I, of course, being the huge nerd that I am headed off to PAX 2007 to take in a massive dose of gamer culture before I head to the big smog. It was as good an experience as one could hope. The organizers were very aware of gamer needs and addressed virtually every issue before it occured - clever does not adequately describe the planning process for this event.

What did I see (abstract)?

There was way too much stuff to really internalize at PAX. I only got a fraction of the experience and I think I can say the same for virtually every attendee - it is simply impossible to do and see everything the convention has to offer, to the point where one is presented with opportunity paralysis, unable to discriminate due to equivalence in utility for options.

I decided beforehand I would forgo those events wherein I would be required to demonstrate familiarity with a particular game to really get anything out of it - that mainly means tournaments and/or game-specific events unless I was really into it (such as LotRO). I frankly have never played a miniatures game in its entirety (despite owning rules for no less than 5 minis games as well as a bevvy of Pirate ships and Mechs). I haven’t played a round of Magic…ever, even though I own about 200 magic cards. Come to think, other than the demo rounds of various games, I’ve never played a round of ANY CCG - despite owning complete decks for about a dozen. I’ve never played a full-fledged D&D and nobody was offering a rousing tabletop game of old WOD Vampire, Werewolf, or (shudder) LARP.

Aside from my minor quibble about not being able to buy the very thing they are trying to sell me the exhibition hall was a spectacle unrivaled in my experience as a gamer. A teeming box of electronic lights, mashing thumbs and excited gamers coursing about the place - it felt like a small city for my kind - like home.

The panels were good, if shallow in their exploration of the topics. An hour for 3 experts in the field to provide analysis on some pretty tought questions lead to a lot of qualitative answers with broad, truisms rather than hard quantitative facts/figures. I attended the panel on the future of Online Gaming, the future of MMOs, future of TTS, how to make a collectible game, the fragdoll panel, the state of gaming journalism and how to make a game under $10k.

Favourite thing about PAX 2k7?

This is obviously a difficult question to answer ‘thing’ is universally applicable. So, I’ll break it into categories.

Favourite new (playable) game: Tabula Rasa, my expectations for this game were mixed, it really impressed me in the addictive nature of actions that are punitive in typical MMO’s (combat particularly).

Favourite new (previewed) game: Mass Effect, while I knew I already loved this game - it’s BioWare for cripe’s sake, the demo really drilled home just how phenomenal the game is.

Favourite total surprise: Warhammer 40K Squad Commander, I didn’t even know this game was being made and it seems few still do, it was literally in the far corner of the hall BEHIND the THQ booth on a inconspicuous DS and PSP - I tried the DS version and really enjoyed the experience, if I can warrant the cost, I’ll pick this up for sure.

Favourite re-affirmed purchase: Company of Heroes Opposing Forces, I knew I was going to get this game anyways, trying out the demo just drilled it home.

Favourite panelist: Tyler Bielmann (I think that’s his name), his frankness and delivery were refreshing even if his powerpoint presentation was a bit cobbled - he reaffirmed my choice in gaming as a definite career possibility.

Favourite exhibitor:Kim Hansen (from BioWare) with a Patience from LotRO a close second. Kim is a QA Analyst at BioWare for Mass Effect. She spent many long days demo-ing the product and generally putting up with guys drooling on her. She was a refreshing change from the typical female presence which came off as shallow (Fragdolls may be awesome at R6V but they shouldn’t be advocates (a subject for a later post)), or cheap (the booth babes). Firstly, she was a honest-to-goodness developer, not someone paid to show up and be pretty (despite being totally hot). Kim’s shyness was very endearing. Patience certainly made an impression on me and reaffirmed my enthusiasm for LotRO. She’s not a young girl and that of itself was impressive. But she took the time, even at the end of a very long day before yet another very long day, to chat with me - one fan amongst legion.

Worst of PAX 2k7?

There was surprisingly little to complain about through the whole affair - it was easy enough to ignore those things that bothered me and to find something that totally engaged me. But here’s a list of those things that need mentioning:

Dumb questions to the panelists: While the panelists themselves were often top-notch pro’s in the industry who knew their shit and could provide a great deal of insight, the audience questions frequently and those questions posed by the moderator occasionally were lightweight and shallow - if not plain stupid. A better system for preparing questions needs to be implemented, moderators should inform panelists of the questions beforehand, audience members should either submit questions via email and the moderator can pick the best-of beforehand, or an Enforcer needs to filter the questions based on appropriateness and relevance. The panels were good for the most part and great in some cases - but more preparation and less “ad hoc”ery would go a long way to making these things worth the precious time they occupy.

Lack of wifi internetSetting up a gateway for WiFi access needs to be done. Getting AT&T or someone as a sponsor would be straightforward especially if you let them charge a nominal fee for the service “Go To the AT&T booth to buy your credentials for PAXWiFi.” It needs to be done for a tonne of reasons.

No on-site game purchasingEBGames/GameStop should’ve had a booth and should’ve been selling god-damned games (perhaps with a special PAX discount or with coupons connected with other exhibitors). If I were to do a PAX booth for the sake of it, a retailer would be it. I can’t imagine how many copies of BioShock, Gears of War, preorders of World in Conflict, etc etc could’ve been sold if a retailer could capitalize on that gamer rush. DS and PSP games would’ve been flying.

Poorly Prepared or Irrelevant ExhibitorsDeVry university just didn’t have their shit together, they were marketing programs that were non-game related to people who can’t or wouldn’t attend their college, don’t waste the cash or booth space next year DeVry - people were just taking your water bottles. Strategy computers was possibly the most forlorn booth I saw - they just didn’t meet the tempo of their surroundings, and it showed.

Bad booth-baberyBad booth babes fall into many categories. They can be too young (Sword of the New World’s gun-toting teen looked to be 16. Hot? Yes. Wrong? Also yes.) They can be insufficiently good looking, often these are normal looking women who are selling the game - but they’re jammed into ridiculous clothing and tarted up like an import-car model, it’s awkward at best laughable at worst (the TTG companies seemed the most guilty of this). The worst of all booth babes are those who simply don’t get the product. They can be pretty, flat out gorgeous sometimes, but they are hired models who took a training seminar on gaming and the product they’re selling - and it shows. They’re poor salespeople AND poor spokespeople for the game or hardware they’re selling. Sony’s booth babes were glorified tether posts for the new slim PSPs, they gave scripted answers to questsions if they could answer at all - not a good showing.

As a gamer what was the upshot for me at PAX?

Well, it pounded out my shopping list. Firstly, I’m not going to buy a PSP and I’ll get a 360 before a PS3. Secondly, it reinforced my awarness that if I plan on using my laptop to game I’m going to have to invest in a new one. The games I’m going to purchase /subscribe to are as follows:

- Tabula Rasa : It’s some unholy combination MMO and twitch shooter. When I demoed the game, an entire hour and fifteen minutes went by without my even glancing around, a good sign for ANY game. Also, it is the closest thing I can get to Mass Effect without owning a 360 (or TV for that matter).

- EvE Online : I always knew it was a good game - I just need to find a community of fellow gamers, this game, more than most needs a real-life group.

- Warhammer 40K Squad Commander : This will likely be my DS game of choice, the only mobile game I’ve stuck with for an extended period of time is Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance.

- Dungeon Runner : If I’m in a dorm, having a free-to-play MMO seems like a good choice, especially if I’m going to be an “advocate” for the game.

- Logitech USB Gamepad : I’ve got GameTap - having two of these essentially gives me a portable SNES/Genesis wherever I have WiFi - a uni must.

- New laptop : If I want to take mobile gaming seriously, I’m going to have to be buying hardware every two - three years. When more than half of the new titles being released simply will not run on your machine and those that do run piss poorly, I need to assess whether I want to invest in a better laptop or upgrading my desktop.

- An XBoX 360 : Once they simmer down on the versions of the damn hardware I’ll probably invest in a system. But this dropping of lines, introduction of upper-end models and other fragmenting of the market is ridiculous - it defeats the advantage of the consoles over the PC (which is uniformity of platform target for development). Mass Effect, Halo 3, and other games are coming out as exclusives - in order for me to get in on that action I’ll have to drop the monays.

Any to do lists?

I like to use events like this to really refine what I want to accomplish in the gaming sphere. Obviously what I want to do, what can be done and what makes money are often in completely different spaces - conventions, as well as constant internets vigilance are required to identify that sweet-spot where they overlap.

So, are you going into gaming after school?

If I’m going to take my education anywhere in the gaming sphere it’ll have to be applied to serious gaming, there’s very little opportunity to apply what I’m going to learn directly in the gaming sphere. That said, serious gaming is a difficult market to penetrate, it is VERY small and consists mainly of contractors to big corporations. Also, very few developers want to make a game for a few million dollars when, if the game is really good, it could be sold at retail and make hundreds of millions.

That said, I think there’s a market for serious-casual-games. Games with a very limited scope and development budget which teach a specific skill or paradigm rather than whole-sale simulations of a given activity.

How do you plan on breaking into the industry?

Well, I want to get a job as a game designer - so doing that is key. I think if I can get a board game released, maybe an RPG with a digital-conversion template and have a portfolio of ideas ready to hawk to anyone who stands still for 30 seconds it’ll be enough to get into somesort of entry-level designer job. I’ve been evading the serious programming bullet for several years now - while I understand software design and such, the act of simply sitting down and learning an language inside and out is tough to reconcile with others.

So I should really just decide on a target platform and be unafraid to exclude others. C# seems the most obvious candidate.

What about releasing your own titles

Technomancer basically sells hand-bound xeroxed copies of original game material. It’s cheap - like $13 for a 100 page book or so, and very dirty (it’s black and white often very lossy copies). I don’t know how much thought they put into production cost-reduction. If I were to do my own Technomancer it would be a manifold process. I would develop an RPG system so people would never have to dump $120 on a core rulebook. I would also create my own OGL-based D&D core rulebooks ala Mongoose for budget retail. I would also include some more marketable premiums in production - full-colour covers, perhaps coloured inserts for the art, I would conduct a great deal of market research on binding methods. Stay-flat binding seems the obvious choice to me, this opens up using the book itself as a play-space for a game (maps with minis).

The hope would be I could sell enough of these books to purchase a printer and completely self-publish rather than out of kinkos. A decent quality, high-throughput printer is reasonably priced these days and I could “waterfall” the production costs as my investment capital grows.

I would also take on the space occupied by Cheap-ass games. I would produce budget priced games, perhaps with a modular/expandable system as a core with various one-offs along the way.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

In Thomas Hammes’ book The Sling and the Rock, the author articulates the current form of conflict that threatens the US and by extension the military and political influence of the western world.

This method of warfare, dubbed fourth generation war, goes by many other names – insurgency warfare, low-intensity conflict, asymmetrical warfare etc. The essential principle from a strategic perspective of this methodology is that the political will of the enemy is the target of operations. The thrust, at all levels, is to erode the will of the decision makers so that the enemy disengages from the conflict – effectively ending the war in the 4GW practioner’s favour.

This is the only type of warfare, Hammes and many others postulate that is a threat to the United States and its interests worldwide and moreover is the only kind of warfare the US is fighting. Hammes goes on to explain that it is the only type of warfare to show consistent supremacy against US forces.

As a remedy, Hammes articulates a restructuring effort for the armed forces that emphasizes a “leaning down” of the overall staff-level officer corps, increase in the rigor and dynamism of the training, increasing the specialization of officers and providing a 360 review system for officer promotion. One of the solutions Hammes mentions in the book is the development of training simulators using multiplayer virtual worlds.

This is not a new concept but it is one that has yet to be brought into full development. There have been games built for tactical and even operational event simulation but mainly they were designed to recreate circumstances that were too expensive rather than utterly impossible to manifest in reality. Hammes’ idea is to provide a dynamic, hostile simulated environment wherein officers can experiment and fail without grevious consequence – in short execute the true philosophy of wargaming in the new generation of warfare using the new tools available.

When visualizing what this game would look like I took to reviewing the typical “serious games” architecture we have available.  After some research I discovered that there are three games on the mass market that have direct counterparts for use in the armed forces, there are several others I’ll describe in brief. The primary three are Full Spectrum Warrior, America’s Army and Defcon: Everybody Dies. Others include simulators for various combat vehicles such as Silent Hunter, a submarine combat simulator, Combat Flight Simulator and some real time strategy games which attempt a realistic interpretation of contemporary battle.

Full Spectrum Warrior is a fast-paced real time tactical game. In it you command two fire teams of US Soldiers in a variety of combat settings. You issue directives  by assigning movement commands and disposition orders – you may also take control of any of your soldiers individually for specific target pointing. Full Spectrum Warrior is an adaptation of a product developed for the Army officer training corp, wherein players must make tactical decisions using only line-of-sight information and given intelligence, to simulate fog-of-war .

America’s Army is a first-person shooter developed by the Army as a recruitment tool. In it, players take part in boot camp and eventually combat missions. Expansion packs have included training and operation modules for the special forces and commando units.

Hammes outlines very abstractly what his ideal game would include. He mentions a massively multiplayer world, which implies a persistent environment. He articulates a mixed player base of training players who are officers using the simulator for learning, training operators who are the instructors and professional opponents within the playspace and finally the general public could take part in the game by providing a large, intelligent agent swarm.

Hammes describes the skills important to fighting 4GW which go beyond combat superiority and include rapid infrastructure development emphasizing health facilities, law and order systems and rudimentary civil engineering.  Combat superiority is obtained not simply through greater firepower but an increased HUMINT capability, fast OODA loop and low-level decision making capabilities to maximize flexibility and minimize response time.

What would such a game look like? There are few analogs in the gaming world at the moment, though more are perhaps on the horizon.  HUMINT must play a role, perhaps players can interact with NPC characters which act as open-source channels for information. This can be used to develop contacts with player agents.

At first, my initial idea was to outfit character groups analogous to real world situations. Soldier-players would be western soldiers with appropriate facilities and weaponry. The Operators would be high-level power brokers within the OPFOR as well as possessing GM-like capabilities to manually control any agent in the playspace. However, this would establish a crutch on western technological superiority rather than teach the kind of problem solving required for the real battlefield – the cards should be stacked overwhelmingly against the soldier-players, success must be tremendously more difficult in the playspace than in real-life conflict.

To that end soldier-players would essentially start out as a team of combatant, power-brokers, a guild. They can recruit members, develop infrastructure and increase a sphere of influence. Of course, other players are members of other teams, each vying for superiority within the finite play space. Teams would need to develop support systems to generate revenue, train soldiers, execute missions, gather intelligence, evade capture etc.

Soldier-players would become, in the playspace, the very enemy they will fight in reality. Some primary aspects to team success will be centered around the hearts and minds tug-of-war between the various factions in a given area. Tactical superiority in combat is insufficient, and largely irrelevant to success within the playspace – as it is in 4GW. NPC agents would represent political decision makers, media outlets, foreign public etc – the AI would of course be modeled around what empirical data the developers can scrounge on real-world events.

The Operators would, in effect, be the western powers. They would control the current regime, if applicable or the US military or equivalent in the playspace. They would have the big toys, superior weaponry, etc. The parameters for their resources would be set as a function of the success of the insurgents and the Operators success as well.

The Operators, in this context are professional game players – they live and breathe the game. The combination of firepower superiority and extensive experience within the simulation would make this team formidable opponents. Especially when coupled with the ability to create missions for the public-players. The Operators would also control the leaders of the various public-player factions, allowing them to form coalitions of the willing against soldier-players.

MMO’s are hideously complicated to develop – easily the most complex and expensive games to develop with budgets into the hundreds of millions and teams in excess of a hundred developers. However, given that the game would essentially be non-profit, open-source development supplemented by a team of organizers and core developers could make it a reality.

There are several MMO architectures available, assuming government agency sponsorship any or all of these could be purchased and adapted by a skilled team of developers. MOD communities abound that could contribute art resources such as models and textures. Existing physics engines could be used. The server architecture, if built around open-source software would cost the hardware and bandwidth.

Making the primary cost-driver gameplay design and development (which is typically part of an equal triumvirate of architecture, content and gameplay when it comes to MMO cost-drivers).

The current limitation of MMOs being latency and how to have spontaneous, non-repetitive, non-default action without crashing your servers is a problem that would need to be surmounted – though several games appear to have figured it out.

More on this to follow, I think.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

In my previous entry I outlined a system through which I will track my progress (both in work output and quality improvement). While I potentially could track all required information using pre-existing tools, skills development, adaption of platforms and other complexities might make it more difficult to adapt say, Microsoft Office 2007 to the system than developing a (partial) solution myself. I’ve named this system “StudentQuest” the idea is actually inspired by MMO’s and other large-scale RPGs - all of them have a solution for managing what a player is supposed to be doing at any given moment - quest management. Since there is a clear personal progression and understanding that this system is focused on only a single aspect of the total experience, StudentQuest seemed like an appropriate name.
Scheduling, note data and work unit products can all be developed using Microsoft Office 2007.  Project planning, estimation, quality analysis and other “process tasks” will have to be developed external to the system.

Which means the software, if it were to be built, would not:

• Author or manage documents, physical or virtual other than by reference.
• At first build, allow for work-unit-level process and planning (this would be done ad hoc).
• Create or display calendars at first build.
• At first build, track extraneous data integral to productivity such as resources, school supplies, study partners, etc

Which means the system, on first build, will:

• Track productivity and estimation accuracy for work units and courses.
• Track study-time requirements as a function of lecture quantity and difficulty.
• Track a partial work-unit lifecycle from estimation, skipping planning, development and post-mortem (QA is teacher marking).
• Allow various reports to be generated on productivity, work quality and overall progress.
• Report on schedule adherence, estimation accuracy and allow recursive adjustment to project scheduling.
• Indicate work-hour parameter warnings (over-load or under-load)

Now we’ve defined the basic scope for an initial build let’s define some basic use-cases.

Create a course

User elects to create a course. The user is prompted to enter information regarding the course including: course name, course code, start date, end date, professor, number of lectures, number of seminars, number of labs, projected difficulty of course (score from 1 - 100). System will validate fields and update database.

Create a work unit.

User elects to create a work-unit. User selects a course association.  User is prompted to input the following: Work unit name, work unit description (usually the assignment description, test outline or other information regarding specification), due date, start date (if pre-planning course outline, default is “today”), estimated total work-time (in minutes), percentage complete (default = 0%).

Update work unit progress.

User is presented with a work-unit table. The user can update progress increase and work-time additions (in minutes).

View work-unit progress.

User is presented with a report table for all work-units including cumulative hours, total progress, schedule adherence, estimation accuracy, projected completion date, work adjustment, scheduled hours remaining, projected hours remaining.

Post-Mortem

Once a work-unit’s progress is 100% it is added to the post-mortem list. A user selects the post-mortem list and selects a work unit. The user is then shown a final progress report and is asked to input QA information. The user inputs a grade (either letter or percentage or both) and can input and add one or many “fault points”. For each fault point a user is asked to input a name, brief description, cost, scope, probability of recidivism  and corrective prognosis.

View fault-point list.

As fault-points are added a list is available. A user can view this list which displays a report of all fault-points with the ability to sort by cost, scope, probability of recidvism, risk or work-unit of origin. This is presented as a table/check-list for easy printing as a user-side QA.

I think that is a sufficient set of use-cases for an initial build. Even if the feature count doesn’t expand beyond this, it should be a useful application for preliminary calculations and recursive analysis.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

In preparing for my impending serious academic studies I’ve been refining and preparing a suite of tools that will allow me to implement my learning system.

This isn’t a simple labelling or sorting system or a commitment to “taking notes.” Using my knowledge of my own learning habits (good and bad), cognitive impairments and expected learning schedule I’ve developed an integrated cluster of tools to help me with my college education.

What struck me about the system was it’s apparent novelty. There isn’t really anything like it out there, as far as I could find that merges all the various methodologies I hope to implement. In essence this is a merging of task management, project management, note taking/managing, data mining, document authorship/management, research tools, with a hodge-podge of various other widgets thrown in for good measure (virtual flashcards, etc.)

It’s a adaptable system, suitable for virtually any college course. It’s centered around a number of assumptions. Firstly, that the only quantitative measure of success is CGPA, so although my subjective personal feelings are important, they are outside the scope of the tools here (so there’s nothing about these tools that will help me make friends, for example). Secondly, that although tasks may be completed at various times, school follows a very rigid timebox (school session dates) with predictable schedule anomalies (holidays).

The system is class centric and work unit driven. The largest unit within the framework is a semester. Within the semester we have courses, these courses have one or many classes. Classes have a type, either lecture, seminar or lab (which defines the note taking and document managing methods). Classes have a schedule and collection of work units. Each class has work units or study time associated with it. Work units represent tests, papers, reading or any other activity requiring one or more sessions of work on my part with a definite deadline. Work units are either graded or un-graded, graded units have a weighting (hopefully all provided by the professor).

The schedule is the aggregation of study time, work time, and classes. The system aids in the development of a schedule by accounting for these three entities for all classes. When a work unit is assigned, I will input an estimate in 15-minute units as to how long I will need, I will then take 115% of this time and distribute it across the amount of time I have remaining, based on the deadline for the assignment. Productivity is tracked based on hours worked and percentage complete. For reading assignments that is pages read, for test preparation that is stages of test prep (outlined below) progressed. Papers and other “projects” will require an outline of steps each with an approximate work value, progress is the percentage value of work “points” completed.

If a schedule slip occurs, more time is alloted accordingly. I will know very quickly how accurate my estimations were and will be able to adjust in future cases. Moreover, if progress is tracked accurately and consistently, deadlines won’t sneak up on me with little of a project completed.

Also, the priority of a given work unit is decided based on the weighting of an item, making triage of study efforts trivial.

Once I have received an assignment or test back from a professor I shall go through a process of post-mortem. This will allow me to track any errors, problems, omissions, inaccuracies and other quality failures in my work. These will be triaged, reported and prognosed in the post-mortem process. The primary focus will be on reducing or eliminating the possibility of repeated error - fail the same way only once.

As QA failures are noted, a checklist can be generated to be applied to future work. As work output increases and faults are detected, the checklist will grow.

In many ways this is a direct adaptation of personal software process - instead of generating code I am generating various documents. The project management aspects will help keep my schedule doable and stress-minimized by diffusing the work in the most efficient way possible.

I implemented as much recursive analysis as possible to allow continual adjustment to schedule timelines and work-blocks. Given the rather small time-boxes of work-units it was essential to make this a daily process. I’ll also be able to track the accuracy of my estimation skills, hopefully increasing my accuracy over time. The hope is that my tools will “learn” as I progress in work out put becoming progressively more accurate and precise, making them more useful when they are more essential to success.

In all, this is a rigorous way to keep precise and accurate what is often a fuzzy analysis rife with subjective error and personal misrepresentation. It keeps me honest and keeps my eye on the ball.

The software being used is a combination of Microsoft Outlook 2007, OneNote 2007 and my own hand-coded PHP software, though I am exploring switching to an Access DB for total Office Suite interoperability.

Uncategorized | No Comments »