Game developers and players aren’t organically aligned. What is easy to code isn’t always hard to avoid and what is hard to code isn’t always easy to appreciate. Development difficulty and player experience are not related.

For example, a player may spend 30 minutes trying to avoid Game Over in Tetris when the following lines make Game Over happen:

[game lose]; // fire the game over screen
gameRunning = FALSE; // set our game state variable in case of clean up
return; // return and basically exit loop

Three lines or less is really what fires and controls the player experience. Whereas boundary checking, animation tweening and AI is much more difficult. So really the code work doesn’t align with the game play. This is important because nothing is built-in to align up the experience of developer to player. Of course there’s no solution. Maybe this disparity can be managed by completely ignoring coding effort. Just because physics took a long time to implement, let’s not create a physics playground level. Just because an animation was hard, let’s not reuse animations everywhere.

30 minutes of player effort to avoid 3 seconds of coding effort. Ignore it.

The majority of Megafauna (large animals) were driven to extinction and humans are most likely to blame. I can imagine a small army of humans hunting for meat, tearing down the largest scariest things they see in response to fear and the desire to topple odds. The human spirit wants to cheer for the underdog, to make things equal and spread tall stacks even.

In a video game (especially RPGs), a boss fight is a super-villian goal element where the hero must kill “the head guy” to receive some benefit or reward. In many games, the boss fight is the climax of the story and/or action.

Diablo III‘s limited amount of content release ends with a large beast surrounded by 5 humans. They hack and slash, slowly exhausting their target. I couldn’t help think that this could have been the last Mammoth. The large beast falls and the party stands around, victorious but silent. They stand and the monster is beneath them. You can see the large creature in the screenshot below. The gameplay video shows five heroes running around a very large creature and cooperatively helping each other kill it.

Then in Bioware’s upcoming Dragon Age Origins, a large creature is being attacked by a group of smaller people. It’s seems natural to take down a large intimidating creature. The Russian from Rocky IV, the Empire from Star Wars and any College movie where the Dean gets his comeuppance by the “out of control fraternity”. In the screenshot below, a smaller boss is being fought by the heroes.

Naturally, a video game player is going to side with the human hero versus a large wild beast. There is little for the observer to relate to with the boss (or megafauna). That is to say, when I see a Mammoth I don’t think of it as a mother of smaller Mammoths. There is no empathy and it’s an impersonal large object. Maybe it’s this distancing and repulsion that allows us no guilt in killing something.

This idea spiked when I finished reading The World Without Us, an excellent book that describes what would happen to our houses, streets, cities, pets and wildlife if humans disappeared suddenly.

Once humans did appear, they proceeded to change the world more than any other species — in part by killing off a lot of other species. Weisman visits Arizona to talk to a paleoecologist named Paul Martin, who believes that when humans left Africa and Asia and came to North America, they exterminated three-quarters of the continent’s late Pleistocene megafauna — “a menagerie far richer than Africa’s today.” Huge animals like giant armadillos, giant short-faced bears twice as big as grizzlies, giant lions bigger and faster than African lions and, of course, woolly mammoths — all were driven into extinction, Martin argues, because they did not suspect that the “runty biped” who confronted them was dangerous. Martin’s theory, Weisman writes, remains “one of science’s greatest flash points,” the subject of endless debate.

It was these large creatures that disappeared first. Not the rats, bugs or plants. Humans initially desire a toppled pile of meat and then will be confused as to what to do next. Just as now when modern life brings us squirrels and deer in our daily lives instead of T-Rexes and Sabertooth Tigers. It’s an ancient ritual that wants to be fulfilled, even if it’s not necessary or doesn’t fit in with grocery shopping.

Some coworkers and I play WoW after work and sometimes we co-operatively take down large creatures. It’s the exact same mechanics in Diablo III and any climatic “man vs nature” movie. It seems to make sense after a day of irrelevant office work and engineering that takes place in the upper tiers of Mazlow’s hierarchy. We organize. We run and hunt. It’s dramatic and exciting during the fight but when the polygons stop moving that’s basically the dead-end of it. The landscape is flat and the human experience gives no guidance as to what is next. The hunt has ended and the family is fed by the toppled towers. That’s it. Go to bed. Do it again.

A lengthy discussion at work broke out about Nerd vs Geek. My point took some time to sink in but eventually some like-minded people started coming up with their own examples of what I was trying to communicate. The following is the table that we whiteboarded.

The conclusion we all came to is, a social group is able to judge themselves very accurately. That is to say, “takes one to know one”. We also realized that all things in this list would seem nerdy to an outsider. That is to say, a jock would think that “The Matrix” is a nerd flick even if some people see it as a mainstream cyberpunk movie.

The most important thing to me is my ever-vigilant intent to only have a small percentage of things from the Nerd column. If I start playing D&D then I give up my Slinky or whatever. We also noticed that there are good examples and bad examples. I think the first example is the reference example. One is a movie series you can take a date to, the other involves no dating ever.

Halo3, the Microsoft juggernaut, launches tomorrow and seals away a story arc spanning two consoles. Halo was originally a Mac game (as well as Windows) before the Xbox version, that changed and Halo1 was a very successful launch title for the Xbox1. It was really _the_ launch title for the Xbox. The PC versions wouldn’t be released for a couple years later and when they were released, most people had already played the Xbox version.

At the time of release, everyone I knew was into Halo. People bought an Xbox to play Halo with their friends. Of course, Xbox Live has never been free so people signed up for Xbox Live. People also needed to chat so they bought headsets for use with their Xbox. Outside of an active monthly subscription, the headsets would be useless. Online play continued, Red vs Blue got popular and even an online gesture “the tea-bag” was as due to Halo.

To me, Halo was generic when I saw it first. Massive maps, bland textures, obvious color choices and a repeatable military vs aliens theme. It didn’t click. During the gold rush of Halo2, my wife bought me an Xbox1 and a copy. I was grateful. It was something fresh for me and it’s been a sore point of critisizing something as cool as a wife giving you an entire game console. I watch my step because the present itself was extremely rad while the Microsoft disease of hype and design-dearth is anti-rad. So, let it be told from the top of the highest peak of a silent blog that I enjoyed my Xbox1. Wife protection off.

The satisfaction of pulling the right trigger button on the fatty Xbox1 controller to squeeze off real metal rounds into a herd of emotionless monsters is caveman satisfaction. Bill Maher, Dennis Miller and Frasier are closer to my stereotyped intellectual entertainment but sometimes I have a headache and I want knuckle dragging rock. In this vein, Halo delivers a one-note riff.

I played through 1/2 of Halo2 and gave it an honest chance but then put it down for a while. After getting the 360, there’s no save game feature to let me continue so one of these days I’ll have to hook up the Xbox1 and finish it off so I can trade it in. There was a clan I was in with friends called “Gamers with Jobs” but that fizzled for greener CS:Source pastures. There was a headset that I used to play with people online but in the end I ran into too many pre-teens with nothing to say.

And now as I see the Halo Zune and Halo crap-colored 360 (with no specs to back it up), I’m glad that Halo3 ends the story arc. Maybe they’ll reboot the series and go with an ultra modern “Vista” Halo with a translucent suit for Master Chief and heart boxers. “Aliens beware, I have Windows Defender!”

I digress. Halo was was described by gamespy as

the game was tenth on GameSpy’s “Top 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time”; one reviewer stated that the game “recycl[ed] the same areas over and over until you were bored to tears.”

If you have never seen the infamous E3 2007 Halo 3 Special Edition 360! *Crickets* post by Kokatu, please run and watch.

Halo3? For $60 and only 10 hours of gameplay, I can find something better to do; like finish Bioshock.

I accidentally agreed with an older PA post. I was talking to Tim after seeing him on Xbox Live playing the Crackdown demo. My IM was something like:

Me: Crackdown is cool I guess. It’s way over the top but … not to nickpick, the font is so lame. I wonder if the developers were forced to use it because it’s a MS font.
Tim: lol

Or something close to that effect. Of course I sound whiney but that’s not really the case. I’m in the throws of beginning gamedev and the very first thing I played around with was fonts. Default OpenGL fonts suck. They look horrific. And there’s very few people that care enough to work on it. FTGL is something I’ve messed around with but it’s not a great solution for reasons I barely remember. Getting in bed with MS is your only option on the 360 but even on the Mac some of the best font tricks are NSObjects which means your audience better be running a Mac.

Bleh to portability. And bleh to me pretending I’m a real developer. I’ll post some screenshots later today of my “nice” proof of concept. It’s mostly stolen code but I can’t afford to reinvent the wheel when I’m sizing up effort. Nice fonts or nothing at all.

So while all of this is klinking around in my head, PA posted this about Crackdown. Remember Crackdown? That’s the topic that I started this raging post with … O_o

So, yes, I do like it, but there’s something I don’t understand.

You’ve got this big, open-world game that runs well and has a unique look. Against all odds, you’ve managed to carve out a multidisciplinary gameplay niche and make it work. What’s more, your game is now indelibly tied to one of The West’s most potent action franchises. So why does your entire interface look like a first-pass prototype?

I have to say that red flags are raised whenever I see that default Xbox system font in a retail game. You’ll know what I mean if you see it. Talk to Nate over at Blambot, for fuck’s sake.

The font is just the beginning of it – every time data is communicated to the player it’s done in a lackadaisical, lifeless fashion that looks like it must be the example code they ship with the Goddamn devkit. It looks cheap, and it is cheap, only it’s not, because this thing costs sixty fucking dollars. I’m not going to deprive myself of otherwise solid entertainment because of it, but this is nonsense.

Yes! Yes, exactly. Thank you. The Xbox system font he’s referring to is Arial 14 point and it’s so played out. I don’t want to be reminded of Outlook when I’m blasting space alien vampire hooker mutant rockstars. Blambot, yes, buy the $20 font you bastards. Wouldn’t this look so much better than that Arial crap?

Windows typography just isn’t even a phrase. It’s an afterthought. Lose the Age of Empires frontrosity.

Here’s the obligatory step-back opening statement of a rant. If I was ranting about baseball, I might say “I’ve been a fan of the national pastime for 25 blah blah”. If I was ranting about poltics, I might say “Every once and a while the clowns in Washington surprise me by blah”. So without further introduction, allow me to open this rant in this weak and typical way that exhibits my inability to be a real writer or pundit.

The gamer market. An unending showcase of consumerism and popular thought. Faster, more, better. Win, frag, hi-score. With so many products, so much assumed demand and furious pace, it’s no wonder why video games have outpaced the film industry for a while. $13B or some such market figure.

I am the kettle calling the pot a lovely shade of ebony. After all, I picked up a Creative X-Fi, buying into the hype. Sure, I hear a small difference. But it’s super small and not very super cereal.

Q:I want one, where can I buy it?!
A:You can pre-order it now at www.killernic.com. We will be announcing ‘where to buy’ locations soon!

Q:How much does the KillerNic cost?
A:$279.99.

Q:Why does Killer NIC cost so much?
A:Lag and Latency Reduction technology is extremely expensive to make, and quantities are extremely limited. Killer was designed from the beginning for Elite gamers who want an edge…who want to win.

Ok, whatever. $280 for a NIC that magically gets rid of lag. Here’s a thought. Take that $280 and bribe your congressman to pass a law stating that Verizon must share it’s new FiOS network with federal assistance. Or maybe just pay your congressman to ignore telco bribes. Your $20 gigabit card is fine. It’s your cable and telco company that isn’t giving you 20-50mb like even lower density countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden) are. US is far behind other places because our government is for sale.

nVIDIA changed it’s logo recently. A company that once prided themselves on different capitalization and casing, now screams in all caps LIKE SUM GR8 IM CONVERSATION KTHX<3.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of an Acura logo while driving to work. Perhaps they aren’t as similar as I thought.

Oh, another Internet OS flame war. Yay. This stupid fuck on engadget’s shitty comment system is overloading the site with his shitty-kid opinions:

Macs (and Apple in general) are made for noobs who dont know how to use computers; plain and simple. Guess what? Your OS isn’t secure; if OSX was as popular as Windows was, you’d have way for viruses/spyware/hacks out there. But guess what? NO ONE CARES ABOUT MACS!!! Keep thinking you’re cool with your 3% global market share, LOL.

Yes. Viruses have everything to do with market share.

Of course it was boring… WHY DOES APPLE EVEN HAVE A DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE? All of the developers are writing software for WINDOWS!

ALSO with the move to Intel Apple is now nothing more than a PC… there are flavors of Linux out there that are better than OSX (by the way… how is Apple innovative with OSX which is built off of a platform designed by someone else?)

It’s not going to be hard to port the OSX version of Unix to Intel when EVERY OTHER VERSION of Unix already runs on Intel platforms.

Yes. Linux is better than OSX. It’s so great that it’s impossible to understand. Coding X11 apps is fun too, way better than Xcode. Yes, Apple doesn’t innovate because they use open standards whereas Microsoft certainly doesn’t Embrace, Extend, Destroy. This is your new community. It is Xbox Live kids trying to explain Microsoft’s pwnership. But I’m flaming.

Here is my point

Anyone who flames Macs are idiots. Here’s why:

• PC = Intel chip that runs Windows
• Mac = Intel chip that runs Windows (boot camp) and even Vista

Exactly what is a PC? Why would you buy a Dell that can’t run OSX? 10% savings, couple hundred bucks? It isn’t price anymore. Compare the two products side-by-side. Yes, you can build an expensive Mac. But you can also build a $10k XPS Dell.

Let’s get some numbers. Some real numbers. Not the first number you see on the Dell page (base cost).

Dell gaming rig – $2,649.00

XPS 700
Jet Black

Intel Core 2 Duo processor E6700 (2.67GHz)
Genuine Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition with re-installation CD
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz – 2 DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write capable
Dual 256MB nVidia GeForce 7900 GS
No Floppy Drive Included
Dell USB Keyboard
Dell Optical USB Mouse
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic (D), w/Dolby Digital 5.1
Dell A525 30 Watt 2.1 Stereo Speakers with Subwoofer
Windows Vista Capable
PC-cillin Internet Security with AntiVirus and Spyware removal

I couldn’t leave the speakers off apparently. Windows MCE is a nice touch. Would be able to do some Xbox 360 stuff that the Mac can’t do. Dual DVD drives only option too. Dual 7900GS is a better video card than the Apple.

Mac Pro – $2,499.00

Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
1GB (2 x 512MB)
250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)
1 x SuperDrive
Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse – U.S. English
Mac OS X – U.S. English

Ok, so we’re a little bit cheaper although the playing field isn’t fair. We have twin 7900 GSs and a bunch of other stuff that the Mac doesn’t have. 7900 GS is $149 and the Dell speakers are $19.95. If we want to run bootcamp, we need a copy of XP with MCE to be fair ($109 from newegg). The Dell has a DVD-Rom drive that the Mac doesn’t have, add on another $19.95 and the new total is:

Adjusted Mac – $2796.90

So we’re talking about $147.90 here to miss out on OSX, Mail, a fast PDF creator/viewer, iChat (free video conferencing), Spotlight (WinFS), Widget (Vista’s Gadgets) and an OS that doesn’t get viruses. An OS that you can move Apps wherever you want without re-installing. An OS without a C:\ or a registry.

So what is a PC? An Intel computer that runs Windows for cheap? $148.

Citing the new Mac ads as a reason to start this holy war again, Greenvilleonline did a little article on a local guy switching from PC to Mac. The story was a quaint and cute human interest type story until they started spouting off a technical comparison of PC vs Mac.

One of the bullet-points makes my eyes go cross:

Viruses: PCs are more vulnerable. That’s not a PC flaw. It’s a reality of hackers targeting the biggest market. Logic says more-popular Macs will attract more viruses. Optimism says they’ll stand strong.

I sent this email to the reporter:

Give me a break. Macs have 10% of the personal computer market, 3-5% of the total computer market and they have 0 viruses. Hackers can’t hack Macs and so there are zero viruses and not 10% or 3-5%. Not to say that Macs aren’t un-hackable, it’s just tougher.

Windows is open by default (you can create a file on C:\ , which is the root level directory)
OSX is closed by default (you cannot create files on / , which is the root level directory).

I’ll spare the rest of the details. But OSX debuted in 2001 and it pains me to hear people spouting off “hackers target the largest market”. No. Hackers target the possible market. If all things are equal, it should be easy enough for at least one rogue hacker on all of planet earth to take a few moments and create one measily little virus to knock the 0-virus record off its pedastal? Do you not see the massive prize awaiting this feat? Climb a mountain that has never been climbed? Be the first in all of OSX’s history to do this? Be responsible for 100% of the Mac viruses? Is this not motivating?

In fact, “hackers target the largest market” is the least technical and least accurate statement a speculator can make. Microsoft is big, everyone knows that but the association to security is some Urban Legend that won’t die off like “Jesus was born on December 25th”.

Phew. I feel better.

What?

A Half-Life2:Episode2 video entitled Portal is out showcasing a new type of weapon or possible stand-alone puzzle game from Valve. The game is rumored to ship free with Episode2 but it may be a section of EP2, it’s unclear at this point. Portal is impressively inspiring, showing that Episode2 will be another quality chapter in the episodic HL series.

Episodic. Yes, everyone knows that Episode1 was renamed from Aftermath to a serial name. Episode1 means there will be an Episode2. Episode2 means there will be an Episode3. Valve announced plans for a trilogy citing the advantages of developing continuously. Just like Steam easily and automatically pushes out the latest code, episodic content is released more frequently and can take advantage of the latest hardware or features. Continous, episodic, story-telling. Great. This is old news.

However, many people have beaten EP1 now. EP2 is in the works. Portal looks great. And yet, even with the hype of EP2, some are critical. After all, EP1 was $20 and it was only 4 hours of gameplay. For reference, Doom3 was about 20 hours. GTA:San Andreas was advertised with 150 hours of gameplay. Final Fantasy VII was 330 hours for me to beat. Gran Turismo was probably 400+ hours. And WoW still is racking up the hours with me personally.

Versus in the banner is flamebait.

Yeah, fine. But that’s what I’m going to compare here. Hours in-game.

Gameplay hours do not equal fun. WoW and HL are totally different games. People will enjoy them differently, fun is completely subjective. However, hours versus money is an easily measurable subject; easily and pointlessly measureable. A well-scripted and content-heavy first-person shooter/adventure game like HL is not remotely the same experience that a drawn-out ramp-up that a MMO is. However, one can easily argue opportunity cost. While busy with one thing, you are not likely to be spending money on other things. So it’s entertainment dollars I’m talking about here.

This post is pointless.

Probably. But beyond the fun of crunching the numbers and calculating entertainment dollars, we might come to a complicated conclusion. I guess we’ll find out. Let’s start with my personal numbers:

• Half-Life 2 was $50. It provided about 10 hours of gameplay.
• Half-Life 2:Episode 1 was $20 and it provided about 4 hours of gameplay.
• World of Warcraft was $50 to buy. I’ve been for 16 months at $14.99 a month with one month free. That’s $242. And here’s the kicker. I have logged 1,473 hours between all my characters. Holy crap.

That brings us to these ratios:

• HL2 = $5 per hour
• HL2:Ep1 = $5 per hour
• WoW = 16.42 per hour

But hold on a second! HL2 came with CS:Source which I played the heck out of. I’ll be generous and say that I put in 400 hours on my own server, at LAN events and on the Interweb. That puts us at:

• HL2 (with CS:S) = 12.19 per hour

So you see that HL2 is still a better deal in terms of distraction. Not to mention, as you play CS:Source, this cost would go down. The game has been paid for and you continue to log hours.

But hold on a second! I don’t play CS:S anymore. Because it’s the same round over and over. WoW’s subscription means patches and content. WoW’s large userbase means massive activities and Blizzard revenue. That money doesn’t just disappear. It comes back to you in forms of new areas, new things to do.

So now we start getting into the fun argument again. And I’m not going to get into that.

So what? No one wins?

My point is: it’s apples and oranges. Fun is preference and although movie theaters might pitch “the value of a $9 movie as compared to other activities like baseball game”, it’s not a good metric. WoW doesn’t have instant action and CS:S doesn’t have any character development. WoW is no fun to learn or watch unless you understand the ideas and CS:S wouldn’t have activities ranging from drunken chatting/fishing to capture-the-flag to player-run savenger hunts.

In conclusion, gameplay hours to cost isn’t something you can throw out as a valid argument of game superiority.