Sulka's Game

You need to see this film

2009-04-21T10:50:42Z

The Finnish national broadcasting company YLE recently broadcasted Rip! A remix manifesto. What an excellent, inspirational film! I think everyone on the planet should see this film before it's too late. In the spirit of the film, the makers have put the entire film online to be viewed and remixed.

Intro embedded here - view it now and check the rest on the websites linked above.

EU Telecoms Package

2009-04-21T08:14:22Z

It seems that EU is about to vote on directives that might change some Internet access policies quite fundamentally. Most of the changes sound like things that have already been shot down local legislation level, so the lobbying corporations are now trying to pass the legislation through as directives.

Perhaps the scariest part of the proposal is that it gives ISPs open rights to change Internet connections to whitelist content available to users. Yes, not blacklisting inappropriate content, but whitelist a pre-defined set of services you're allowed to use. If this goes through and becomes the norm, we can kiss the Internet goodbye, especially given that the text in the directives that tries to guarantee citizens' right to create and distribute content have apparently been removed.

Some people are calling this trying to change the whole of Internet into operating on the classic TV broadcast model, where ISPs will start to offer you content packages similar to TV channel packages, where you have to pre-order websites you want to access. Sounds pretty scary.

There's more information available here, and I recommend you write and call your MEP, contact information of whom is available here. I'm ashamed to see the Finnish MEPs are in favor of the legislation, so time to contact them.

Atlassian 555

2009-04-21T07:24:52Z

Atlassian software has a great deal available for 5 days - you can get a 5 person license to Jira and Confluence for $5!

I have experience of both products and think Jira is a grea issue tracker, and Confluence is a great enterprise wiki product. Both have their weak points (maybe biggest one being the fact the software is so flexible you can really shoot yourself in the foot by taking the customization too far), but I don't think there's better products in their class in the market. Even better, Atlassian folks are very pleasant to deal with and they're one of the most open companies in their communication to the customers, which I respect a great deal.

Best of all, the money made with the offer goes to charity! So, go get your licenses now!

Beyond Game Design: Nine steps toward creating better videogames

2009-04-07T08:36:27Z

Amazon just dropped me a new book, called Beyond Game Design: Nine steps towards creating better videogames. Based on my quick reading of the book, it looks like a good reference on the current industry thinking of how games ought to be constructed. So unless you're one of the designer types who reads everything available on games (as Richard Bartle discusses on page 119 of the book) and want an update on game design, I recommend you get a copy.

Of note, the fist chapter of the book, Understanding Emotions by Nicole Lazzarro which discusses the role of User Experience Design vs Player Experience Design seems to a useful tool when discussing design prioritization in the future.

Looking at the bleeding edge of game design research, Jesper Juul argued in this year's GDC just a few weeks ago that the classic flow model presented in page 13 is actually not correct. He had data to support that instead of keeping players in the flow channel all the time, good games make players fail occasionally, which in turn leads to players enjoying the game more. His slides are available online, so go read those too. :)

Travelling to GDC from abroad? Registered for ESTA yet?

2009-03-15T16:37:18Z

It seems some (most?) people traveling to GDC from abroad haven't actually heard about ESTA, or Electronic System for Travel Authorization. It's a new system where people travelling to US need to register on the web as incoming visitors prior to travel. There's some scaremongering on the site that if you don't do this 72 hours before flying in, it cannot be guaranteed that you'll be let onto the plane.

So, if you haven't already done it, go sign up for ESTA right now. Have your passport handy, you'll need your passport number and issuance dates.

And even though this effectively duplicates one of the paper forms you've filled on the plane in the past, you still need to fill it in, even with this system in place. Getting into US is starting to be an interesting challenge! I wonder what's the next change. :)

Born too late

2009-02-13T20:55:33Z

Boing Boing has an awesome post pointing to Coppakids, a blog that contains kids' explanations on why they should be allowed to register after a COPPA age check has stopped them.

I've seen a bunch of similar messages, as sent by players as their parents, demanding their banned accounts are restored. The writing style of kids pretending to be their parents is very recognizable. A sure sign is when the writer tries to establish his/her authority in a manner that'd never be used by an adult. One very memorable email that got immediately flagged as being from the player himself started with, guess what, "I am the father of my son." I don't have the text at hand, but the rest was as believable as the start. :)

5D mark II drops frames when recording video

2009-02-10T12:28:51Z

I've been meaning to write about the 5D mark II (which I've had for about 1.5 months now) for a while but given the amount of information in the web already, it's seemed somewhat pointless. However I have to rant a bit now, given the video mode on the camera was detected to have yet another fault. It drops frames, resulting in jerky movement.

Here's how the video mode in 5DmII works: the camera is in full auto mode while shooting video. The user can compensate the exposure to under- or overexpose, but you can't change the frame exposure time, aperture or sensitivity. (You can sort of work around this by fiddling the exposure compensation and pointing the camera here and there + locking exposure, but that workaround is not a real solution.) For some reason, the camera seems to sometimes make rational choices on the exposure, and sometimes prefer to use extremely high sensitivities even in bright light, resulting in noise.

Now, I noticed the video from the camera occasionally jerks a bit, but assumed it was my computer occasionally dropping frames due to the fact the 1080P footage from the camera is extremely CPU intensive to decompress. Turns out this is not a playback problem, but a fault in the camera. What's happening is, whenever you're recording video, if the camera changes the aperture, it skips 2-3 frames, and replaces those skipped frames in video stream with copies of the last frame recorded.

Reproducing this is very simple. If you have a variable aperture zoom lens, just change zoom in and out during capture of a moving subject, and check the footage frame by frame. For constant aperture lenses, find a spot that has dark and brightly lit spots that are bright enough that the camera has to change aperture when shooting (hint, point the camera out the window, then back in), record a clip while alternating pointing the camera to these spots, and check the footage. You can see the aperture being used during the video capture by depressing the shutter button halfway down. On my footage, I'm consistently getting four duplicated frames in a row when the aperture changes, making these clips useless.

The workaround is to always remember to lock the exposure with the * button prior to starting to record video.

With this issue in mind, I have a couple questions in mind. What's the point of having the camera work in forced full auto mode by default, if that mode produces jerky video footage? Why on earth can't I select the aperture manually, especially if the manual selection would prevent this from happening? Can a camera even be marketed to record video, if the camera regularly drops frames?

The most infuriating part about this that Canon still uses an old world communication policy, whereby they effectively don't talk to their customers. The web is chock full of angry commentary about all the issues and lack of features on the video capture, and there's no word whatsoever from Canon on whether anything related to the video will actually be changed.

Until this issue is fixed and the manual controls on the video are released as a software upgrade to the camera, I have to recommend anyone considering to use the camera to record video forgets about it. Sad, really.

Reason for WAR Europe failure in one picture

2009-02-04T19:39:27Z

I blogged about why I didn't subscribe to WAR a couple days ago. Now that the latest subscription numbers are out, as reported by Scott, I figured I had to do a small continuation piece.

Now, when people find something new, the excitement curve goes something like this:

where we have the Honeymoon, Negotiation and Adjustment phases as defined in the theory for culture shock. How long these phases take for people online depends on the service and their level of experience that type of services, but the phasing is pretty much the same.

How is this applicable to WAR? Well, when launching a new service that depends on subscriptions, you want the user to enter his credit card number during the initial excitement phase and hope the user doesn't cancel during the hangover before the commitment picks up again. What you really, really, should not do is what GOA seemed to with WAR in Europe:

Obviously I can't prove anything, but I think this is the single biggest reason the subs crashed in Europe. Simple operational mistake - the players couldn't enter their credit card number when activating the license. Which is very sad since the game is was fun.

iPhoto 09 face recognition

2009-02-01T10:34:50Z

Apple just shipped their new iLife package last week, which came with a new shiny upgrade to iPhoto, their photo management application. I haven't used the app for a long time, but it now has something no other photo management application does - face recognition. I've played around with it for a couple hours and while the feature is very cool, it's glaringly obvious this is their first iteration at the feature.

Good stuff first: Flagging people in photos is faster with the feature in place. Even the current iteration is useful, and fun. Adding metadata to my shots was never this enjoyable.

The the bad stuff: The interfaces to teach the classifier are slow to use and sorely lack features.

Faces preprocesses the images to find people in your library, but with no progress indicator telling how long it'll continue the processing. And it takes a long time to do it. Classifying people while Faces is working processed crashes iPhoto. And if you add a face manually to a shot before iPhoto has automatically processed the shot, it destroys the manual classification.
If a face is pretty small or very large, iPhoto just doesn't find it. I suspect this is done to speed up the detection, but is annoying, and I can't configure the tolerance. There's no button anywhere that says, "Really, there are faces in here, search for them goddammit!"
I can ask for a list of photos iPhoto thinks has someone I've taught it, but in this mode I can only confirm if that one person is/isn't the person iPhoto thinks it is and not tell the app who is really in the photo.
There is no view for seeing all faces that haven't yet been classified, you have to browse the whole library and search for photos that might contain people you haven't taught the app before.
When telling iPhoto who is in a photo, you're forced to use the keyboard, even if there's only a couple people configured in the whole system.
When you start typing for a name and get a list of name suggestions based on people you've taught, you can't use the keyboard to choose from the list, you have to click the suggestion with the mouse, which again slows down the interfaces considerably.
The user interface that shows people who've been classified seems to have been designed for users who only teach the app maybe five people or so. Listed people can't be grouped, and they're forcefully alphabetically ordered.
For whatever reason, Apple seems to have ignored using other metadata to help the Faces classifier. For example, in a burst of ten shots one second apart from each other, of the same people in the same location over the burst, Faces seems to ignore the fact that I've already taught it the people in the previous shots. Combining the time series data of the shots to the face recognition should help, but it doesn't appear to be there.
Last up, for some reason Faces has trouble recognizing me. I dunno if it's the eyeglasses, but I've gone through sets of shots of myself which are essentially the same, and teaching the app with five shots that are essentially identical doesn't seem to make it understand I'm the guy in the sixth shot, that's also essentially the same shot.

Why I didn't subscribe to WAR

2009-01-28T10:29:53Z

So, I never subscribed to Warhammer Online, despite my initial enthusiasm on the game. Here's the reasons I've been able to identify, in no particular order:

1) The apparently last minute decision to reduce XP gains slowed leveling so much that the XP grinding felt painful. Being able to level with PvP didn't help since my Squig Herder just wasn't an effective class for PvP.

2) None of my friends started to play the game, part simply due to lack of a Mac client. Also myself playing on a Mac, I totally hated having to reboot to XP and hence not having access to my regular browser bookmarks and IM buddies etc while playing. Starting each game session grinding my teeth on seeing the XP logo wasn't doing much good to the game's immersion.

3) The pre-Wrath mega-update came out roughly at the critical decision point, and suddenly made WoW fun again.

4) Having used to having a mount in WoW, the movement speed in WAR felt pretty darn slow. I missed a few quests in some places and running back between places took too much time, considering I'm a fairly casual player.

5) I'm a rules and numbers junkie, and part of my MMO experience is trying to optimize my character to my play style. I couldn't see the rules in WAR through the dressing and had access to very limited amount of equipment to try out, so I was missing this part of the game entirely. This combined with the fact that some of the Squig Herder abilities felt utterly pointless (such as the Squid Armor) just made me feel like a monkey triggering abilities with too little strategy. Jumping back to WoW being able to survive accidental pulls of seven mobs alone felt very liberating after spending hours very carefully pulling mobs one by one.

6) Last but definitely not least, GOA only put the credit card subscription capability live at the last minute before people had to subscribe to continue playing. Had it been there when I activated my account, I'd have entered my credit card number without hesitation. When they put it live later on, I didn't bother to go there to enter my details, and when I got an email saying my account is frozen, I just didn't bother. Whomever was responsible for the account system at GOA messed this up seriously, and probably cost them a ton of subscriptions.

The part of WAR I liked the most was the humor. The world is just brilliant. WoW's torture crap makes me queasy, while most of the content in WAR made me chuckle.

I supposed if Mythic put out a Mac client, I'd subscribe immediately. The rules have now been documented much better by the players, so I suppose I'd get the hang of the game much better at this point. And or course, Wrath has been out for long enough that the honeymoon is over.

Development methodology of the day

2009-01-21T15:50:32Z

I wonder what the code would look like that was developed with this mindset.

(From myconfinedspace.com)

Feedburner Google account migration bugs

2009-01-18T13:51:44Z

If you're using Feedburner, you've maybe noticed they now prompt you to migrate to using a Google account. I did it last night and found the migration has a couple issues.

1) Feedburner re-scrapes any external feed data sources after the merge. You might have noticed my feed suddenly re-posted a couple photos from Flickr - this was FB crapping out.

2) Some of the feed settings are lost, and need to be re-enabled. Like, my feed suddenly stopped tracking individual item statistics. After re-enabling the setting, I noticed all historic data was lost for the item stats.

3) Site stats have disappeared, probably in favor of Google Analytics integration. However, the GA integration isn't live yet (or at least I can't find it).

So, the old wisdom of holding account migration until you're forced to do it would have served me better. Sigh.

The MMO blog to read right now

2009-01-17T08:24:03Z

Looking at my unread counts in my RSS reader, it looks to me the MMO-related blogging has slowed down in the last couple months. (Except for those pesky "links for xxx" posts which I very much dislike. Daring Fireball does those right, one item per link.) I'm following around 150 feeds and I can actually keep up with the stuff now. In the light of less material coming out to read, I'm glad the quality seems to have up, at least on some blogs. Right now, the blog to read about MMOs seems to be T=Machine.

Yesterday Adam posted a wicked good piece on his view on why Tabula Rasa failed. And if you haven't read his post on customer relationship management, from late December, that's definitely worth the read.

Eagerly waiting for the next piece.

Package tracking excitement

2009-01-14T08:05:35Z

I ordered a new SLR lens (the Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8, a supposedly sweet piece of glass) after having sold some of the other lenses I had. I received an email from UPS on Monday morning about the package having been sent, so I went to their package tracking site and subscribed to notifications on the package's progress towards me.

Now, I don't know if it's just me, but I'm finding getting the various reports about the package at least as exciting as questing in MMOs. :) There's a reward at the end when I'll get the shipment (On Time! Tomorrow!) but there's Exceptions on the way, like the most recent THE PACKAGE WAS MISSORTED AT THE HUB. IT HAS BEEN REROUTED TO THE CORRECT DESTINATION SITE.

I know I can't do anything about the package other than wait for the delivery notices, but for some odd reason that seems to be exciting enough that I'm obsessing over the package. Makes me wonder what the lesson here is in regards to building virtual excitement. Would sending virtual gifts and purchases be more exciting if the item was actually delivered to you in this trackable progressive manner, instead of immediately? It wouldn't work for stuff you need fast, buy maybe it'd make total sense as a storytelling element of rare, exclusive items.

Edward Castronova committing social suicide in public

2009-01-13T20:39:32Z

Writing about Seriosity seems to be all the rage right now.

I bumped onto this on Matt's blog, and then noticed this long thread on Terra Nova. The thread is quite a hilarious read - I think Ted has committed a social suicide and will never stop being Mr Serio no matter whether Serios pick up or not. Makes me wonder if this can get any worse...

Update: Edward now retracted. Good move. I predict the Serio jokes will stop in about a year.

Lessig, remixing and Songsmith

2009-01-13T09:06:47Z

Ok, so Joi Ito blogged about Lawrence Lessig appearing in Colbert show, resulting in a ton of remixes of the show, some of which are funny.

Unfortunately Lawrence didn't have that good of a example about remixing in the show.

Microsoft to the rescue! Songsmith seems like a perfect tool for, well, something. At least for remixes. So someone took this, put it in Songsmith, resulting in what could be called the remix of all time.

The Songsmith ad had me in emotionally fragile state, so I certainly wasn't prepared for this remix.

Why do people buy virtual goods?

2009-01-12T13:18:51Z

Vili Lehdonvirta has published his excellent research paper on virtual good sales over at VERN. He identifies nine attributes for items that define metrics people are using to value the item, all of which make sense based on my knowledge on this area. Part of the research has been done in Habbo.

The couple things that are missing from this classification that spring to mind are:

Versatility, or how many different types of application does the item have in your world, and
Multiplicity, meaning whether it makes sense to own just one copy of this item, or does it's value increase if you own it in multiples

Anyway, I recommend you read the paper. There's still a couple more papers yet to come out from Vili this year, which are at least as interesting as this one. Can't wait for those to come out, too! :)

Secret of the Monkey Island - the school play!

2008-12-16T12:27:10Z

How awesome is this? Secret of the Monkey Island, one of my favorite games of all time, as a school play. Pure genius. (Jump for a Youtube embed.)

PEGI - what I hadn't understood before

2008-12-04T11:26:11Z

So, I asked PEGI about the WotLK 12+ rating based on it containing scenes where the player has to torture human-like characters, and shoot people in cages, some of whom beg for mercy before being killed by the player. Their stance is that the 12+ rating is correct, since the violence isn't graphic enough, and that the victims don't respond to the violence in a realistic manner. No blood - the violence doesn't exist. I'm slightly confused on how lying dead in the ground after being shot is unrealistic, but maybe that's just me. I was told I can continue the discussion by filing an official complaint, but I don't think I want to go quite that far.

I guess by this logic one could create a text-based game where the primary objective of the game is to strangle bound people, have long descriptions of how the suffocation happens and get a 12+ by PEGI, since there is not graphics involved. The official PEGI literature uses word "depiction" to describe the game content, but PEGI interprets that as pure visualization. I can only assume the lingo has been carefully chosen for maximum approval by authorities, and the interpretation for the maximum benefit of the gaming industry.

What this means to me, is that when I get to the point of purchasing games to my daughter in a few year's time, I won't actually trust the PEGI system. While the visualization of violence and sex is something I think I'll want to protect her from, I don't want her to play games with torture either.

I work in the gaming industry and I love games. And I really like WoW, too. But I just sometimes get this feeling that a bit more honesty wouldn't hurt anyone. And organizations which have been created within an industry in order to proactively prevent authorities from meddling with the industry tend to have issues with honesty, which seems to be the case here. Sigh.

My take on WoW torture quests

2008-12-03T10:05:56Z

Richard Bartle blogged a while back about a WoW quest where the player has to torture an NPC, and how it upset him. Which raised a lot of (sad) comments from all over, so he had to reply in public.

Richard, I agree with you. The quest is sad, and I don't think it fits in WoW very well. Sadder thing is, there's more similar content in WotLK and some of it is ever worse.

Here's a quest where the player is asked to experiment with a disease agent on a prisoner. Here's another torture quest (during which you see prisoners to be tortured, and can't free them). Here's my personal favorite: a quest where the player is ordered to kill citizens captured by the enemy, as a punishment for being captured. The prisoners are in cages so they can't escape and you're supposed to shoot them in cold blood.

What's Blizzard trying to teach people who play WoW? The comments in Wowhead make me feel a bit better, which range from "I hate Blizzard for doing these cruel quests" to "This quest killed me a little on the inside".

I don't think it's going to happen, but what I'd love to see happen at Bliz is:

1) Have a discussion with the copywriters who wrote these quests, and talk about why the quests where done the way they were done. And if you have the guts, state this in public.

2) Allow for alternating storylines where you can complete a quest without doing this disturbing stuff.

What makes this discussion especially interesting is that WoW has PEGI rating of 11+ in Finland, and 12+ elsewhere. I doubt this would stay if someone actually told PEGI about these quests. And this goes to show how PEGI is broken.

Update: PEGI lists WotLK as 12+. I sent them a query about whether they think torture scenes are appropriate for 12 year olds, and got a quick reply:

"We have examined the game World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and according to the PEGI system this game has been rated 12+ because of the depictions of non-realistic looking violence towards human-like or animal-like characters. Also in he scenes/ quest you describe the violence visualized is still non-realistic."

I guess this begs a question on what is actually realistic, and what isn't. PEGI's interpretation seems to be that since you can opt to play a non-human character and there's no blood, the scene is non-realistic. I'm slightly confused - I guess Reservoir Dogs torture scene was non-realistic as well, since the violence wasn't actually visualized at all.

Update 2: PEGI's questionnaire that's aimed to make rating games easier states the following are indicators that a game should be rated 18+:

Depictions of gross violence, which includes torture, dismemberment, sadism and horrific depictions of death or injury towards human-like or animal-like characters.
Depictions of violence towards vulnerable or defenceless human-like characters

The explanation for the former suggest the torture should be somewhat graphic to count, and the latter is indicated to have merit on it's own, be the violence graphic or not.

I guess my opinion on this is that it's fine to have the scenes in WoW, but I don't think the game's content is suitable for the 12+ rating it's been given. WotLK should have PEGI rating of 16+.