New Commenting System
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally replaced the default Wordpress comment system with Disqus, which is more or less a centralized location for managing comments and keep track of threads and conversations.
I figure this is a good move because I’m fully aware that my site hardly warrants constant revisits once you’ve commented to check and see if yours truly has responded. Maybe you’re not even interested in such responses, in which case I don’t suspect this announcement will make much of a difference to you.
Comment threads are turned on here, so hopefully any conversations that spring up will be more manageable than the comment blob delivery method. You can also continue to comment anonymously or without a Disqus ID, but I’d encourage anyone not too afraid of signing up for yet another service to go ahead and make a Disqus account.
So now that this is out of the way, what should we talk about?
Tagged: comments, Disqus, thread
On Premium Themes
All three of you who visit my site with some regularity are probably aware of my past frustrations in settling on a Wordpress theme. It took some time to finally settle on one, but so far I’ve been pretty happy with my current theme, WP Premium. That said, it’s come to my attention that the author of WP Premium doesn’t seem interested in maintaining the theme at all1, which is of course entirely his prerogative. After all, you get what you pay for, so I can completely accept the fact that I may be stuck with a one day obsolete them.
A more savvy web ninja would probably just damn the torpedoes and fire away, confident in his or her ability to handle any issues and incompatibilities that come up with future versions of Wordpress. Alas, I am neither savvy or ninja, so I’m starting to seriously consider a new theme.
Despite it’s open source roots, there’s a pretty massive amount of business that gets conducted around Wordpress. This is to be expected and there’s no doubt the individuals who put the time into tweaking the software into something completely new absolutely deserve the (presumed) financial windfall they so very much deserve.
I, on the other hand, can’t really justify the purchase of a heavy duty customized theme, regardless of my desires for such a thing. I may serve some ads here in the sidebar and whatnot, but I assure you, these ads cover nothing. I threw those ads up more out of curiosity than anything, and certainly do not expect them to result in much of anything. My viewership is tiny and more or less limited to friends and the occasional straggler who, for some reason, still likes to google topics related to the Cloverfield ARG I spent the better part of a month writing about last summer. This is not a complaint, just a statement of fact, and ultimately the reason why I won’t pay for a Wordpress theme. This site is not a business for me. It’s an outlet. I suppose I could just use a free hosted blog somewhere else, but I actually like getting my hands a little dirty now and then and trying to work things out for myself. The degree to which I can customize things using my own install of Wordpress is enough incentive for me to keep my own domain and paying for my own hosting.
Despite what I just said, I’ve been tempted by some pretty fantastic looking themes out there, which brings me to my reason for posting today. The people behind Revolution, an excellent premium (i.e. paid for) Wordpress theme, are going open source:
It means that as of Saturday November 1st, a completely new Revolution site will launch - call it the second coming, or what you will. There will be a new set of themes on that website, which like I said will be made available under the GPL license.
This is extremely exciting because if Revolution is any indication, I suspect the open source themes they release will be of an extraordinary quality. I could end up being wrong there, but at the very least they’ve got my attention.
I hate to jump around from theme to theme, so here’s hoping I can get something that’ll fit the bill soon. I’d hate to see a new Wordpress release break the theme I have here. I just don’t have the time, energy or knowledge to confidently feel I can come out the other end with success.
- Any support that was taking place with WP Premium was through the comments on the post about the theme’s release and as of recently, the comments for that post have been closed. [↩]
Excuses
A hefty tome indeed.
I have this really nasty habit when it comes to entertainment of pushing off experiences that require a great deal of time. This is a pretty universal thing for me and not particularly specific to any one form of media. You can spot evidence of this nasty habit just by reviewing my personal collections and asking me what I thought of some specific items. Example: I picked up the DVD release of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900 well over a year ago and have yet to work up to courage to embark upon a 311 minute epic, regardless of how excellent those 311 minutes are supposed to be. Seriously, that’s over 5 hours of my life devoted to watching a single film. That sounds impressive and nearly insurmountable, but of course that’s a load of horse shit, since I’ve easily spent well more than that engaged in significantly more low brow entertainment.
Want more evidence? My bookshelves contain unread, mint condition copies of books like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, and the second and third books of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver trilogy, The Confusion and The System of the World. All of these are completely worthy of my time, practically demand it, yet when confronted with upwards of 1,000 pages compressed into one volume, I flake at the last minute and grab something slimmer, justifying my decision by pointing out that in the span of time it takes to read one grand epic about a tennis academy, substance abuse and irony, I could read three or four other books. I hate to sound like a bitch about this, but is it so wrong to want to engage in shorter experiences? I suppose not, yet it still becomes this internal conflict for me that I have a hard time reconciling.
This all came to mind earlier this week when I started to play Yakuza. The game is broken up into chapters, the first of which does double duty as both a tutorial to the game as well as the set up to the story. You play as Kazuma Kiryu, a high level enforcer for the Dojima family, who takes the blame and does the time for the murder of one of the family bosses, which was actually carried out by his good friend Nishiki. The set up leads to Kazuma’s parole, 10 years later, and the part he plays in sorting out the sordid events going on around the Dojima family, a story full of juicy bits like murder, a mysterious girl and 10 billion in Yakuza Yen gone missing, all of which is just short hand for saying the story is detailed and interesting and completely engaging.
If you can accept for a moment from that last paragraph that I am very much enjoying Yakuza, you would perhaps then be surprised to hear what I did somewhere towards the end of chapter two: I went over to IGN and looked up the walkthrough. Not, mind you, in an attempt to solve a frustrating element of the game or to follow along to ensure supremacy the first time around, rather than the usual trial and error approach employed in most game playing. No, I wanted to look at the walkthrough to get an idea of how quickly the game would move along.
I genuinely have no idea if actions like this are particular to just me, or if everyone does this at some point. It seems to me that a lot of people I meet subscribe to the cliched idea of something they’re enjoying being “so good [they] don’t want it to end.” You get that from bookworms and cinephiles, gaming geeks and probably opera mavens, too. I, on the other hand, never really feel this way. Just as I’m inclined to consult a walkthrough of a game to gauge the relative amount of time playing, I’m also just as prone to check the number of pages on a novel I’m about to read or check the running time of a movie. Intellectually, this sounds to me like a really awful decision on my part. The quality of a work generally has nothing to do with the amount of time one must invest in appreciating that work, right?
Despite these misgivings, I should point out that in the end, everything gets done. I’d be remiss not to point out the 100 hours I spent on Final Fantasy X earlier this year, or the 80+ hours in Grand Theft Auto IV, all which were without once loading up the potentially limitless multiplayer options.
Braid's intro screen is gorgeous, obviously.
What this all really boils down to is the fact that I tend to collect things, a habit which is most likely intrinsically linked to the fact that video games shaped so much of my experience growing up. After all, one of the great elements of what makes so many games work is that you are rewarded for collecting things. Sometimes these rewards are ancillary to the primary action, such as when you collect 100 coins in Super Mario Brothers and you’re rewarded with an extra life. On the other end of it, sometimes these rewards are necessary to reach the end game. Braid is one example of many that comes to mind: You collect your puzzle pieces from level to level, yet the game never forces you to collect them all within each world. You might get only three pieces (out of far more than that) from world 3, but your access to world 4 is unhindered. It’s not until you need to reach the game’s conclusion that you realize you have to collect all of the puzzle bits, which in turn form a set of images meant to convey the elements of the story to the player.1 Either way, the concept boils down to collecting things = being rewarded.
I’m the first to admit that the concept outlined above kind of falls apart with some poking, so I’ll go ahead and poke away. After all, plenty of people who’ve never touched a video game controller collect things2. So what is it then? Do we, as humans, have a natural tendency towards collecting things, a tendency that is satisfied for some of us by playing video games? Or do the very same games encourage us in some subconscious way to seek those similar rewards, extra lives and such, outside of the context of a game?
Sorry to leave you with a chicken-or-the-egg question, but I don’t have the answer to that one either.
- I’m sorry for the overly simplistic description of the phenomena of collecting in video games. It’s a worthy story, I’m probably just not a worthy teller, at least not without a lot more preparation. [↩]
- If only gamers had bought Beanie Babies, for example, they wouldn’t have been quite the ridiculous phenomenon they were for those few months a few years ago. [↩]
Tagged: Braid, chicken or the egg, collecting, final fantasy x, game length, grand theft auto, Gravity's Rainbow, GTA, Infinite Jest, kazuma kiryu, long experiences, Quicksilver, stuff, video games, yakuza
The Way We Used To Play Madden
A couple weeks ago I was playing Madden 09 on the PS3 with my roommate via offline multiplayer. You know, old school style with two buddies in the same room trashing it up and sharing a screen, trying and failing to resist the temptation to scope out the other guy’s hands on the controller to see what play he’s REALLY calling. This is how I’ve always played Madden and is, for me, what always made Madden so great. As a testament to this, I point to Madden 08 as an example: Due to whatever reason, the opportunity to play with friends just never really arose. As a result, my copy of Madden 08 got a customary once or twice over upon purchase and has since become the Boo Radley of my collection.
You can see then how I would greet the opportunity to share a single screen to play some Madden 09 with great enthusiasm. That is, until we actually played and discovered an outstanding flaw built into the very core of the game, one which deserves a little set up.
Here’s the deal: I’m a stat junkie, as many sports fans are. The best part of playing Madden with your friends (or any sports game for that matter) is the fact that the game is meant to keep a history of your accomplishments, a running tally of your lifetime stats, your win-loss record against each individual friend and so on. Years ago my friends and I would gather in one guy’s basement and between taking turns on playing the original Halo split-screen, those of us sitting out would play games of Madden against each other. We all had our personal profile and the stats would rack up, the history of those games captured for as long as we cared to look at them. Between games we’d spend our time perusing the stats and reminiscing about that time one of us used Brett Favre to launch a 600 yard aerial assault on another, or the time Priest Holmes rushed 42 times in one game, picking up 380 yard in the process and hitting the end zone no less than 6 times. What made Madden so unique for us is that we weren’t just playing an isolated instance of the game so much as we were contributing to the greater history of our group.
So what happened with Madden 09? Well, you can still make your user profiles, true. But guess what? You can’t have multiples logged in at one time. If I’m logged in with my profile, my opponent gets relegated to a default profile, User2, regardless of whether or not there’s another profile ready and waiting to be loaded.
When I first observed this, I figured it had to be a mistake. Despite all my historical love for Madden, the game’s saved file system has always sucked donkey, and that’s putting it kindly. With that in mind, I simply assumed I was looking for the profile loading options in the wrong places or that there was some trick to the whole thing. I perused the manual, but as anyone who’s played an EA Sports game knows, their manuals are woefully incomplete and hardly worth the paper they’re printed on. We played on and I made a mental note to google a solution later.
I finally got around to googling that solution and after a little digging around I ended up at this post in EA’s customer support site, which answers the question, “Can I load a second player profile in Madden NFL 09?” as follows:
In Madden NFL 09 for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3, you cannot load a second player profile for multiplayer games. The second profile will always default to “User 2″ when looking on screen. We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.
Ouch. I suppose I should be happy they apologized, but what fucking good does that really do me? What strikes me as most odd about this is that it just doesn’t seem like such a horrifying thing to include in the game. I’m fully aware that the vast majority of multiplayer gaming has moved out of the living room with friends and into, well, the living room alone. That’s fine and I get the impression that in those situations there’s no issue: You get your stats on your box, your opponent gets his. But why leave out the rest of us who want all the supplemental joy those accumulated stats can bring and have the opportunity to play against each the way they did back in the late 20th century? The whole thing kind of stinks, but if it’s gone this year, I don’t see why they’d bring it back next, or ever again for that matter. The whole thing kind of saddens me and really makes me miss those old days.
Tagged: Boo Radley, disappointment, madden 09, multiplayer, sports, stats, user profile
Ken Levine’s PAX Keynote
Despite my failure to comment on it here, I attended PAX in Seattle over Labor Day weekend. One of the highlights of the event was the opening keynote, delivered by Ken Levine, designer of the most outstanding game of 2007, Bioshock. 1up’s GameVideos portal has a high quality video of the keynote that’s worth a watch. Fair warning: It’s longer than your average internet video and contains not a single cute kitten, which makes it anomaly. Still, if you’ve got thirty minutes to spare, it’s worth a watch.
I’ve heard some people complain that Levine spends pretty much zero time talking about game development, Bioshock or otherwise. He makes no mention of the upcoming PS3 version, and pretty much just takes this opportunity at a podium to talk about himself. That might be annoying to some, but given the subject matter, which is ultimately about coming to terms with his nerdiness, I couldn’t help but feel in excellent company, especially given the venue. After all, PAX is ultimately a gaming enthusiast event and like it or not, most of us who identify ourselves as being gaming enthusiasts or obsessed with games or hardcore, whatever your semantic preferences, well, we’re fucking nerds. And guess what? We’re pretty happy about it.
Tagged: BioShock, Ken Levine, keynote, nerd, PAX