More small updates over here. Plinka Plinka Plinka.

I keep plunking away on this story. The next scene isn’t quite done so I didn’t add it to the website. I did a bunch of work and planning for upcoming scenes though, to better fit a more episodic structure. Since this update is only a handful of words and some edits I briefly considered posting up a synopsis, but just giving away the whole story doesn’t seem very fun. So, for now, you will just have to make due with this small change. You can also safely skip this one and wait for next week when I will have the first part of chapter 3 done.

Best Games - Missile Command There are a lot of games that are tests of endurance. Most early video games had no victory state, no point at which you could say that you had beaten the game. You could play the game until you could not ,or did not want to continue. You could play until the game stopped working, or you ran out of money. Arcade owners were hoping for the last option. It was a competition between you and the game to see which one could last longer. Games with the design sense and basic play cycle of Missile Command were not uncommon. It was a product of the artform and arcade business as it was in 1980. It was also a product of the late stages of the cold war. 

I continue to slowly work away on my story over here. The writing app I have been using (Quoll Writer - ​quollwriter.com/) happily informed me, completely unprompted, that it is currently a novelette, and I’ll probably be straying into novella territory soon. Of course more words doesn’t mean they are good words, so there will be a lot of editing to do, but having the program tell me ‘Hey, you wrote this much!’ has actually made me want to write more. I mean that first chunk of words was tough, but not impossible. Like a long walk, jog, or bike ride, if you keep going forward you will make it to the end. There is really no other option. You keep going forward and you will get it done. It could take a long time. It could be bad. It will be done.

Best Games - Tetris It won’t be news to anyone that Tetris is one of the best games ever created. Not just video games. Games. All games. Tetris is one of the best Games ever created. Tetris is that good. If the devices exits to play it, tetris will likely be played in much the same form as it is today well into the next century or further. Tetris will persist. Tetris is as good a game as Poker. Video games are a technology driven artform constantly chasing better, more vibrant visuals, sharper fuller audio, more intelligent and challenging adversaries. All of this progress demands new programs and techniques and new silicon for those programs to run on. Tetris, by contrast, is an experience driven work of art. To Tetris players the look and sound of the game doesn’t matter much at all. It only matters that it plays like Tetris. Teris is as good a game as Auto Racing. You can spectate a game of Tetris exactly once, and understand how the game is played. You can play Tetris exactly once and start to develop strategies to improve your next game. You can continue to improve at it, but Tetris can’t be beaten. It is a game that test your skill, no matter what level that skill happens to be. Tetris is as good a game as Golf. No matter what device you are currently reading this on, you could also use that device to play Tetris. That version of Tetris will play pretty well. There are definitely controls that people prefer, like joysticks or gamepads or different configurations and sizes of buttons, but even most touch screen versions of Tetris play just fine. It’s so good what you play it on almost doesn’t matter. Tetris is as good a game as Trivial Pursuit. There are a lot of different variations on the original game and you can choose to play most of them against the game or against another person. They are all slightly different experiences, but they share the same simple mechanics. No matter how you play it, no matter what version you play, Tetris is all about preparation. You have to prepare for the moment that the one piece you need is drawn randomly from the small group of available pieces. It’s about using what you know of the system to plan ahead, but being ready to improvise when you need to. Tetris is as good a game as Chess. Tetris is as good a game as Soccer. Tetris is as good a game as the 100 meter dash. Tetris will outlive its creator. Tetris will outlive its creators generation. And the next generation. And the next. Tetris will outlive the memory of its creation. Tetris is one of the best games.

We picked up one of the Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets more than a year ago. We have played a lot of games, and I have hooked up up to Unity to test out some of the development tools for VR, but It always felt a little wonky. There are a lot of claims that the inside out tracking on the headset might not be up to snuff, but I can safely say that the headset was never the problem. The headset has two wide angle cameras that look out at the world in front of them. By testing for changes in the position of static objects around it and comparing that information to internal gyroscope and accelerometer data, the headset can figure out where it is, if it moved, and where it moved too. It does this at a rate that is much faster than you could physically move your head, and because of this, the virtual world displayed in the headset stays pretty rock solid. If you think that can’t possibly be accurate enough you’re going to be blown away by how optical mice have been working for the last 30 years. Having tested the other two major VR headsets several times, I can safely say that, for regular use, the inside out tracking solution works just as well as the other positioning systems. My problem wasn’t with the tracking, it was with the controllers. The same system that tracks where the headset is in space, keeps track of the two controllers, but rather than being wired to the computer they connect over bluetooth. They aren’t the most comfortable of all of the current batch of VR controllers, but they aren’t the worst either. For several months though, they were super flakey. Early on, the controllers would regularly freak out and stop registering, often when you were moving them quickly or turning around. Most games became a test of patience as you would watch one controller that had been behaving well start to twitch and move to positions that it would be impossible to get your actual hands into. In the Unity editor where things don’t always react as quickly as you would like anyway, the controllers could become downright useless. I would wait with my hand hovering over an interaction point that I had set up until the controller decided to show up and snap to that same spot. It’s worth noting, that while this was happening the headset continued to work properly. It even kept up when I would do things in the Unity editor with lights and physics that would slow down my framerate and cause pauses in the simulation. Through all that the headset continued to track properly and even respond to quick movements. One day I was connecting and disconnecting USB cables, as you do, and I thought to swap the XBOX controller receiver with the bluetooth adapter. The XBOX receiver had been finicky from day one and it only seemed to work properly when I plugged it into a USB extender so that it could get some distance from the PC case. I supposed that the case, or something in the case, had caused some interference with the wireless signal between the receiver and the controller so giving it that foot or so of separation from the PC had solved the issue. Instantly the problems I had with XBOX controllers went away and I could reliably use the controllers up to a room away even with a wall in between. I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me for months, but it seems the same issue was plaguing the bluetooth adapter. I put the adapter on the short USB cable so that it sat a small gap from the PC case and that changed everything. Now the controllers follow your hands solidly and consistently. They react accurately to fast movements, like throwing or catching or punching. When the controllers move outside the view of your headset, like when you are reaching behind you or far out to the side, the accelerometers and gyroscopes take over and usually do a pretty good job. As soon as the cameras pick up the controllers, if they had strayed at all they instantly snap to their real locations. We have tested (played) a lot of our favorite VR experiences again and they have a whole new life. When you can count on the controls, games are so much more enjoyable and engaging. I suppose that isn’t really a revelation. I have yet to test out the more demanding interactions in the Unity editor again, but I’m pretty confident they would work much better now. I suppose the moral of this story is, when you are trouble shooting some problem, it’s often easiest to blame the newest factor, or the most exotic component of a system. If there is a part that you don’t really understand, like the camera based inside out tracking of this VR headset, it becomes very easy to lay the blame there and move on. In this case the problem was simple radio interference, something that should be familiar to anyone living on earth since the early 20th century, and usually solved by moving one of the antennas. Bad TV signal? Put the antenna on your roof. Lost GPS connection? Get out of the parking garage that’s between you and the sky. VR controllers aren’t working right? Move the bluetooth antenna a foot to the right. Cool. I’m gonna have to set VRTK back up and test it out in Unity again.

A small bit of movement on the story over here. As soon as I have one of my characters talk to another one of my characters, I first have to go and make sure that I know who they are, and that requires writing some other background and even a couple of test conversations. It’s a slow constructions process, but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. I’m resisting the urge to go back in and rewrite stuff at the start that I find clunky, because I at least want to write up until the first major plot point before I start reworking earlier stuff. I have a couple of scenes later on already written, it’s just a matter of filling in the space between here and there. I think this is why most writers don’t put stuff out until they have at least one full draft. Too bad I guess. If you read it now you have to suffer the halting sentences and jarring pace.

sometimes you write. sometimes you make some cards.

New additions, new edits and I’m getting closer to bridging some gaps in this story so that I can build to the conclusion of what I have been thinking of as episode 1. You don’t have to think of it like that, but I suppose it’s worth knowing that I do.

I put up a new, very short, story over here. Go over and have a read. In fact, go over and read any of the other ones too and let me know what you think.

Best Games - River Raid The first thing you notice about River Raid is how beautiful it looks. Symmetric fields of solid color in perfectly balanced palettes. Everything on screen is clear and crisp. The second thing you notice is how smooth everything moves. The Atari 2600 is well known for its low resolution and chunky movement, but River Raid feels fluidly analog at all times. Next you notice the sound. In a world of digital farts and squawks somehow only the most harmonious tones were selected from the white noise generator built into the Atari 2600. River Raid sounds intense, but never jarring. When you start to play the game, the ramp from simple shooting gallery to incredibly demanding is so smooth you won’t notice that the game is getting harder until you crash 3 times in span of a few seconds. Instantly you restart and try again, becoming incrementally better at the game with each attempt. There is no end to River Raid. No point where the game informs you of your mastery. It grows more difficult until it over taxes either your skills or your stamina. You can’t beat it, you can only improve. It would be easy to suggest that this purity of design and presentation sprung from the limitations of the Atari 2600. Somehow I doubt that. Carol Shaw surpassed most of the perceived limitations of that simple computer in River Raid. She created a smooth, vibrant, aesthetically pleasing game on a system not really known for that sort of thing. The game explains itself while you play with no need for instructions or tutorials. It is abstract while being easily readable. River Raid could only exist as an interactive computer program. The engineering and the art only work when meshed together as one. It is a self contained wonderful thing polished to a high shine. River Raid isn’t a product of limitations. River Raid is proof that we never really saw what the Atari 2600 was capable of, or more to the point, what a brilliant creator could accomplish with those simple tools. 

There is no way that I will ever play all of these games. It will never happen. There was a brief window in the 80’s and maybe the early 90’s that a ‘gamer’ could have at least touched most of the popular titles and genres. I have played a Megaman, and I have played a Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have played Street Fighter, and Doom, and Space Quest. Action, strategy, sports, adventure, role playing, puzzle, narrative, abstract, simulation, educational. All the types, styles, and genres available, I played. There were games that I liked better than others, and game types that had their devoted fans, but there weren’t subcultures. There was no punk rock or Jazz. No surrealist theater or period piece costume dramas. Gamers played games, and most likely they played all of them.

You know how they say “for every movie made there are 100 scripts on the shelf”? Games are the same. I took one of my game ideas off the shelf recently. It had started as a video game riff on everyone's least favorite game mechanic, inventory management, but I have made some significant changes. Most notably, I’ve changed it into a board game. The original intent for this game was for it to be a mobile or tablet, single player game that demanded fast reactions and decisions. Of course that sort of thing is not the strength of board games. Board games are slower, more contemplative, and usually turn based. The best board games are very communication focused. Creating an excuse for people to talk around a table is where board games shine.

I’ve been doing some more work on the story over here . I actually ended up writing some more stuff in part one, or chapter one, or whatever you call parts of stories. I tacked that on, but I haven’t quite caught up with the other stuff I had been writing so that I could figure out how to write this stuff. It’s a wacky non-linear world of writing. The real kicker is, I absolutely know for a fact that I will end up completely rewriting pretty much everything in the first chapter or so to make it flow better with everything else. I think I have made peace with that.