E-Books and Their Readers – 11-18-09

I read an article on the New York Times’ website how smart phones such as the iPhone are becoming a popular e-book reader as opposed to dedicated devices such as the Kindle or the Nook. I understand the concept of it being a device that is always with you. However, I cannot think of situations where that convenience would actually be taken advantage of. An analysis of commuter statistics says that, as of July of 2008, around 75% of all commuters in the US drive alone. Without an extreme risk of personal harm, that means that potential readers would not be able to read on their way to work or school. If a person is reading at home, then a “device that’s always with you” begins to lose its value as it does not matter that you don’t want to take your e-reader with you everywhere because you won’t. I do understand the value in not buying another $250+ gadget, which is the only “pro” of a non-dedicated device. However, a dedicated e-reader usually is capable of holding a battery charge for weeks, as opposed to hours, and the size of the screen would allow the person to read more per “page.”

E-books as a general concept are interesting to me. It creates many opportunities for readers: potentially less time between final editing and release, a definite price value (which is an anomaly in digital distribution), and a sense of helping the environment with paperless books. Unfortunately, most older generations are so used to the idea of having a large book collection that it is unlikely for e-books to become popular until there is a generation that is conditioned to having most of their entertainment consist of bits versus atoms.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: The Story: The Blog: The Semicolon: The Dash 11-18-2009

Once again, I’m going to preface this by warning anyone who may be reading this that wants to play the story of CoD:MW2 that I will be talking about the story. I will try to not go more in-depth than is necessary for discussion, but be warned nonetheless.

Modern Warfare 2 has a story that is best described as interesting. It is by no means a great piece of fiction, interactive or otherwise, but players can see and appreciate its attempts to be more than the game equivalent of “popcorn flick.” It’s a globe-trotting experience with the amount of plausibility of an episode of 24, but like the Kiefer Sutherland show the overall story is enjoyable enough where it is difficult to care that the chance of everything happening in real life is slim.

Part of what makes the story so interesting to play is the way Call of Duty games always tell their stories: by putting the player into the shoes of multiple characters in different parts of the world. An element that Infinity Ward introduced to this style of story-telling with their last game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is the potential for your character to die. Unfortunately, this sort of storytelling makes it difficult, if not impossible, to gain any sort of attachment to the characters you embody.

An example of this is where you take control of Private Joseph Allen. You are hand-picked by a general to join a CIA task force to infiltrate the ranks of a Russian dictator. You are warned that in your mission, you may lose part of yourself. As Allen, your first experience in this situation is working with the dictator in the massacre of the population of an airport. If you watch any of the 24-hour news channels, you have probably seen a news story about this level. What those stories probably never mentioned is that, as the player, you can actually choose to either skip that entire scene as a playable mission or, if you choose to play it, you can choose to not participate in the slaughter. You are not allowed to attack any of the terrorists, so you are still forced to watch the civilians get killed. On the surface, this is a powerful story-telling tool. In practice, it feels sort of empty as it seems that Infinity Ward tried to push the envelope, so to speak, without pushing it very far. They could have had one of the terrorists force the player to shoot a civilian, or do something. Also, any distress the player may have felt over participating in this is made void by the dictator killing Allen at the end of the mission, which somehow triggers the Russia vs. US war that most of the game focuses on.

Modern Warfare 2 shows both the potential for what can be done with first-person interactive stories, but also the hindrances of trying to do so while also making a product that sells over 4 million copies on its first day of release in the US and UK.

Choices, choices… - 11-9-2009

I just want to preface this real quick and say that I’m going to describe story elements of this game in the following blog post so be warned.

Click to enlarge

I’ve been playing the new game Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend and I had to talk about it. Beyond being a fun game, it has changed the status-quo of moral choices in video games. For those who don’t know, moral choices in games usually boil down to a super-evil choice or a super-good choice, exemplified in the above Penny-Arcade comic. In Dragon Age, the choices are vaguer, grayer if you will. For example, there’s a choice where a child is possessed and there are two ways to save him: kill the child or sacrifice his mother to enter the child’s psyche and destroy the demon possessing him. There is no specific good or evil choice in that situation. Someone will die either way and you have to choose who it is. Later in the game, I had to choose who I would put forward to be the next ruler of the game’s country. My two choices were the previous queen, Anora, the daughter of one of your enemies and someone you have only briefly met at that point in the game, or one of your teammates, Allistair, who you have been fighting alongside since the beginning of the game, the bastard-child of the second-to-last king but a man who does not want to be King. You have to choose between someone with experience you can’t necessarily trust or someone you trust who has no experience nor desire to rule.


Choices would have no impact if they did not have a consequence. In the first example, I chose to sacrifice the mother and had to explain to the father what happened to his wife and listen to the child wonder what happened to his mother and despair over the knowledge that he will not know for a while. In the case of the ruler-situation, I had chosen to spare Anora’s father, Loghain, which caused Allistair to accept the throne so that he could order the execution of Loghain for crimes he committed earlier in the game. I resisted that decision and ended up supporting the Anora to prevent Loghain’s death. Allistair decided that he would leave then, and Anora stated her intent to have Allistair killed so he could not start a rebellion to claim the throne with his royal blood. I did not want him to die so I called in the favor that Anora owed me to save him. This game has had decisions to make that I have had to stop and seriously consider and then feel guilt over the hurt feelings of my computer.

With all of this consideration on guilt I was curious if there were any known physiological causes or activators for guilt. On the Wikipedia Article for guilt, I found that “Guilt is founded on our empathy system and mirror neurons.” To paraphrase the article, mirror neurons are parts of our brain put us in other’s shoes, especially when what the other person does is caused or started by a decision or action that we have made or done. It is a high mark for the quality of the voice acting and character animation in Dragon Age to make me consider the feelings of a decidedly fake being.

...And I'm a PC - 11/4/2009

With the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 Operating system, Apple has launched a new series of ads meant to discourage Windows users from upgrading to 7 and instead become Mac users. My gut reaction to these commercials is that they’re petty and have an air of panic about them on Apple’s part. Apple had a field day with Windows Vista, and their ads did a lot to keep public opinion on Vista decidedly negative. Focusing on being number one in customer satisfaction seems odd as well. According to research firm IDC, the market share for Mac computers is at 9.4% in the United States. In that situation, using a population-based fact like customer satisfaction is not the best idea. For example, on one the WrestlingFigs message board, a post that I read mentioned how an eBay seller was reputable because they had a 100% feedback rating. The problem is that the vendor had only done 7 deals. It is very easy to have high positive ratings when your sample base is smaller than competitors.

To be a better conversion ad, it may be a better idea to have PC go through and mention features that are new in Windows 7 that have direct corollaries that Mac OS had first. For instance, the new taskbar displays a list of an application icons that users can start them from, much like the Mac dock.

Mac OS X Dock

And the Windows 7 taskbar; Why is Apple not attacking this similarity?

Apple could even word it in such a way like, "You like the copy, why don't you move up to the real deal?"

Digital Pengins and the Uncanny Valley 10/28/09

I found an article at Variety about the Digital Penguins in the movie “Surf’s Up.” They talked about the movie’s Mockumentary nature leads to characters being interviewed by the quote unquote cameraman and had close-ups. They talked about how Sony needed to draw and animate the characters more like 2D characters as opposed to traditional 3D models. While I think the art style choice is interesting, this discussion made me want to look into the idea of the “close-up” in films.

I looked at Wikipedia and saw that the earliest filmmakers did not use close-ups for the most part and that there is even argument among historians in regards of who was the first filmmaker to use the close-up. I also saw that in movie theory, the close-up is often intended to distinguish main characters from the rest of the fray.

To go back to the initial discussion, this high-detail shot or scene would require either CGI models with incredible detail and fidelity, or a decision to go with a flatter look. Sony went with the flatter look, which helps them avoid what is called the Uncanny Valley where a fake image gets so close to reality that the small details that are not real make the image jarring and almost uncomfortable to look at. A close up of an almost-real Penguin talking to the camera would have likely been painful for the family-audience that Sony was aiming for.

Example of the Uncanny Valley

With all of this in mind, I think that as technology gets closer and closer to producing life-like images, CGI movies will actually go further away from realism, stylistically, so they avoid the issue of the Uncanny Valley. Once computers are capable of rendering a completely realistic human without any of the issues of the Uncanny Valley like movement or emotions that look just “a little bit off”, then a shift back towards realistic CGI people will happen.

Digital Candy… Tastes like Binary 10-28-09

I found this candy at stupid.com and it belongs here. A person can order gum that is shaped like pieces of technology, such as a Game Boy, a computer mouse, or a DVD.

Given the size of the gum relative to the size of the hand in the image, the gum is unrealistically big. The average size of a piece of gum is about the size of a nickel or so. The Game Boy gum alone is the width of the hand’s four fingers! It is impractical to chew this gum because you either are going to have a piece of gum the width of your fingers in your mouth or are going to have to rip up the gum and wrap up the remainder. Look at this image of various types of gum. The Game Boy gum is the width of stride package or the 5 gum package! There’s a reason why an average piece of gum is a nickel in diameter, is long and thin, or is thick and short. These gum manufacturers know that their consumers don’t want to save part of their gum for later, they want the whole piece and the only purpose of the wrapper is to cleanly dispose of a flavorless piece.

As a novelty piece, it works or could be fun, but it’s just too big to enjoy through its intended purpose, chewing.

As a practical food, it may be more reasonable to make technology based gummy fruit-flavored foods, like gummy bears but with iPods and laptops, but keep within the traditional size of those snacks. I did a google search for Tech Gummy Fruit and could not find any results that would suggest that these snacks already exist, but they would be delicious.

Feet First into Hell... or Halo 10-7-2009

FYI: For the sake of discussing thematic elements of this game, I will end up revealing story elements. I will try to avoid anything major unless it is relevant to what is discussed.





Halo 3: ODST is Bungie's latest foray in their acclaimed Halo franchise. However, from the first moments of actual playtime, you realize that this game is unlike every Halo game made yet.

In previous Halo games, the player stepped into the power-armor of the Master Chief, a genetically enhanced super-soldier, a SPARTAN in the fiction of the series. The player is essentially a walking tank, with enough solo lethality that he or she would never fear the enemy characters. In Halo 3: ODST, you play as an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) called "The Rookie." Unlike SPARTANs, ODSTs are not super soldiers. They are human, even if they are the best of the normal humans. This distinction sets up most of what makes ODST unique.

Bungie clearly struggled with the concept of making ODST feel different while still feeling like Halo. Many of the gameplay changes are cosmetic or revert the gameplay style back to that of the original Halo game. For instance, falling from a great height will hurt you. While you don't have shields, you have "stamina" which works the same way where you have a recharging protection before your health starts getting lowered. Your health does not recharge, meaning if you start taking damage when your stamina is lowered, you need to find health packs to heal. The enemies also deal more damage now, so that what was cannon fodder from Halo: Combat Evolved to Halo 3 is now lethal.

The biggest change of all is one that only the hardcore Halo fan will notice and it is the one that makes the game feel the most different. You feel alone in ODST. You are not a god in power armor. You do not fight with a squad. In fact, you spend most of the game trying to find what happened to your squad and meet up with them in the last two missions of the game. The largest portion of the game takes place during the night in a vacated, destroyed, city, with most of the lighting deactivated by an EMP or destroyed by the battles that were taking place beforehand. Unlike the other Halo games where you had an AI companion inside your helmet talking to you, your only companion as The Rookie is the city's highly damaged AI, the Superintendent.

Another difference is the flow of the game itself. You play as The Rookie in the destroyed city of New Mombasa, looking for clues for what happened to your squad. The clues that you find activate flashbacks where you play as the squad-member which feel like Halo. After you have played through the first four flashbacks, it is entirely up to the player as to what order you play the remaining missions. If the player follows the waypoint system, he or she will follow the story of the squad in a more natural order leading up to the point in time where the last flashback you play is parallel to The Rookie finding out about them.

Overall, I think ODST succeeds at feeling different from the previous games while not feeling like a game not attached to the Halo franchise. It ends up being one of the frist games I have played in a very long time that conveyed a mood to me in such a strong way.