Online Gaming

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First up, I’d just like to say that I don’t think online gaming is without some merit.

That sounds like real negative forshadowing for something that generally receives nothing but praise from most, but I’m not having a mindless bash at online play merely because I have a rubbish connection. Or because the online player can take me to the cleaners on even my favourite games. It’s much more general than that.

Online play, while touted as being more social and outgoing than the ‘lonliness’ of single-player, is actually pretty solitary. You know what? Playing with people is so much more fun when you’re not sitting in the house on your own. It’s called LAN, and with modern laptops this is more feasible than ever.

I know not everyone can do this, and being a developer I have more computers than I should so I’m inclined to be a LAN gamer. But it’s not just LAN. Split screen and turn based games are even easier; Trackmania being the current favourite (turn-based racing at its best). I always enjoy it so much more playing games with people who are present and I actually know and/or care about.

Online games aren’t forbidden a look in among all this, I just don’t think they’re the big positive social train they’re made out to be. Also, it may come as a shock to those who think that bots are a thing of the past and that World of Warcraft is how all games will be someday, but I’ve deduced some fundamental logical inevitables:

  1. AI will sooner or later surpass humans. In my opinion they’re already more fun because they don’t hack, or spend the whole time telling you you’re doing it in an inefficient way and not using the best gunz. Regardless, AI will eventually be as good (and optionally better) than humans. [1]
  2. Role Play Games are fun because you’re the only one that can save the world. If everyone in the world is also saving it as well, all your greatnesses average out and you’re left back in the real world where everyone is samey and bored. This is called Lex’s Hypothesis on Why World Of Warcraft Sucks. [2]
  3. People on The Internets are all dickholes [3].

I’m not just getting at online games for the hell of it, I just think the industry needs a kick up the jacksie to remember that there’s greater things a game can aspire to than Battlefield 2. Players of ‘private session’ style games like my humble self are finding our choices slim these days, because developers/publishers think that online is where the cash is. This is probably true. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it!

Space Station Sim

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I buy more games than I play. I think everyone does this a little. But I also buy games I know aren’t that great, just because I’m curious. I’m curious to know what’s out there; what the virtual world offers us today, how it ticks, and what I could do to improve it. This has led me to buy games that I rarely play, and take chances on titles with such bad marketing and presentability that their only other buyers will be confused pensioners and clueless parents. Raph Koster calls it ‘Designeritis’: the almost scientific need to acquire and analyse as many games as possible, then toss them aside like an ungrateful teenager.

Well one such whim was a game called Space Station Sim, recently on offer at my local GAME for a rather amusing £1.95. How can I say no to research at that kind of price? Titles that do something I’ve not otherwise had a chance to do always perk my interest, regardless of how interesting the activity may appear at first glance. Making a spacestation sounded intriguing, so I payed the price of a bare sandwich and took a look. Review follows! Continue reading →

A New Year

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I just watched Yes Man. And then everyone went to the pub, but I came home cause I was all like “nah I got stuff to be getting on with…”. Obviously I learned nothing.

I have felt the need recently to vent into writing but every time I go to make an entry I forget what it was I wanted to say. Chances are that means that nothing’s really bothering me, which is a good thing, right? Or perhaps I’m just in bit of a writing drought; I haven’t worked on any of my books in months at least.

Finishing the monument that was Tales of Wobells over the course of December was probably why for the most part. And maybe a little time for relaxing with Lucy. But as 2009 kicks off, I find myself wishing I were doing more. I want to get out there and ‘soar’. I just have this continuing sensation of trundling down the runway, but those wings aren’t kicking in with the lift just yet.

Speaking of which, got a flying lesson to book sometime. Can’t wait.

Game Design Thoughts

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In my mind, most developers seem to design games back to front these days. So cornered by the publisher’s demands to maximize on the trends, they’re churning out permutations of a current formula entirely on purpose. The advertising is a dead givaway of this mentality; it’s some other game, but this time with aliens. Or cowboys. No, wait, it’s probably still just WW2.

Rather than to take a game that’s done already and think of what you can tag onto it to make it different (the ‘EA approach’?), I think the best way to come up with a design is to think of something that would be fun to do then turn it into a game (the Wonderous Child approach).

Spore (despite its publisher) is a good example of the latter: Will Wright didn’t think “lets combine Pacman, Populous, Civilization and GalCiv 2 and figure out a theme for it”. It was clearly more a case of “lets make a game about evolution, because the Discovery Channel is cool”. More designers need to go back to this. There are so many great experiences games could be giving us if they could halt making WW2 shooters for just five minutes.

A list of awesome things no game lets you do yet*:
– Freely explore a human body in a microscopic ship like in Innerspace
– Offer a ‘crew camaraderie’ experience running a small ship/spaceship online
– Let you experiment building an orbital vehicle (at a component-placing level) to try and reach space

(*) – As far as I’m aware, anyhow

 

Feb 2016: Since this post was made, we now have Kerbal Space Program, of course! Space Engineers is the closest to the second one; I don't think Star Citizen will hit what I had in mind, either.

Exploring human bodies as a microsub is still lacking, though... if anyone sees one, I'd love to check it out.

Liang Wave Theory

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Changing the timeline causes it to, in simple terms, wobble (rather than simply veer off), as exhibited in Liang Oscillation. The study of this is called Liang Wave Theory. It is thought the shape of the 5th ‘Meta-dimension‘ is what determines the nature of this wave. The 5th Meta-Dimension is essentially a modelling of the change in spacetime (although not strictly a dimension as such). Spacetime’s “path” is determined by the varying warp of the fabric of spacetime, producing a sort of shape of probability. It is thought that this warping is what determines the largely unknown specifics of Quantum States.

Different effects (such as a time traveller’s presence) can change spacetime’s path, but curvature of the meta-dimension largely determines its overall path. Like a river meandering through the trough of least resistance, if it is diverted it will still follow the groove of the terrain. I won’t delve further into fourth and fifth dimensions just now; suffice to say it’s the realm within which the Liang effect manifests itself.

The other important thing to note about Liang oscillation is that on occasion changes can cause time to alter its event flow completely, almost ‘jumping out of the trough’ to a whole new path. This abrupt and permanent change is called a Liang Cascade, and although it remains only a theory, there is no possible way of proving if one has or hasn’t happened already. They are considered a Chrononaut’s worst-case-scenario, as a Liang Cascade will alter the future on an irrevocable, unrecognisable new course.

Fuel & Paranoia

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You know what’s ridiculous (apart from the interval since I last updated)?
Fuel prices!
Am I right? Actually, I am not going to talk about fuel prices at all; partly because, without trying to be smug about it, I remain mostly unaffected. But mainly because it’s all I hear about at the moment.

So instead I’m going to talk about paranoia. People seem to love paranoia these days; I suppose its a reflex action from each successively more twisted crime we hear about. But there seems to be this idea floating about that with enough preparation anything is preventable. I like that notion in a way, it sounds like the kind of theorem that would work. Nevertheless I don’t believe it’s completely true. There are some things that you just can’t predict or prevent, and it’s typically these that people get so paranoid about.

I came across a list of safety precautions recently that proclaimed, amidst a vast bore of mostly speculative measures, that “you’re better off paranoid than dead.” I have to disagree here. I would rather risk dying from some ludicrously unlikely death than spend every waking hour worrying about what might happen. This goes beyond the way you unlock your car in a dark car park; I’m talking about life attitude here.

Take sensible precautions, but understand that if Lady Luck and her dice hate you, there’s not a damn thing you’re going to be able to do about it.

What is Chronoportology?

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“Chronoportology is the study of artificial traversal of the spacetime continuum; in essence, the science of Time Travel.”

– “Chronoportology: The Basics”, from the archives of the Novodantis

The history of time travel as a serious science is surprisingly sparse, up until the mid to late third millenium. By 2.9.C * it was growing fast, as new ways to transmit information along time were continually being discovered. However, there was a crucial limitation that prevented movement of a person against time’s flow.

The Law of Conservation of Energy states one of the cornerstones of known science: energy (and therefore mass) cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. Because of this, the sum of matter and energy in the universe at any given moment will always be the same. In other words any object, such as a chrononaut, cannot physically move back in time (as any given quantum particle only exists once at any point in time). On the other hand, information is an abstract construct and thus circumvents the mass-energy constant.

Thus, a breakthrough came with the invention of Teleportation. This controversial new technology destructed mass at one location, then remotely assembled the pattern using atoms elsewhere. The implications were many: revolutionising transport, causing a multitude of religious wars (due to its shattering effects on the Self and supernatural concepts) and opening up the economy of the solar system. It was only a matter of time before the method was applied to Tetra-warp, the method of shifting atoms in the past. With this advancement, true Chronoportology was born.

The other great limitation to the practice (that remains unresolved), is the necessity of a highly accurate set of data about the target location and a heap of matter to manipulate. This target window and assorted matter is known as a Chronozone. Given that their creation and recording depends on prior knowledge of Chronoportology, destinations before the invention of time travel would appear impossible. This also explains why no time travelling has been witnessed in past records.

(*) – The Novodantis Core uses thirty-second century notation for centuries: eg. “2.9.C” = the twenty-ninth century.

An Introduction to Liang Oscillation

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The Liang Oscillation Effect (often referred to simply as “Liang Oscillation”) is the effect observed primarily by chrononauts; that is, people that have moved through the spacetime continuum in a non-natural manner.

Named after Dr Liang Shi Meng (梁时萌) in 2982, it is a theory describing the behaviour of altered time. Contrary to early concepts, changing past events doesn’t produce an alternate parallel timeline. Nor does that timeline skew off at a tangent, forever getting more and more different from the original events of history. Time, if modeled as a crude line on a graph, in fact oscillates like a wave when it is changed.

This is based on the concept that the effect of an event will be proportional in significance to its cause, the majority of the time. In other words, big changes will come from big things, typically. Sometimes we observe what we call the Butterfly Effect, when something very small sets off a chain of implications that snowball up into a massive effect. But the probability of one of these occurring is inversely proportionate to the difference in significance. Ergo, a butterfly and hurricane are a factor difference of several billion and as such a given wing-beat has a one to a billion probability of being necessary for the hurricane formation. This is only measurable however with identical circumstances in the same time and space, requiring information to travel through time in order to produce precise results.

A sorta different approach

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Last week I turned twenty five, which is a really bad idea and I don’t recommend it at all. But I had a day out in London and an excursion to Thorpe Park with some friends so it was rather fun as birthdays go.

Anyway. As is now tradition for me at this time of year, I’m working on my yearly summary. It’s a kind of super diary entry for myself to record my past year of being 24 and what it was like, all the little things I might forget. Hopefully I’ll finish it before I have to do the next one.