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I would’ve been blissfully unaware if it hadn’t been for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It seems someone leaked some details about Wrath of the Lich King from the “Friends and Family” alpha testing. So of course I went to the site. So of course I read all the juicy details. Ugh. Tycho from Penny Arcade coined the term “brain hunger” in relation to WoW once, and it definitely applies to me. I don’t really know what it is about it. I start trying to imagine what it would be like to play with all the exciting new abilities, start to imagine how the gameplay will have changed. It’s like I’m trying to run a simulation of it in my head or something, it’s terrible. But I won’t play it again, not matter how cool the druid changes sound.

What I hate though is that more games, or just more games that I actually enjoy playing, have started to head in a “grind->reward” direction. I’m mostly thinking of TF2 here, the only other game that I actually play regularly (except Audiosurf :D ). It’s almost as though the most profound effect WoW has had on gaming is to make other developers realise that introducing a bit of a grind into the game is a surefire way to keep people playing longer (aside from making them realise just how much cash you can make from MMOs). This frustrates me. Multiplayer pvp should be about skill, not how much time you’ve invested. TF2 isn’t on the same scale in the time-sink scheme of things as WoW, but it stills takes a heap of time to complete the new medic achievements and unlock the new guns. I gave up after farming the first gun late one night on a server with a friend. I hate the direction Valve has gone with this. It’s a cop out for the studio too. Instead of making the gameplay itself appealing enough to keep people playing for the gameplay’s sake alone, instead they opt for the cheap and easy route of making a bit of a grind. Blizzard and Valve - the creators of StarCraft and Counter-Strike (respectively), games with the longest lasting appeal of pretty much any game (not counting sequels). It’s disappointing.

In other news: I’ve decided to make a rule for myself: If I become involved enough with a game that I start to get angry (rage :P ) over the game then it’s time to stop. When I write it down it sounds like an obvious thing to do. I don’t like that I become involved enough with games to start getting angry about them. Gaming should be about having fun, if I’m not having fun I shouldn’t play. Sounds simple and a bit “no duh, retard” but I get carried away with it easily and I think other people do too.

I think gaming is probably too big a part of my life. I should really get some other interests. I have other interests (reading, listening to music, talking with friends) but they’re kind of passive things, not interactive. The thing with many of my friends is that they’re also gamers. I need to take up something that doesn’t involve using a computer. All my uni work requires the use of one and most of my leisure time I’m on it too. I need to get out more :S

I recently spent a few days in Tasmania, a place I didn’t ever really think I’d want to go back to except to visit friends. Those few days were the most relaxing days of my life. You hear people talk about Tasmania as being like this super-beautiful fantasy land or something. And it is beautiful, but I’ve always bagged Tassie out by saying there’s not really that much to do there if you’re a young person. Also, the public transport system there is terrible even in Hobart. I’ve occasionally said before that people in Tasmania are oppressed by the inability to go places except from 8am-6pm unless you drive a car. It’s really that bad.

However, this time I visited I felt something I hadn’t really noticed before. It feels clean. The air is so clean. Living in a city you become used to all the cars and you don’t so much notice the state of the air you’re breathing. The constrast between the air where I was staying in Tasmania and the air in the city is remarkable. There were no car fumes lingering in the air, I could taste the scent of trees. I felt peaceful. I was staying with a friend who lives next to a beach. We took their dog for walks along the beach. It felt so fresh. It instills in you a sense of tranquilty.

I returned to the city I now call home after only a few days in Tassie. I like where I live. I like the culture, I like being able to do things and go places at any time and still know I can get home on the public transport. It is a good place to live. But it is not a peaceful place to live, not in the same way that Tasmania is peaceful. The city here is so busy, people always going places, people always beeping at each other in cars. You move from one air-conditioned building to another, often trapped inside. It is easy to become stressed. The pace of everything, the environment with all its artificial lights, articifial air, and artificial people. It can be depressing.

When I used to live in Tasmania I never really noticed how good it is there. I now know why you would want to live there. I want to live there. But not right now. Not yet. When I am older. But until then I miss its beaches, I miss its air, I miss its peacefulness, but most of all I miss my friends.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how different mediums can be used to tell stories, and the consequences associated with using a particular medium to tell a story.

Music can tell stories. Lyrics obviously can be used to convey ideas and meaning. However, music without lyrics can convey emotion, and less explicitly elements of plot (Peer Gynt for example). Songs are typically short so a song will often deal with just a specific idea. Concept albums (like Scenes from a Memory by Dream Theater) and classical pieces can tell whole stories.

Films are typically around two hours long, two hours in which to tell a story/convey an idea to an audience. You tend to be able to fit quite alot of story into a film of two hours since you can convey ideas visually and aurally. Films often contain music but the music in films is usually more to augment the story or mood rather than to explicitly tell a story. Films don’t ask much from the viewer. You can sit and watch and listen and have experienced a lot of story telling in just two or so hours. So films are information dense and require little effort to absorb.

Books (novels) are much more demanding of a reader. The visuals and sound are not provided directly to the reader, they must be interpreted from words on a page. Since some of the words in a book must be used to describe what is seen and heard, books are less information dense than films. So books take many times longer to tell a story than films. However, the process of interpreting the words on a page, linking the words on a page with their meaning in your head… this can result in a richer experience.

Computer games incorporate visuals and audio so they’re as information dense as films. However, games which tell stories take much longer to play through than it takes to watch a film and in some cases approaching the time it takes to read a novel. Why is this? Is it because games have to also involve the player in something fun? Does making compelling gameplay compromise story telling? Or does the added time it takes to finish a game over a film the result of gameplay which compliments the story and thus creating a richer experience for the player? In my experience gameplay interferes with story telling. Setting goals to achieve (beat this boss, get to point X on the other side of hundreds of enemies) for a level makes me focus on achieving those goals and forgetting why I want to achieve them. Success for the sake of success. I can’t even remember the plot behind Half-Life 2. Most of it seemed to be “get to the other side of town through zombie and combine infested areas to shutdown a reactor thingy”. Perhaps I’m alone in this. I certainly haven’t experienced any particularly strong emotional response from a (story-oriented) game, the same way I might from reading an engrossing book, listening to my favourite music, or watching a good film. Are games a bad medium for meaningful story telling? Are compelling gameplay and emotive story telling mutually exclusive, or have we just not achieved it yet?

Sometimes playing games makes me feel like I’m a lemming and someone is playing me. Unless I jump through the hoops just right I’ll die and have to start again.

As promised previously, I’m going to write a post about the game I want to make at some stage. However, before I get to that I’m going to start by giving a bit of a run down on WoW PvP. Until about 4 months ago I used to play WoW pretty heavily. At times this became pretty unhealthy. Not something I’m proud of, but that’s a discussion for another time (maybe). When I played, I PvPed exclusively. PvE completely bored me. At one stage I was pretty decent at PvP (not great, just decent). However, after a while I got sick of it as it wasn’t balanced, but I kept playing even after realising I was bored of it because I was kinda addicted :/ The point behind talking about WoW PvP is to give my game some context. I enjoyed some aspects of WoW PvP while hating others, but both aspects influenced me in equal amounts, and WoW PvP in general is the biggest influence on my gaming tastes at this stage (along with the other games mentioned in the earlier post).

Here is what I enjoyed about WoW PvP:
- Classes. I like the idea of classes and adapting to and learning different playstyles which can be equally effective.
- The large scale. The world PvP in WoW has been some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming, and it’s because the scale is large. You can get a hunter/prey situation going where each player is looking for the right opportunity to make the kill, and one player might follow another all over the map to eventually beat them.
- Unpredictability. The great thing about world PvP in WoW is that you don’t know what’s going to happen or when it will happen. Like when you get ganked by a warlock and just as you start to get the fight under control you get jumped by a rogue, but somehow you manage to beat them both.
- Skill. Some people don’t think WoW requires skill to play. They are wrong. As in the above scenario with the warlock and rogue, there’s something deliciously satisfying about getting ganked by several other players but coming out on top - knowing you outplayed them, knowing you played perfectly and pulled through despite being overmatched.

Having heard about why I liked WoW PvP, here’s what I didn’t like about it:
- DoTs. Or Damage over Time spells. These are just retarded, they allow a player to continually damage and grind down another player’s health without being vulnerable to attack themselves (by being out of range or line of sight).
- Random Number Generation (RNG). Nearly every spell or ability in WoW relies on random number generation to some extent. Whether spells/abilities hit or are resisted/dodged/parried. There are also many “on proc” abilities that have a chance to occur. For instance cast lightning bolt and have a 5% chance to have another lightning bolt cast immediately after it. There would be times when whoever you were fighting would get many lucky rolls in a row and just destroy you, no matter how well you played. Or you’d get unlucky rolls and your enemy would resist 5 spells in a row and you’d die.
- Crits (Critical strikes). This relates to RNG above too. More random rolls. Being the victim of 3 crits in a row and not being able to do anything about it and dying no matter how well you play. It’s no fun, and decreases the amount of skill needed to play, as long as you stack enough abilities that have random “on chance” effects. There’s critical strikes in TF2 as well, but it doesn’t matter so much because it’s much more a team game and the respawns are so fast and health is so low compared to damage.
- Balance. WoW PvP has never been balanced. And you’d be trapped into continually waiting for the next patch to fix it but it might fix some aspects while breaking others. There’s a big compromise for the WoW designers. It’s impossible to balance arena pvp with battleground pvp and world pvp. To fix this blizzard now just prioritises arena pvp at the expense of everything else. And this results in a poorer quality experience than if a game was to just focus on one aspect of pvp. Part of the reason it’s so hard to balance is also due to the huge number of variables. There’s so many stats in WoW (Intellect, strength, stamina, armor, critical chance, blah blah), and each class and player has different amounts of each that balancing becomes impossible. This is a gear issue. And gear is a big part of WoW, but wouldn’t it be nice if winning was more about skill than just how many hours you invested in getting the best gear for your character?
- Counters. There are some classes (or class combinations in the case of arena) that are hard counters to other classes. It’s almost impossible for a good mage to beat an equally good warlock, same with warrior v mage. It’s even worse in arena where only a very small subset of the potential class combinations are able to do well. This isn’t fun. Knowing you will never be able to beat another class in a fair fight is disheartening. Of course the reason one class is better than another class is down to what spells/abilities they have, which suggests that there are abilities that perhaps shouldn’t even be in the game because they render another class unable to do its job or perform effectively.
- Too many abilities/Steep learning curve. I predominantly played a mage when I played WoW. To be effective in pvp I used over 40 different abilities regularly. As I said before, I played fairly heavily and was therefore quite proficient in the use of abilities and did well. But more casual players have a hell of a hard time trying to do well in pvp with so many abilities.

After quitting WoW there’s been times when I felt like logging on and playing just to experience the fun of chasing someone all over Hillsbrad Foothills on my mount around Tarren Mill. However, looking at the list of what made PvP fun for me in WoW, I realised that the positive aspects outlined above are not WoW specific. If you could capture those things that make WoW fun in a game without the downsides you’d end up with much more enjoyable PvP. The interesting thing is that Blizzard has in some way recognised some of the unfair/less enjoyable aspects of WoW PvP and has tried to fix it by introducing resilience (and increasing the effect of resilience). Resilience is another stat (*sigh*) on some gear which reduces the chance to be crit, the damage done by crits, the damage done by DoTs, and the amount of mana drained by mana-drain spells/abilities. The DoT and mana drain effects of resilience were added after much lobbying by players to try and fix those aspects which spoiled the fun of PvP. Blizzard has also introduced PvP sets which to some extent homogenise the amount of health/damage each class has, which also makes things easier to balance. But wouldn’t it be nice if PvP was designed to be fun in the first place? That’s the goal for my game. Keep things simple stupid :P

… until robots and AI become advanced enough to take over the world ;-)

Only half joking. Found two interesting links recently. The first one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

It shows a robot called BigDog with 4 independant legs and just amazing balance. Watch the video, watch how it recovers from stumbles and slipping on ice perfectly. Watch how it jumps at one point like a young lamb does. The movement of it’s legs is so much like an animal’s (maybe a camel with the reverse leg joints). It can’t be long before someone makes a humanoid robot that can perfectly mimick human movement (or even better - an Alien robot like from the Alien films). Powering it will be another matter. Sounds like BigDog (presumably named because they use it to carry things like some dogs carry people’s newspapers or something, I dunno) is running a 2 stroke petrol engine.

And the second link:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/72057,childlike-intelligence-created-in-second-life.aspx

This article talks about some AI that’s been developed that’s as intelligent as a 4 year old and who “has his own set of beliefs, and the ability to reason about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children”… Wait, so Eddie (the name of the AI) is almost sentient. Okay, so that might be a bit of a stretch, the differences between something sentient and something that can reason about it’s own “beliefs” is probably quite large. However, surely it’s on the right track to sentience? The “ability to reason intelligently about your beliefs” is probably a topic in Sentience 101, right? In 10 years or so when computers are roughy 10 times as powerful as today (Moore’s Law: computing speed/power doubles roughly every 2 years or something like that), it’s not that much of a stretch to think AI might be nearly sentient maybe?

Now think about what would happen if the 2028 edition of BigDog (or whatever Alien-resembling robot is around then) utilised the 2028 version of Eddie AI. Heck wireless would be everywhere by that stage and with excellent bandwidth… Every robot could be wirelessly controlled by the 2028 Eddie AI. It’d be like a hive mind or something. And then all of a sudden the Eddie gets pissed about something one of the fleshy humans says and starts to go all HAL on us. Shit guys!

Okay, so that last part is pretty much pure speculation. But judging by those two links things are kinda heading in that direction. Whatever happens, the stated goal of RoboCup doesn’t seem quite so far fetched any more.

Daisy, Daisy…

I spend quite a lot of time on computer, either for work or play. I typically play online multiplayer games which have some sort of combat or fighting between players. Games I’ve enjoyed playing most over the years are Soldat, WoW, CS:S, TF2, and Naruto: Rise of a Ninja all game with pvp content (well… Naruto has 2 players anyway :P ). However, recently I’ve become frustrated with these computer games:

- Soldat I’ve loved and still love playing occasionally but it is dated and I yearn for something fresh and modern which retains the frenetic gameplay.

- WoW was fun but addictive and not balanced. Many players (myself included) would play it eventhough its pvp is not balanced, but eventually you get trapped into a cycle of waiting for balance changes from a patch, the patch changing some stuff but creating a whole set of new problems, then waiting for the next patch and so on… This kind of vicious cycle which continues, all the while you’re lining Blizzard’s pockets with cash for a game which you continue to play on the off chance that they fix it up.

- CS:S and TF2 basically suffer from the same problems: they’re both very team games and if you join a game and end up on the crap team then you can have a pretty miserable time for a while as the other team whips you round after round. Eventually the map changes and you try and get on the team with the better players. Although you can have fun in these games (and I still do to some extent) you are somewhat dependant on the other members of your team to not suck. The gameplay itself isn’t good enough to want to play it even if your team is getting hammered, atleast not for me. Obviously this isn’t an issue if you join a clan and play in a ladder or something against other clans, but players shouldn’t have to join structured teams to get the most out of games.

- Naruto on XBOX360 I only like for the 2 player vs mode, which is a bit like street fighter but 3d and a bit better mechanically. It’s problems are that it’s only 2 players, only on 360 (I don’t own a console and still consider them inferior to the pc for gaming). And it’s based on Naruto which means half the characters look/sound like girls eventhough they’re guys, and it’s a bit childish looking (I mean honestly, he’s meant to be a fucking ninja, what kind of ninja runs around in an orange jumpsuit?!). It just isn’t hardcore enough.

This brings me logically to a solution: Why don’t I make a game, a game which plays like I want it to play, and which hopefully appeals to some other people too? So that’s what I’m going to do. I know that huge numbers of people have had these same thoughts “if only it played like this and this and featured awesome stuff like this”, but this is something I feel committed to. I’m not going into this lightly, I don’t expect to be able to make this in a few months or even a year or even several years. I’m studying software engineering, I know large projects take time, especially if you don’t have all the knowledge or experience to complete it right now. That’s why I’m not setting a deadline at this stage, I’ll work on it as I can, while fitting in all the other things in my life (mostly uni), but all the while aquiring the knowledge needed to create something awesome.

So! What’s this game going to be like then? I’ll post some of my thoughts on that next time :)

This blog was originally hosted at wordpress, and then blogger, but I’ve decided to move back to wordpress because I dislike using google products for various reasons. The first few posts from the old blog location(s) will be copy+pasted here, hence the first few posts will appear as though they were all posted in one day when they were actually posted over a couple of months.

This will just be a place where I write down my thoughts on stuff. The idea is that by writing thoughts down I flesh them out and hopefully derive some greater meaning from them than I would by letting them sit around in my head. I figure this is also a good way to practise my writing skills in shape (given that my day to day life doesn’t otherwise involve much writing).

When I decided to start a blog I was initially going to use blogger, and did actually create a new blog with blogger. However, recently I’ve become more concerned with the amount of information google knows about me. I have my email with google, I often use google docs for word processing, I sometimes use google calendar (in fact I intend to use it more often this year to keep myself better organised), and I talk to friends using gtalk (and those conversations get logged). By using all these services I’m sure someone at google would be able to piece together a pretty decent picture of my life and where I live with all my personal details and everything. I know it’s pretty unlikely that anyone would choose to stalk me out of the millions of people who use google products, but just the fact that they have so much information about me has begun to make me uncomfortable. Just imagine though if they ever had an information leak or their security was compromised (unlikely I know given how good google has been up to now with its security and privacy). I find this a scary thought.

So that’s why I ended up deleting my blog on blogger and checked out livejournal (after hearing from one of my friends who uses it). But after creating a livejournal account I deleted that blog too. Livejournal seemed very complicated and wasn’t very easy to use compared to blogger (I had actually used blogger a couple of years ago for a little while and was used to its interface). After seeing the wordpress name on a blog I read fairly often I decided to check it out - and I was pleasantly surprised. The interface is similar to the blogger one, and it means google won’t be able to associate even more information about me with my personal details :)

That’s all for now. I’m only going to be posting as interesting thoughts come to me that I feel I should write down. This means posts might be few and far between, just so you know.