Nekomata.se

I'm not dead

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Wed, 9 May 2007 09:04:48 +0200

..I just feel like it. Somehow things crept up on me and made me very busy. Insanely busy. Wishing-I-would-break-my-leg-so-I-could-get-some-rest-at-the-hospital-busy.

It's better now, but still it seems I don't really have the time to write much here. Heck, I don't even have the time for one of the essentials in life - idle surfing. What's going on in the outside world? I have no idea.
Hopefully it will slow down a bit soon, or I'll break my leg. See you then!

Spreading the cuteness, oh and firefox

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:49:03 +0200

It seems to be a law of nature - everything is cuter in Japan. And It's strange but somehow it makes life just a little bit better to be surrounded by that cuteness. You can just tell that the cuteness wants no harm in the world to anyone. (Yeah I know it's a biological thing - cute things look like babies and so on.)

Just look at the fiery Firefox fox who on his travels to Japan transformed from a stylistic logo into a huggable fluffy ball of cuteness. With some mandatory cherry flower petals on the top.

If you like him as much as I do you can even build your very own version of him:

Dear internet,

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:46:42 +0200

Desktop Tower Defense

Someone I care about deeply has become obsessed with this web game. He plays it for hours at a time and says it's all the fun of building towers in an rts condensed into one little game. To see the enemy approach and getting annihilated by your mighty defenses, brilliantly placed at strategic key locations. He can't stop staring at the hi-score list and mumbles that it's brilliant that you can compete with people you know by entering a group name. He's been playing it for hours, a web game! Surely that can't be normal. Whatever shall I do?

Yeah, I should try it myself and beat his hi-score. That'll teach him.

The world's most inaccessible game?

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 11:25:01 +0200

I have played what the makers claim to be "the world's most inaccessible game" - Game Over!. I think it was the second game in six months time that I could actually play on my Linux platform which is a bit ironic. Anyway - the game was made by "Universally Accessible Games" a research project in Greece and it's a space invaders clone designed to illustrate several guidelines and principles one should follow to make a game as accessible as possible. As you might have imagined it does this by violating these guidelines. It is fun to play in it's own way. Even though starting the game is probably the very best part of it:

Press the following shortcut to start:
Ctrl + Shift + Enter +Page Up +F3 + F12 + Right Arrow

The thing is that most of the principles presented should already be pretty obvious to anyone making a game. No - you shouldn't write the instructions in Swahili if your players don't speak it . You should write them in a form that's clear and easily understandable for everyone. Everyone gets that, the difficulty lies in the next step - how to achieve just that.

Level 7: Die (not so) hard

Other principles are hard or almost impossible to implement in every game, like this one: "provide control over game speed". There are lots of games where the speed of the game are such a big part of the core design that you can't have the player adjusting it without major impact on the design. Not even mentioning online games where the speed necessarily have to be the same for everyone playing it.

No good reasons not to

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 10:42:15 +0200

I've been reading Paul Graham again. This time an essay on his website entitled "Why to not not start a startup?". Now I am dead certain I should start a startup - I wonder what it's like to have a way with words like that. In this essay Graham demolishes the most common reasons you may have to not start a startup.

You can't be too young - as long as you're adult enough to face a challenge without flaking out or acting rebellious. There might be a possibility of being too old though, since that usually means you'll have a family to provide for. Better start as soon as possible.

A small angry cat blocking your computer is not a good reason not to either.

You can't be too inexperienced - since starting a startup is the best experience you can get, no matter the outcome. You can even expect to fail, only dream of success and it's still the better thing to do (you might have to read the article yourself to be convinced of that one). If you later want to get a job it impresses the boss more if you have started a company, worked really hard on it and failed than if you spent the same amount of time working at a big company.

You don't need a great idea of what to make - that idea will change over time anyway. Start - and you will figure it out along the way

And I'll end with one of my favorites - the fear of being smart enough to start a startup. Graham says that if you are smart enough to think about whether your smart enough then you are probably smart enough. Aaah.

The HK Noob: Residence

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:46:51 +0200

To get some feel for the place that I'm actually going to spend almost a year in I've been doing some research on Hong Kong living. Particularly into what kind of places people stay in. Since I can't read Chinese I'm guessing that what I'm really coming up with here is mostly how foreigners in Hong Kong generally stay. I find it a bit interesting.

One way for new residential areas to be built seem to be to finding a spot where there is nothing and then build a large complex there, with everything in place owned by a single company. Then you come up with a name that's will fit in the magazine ads like "Discovery Bay". Every one of these complexes has their own "club" with swimming pools, tennis courts, marinas and so on. All in all I get a very touristy feeling when looking at these places. Perhaps they are a mix of tourist resort and residential areas, many people living there appears to be foreigners working in Hong Kong for longer or shorter periods of time. There is something artificial about these places in more than one respect - for instance Discovery Bay that I mentioned before has it's own artificial beach and every night you can see the fireworks from the nearby Disney Resort. I'd really like to hear from someone living in one of these places. Could living there really be like being on holiday all of the time?

Another thing that constantly strikes me is how much I like the contrast between the green mountains, the sea and those high buildings shooting up from the ground. A majority of the apartments seem to have large windows - and every single one of them seem to comes with a great view. You can of course stay in the middle of town instead of one of the more suburban complexes I've been describing. But just as everywhere else in the world - living in the central of town comes with a price. The apartments are smaller and more expensive. I saw one at a reasonable price - with no window. But hey, as a substitute an lcd-tv was included in the rent. You can't get everything in this world.

Nerd humor

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:18:22 +0200

I was writing a method in python when I suddenly paused for a second and looked at the code I had just written. I actually found this funny:

def touch(self):

I'm not sure if this makes me nerdy or just overall embarrassing, you be the judge.

The endless game

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:56:06 +0200

To an outsider it might seem like World of Warcraft have succeeded in being a game that never ends. Two years after release people are still playing it, a lot of them people who didn't spend all their time playing other mmorpgs before it. But with the recent expansion I think that a lot of people in the game realized the opposite - that this is not a game to play forever. We could finally all see that it doesn't matter how much content is added, it's still the same game and will probably stay that way. There are a lot of people who are starting to feel done with WoW and that are looking for a worthy successor. A WoW-killer.

We are just days away from the release of Lord of the Rings Online in the US. Sadly, after playing the a bit on the beta I don't think this is where WoW is going to meet it's death. Not that there isn't any interesting new stuff in LotRO. The monster play where you set out in monster form to hunt down players seems promising for example. But it doesn't have that ability to instantly capture you that WoW had. I'm talking about that special power that had you start up the game - blink - and then realize that it was 17 hours later and you probably should eat and sleep in life as well, but you didn't really want to. Then there are those small unpolished details in LotRO that hurts the oh-so-important first impression. Like the elves. These are the creatures that Tolkien described as being so graceful that they are able to walk on a gravel path without making any sound. I made an elf character in LotRO and she runs like a bandy-legged kangaroo. The proportions of her body also feels wrong somehow. Seems like we wont see WoW's murderer emerge until Warhammer Online or maybeAge of Conan.

To make a truly endless games I think some new ideas are needed - or at least a better use of old ones. For example: a story line that is constantly progressing and that every player in the game can feel that they are really taking part of. The tricky part is then of course to make thousands of players all feel important to the story at the same time. Another way to make the game never ending could be to let players contribute to the content to a high extent. Then there would surely be so much ever-changing content in the world that you could never see it all. The risk with this is to end up with something like Second Life where there are lots of stuff but all of it is ugly and there is no uniformity to the world. Something would have to be done to prevent that from happening.

All in all I'm not so sure it really would be healthy for me if the game that never ends actually is created someday, but I can't help but hoping for it anyway.

Howto: chopsticks

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:54:36 +0200

Remember the educational video on how to eat sushi in Japan? It was brilliant stuff, from the beginning with its a-bit-to-screechy instrumental sound and onwards. Turns out there are more videos in the series, here we get a basic lesson in using chopsticks. Don't be alarmed that it's all in Japanese though, give it a couple of seconds and you'll get to the good parts where everything is perfectly clear.

Nowadays I imagine almost everyone know how to use chopsticks, at least that's the way it is here in Stockholm. I always felt like I didn't really deserve all the praise when someone complemented me for being able to eat with chopsticks in Tokyo.

Here we go again

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 09:35:45 +0200

Apparently lots of women are playing games. But once again, the games women play are casual games. What is a casual game anyway? To me it still sounds a bit too much like a convenient way to label some games as being less "real" than others.

Kanji craze

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 08:56:36 +0200

This is great. I get to buy not one but two new games for my Nintendo DS with a perfectly clean conscience intact. They have to be a good investment - they are educational . I admit, I already own that language game with a giant blue bird - Talkman for the PSP and I rarely used it. But it was more of a dictionary than a learning aid really.

The two new games are both about learning Chinese characters - kanji as they are called in Japan. That should be a good idea for me since learning Chinese signs is good both for brushing up my Japanese and will come in handy in Hong Kong since most of the characters have about the same meaning in both countries - at least that's what I've heard and hope for.

The first one is called Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun and is meant to help out Japanese children just starting school with learning kanji. In Japan you often see these seven-year-olds sitting on the subway practicing their kanji with small paper notes. It was about time that they were provided with a little more hi-tech solution. The Nintendo DS comes to the rescue and it is of course perfect for practicing kanji with it's touch screen and pen. Check out the commercial for an injection of Japanese cheerfulness.

Game number two might suit you better if you have trouble identifying with a Japanese seven-year-old. Here you get to be a kung-fu master. Better eh? A kung-fu master who defeats opponents by demonstrating his awe-inspiring kanji skills apparently.This is Kanji-ken where you write the correct kanji on the touch screen after reading the phonetic description of it. A concept that reminds me of the home made RPG Slime Forest where battles also are won by knowing your alphabets. In slime forest you start out with learning hiragana and katakana - the two phonetic alphabets of Japanese that you probably need to know before you start practicing with these two DS games - could be a good start if you can live with the graphics and have a sense of humor - there are some really funny RPG clichés in it.

I have already been through the slime forest myself so I'm ready for some kung-fu action!

Occupation: being popular

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 08:40:58 +0200

Teenagers are trapped in an endless popularity contest and miserable by default. It's natures law - all those hormones flowing around in their bodies. But is that really and inevitable true? I've always had a nagging suspicion that the hormone explanation is used by adults to easily explain away the fact that everyone hates those years from around 12 to 17 and still be able to sleep at night without having to do anything about it. Paul Graham writes about exactly this in the very first chapter in his book Hackers & Painters and it was a bit of a revelation for me to read. I think he's on to something.

He argues that any group that's left without anything meaningful to occupy themselves with will degenerate, they will find something to occupy them - keeping track of popularity and rankings inside the group. For many, school just doesn't feel meaningful - but more a place that you have to be in for a certain couple of hours each day until you are let out again. And the main reason, he writes, that kids are sent to school is just this - so they are out of the way for the grown-up society to take care of the real work in the world in the day. In older days young people could still do some good in the real world as apprentices or assistants but today work is so specialized and often need a high degree of education even at the most basic level that it's not possible for kids to be useful there anymore. They have to be kept somewhere else in the day time - in schools. The same school for everyone, no matter what you're really interested in doing and not - and the whole thing is mostly about as Graham puts it "an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through" memorizing certain points so that you can pair them up with the corresponding questions on the test. When humans don't feel like they're doing anything meaningful it's just human nature to start focusing of who his more popular than the other - you need something to do. He compares high school kids to rich house wifes in the suburbs who without anything more meaningful to center their lives around instead fills them with gossip and who has the nicest house, who bakes the most delicious cookies and so on.

All of this gives Graham an answer to the question of why nerds are unpopular - they are as he says distracted, somehow they see beyond school and aren't able to make the endless popularity contest their first priority in life, they have other things they want to do with their time. Computers, nature, games, books, inventions and so on. But that contest has to be your first priority or you will fail in it, it's hard and constant work trying to be popular.

A bit optimistic?

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:40:21 +0200

Sometimes you don't know whether to envy peoples optimism or just be astonished by it. How did the people behind this music video for the Korean singer Ivy think that they would get away with such an obvious copy of a scene from Square Enix' Advent Children? Footage from the movie is in the lower right corner.

It has now been banned from being aired on TV by a South Korean court according to Japan Probe. But it's still on YouTube of course, where a lot of people like me who have never even heard about Ivy are checking it out to see the resemblance. The makers of this video are probably not incredibly optimistic after all, but incredibly smart.

Flow

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Mon, 9 Apr 2007 09:35:00 +0200

I seem to have thrown away all my old principles because just as I thought I'd never start playing a paladin in World of Warcraft I never thought I would use a level guide. A level guide tells you exactly what quests to do and don't do and the exact order in which to do them in order to level up as quickly as possible. Sometimes it even tells you to go and die on purpose because that's the quickest way to get back to town. The thing that surprises me the most is how much fun it is to follow strict instructions while playing WoW. I think it has got to have something to do with flow.

Wikipedia says:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

But there's one important factor in achieving flow that isn't in that description and that is to always have clear goals. That's something the level guide gives you. Now you do this and then you do that. No doubt and no hesitation about what to do. It means always knowing that you are doing the most optimal thing you could be doing and always with a feeling of progression, of getting better, even more so than when leveling normally since you can tell that this is a more optimized way of doing it.

I wouldn't recommend using a leveling guide the first time you level up a character, then it is clearly more fun to explore, to actually listen to what the npcs has to say and perhaps get a bit immersed in the world. But when you're doing it for the third or fifty-third time it can be a lot of fun - if you can feel the flow.

Real games

nospam@example.com (Linnéa) — Sun, 8 Apr 2007 09:45:30 +0200

I really agree with this blog post, I agree on every point in it. Especially the one that you can be a hardcore player no matter what kind of games you play. The post is not so much about how players of different kinds of games are viewed, rather it gives a lot of good advice to anyone making games. But it go me thinking about one thing that really annoys me: the fact that a game that are played and loved by the "wrong" groups of people are instantly viewed as being less of real game - almost to the point of being a non-game.

For example - as I remember it, when The Sims first came out just about everyone played it. No wonder, it was a good game. But when people who liked to view themselves as "real gamers" realized that a lot of people who usually don't play a lot of games had found their way to The Sims and liked it too, it was shortly looked at with condescending eyes. Suddenly it was less real than "Kill a lot of people 2" and "Lol, I'm driving 3". The "real gamers" stopped playing it, or at least wouldn't admit that they did. The same is even more true for web based games, somewhere I read that the majority of players of online games are actually women if you count the web based games like Bejewled but of course they are not counted since they are not real games. I can't see why that is besides that the wrong people play them and as Damion writes you can be as hardcore about playing those games as about playing Everquest II.

Seems to me that the biggest factor in deciding if a game is a real game or not isn't it contents but whether or not if it's the "right kind of people" that are playing it and that's what really annoys me.