-put to find - and while I was disappointed that I couldn't play, it was better that everyone else got a game.  That said, I gathered everyone around and explained the legal situation; I asked everyone playing to signify that they gave up the right to sue me since I was not holding myself out to have expertise in the field; I said that scrums were uncontested and rucking players out was a no-go; and I said that the first time anyone threw a punch the game was off.

What strikes me when I ref is that the things that are so very easy become hard.  When playing, I am relaxed and instinctive in spotting errors and offences.  I see virtually all of them without difficulty.  When refereeing, I am playing a different game, comprising balancing twin elements of spotting problems and ensuring a fun game.  I find it much harder, and freely admit that I have more difficulty seeing knock-ons in particular when following the play from the refereeing position.  Clearly, my brain has a "playing rugby" mode which is very different from the "refereeing rugby" mode.  I'm much better and more relaxed in the former.

That said, I was pretty pleased with the results: two of the five tries in the game came when I was playing advantage, which people notice and comment on as A Good Thing.  The scrum count was moderate, the penalty count very low, the play generally uninterrupted and both sides kept the complaints to a minimum.  When a ref gets clapped off the pitch and slapped on the back it's usually a good sign.  But I was unhappy with my enforcement of the offside laws: in the first half, I would forget to check that forwards were joining the breakdown from behind the rear foot, and I am sure I missed a few.  The binding of the loose forwards was a problem for me.  And I was disappointed that I couldn't stop both sides handling the ball on the ground: of only about 10 penalties in the game, two thirds were for that.

And I was, I admit, secretly delighted that in my absence our usual strongest areas - ball retention, clearing out and turnovers at the breakdown - were spectacularly terrible.  Nyuck nyuck.

Cobain is no Elvis

With Forbes reporting that Cobain made more money, posthumously, than Elvis over the last year, there was a whole "ha ha boomers, we da boss now" thing.  This was daft for two reasons.  One is that Kurt's meteoric rise was largely a one-off, due to the wicked witch of the west coast Courtney Love selling a share in his back catalogue to a rights management company (look forward to hearing Nirvana advertising iPods and coffee real soon now).

The other reason is that, if we are going to put someone up against The King, then why don't we pick someone better than a junked-out smackhead who made one-and-a-half really rather good albums?  Look, I was there with my plaid shirt and my goatee and my ripped jeans, but Lithium, Smells Like Teen Spirit and In Bloom are up therewith Guns'n'Roses' November Rain for most annoyingly overplayed track of the last twenty years.  Why?  Because if you want to play a Nirvana track on MTV2, it has to be those, Heart-Shaped Box or You Know You're Right, with an honourable mention for the unplugged session's The Man Who Sold The World.  The Mighty Cornholio will back me up on this: you can't put that up against even the first three or four years of Elvis' recording career.  I, personally, might be rather fond of Nirvana's work (even Incesticide), as well as the stuff by Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and the Stone Temple Pilots it helped popularise.  But I wouldn't claim that his impact will be anything like that of the man who changed the face of rock music.

Anyway, here are my High Fidelity-style top 5 albums released in 1991 that were better than Nevermind:

The Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque.
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Massive Attack - Blue Lines
Primal Scream - Screamadelica
Soundgarden - Badmotorfinger

Limbaugh, Lecturing Others on Drugs

According to a BBC article, Michael J. Fox has appeared in an endorsement in the US elections, backing a candidate who supports stem cell research. Professional liar and drug addict Commentator Rush Limbaugh claimed 'he was either "off his medication or acting" in the 30-second clip.'

Presumably, if Michael was off his meds it is because Limbaugh stole them to feed his habit.  We could stabilise the loss of Amazonian rainforests for years if we could only tap the huge reserves of teak beams in Rush's eyes.  It really takes some going to be such a loathsome hypocrite that, despite only being a regional radio commentator, even moderately-right-wing individuals thousands of miles of ocean away despise all that he stands for.

Oh, that's nice...

I've always been impressed by how fast my PC is.  I got it from Dell almost three years ago, now, and I remember thinking that I was being excessive in specifying a 2.8GHz P4 procesor, since the price jumps from the 2.4 and 2.6 chips were so steep.  Nonetheless, it has never been close to choking on any software I run, whether that was multiple instances of compilers or games software.

One annoyance was that the task manager performance bars always insisted on showing two processor activity graphs.  No biggy, but a bit of a pest: I dislike the system thinking it has the wrong number of processors in it.  Windows has, historically, had problems with hardware "duplicating" itself, and appearing multiple times in Device Manager et al...

Turns out the system was right.

I got interested again, today, and started taking a closer look.  Device manager, on closer inspection, told me I had two 3GHz P4s running.  The graphs of processor activity were, when I ran a Defender scan and a compile* markedly different in their charting.  I opened up the box, and sure enough: there they were.

Dell is generous with their special offers, but I very much doubt that they sent me two processors worth (at the time) 600 dollars each on a multiprocessor board on purpose.  I just hope that someone, somewhere isn't just now opening up that super-whizzy dual-processor computer that never really seemed that great and hunting around in vain for a second CPU...

It is a mark of great shame for me that I never noticed this before.  Time was I knew my spare IRQ lines off by heart.  Plug and Play has made me lazy.

*The compile, by the way, was of the final version of my first game since using BBC Basic: a version of Tetris in C# using DirectX 9.  Everyone said Tetris is the game to start off with for collision detection routines, so Tetris it was.  It certainly makes a difference from the AJAX and server-side javascript stuff we're doing in work right now.  My Tetris works, and looks ok-ish, but it feels somehow, subtly wrong.  I don't know why: it does everything Tetris is supposed to do, and some I think it should (bigger points for clearing multiple lines at once).  It just seems, somehow, jarring.

Review of Scorcese's The Departed

I went to see Scorcese's new film, The Departed, last night.  This will be short, partly to avoid anything spoiler-ish, and partly because I can't be bothered.

Basically, all those people saying that it rivals Goodfellas are a bit mad or something.  It's not.

The individual performances from Jack Nicholson (so long as you enjoyed his portrayal as the Joker), Matt Damon and - particularly - Leonardo di Caprio are excellent, to different degrees.  In the latter case, quite astonishingly so from an actor who has been largely disappointing for years: his portrayal of the traditional under-cover cop is not quite up there with Johnny Depp's Donnie Brasco, but it's very good.  Nicholson's range is hardly that of Pacino, and he lacks the subtlety of Brando, but he camps it up well enough, and the times that he is on-screen are fun.

But William Monahan's screenplay - based on the Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs - is lazy, cliched, same-old-same-old stuff.  Yet again we have a film that is too long because it has about four endings, piled one after another.  Everyone you expect to die, dies (and that's a lot of people).  The few that you expect to live, live.  There are no surprises, except for one cat-scare moment that is only a surprise because there is no clue, ever, that the extremely minor character involved is what he turns out to be.  That is lazy writing: real deus ex machine stuff.

The actors work very well with what they have, but they don't have a lot.  There is no depth except that which they manage to read in despite their lines.  Excellent casting has managed to obscure what are very uninspired, workaday gangster-flick characters.

And the scenes meant to provide snippets of character background are jumpy, snippy, unsatisfying - goodness knows how in a two-and-a-half hour film - and seem dropped in at the last minute.  I think we are supposed to see the characters of Nicholson and Sheen as dualist forces, one of goodness and the other Manichean, fallen-and-worldly.  These are portrayed as father-figures to Damon and di Caprio respectively, but in such broad-brushstroked and unsubtle ways that I felt a little like saying "ok, I get it already, stop quoting Freud!" at a couple of points.  No, really: Damon is made to quote and reference Freud on numerous occasions, while di Caprio discusses, with Nicholson, killing him and taking his place, shortly after a discussion where Sheen literally pointedly refers to his own son.  Subtle.

Anyway, I could go on.  It's kinda fun, if unsatisfying.  Because it is Scorcese, it gets cut all sorts of slack, and the actors are good.  But it's not great, just above-average Friday-night cinema fare.  It is being routinely over-praised due to Scorcese's reputation.  Gangster movies are hard to really mess up, after all.

Massive Magazine Review

I bought the first issue of Massive magazine this week.  Covering the massively multiplayer online gaming genre, it offered a digital subscription option, and I decided to give it a try for the first couple of (quarterly) issues.

Within a couple of minutes, I received an email with a link to the magazine, which appears as zoomable png files with a navigation bar at the top of the page.  The first thing I noticed was the advertising: they must have been offering some pretty good packages, because there is a lot of it at launch, for Blizzard, SOE, Vanguard and most of the rest of the big players in the MMO marketplace.  In all, there were twenty-three pages of ads out of the one hundred pages of magazine.  Another twelve pages were covers, graphical padding, contents pages and the like, leaving about sixty-five pages for actual content.

Sixty-five pages isn't bad, but it depends what you're looking for.  Twelve pages were given over to "What's Next": news on what the next expansions for each of the bigger games in the marketplace.  Then fifteen pages were dedicated to "Coming Soon": a list of upcoming releases over the next 18-24 months, with more minor current and upcoming games in the sidebars.  I found some of this interesting, but it's very sponsor-friendly stuff.  It was interesting what went where: Dark and Light was relegated to a single paragraph in a sidebar when, nine months ago, it was the keenly anticipated release on MMORPG.com.  In total, this meant that twenty-seven pages of the magazine were dedicated to a list of games and expansion packs.  I suspect that this will have been by way of an intro, and that this will shrink into a six- or seven-page news item in later issues.

There were six "first-line" articles, ranging from a fairly soft and fluffy piece on hacking MMOs, through an interesting article on guilds, to a substantive look at UI mods for WoW, EQ2 and CoX.  Generally, they were discussion pieces - farming, the history of the genre and so on - although there was one piece looking at a disastrous server rollback on EQ2 that was nicely different, and amusing to me as a developer.  This was also the only piece that could have been seen as in any way negative about potential advertisers, and even then the EQ2 live team came out of the mess looking a lot more professional than probably would have seemed the case had one been there, watching, at the time.

There are the usual padding and page-filling pieces: hardware that you might like to use; a moderately-amusing explanation of MMO jargon; five questions to a dev; some made-up and unfunny letters to an agony aunt.

Finally, there are a bunch of editorial pieces by big names: Brad McQuaid, Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Richard Garriot and Nick Yee.  The latter is a researcher, and Bartle helped invent the genre, but the others have been involved in most of the A-list games since Ultima Online came out and began to popularise commercial MMOs.  None of the pieces is terribly breathtaking, however.  Nick's is good stuff, but you can read it all (and more) at the Daedalus Project.  Raph's is stuff you can read on his blog every day.  Richard Bartle's piece is less like his blog, and more like his postings on Terra Nova, where, having reached archwizard status and the end of his beloved Hero's Journey, he rarely posts articles any more but just comments on those of others.  Brad is far more controversial when posting on the Vanguard or FoH boards.  And Garriot writes about how useful instanced spaces can be: probably Brad is one of only a couple of dozen people in the world who disagree with him there.  A head-to-head between such names on important areas would have been far more interesting than what turn out to be fairly meh pieces, all in all.

This is the problem with the magazine.  More than just about any other genre of entertainment, those interested in buying this magazine will be reading blogs, forums, news sites and the rest.  A quarterly magazine will not be providing news to a community where any announcement is read, dissected,  cross-posted, flamed, trolled, parodied and even discarded within hours.  Unlike normal games mags, it cannot provide gameplay hints when the readers are, by definition, connected to the internet and liable to be readers of Warcry, Allakhazam and the rest.  And it is difficult for it to carve a niche for itself in the comment sphere when those who really care probably already read half a dozen developers blogs already.

I enjoyed reading Massive.  It took up a couple of pleasant hours.  But I had to pay for it.  On the level of serious comment, The Escapist is first class and free, while Terra Nova provides a forum for discussion.  And such sites don't need to fear offending advertising: considering the current Second Life discussions on TN, they don't even fear offending their contributors.

I hope that Massive finds its niche and prospers.  I'm going to let my sub run for the meantime, just to see what they do next.  But I'm glad I'm not the editor: carving out a unique and necessary space will be a challenge.

Datamining as Data Valuation

Over on Terra Nova, Timothy Burke has posted about mining massively multiplayer online game forums for valuable feedback, in the light of SWG Creative Director ChrisCao's recent pained outburst.  His post got me thinking, especially since my own last few posts have been on kinda-related topics: analysis of forums and the dismissal of some forum opinion by the Star Wars Galaxies team.

What Tim is talking about is a little different from what I did with the Terra Nova posting analysis, of course.  He uses the term "datamining" to describe the rapid assessment of the value of an archive, and the the act of extracting useful information from such an archive through manual but rapid skim-reading, informed by contextual knowledge that allows one to quickly .  As he suggests, it is a skill that comes with practise, especially when exposed by one's role to primary texts, although having two very different areas of study, I find that much the same ability develops with abstract symbology - when scanning tens of thousands of lines of code - as when quickly reading, for instance, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

The article, however, got me thinking about how automation might be used in extracting value from game forums.  At first glance this is an unlikely task.  Game forums are places of natural language, for one thing, and I am not hugely interested in natural language analysis.  To use software to parse and extract actual content from posts is quite possible, but expensive and cumbersome.  I think that Tim is right in bypassing any attempt by technological means to come to conclusions on qualitative grounds.  But weighted quantitative analysis, with a very few specific and easily maintained qualitative

But I suspect that, so long as one accepts a very lossy process of transmissio, then a few easy tools could be scripted.  What a community relations rep should be able to do is to give empirical data to the dev team on what people are discussing (where are the problems) and what the trend of opinion seems to be.

How to get the data is trivial: forums are stored in relational databases, so retrieval is easy, especially if you warehouse to a de-normalised form (one that is bigger but quicker for specific queries).

To find out what people are discussing, have a list of keywords to be scanned for.  As long as this list can be maintained easily, then there is value here.  If 12% of posters in a given day are mentioning an obscure monster in a mid-level zone then it is worth checking whether there is a possible exploit.  If the trade forum is flooded with mentions of a previously rare loot item, then check for a bug in loot tables.

You don't want to get a list of every unique word, and you want some terms to be synonymous.  A feedback loop is useful.  Use a bayesian algorithm to allow skewed weighting of poster value: if a community rep reads a post and finds it valuable, they should be able to rate it higher (or lower, of course).  This value would, of course, be uber-hidden, and data protection legislation would probably require it to be double-blind.  Have this value decay over time (or probably over a number of posts) towards a norm.  Similarly, allow for weighting by admins of specific words, so that their value drops beneath a threshold that excludes them from reports.  One might rank "the" at zero and "exploit" at 85, for instance.

Look for the first and second derivatives.  If there are 1100 mentions of widgeting per day every day, then be alert when that starts to spike or plummet.  And over a period of days, look for accelerating growth (say, as more people tell their friends about how to make teh fr33 l00t).  If token-counts remain steady over time, you are aware already: exclude them from the report on the basis of the first derivative of the postcount.  When the rate of change itself varies, then include it in the report.

You have data that can help shape your analysis.  Weight the scoring given to a mention by a forum member with 4000 postings as compared to someone with 20.  I would suggest that the latter would receive a massively higher scoring by default: when twenty non-regulars come and ask about a certain game feature, then suspect a problem.

Some forums allow fellow-posters to evaluate posts.  SWG had this, but it was removed when the boards split into the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.  You want to know what your players think: use it!  But analysis of this data should be shaded in some way.  One useful method is to balance votes for those with persistently extreme voting patterns: those who consistently vote 1/2 or 9/10 for everything have their votes weighted towars the average, just as those who vote with a very high or low average have their overly discriminating or undiscriminating tastes allowed for accordingly.  A report on the posts rated most extremely (lots of very low and very high ratings) by large numbers of people would show where the current fault-lines are.  Of course, the data consumers would be similarly skewed when assessing their valuation practises: if dev Steve always rates low without ever balancing this, then his opinions are to be discounted by a similar factor, or else others will miss data thanks to him.

I would present a report on threads with an original post over n00 words where there are more than x replies of y words.  This will show manifesto pieces that strike a note with the community, for better or worse.  Burke himself (posting, I think, as Khaldun) presented a series of posts on SWG's systems called (I think) the seven deadly sins of SWG (now deleted in a forum wipe) which provoked very large numbers of responses.  Lots of people post huge lists of suggested gameplay enhancements, but most fall off the front page in hours.  But those which get large numbers of responses beyond "/Agree" are worth looking at.

Mine for common terms (weighted by bayesian means as mentioned above: you don't want a list of swear words and obscene puns on senior dev names) in admin-closed threads and present the top dozen.  This will yield information on what players are angry about, and what reps are shutting down discussion of.

Of course, polls work too, but are conducted in most MMOs with the same care for the result as pre-1989 Warsaw Pact plebiscites.  No poll will risk asking questions where a truly undesirable result could be returned (witness a recent SWG poll where the most popular option for a penalty on character death, item decay, was excluded).

In summary, use of decently-trained bayesian filtering, some weighted user valuation based on simple arithmetic posting practices, together with observation of the rate of change of token ("word") appearance and some specific, tailored reports (who is getting lots of lengthy feedback?), one could gather some decent info.  But someone still has to go in there and read and talk.

SWG Creative Director Goes Shotgun Crazy

I have been known to comment on Star Wars Galaxies.  It's fashionable to knock it, not least on cynic-fest funboard F13, but I did think it came very close to being a really fun, immersive and complex virtual world.

That said, it could hardly be said to have lacked for troubles.  It was rolled-out in a phase barely worthy of the term "Beta".  I don't release code to user-acceptance testing until I can't find bugs any more, and I'm thorough.  Beta-testers are there to find problems of scale, problems related to weird player behaviour, issues related to synchronisation and other such hard-to-predict scenarios.  SWG shipped with features that could never have been regression-tested because attempting them simply did nothing.

Blah, blah, usual SWG rant, broken, buggy, failed expectations, New Game Experience revamp, apparent designer/producer lunacy, tinfoil hats, demonisation, usual suspects etc etc...

The whole game has moved from under-achiever to absolute horror story for the last year or so, and has been an object lesson over its lifetime regarding bad development practises, unbelievably poor QA processes and the dangers of letting a senior developer run with a "really cool" idea (how the producer avoided being taken out and shot at dawn for allowing the NGE to occur eludes me, but I suspect he must know where Lucas Arts and Sony hide the bodies.

Anyway, a year ago a guy called ChrisCao [sic] joined as creative director.  He signed up in Q3 '06, when the NGE revamp was under way but being kept secret from the player base.  Here was a great opportunity to change the direction of the game.  To be involved in turning around a moribund product (maybe he should have asked why only this update was being kept hush-hush).  He posted an enthusiastic, content-lite string of cliches from the Raph Koster book of community management: "we're here, we're listening, we're answering".  The usual marketing weaselry.

And then he lived through nine months of arguably the biggest-scale community-relations disaster in virtual worlds history.  In March, at the very height of the debacle, he briefly tried to defend the changes, posting 18 of his 42 total posts in one day.  Since this was an impossible task, he shouldn't have felt too bad that he met a wall of hostility, but he dealt with it by removing himself for half a year, withdrawing from direct contact from the community for whom he was supposedly the creative driving force.

Then, last week, he snapped.  Something - perhaps a bad day at home, perhaps a particularly well-designed trolling post - made him post this.  If you don't know about Massively Multiplayer Online Game forums, it is worth noting that this is very stupid behaviour.  You do not post saying "if you disagree with me you are all t3h 5uxx0rs".  He is posting about the vehemence of the SWG boards (and accurately so, but he helped make them that way with his "creations").  Well, duh!  Do that and the flames are always going to be so fierce that you're lucky if you only lose your eyebrows.

What he said basically boiled down to: most of you people who regularly complain about the direction of the game are unimportant to us, and we ignore you.  This is either fallacious (why address those you ignore?), or unneccessary (why address those you ignore?).

If he really wanted to say what he said, he should have created a temporary account and flamed away.  Of course, he would have been ignored or laughed at as a shill of SOE (did I say the boards are dysfunctional, the heavily-beaten red-headed step-children of MMO gaming forums?).  But he wouldn't have forced everyone from the community relations folks (the embarrassingly-monickered Thunderheart) to the lead designer (Helios) to post "clarifications" in strangled tones.

The people who remain working on SWG and the players who keep playing it deserve each other.  But they do teach us some valuable life lessons.  If you are foolish enough to pay money for a horrible experience that you can't let go, that is dumb, and you deserve to get played like the junkies you are.  And if you are willing to work for customers who you hate, and who loathe you right back, then be smart enough to be professional about it!

Raph Koster, I believe, literally wrote the book for SOE community relations.  I have not read it, but I have read his other books, and I have seen his guidelines discussed.  He said, amongst other things, that the key is to marginalise the flamers through selectively responding to the positive posters.  Raph is a talented man, and I can't wait for him to design another world, but this dog-training approach to community relations won't work when the plurality of your paying subscribes actively believes that you no longer have their best interests at heart, and when many of the most vocal members of your community believe that you in fact wish to be rid of them.  Confirming this in a senior dev's post, however?  I would love to have seen some faces in the community relations team when they spotted that post glued to the top of the forums: "Erm, guys...?  There's something you, I mean, should um..."

I hope this drama never ends.  Sadly, I think the clock must be ticking, and rather loudly.

Web Page Data Retrieval

I've been asked about the tool I used to gather the Terra Nova data in the previous post.

Basically, it uses the Internet Explorer object model to automate an instance of IE6.  I wrote a series of primitives to do things like navigate to a page; wait until page-loading has finished; enter data into a field; click a link; retrieve a value from the page and so on.  There were about 15 such primitive functions in all.  It was then fairly straightforward to write a scripting language to enable me (or other users) to extract data from sites without resorting to programming.  I also added a scheduler to allow scripts to run on a regular basis and update files overnight with data from various pharms, oil and energy sources.

The whole thing took a couple of days to write, and since it fetches data, it is called FIDO, meaning FIDO Is Data Oriented.  There is a very old tradition, sadly largely in abeyance, that when one writes a useful tool of which one is proud, it gets a self-referential or recursive acronym.  It contributed nicely to my end of year review last year.

The question I was particularly asked was how to specify what particular data to get from a page.  There are three tricks I use to do this, depending on the page:

1. If this is always the only, first, third or nth instance of a given style or class on a page, I build an XML object containing the page HTML and parse accordingly.
2. If the data always appears in the same place on a page (useful in EIA tabular pages) I use IE's ability to export to Excel and retrieve the relevant cell location.  This is great if it works, but useless if the page varies.
3. If the page varies, and there might be an uncertain number of similarly formatted page elements, but the field always follows another field with a certain value (eg a title label) I use method one, but am able to retrieve all such elements.

Almost everything can be done with a mixture of these approaches.

The highlighting I discussed is done with a five-line piece of javascript which colours the relevant fields in bright blue.  I wrote it as the client-side component of a server-side search routine for our Broadvision servers.  That's Broadvision, the horrible application server with terrible documentation that is so opaque that being able to use it is at once very well-remunerated but barely worth it.

Terra Nova, WoW and Second Life

On Terra Nova, there is an ongoing grumble from many posters that there is an imbalance towards Second Life in the postings that are made.  There is another suspicion - sometimes mentioned by way of rebuttal to the SL conspiracy theory - that World of Warcraft gets all the authorial love.  Greg Lastowka addressed this explicitly in a recent post.

So what I did was rip every TN article since the beginning of June, using a piece of code that I wrote to extract oil-sector data from the EIA site.  By a happy coincidence, this came to exactly 100 articles.  I then wrote a script to parse the retrieved texts for expressions such as "Second Life", "SL", "Warcraft", "WoW" and the like.  I flagged every occurrence and manually checked it to avoid false positives from posts by those such as Dmitri Williams who occasionally use "wow" as an exclamation.  I also skimmed the articles to pick up references less amenable to automated detection.

For each article, I collected title, author and a count for three games: World of Warcraft, Second Life and Eve-Online.  The latter I chose to provide a baseline: it is a well-populated virtual world/game, with many interesting and complex factors, which is amenable to study and discussion.  I suspected that it would provide a useful comparison.

Meta-references and purely allusive references that did not substantively refer to an actual game were not counted: thus the mere mention of thorium, amongst a variety of other currencies, in an article that did not go on to mention or discuss World of Warcraft, was not counted.  Such examples were rare ("Born with Silver|Gold|Mithril|Thorium spoons in their mouths" and "How will "free-to-play" business models affect the gaming landscape in the West?" provide an example of passing and allusive references respectively).

For the 100 articles sampled, each game received mentions in the following percentage of articles:

World of Warcraft 29%
Second Life 20%
Eve-Online 6%

This is interesting.  Second Life is referenced only 68% as often as World of Warcraft.  This may seem disproportionate in terms of market share, but it is arguable that Second Life contains more experimental aspects amenable to discussion.  Second Life receiving mentions in only one article out of every five is clearly enough to provoke interest from those who already suspect bias, especially when compared to a 6% rate for Eve-Online, which looks under-represented considering the complex and emergent gameplay possible therein.  But the focus is clearly more squarely upon World of Warcraft.

Another interesting comparison is to split the data in half.

For the latest fifty posts in the sample:

World of Warcraft 40%
Second Life 14%
Eve-Online 8%

For the earlier fifty posts:

Thus, World of Warcraft has more than doubled its rate of reference, whereas Second Life has almost halfed.  Given that there have been no major additions to gameplay in World of Warcraft over this period, nor any substantial reductions from the complexity of Second Life, could this reflect caution in reaction to the perceived bias asserted by non-authorial posters?

I picked out a few other interesting points of data, but lack of funding (the end of lunchtime) prevented further detailed analysis.  In highlight, however:

• Only 6% of posts referenced both WoW and Second Life.  There seems to be a split here between articles interested in gamey worlds and those interested in worldy ones.  Greg was the most likely person to reference both, and also the most balanced author of the frequent posters, referring to each in 33% of his 12 posts.
• Articles which made references to World of Warcraft were likely to be about broader issues, with WoW no more than a passing reference.  Articles which referred to Second Life were more likely to be specifically about Second Life.
• Edward Castranova has been very careful not to provoke his audience.
• Nate Combs receives the Red Thorium Banner Award for Stakhanovite Posting, contributing a sample-skewing 27% of articles over the period studied.  He is also the least likely to mention SL of the regular posters (3.7%), and the most likely to mention Eve (66% of all mentions of Eve-Online were by Nate).

I Mourn Vanilla Diet Coke

I always knew it, but I couldn't make myself look, until now.  The stupid stupidheads at Coca Stupid Cola Corporstupidation cancelled Vanilla and Diet Vanilla Coke in the UK from early this year.  They are to be replaced with (cue gagging sounds) black cherry vanilla.  Yon wid gar ye bauk.

There had been shortages before, but I tended to hoard in such quantity - and seek out minor newsagents with sufficiently slow stock through-flow - that I was immune to the worst effects thereof.

But now it is all gone.  All gone.  Consumers and dentists alike weep openly in the streets.  Tell it not in Largs.  Publish it not on the streets of Glasgow.  Those Irn-Bru-swilling heathens have their victory.

Of course, to us decadent bourgeousie there is a solution: vanilla essence can be added to diet coke (at horrific expense) to make something approaching the real thing, although the temptation to overdose is everpresent.  Similarly, a splash of the Good Captain - of Morgan's Spiced Rum - will do much the same job.  But these are not the same.

Oh, and all these fly-by-night grey-importers like Edinburgh's Margiotta's - apparently now run by the Russian Mafia - who insist on stocking continental Cola Light instead of Diet Coke are missing a major point.  Coca Cola Corporation, despite their arrant stupidity over the vanilla question, are well aware that the US and American markets like a different taste from the sickly continental version.  I am driven to Diet Pepsi.

That said, Diet Pepsi still sell vanilla versions of their drinks in the US.  I am looking at doing a little grey-market importing myself.

Teenage Fanclub Barrowlands Review

On Friday night, I went to see the Teenage Fanclub gig at the Barrowlands.  This was a start-to-finish rendition of 1991's astonishing Bandwagonesque, followed by a run-through of later work.

The atmosphere was strained at times.  Here were a bunch of guys who had known each other for a couple of decades.  They had, once upon a time, created an awesome, majestic album which was favourably compared to contemporary releases such as Nirvana's Nevermind.  The world had been at their feet; they were in a rock band; everything had seemed possible.  Then the follow-up had been, somehow, less.  The drummer, Brendan O'Hare, had left shortly afterwards.  The rest of the band had gradually drifted into safer, more mature sounds: Coldplay does the Beach Boys.  Venues had got smaller, crowds older and fewer.

It was Ibsen-like in the personal tension.  Now, O'Hare is back for a night, and he hasn't really aged in attitude.  He's balding and long-haired, sure, but he's still drinking constantly through the set and saying massively inappropriate things (at great and inaudible length) to the crowd in 1980s-funny, foreign accents.  They're the grown-ups with jobs and he's still their mate from Bellshill.  He's having a laugh and they don't know how to react.  The bassist (Love) studiously ignores him.  The lead guitarist (McGinley) loudly tunes up whenever O'Hare starts speaking.  Norman Blake, lead vocalist, isn't sure what to do, and grins in an embarassed fashion, like the one who was best mates with him once, but had to persuade the other two to have him back and is now dying inside.

I was worried that the newer Teenage Fanclub would play the old Bandwagonesque.  All violins, mellow sounds and highly-produced vocals, they would make it safe and happy.  Luckily, that wan't the case.  The rendition was faithful to the spirit of the original, which is as good a 3/4 an hour of power pop as I can think of.  In fact, by ret-conning in a bit of flow and drift more normal in Ride's work at the time, they actually excelled at times.

Most of the crowd remembered most of the words, and as side one, track one kicked in, it seemed there wasn't a person in the crowd not belting out the words to The Concept, about a girl so uncool she likes Status Quo.  This link to the video for the song on YouTube may work for a while: for a taste of the time it is unmissable.  The band launched into the song with real energy, but did seem to drift at times.  The last track, Is This Music?, was performed brilliantly, but only after a false start and mass retunes, where O'Hare's antics and camp dramatics probably saved what would otherwise have been a jarring delay of at least a minute or so (a very long time in front of a capacity Barrowlands crowd).

I like the format of a gig playing a full album, in order.  The album, after all, was crafted and laid out ni a specific order, with flow and balance in mind.  It was a great album.  Why play it out of order?  Why chuck in a cover of a Zep song or miss out a few songs?  I only wish that I could hear a few other albums done the same way: Superunkown by Soundgarden; Pornography by the Cure; White Pony by the Deftones.

Some albums wouldn't work as well.  The Smashing Pumpkins' Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be the perfect length for a live set, but you'd need to take out the four wrong songs: the ones not about loss tacked on at the end.  Then again, make it a single- instead of double-album and you have arguably the best record of the past 25 years.  Massive Attack create great songs, and amazing albums, but even Blue Lines has jarring shifts.

Anyway, after finishing Bandwagonesque, the Bellshill Beach Boys returned to the stage with their new lineup.  The new drummer was less chaotic, and even technically more skillful.  But the energy and presence was no longer there.  I was here to hear an album, and not to see the Teenage Fannies run through their greatest hits (what hits?) collection.  It felt a little like going to a wedding and - as soon as the service ends - seeing the bride's ex-husband's friends celebrate his brithday, complete with cake and singing.  The songs were nice, and deeply inoffensive, but I left, along with a few hundred others.