Posts | Austin videogame writer thoughts

ACL Festival video + Shia Arrested, Of Course

shia labeouf drunk again If you missed the Austin City Limits Music Festival (like I did) or are just looking to relive some of the moments in video, check out the Red Bull TV video highlights. It’s not the most generous assortment of headliners, but you can find songs from Gary Clark Jr., Nate Ruess (of Fun), San Fermin, Alabama Shakes, Dwight Yoakam, Hozier, and Vance Joy, plus interviews and such.

And in case you were curious, actor Shia LeBeouf was definitely at ACL, and here’s the public intoxication arrest article to prove it.

WTF, WWF?

Zynga’s Words With Friends. I’m a word guy, obviously, and I can’t help playing this game against friends and strangers. It’s crowdsourced word puzzles, really.

But why, Zynga? Why does your QC have to be so utterly lousy? Why are you so hellbent on proving you couldn’t care less about this marquee property?

Here’s example #1: The word of the day recently was “whore.” Inappropriate word to feature, obviously, and also not exactly a word of special interest. Today’s word is “oi”. The definition: “oy.” Not exactly something you’re going to tweet out to all your friends.

IMHO, Zynga has the WOTD on “randomize” without anybody on staff bothering to eyeball it for the .5 seconds it requires to pick something fun and family-friendly.

Example #2: the definition and example sentence for the word KEEF. Do you know what a KEEF is? I didn’t, and here’s what WWF had to say about it.

Thanks for nothing, WWF and Zynga.

P.S. It’s the resin glands of cannabis. Bonus drug reference for you.

More examples in the gallery below. Words With Friends is just a hot mess of fail.

Who writes these examples? Captain Crunch?

Is Geta one of the Geta Boys? And who alphabetizes meat?

Chrome Doesn’t Trust Google

A few days ago I tried an innocent Google search in Chrome — “master lock 141q” — and Chrome told me that www.google.com presented a certificate issued by an mysterious entity (the Elder Gods, I assume) that is not trusted by my operating system, aka Android.

Essentially, Chrome doesn’t trust Google.com.

Chrome, please help me understand.

https://youtu.be/ErnMC7xokQ8?t=1m17s

Hilton Hhonors Royally Botches Password Security

How Not to Handle Password Security

Recently Hilton’s Hhonors loyalty program asked me to reset my password in their attempt to increase security. Makes sense, after high-profile security breaches at several online websites like Target.com. They dangled a 1000-point reward for early action so of course I hopped over and reset my password.

Today I had need to log in to Hhonors and found that my password (saved via a password assistant, so definitely correct) was not accepted. I requested a password reset email, completed the process properly, and got a failure message. So I had to call customer service.

They informed me that the new passwords have to be exactly eight characters, only one capital letter, only one number, and no special characters. Their new “system” didn’t work with any variations, or longer passwords. Not only that, but the password reset screen is inaccurate; it tells customers that it accepts a much wider (and more secure!) set of password variations, including 8+ characters and special characters.

No One’s Happy

This is a total fail. Hhonors is forcing everyone to choose insecure passwords; eight letters plus one number is an easy password to crack. Customers who use more secure passwords are then locked out of their accounts. Customer service is bogged down with unnecessary calls, having to tell customers about password rules that aren’t even on the password reset page.

So in short: Less security. Unhappy customers. Unhappy customer service. And an inaccurate website that wastes my time.

In my opinion, any public system that doesn’t accept special characters or long passwords is run by an incompetent CTO. Period. In 2015, there is no excuse for forcing your customers into less-secure accounts.

Videogame Writers Are Important #4

Far Cry 4: Egg on Face

You know, videogame writers aren’t perfect. We make mistakes and typos, and sometimes our producers and teammates create mistakes and typos in their well-intentioned efforts to fix mistakes and typos. Such is life.

However, sometimes a videogame writer gaffe is just so glaring and ill-placed that it has to be called out for the amusement of all. Such is the case with this ripe goose egg that some poor Ubisoft game writer dropped in Far Cry 4, released November 2014:

Yep. Unlike oxen struggling under the yoke of a cruel farmer, the poor people of Kyrat have suffered under the yolk of a civil war. ‘Cuz the war is like a rotting omelet — full of bad eggs. Bad eggs that had to be cracked.

It’s a prime facepalm moment, especially when you consider that it’s front-and-center in the most elevated prose in the entire game: the online handbook on your location. In other words, one of the first things you see when you open your inventory and start looking around. And it’s also the primary text that’s supposed to give you a feel for the world and your motivations for fighting/playing in it.

Videogame Writer Redeems Self

However, in the eyes of the internet, our nameless videogame writer (or, frankly, probably some other game writer or designer on the same team) redeems him or herself with some funny radio chatter writing.

I found this kudo by searching for “far cry 4 yolk” — part of my due diligence to make sure this game writer goof wasn’t already beaten to death on the intertubes. The only hit was this one foul-mouthed and funny Youtuber who transcribed the yolkishness verbatim in the detail description (click SHOW MORE) of his video.

So I watched the video for a bit, and sure enough, the Youtuber gives a great shoutout to the game writing at a minute and twenty-eight seconds in:

This radio guy is actually pretty funny if you listen to ‘im… ‘Pissing out champagne and shitting caviar,’ awesome! Who comes out with this shit?

There ya go. Day in the life of a game writer. Here’s the full video:

Food for Thought: We Make More with Less

Thought I’d share this interesting macroeconomic article today. The summary, sans cool graphics, is:

Since the turn of the century, we mine and drain a lot less resources per dollar of GDP.
We spend a lot less of our total energy to make manufacturing basics like steel (the percentage has dropped, but we actually spent a lot more total energy to get the same amount of steel).
We use a lot less materials to get more efficient tools, like the computer, which is much smaller than in the ’80s, but ridiculously more powerful. It’s also interesting to note that there were only about 2 million units sold of the iconic IBM PC, while 150 times as many Dell Studio laptops were sold.
Unsurprisingly, despite increased efficiency, we consume lots more raw materials now than we did in 1900. Eight times as much, basically.

This chart shows the ridiculous growth in consumption, driven by inexpensive products and quadrupling population:

Note the ridiculous growth in fossil fuel, cement, and metals consumption. Food consumption looks here to have only doubled, but in this other chart, it’s gone up almost nine times. Meanwhile, cement has gone up 251 times and fossil fuels 16 times:

Other than the obvious question (who the heck is using all that cement?!?*), this raises a bevvy of other interesting questions that should get a game designer‘s brain churning, like:

what would our society look like if one of these materials were taken away, or if it were suddenly free?
what could we do to make and use these materials more sustainably?
who controls the production and distribution of these resources, and for what ends?
how are these materials produced and managed in your game world?

* China. 40% of global CO2 emissions are linked to the construction industry.

Videogame Field of View

I came across an interesting inquiry on Quora recently, and thought I’d share it with you folks. The question: “In 1st person video games, why don’t they introduce peripheral vision? The angle of sight seems to be a lot less than our own angle of vision.”

I’ve had this complaint as well, in both first-person and third-person games (assuming we’re not talking about something exotic like a “peripheral vision mode”). Gears of War frustrates me because I feel like I can’t see the world since I’m zoomed so far in on the asses of the protagonists.

(I historically have the same complaint about Madden, although for different reasons: I find it ridiculous that I have to contort myself to see near-sideline receivers who are by default off the edge of the screen. Something tells me that Tom Brady doesn’t have this invisible receiver problem. Less of an issue in the HD era.)

This video from TotalBiscuit does a stellar job of illustrating the point. Skip to the three-minute mark to get right to the good stuff:

Here’s a shot from Gears of War. Your protagonist eats up about a sixth of the critical foreground screen real estate. If you played the game, you may remember the annoyance of larger levels where foes were shooting you from every direction while you felt like you were looking for them through a shoebox.

Compare GoW with this shot from Infamous 2. The avatar is smaller, the camera position is further back from the action, and you can see more of the world.

TotalBiscuit feels claustrophobic FOVs like GoW’s are due to game developers not caring enough about PC gamers. I think he’s on the right track, but IMHO studios do this extreme zoom-in/narrow field-of-view — and fail to provide options to alter it — for four reasons:

Money (aka complexity). It takes a fair amount of risk for a developer to put in a feature that lets gamers change the field of view. Sure, a few lines of code could change the way the renderer works, letting you see more of the world. Sure, it’d be fairly easy to support that in the game UI. However, adding this option is a significant and fundamental alteration in a very complex system. Your game has to work equally well at all field-of-view settings, in multiplayer, on all sorts of wonky PC systems with wonky chipsets. This is kind of like making a game and a half instead of one game. And you’re doing this to satisfy PC gamers (large fraction of total market) who care about field of view and know what it is (much smaller fraction of the other fraction). Sadly, when the test department starts toying with the FOV option during crunch and filing dozens of bugs on how it crashes this mode and that mode, and causes everything on screen to look weird and skinny, and makes text in the game unreadable, your producer is going to ditch the feature like it’s covered in flaming flatulent warts. Assuming it got that far.
Money (aka framerate). When you widen the field of view, more stuff renders. Guess what? This means that your hardware has to work harder and your silky-smooth framerate goes in the toilet. You can’t fit as many players into multiplayer matches. The big cinematic moments cause the game to choke. People definitely care about framerate. (People are a lot more blase about field of view.) Lousy framerates and stutters cause your game to tank.
Money (aka marketing). GoW wasn’t exactly a critical or commercial failure. People loved the in-your-face action, and the screenshots look like an action blockbuster because you can see all the pimples on Marcus Fenix’s well-rendered butt. It’s annoying to those of us who are accustomed to seeing the game world, but GoW’s other innovations and high-quality graphics were enough to win over the others. Here are some reviews, emphases mine: “Huge, muscular combatants move like giant men wearing heavy gear, fine details are everywhere, and splattering blood never looked so beautiful… It just looks incredible.” – GamesRadar+. “…better than Halo… It’s a fantastic-looking, riveting, fire-first-ask-questions-never third-person shooter that manages to show you things that you’ve never seen before on a console.”- Entertainment Weekly. And, well, this one: “The camera is so good in Gears of War that I never once thought about it while playing. I can’t recall a single instance where it did not frame the action right, or hide anything I should have seen. – Electric Playground
Gameplay. Grudgingly, I admit that GoW was a damned fine game, and that the tight field of view showed off those stellar graphics and made some of the action more fun, like close environments and melee attacks. A game like Infamous 2 requires a wider field of view because of the acrobatic nature of the gameplay.

That’s my take. I like to see the world in these kinds of games, and in the era of hi-def, we can have our cake and eat it in many situations. At the same time, we still see a lot of close-in cameras and narrow FOVs as new games try to out-scream the competition by putting you “in the action.” Hopefully that’s a trend that will die as we move forward.

Oh, and here’s the link to the original Quora conversation: http://www.quora.com/In-1st-person-video-games-why-dont-they-introduce-peripheral-vision

Kickstarter Drama: Why Are the Fans Paying for It?

Kickstarter Campaigns for Veronica Mars and Richard Garriott?

So yeah, as you’ve surely heard, Kickstarter and other social fundraising vehicles are now part of the movie- and videogame-making landscape. How about a little review of where two of those big-name campaigns are now?

I’m talking about the Veronica Mars movie and Richard Garriott’s Shroud of the Avatar game. Both of them are fully funded with room to spare: Mars asked for $2M and landed an authoritative $5.7M, and Garriott got $1.9M from a $1M goal.

Did These Kickstarter Campaigns Cheat Us?

As always, it’s an eye of the beholder kind of deal, but Mars is showing a tidy 78% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not The Godfather or anything, but certainly respectable.

The game is a little harder to judge. It’s clearly a work-in-progress kind of project, with the official site talking about a novel and episodes. TIME Magazine has an insightful column about Garriott’s inflated claims and deflated relevance to modern RPGs, but it’s not a review. And PC Gamer has a vaguely positive “first impressions” preview from November 2014, while the Steam page for the game has the gamer consensus as “very positive.”

Honestly, I find PC Gamer’s article ridiculously generous. This is a product that costs $45 yet still has questionable gameplay elements and a sluggish framerate. It is indeed an alpha game that costs full retail — and my hat’s off to Garriott for pulling this off. However, I’m also cognizant of the fact that the game delivers some things that gamers can’t get elsewhere, like a supportive community, weekly events, and most of all, the ability to comment on the game during a meaningful stage in its evolution. As a developer, I’m not particularly enamored of that opportunity, or the possibility of it all coming to naught, but I do wish Garriott the best (and I enjoyed attending the barbeque he holds in the Austin area for the game developer community). It is indeed possible that the game could become something completely unique, a dynamic world that continues to evolve as new ideas and new technology are introduced. It’s a longshot bet, but the best-case scenario is that this could be a new paradigm: an evergreen title that self-heals and evolves to become what its funders want — and discover what they want — in real time.

And Why Did Garriott Ask Us for Money?

Author Paige Ewing also has some insider insight into the logic and motivations of Garriott’s Kickstarter, which she’s allowed me to share here. Initially she’s commenting on some of the raised eyebrows among our friends who questioned the appropriateness of a millionaire asking fans for cash:

Personally, I don’t think Richard’s kickstarter is much about money. 1 million doesn’t even put a dent in the budget necessary to make a new multiplayer online game nowadays.

However, Richard’s last attempt to make a great game took 7 years of his life, and the lives of lots of other talented people, and a fair chunk of his fortune, and bombed.

Part of the reason for that was a lack of participation, input, and buy-in from the folks who buy his games, the players. Being an intelligent man, that’s a mistake he is trying to rectify.

In doing things this way, he’s getting buy-in ahead of time, and he’s also encouraging the people who are enthusiastic about gaming to give him their input on key aspects of the game before it launches.

Richard has already invested a fair amount of his own money and time in this game. It may not be mentioned in the kickstarter, but this game has already been in the works for some time. He wants to expand his art team, work on the complex decisions like how will player vs player work in this world to make as many people happy as possible, and for that, he wants some assurance that he’s going in directions people will enjoy.

He is particularly shooting for the older gamer market, and he needs to know that’s enough of a market to justify the expense and time.

Kickstarter isn’t just a way to make money, it’s a way to test response to an idea, and to get a market excited about a new project, among other things.

This is all just my opinion, of course, from an outside perspective. I haven’t spoken to Richard for more than ten minutes in years.

So there you have it. I don’t think Kickstarter movie and videogame campaigns are going away anytime soon, and I believe it’s a valuable way for creatives to take the temperature of the fan base. As long as that thermometer isn’t forced into any of my body orifices, I’ll keep from crying foul.

Are You Allergic to BBQ? And Google’s Spoofable Emails

Yes, Virginia, There Is a BBQ Allergy

Allergic to meat and barbeque? I would’ve thought it impossible, but recently the intertubes and the power of science have proved me wrong.

According to CBS News, increasing numbers of people are afflicted with an allergy to red meat, ironically caused by the bite of the Lone Star tick, an insect hailing from my home state, the spiritual Mecca of BBQ. The symptoms are severe enough to cause victims to swear off red meat forever. Here’s one quote: “I woke up with very swollen hands that were on fire with itching… I could feel my lips and tongue were getting swollen,” and after calling for assistance, “I was losing my ability to speak and my airway was closing.”

When victims are bitten by the tick, it sets their immune systems into a defensive posture and introduces an “alpha-gal” sugar into the bloodstream. This sugar is also present in meat and some dairy. The victim’s immune system identifies the alpha-gal sugar as an invader and thus when it’s ingested from another source, like BBQ, it triggers a fierce, life-threatening reaction.

Who knew? Maybe Mother Nature is indeed restoring the ecosphere through guided evolution. Since I appreciate a fine burger, I’m not hoping to contract the BBQ allergy anytime soon, but I’d reluctantly submit to a Lone Star tick bite if it were part of an epidemic of such bites sweeping out from Texas to the rest of the country. Frankly, if we were a country of unwilling vegetarians, we’d be a leaner, healthier, stronger country. I would make the ultimate BBQ allergy sacrifice because I am a f***ing patriot.

And if there’s a renegade colony of militant vegans out there in Austin, living off the grid and stewing their own kambucha or whatever, reading this and contemplating the careful cultivation of millions of bloodsucking, BBQ-allergy-spewing ticks, well, maybe they’re patriots too. God bless America!

DKIM Embarrasses Google

Trending at the top of WIRED’s content right now is an article about how Google, PayPal, Yahoo, Amazon, and Twitter all have been sending email with weak security keys. The security scheme is called DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), named after my buddy Dave Kim, an Austin IT expert. Zack Harris, a Florida mathematician, thought an email he got from a Google recruiter was actually a sly test of his skills, so he cracked their weak DKIM key and sent a spoofed (fake) email to the Google founders.

Zap! Google quickly fixed the problem but didn’t give Harris the satisfaction of a response. Since then Harris has found this flaw fairly common across the ‘net.

So beware geeks bringing gifts to your inbox, because they may be scams. And of course, beware recruiters. Because recruiters are the new kings of spam.

Gauntlet Revived: Reworking a Classic

Just saw this trailer for the reboot of the arcade original, and it’s well done. It shows how the gameplay echoes the original, and even more importantly, it’s humorous. I like how the arrowshot at the beginning draws you through the story it’s telling.

The new game can be found on Steam.