>SUPERVERBOSE, Page 20

Trivial Matters

On January 23, 2011

Having just been to another Basement Bowl, I’ve been ruminating on a blog entry about what makes a good trivia question. And I do want to write that, but first I’d like to address those of you who may be saying, “another Basment Wha?”

Let me say: this is going to be long. Consequently, I’m breaking it up into a series of posts. This first one is the big lump of backstory that’s required to understand my personal trivia history. Your eyes may glaze over. This is normal.

I can go back quite a ways with my connection to trivia — I remember having books like Fred L. Worth’s Trivia Encyclopedia sitting around the house as a kid, and playing Trivial Pursuit with my family. (My dad dominated, though really he was only competing with one other adult.)

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado, my alma mater two times over and now my employer, started hosting an official Trivia Bowl in 1968, sponsored by a professor who’d just led a CU team to victory in the GE College Bowl. The difference was that while the College Bowl focused on various academic areas, the Trivia Bowl was dedicated solely to pop-cultural ephemera: music, movies, TV, sports, and “garbage”, which encompasses things like comic strips, theater, radio, etc.

The games follow a standard “quiz bowl” format. Two teams of four array against each other. Each team member has a buzzer. The moderator reads a “toss-up” question worth 10 points. At any point during the reading of the question, an individual may buzz in with the answer. If she interrupts with a wrong answer, her team incurs a 5-point penalty and the other team can listen to the entire question. A wrong answer that doesn’t interrupt incurs no penalty. No conferencing or teamwork is allowed on toss-up questions — if the judges see a conference, that team is automatically disqualified for that question, and the other team has a chance to buzz in.

A correct answer on a toss-up earns the right to a “bonus question”, worth anywhere from 20 to 40 points, and on these, teamwork IS allowed. (It’s usually essential, in fact.) These are usually multi-part questions, often with some kind of theme tying them together.

Example of a toss-up question:

James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?

Example of a bonus question:

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.

Teams compete against each other in a long tournament — at the height of the trivia bowl, it started with 64 teams and narrowed down to two. The game consists of two ten-minute halves, though later in the tournament these periods are sometimes longer. There’s multimedia fun too — audio and video for both the tossups and bonuses.

The Trivia Bowl got quite popular, playing to packed houses in the Glenn Miller Ballroom throughout the 70s. A version of it was broadcast on ABC’s Wide World Of Sports at one point. Teams tried to outdo each other with silly, funny names (e.g. “Children Of A Lesser Godzilla”, “Bill Clinton Sings ‘Devil With A Blue Dress On'”), and the level of competition was impressive — there are people out there with some frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge about pop culture. The matches lasted through the week, and on the Friday before the finals there’d be a concert by some oldies act — Del Shannon, The Guess Who, Bo Diddley, etc.

The Bowl’s popularity endured a slow decline through the eighties, and by the early 90s attendance was sparse indeed. CU finally pulled the plug on the event in 1993, with a brief revival from 2001-2002. The year after that, a guy named Paul Bailey continued the Bowl in diminished form — people gathering in small conference rooms to answer questions, no audio or video, and no audience. But still fun.

Okay, that’s all for now. Next post will explain my personal history with all this, and give answers to the questions in this post. If you don’t want to wait that long, I will be happy to confirm or deny any answers that appear in the comments.

Game As Life, Life As Game

By paulobrian

On December 22, 2010

In Uncategorized

Something Dante loves is to find some little Flash game on JayIsGames and play it with me. At this point, he’s got a repertoire of them in his head, and he calls them out for me from time to time like requests at a piano bar. “I want to play Electric Box 2!” “I want to play Meeblings!” “I want to play FireBoy and WaterGirl!” “Let’s play Shape Switcher!”

Some of these games have level editors, which fascinate him. He delights in putting together nonsensical levels and watching them go. I can relate to this feeling, but when he asks me to make my own level, I always demur. I just have no interest in constructing a puzzle off the cuff, partly because I am terrible at it, and partly because I don’t get much pleasure from it. So one night last week, as usual, he said something to me like “Now you make a level!”, and I said, “No, that’s not the kind of game I like to make.”

“Well, what kind of game do you like to make?” he asked, quite sensibly. Heh. So I told him that I like to make text games, and he asked what those are. It’s come up before, but he’s a little older now (he turned 5 in June), which made it feel like even more of a Talking To Your Kids About Star Wars moment. So I explained the basics to him, and asked if he wanted to see one. He did.

So we played Zork 1 together for about 45 minutes. Oh my, the cuteness. Rockhound that he is, he got very interested in the description of the canyon. He laughed at the response to COUNT LEAVES. He called out suggestions and had fun seeing the responses. However, the response to WHAT IS A GRUE made him so nervous that he refused to enter the trapdoor after we’d found it. He was up for everything but that, which is a pretty funny way to play Zork.

Then it was time for him to clean up his dinner dishes, so I asked him to do that, and he said:

“WALK TO TABLE”
“GET DISH”
“PUT DISH ON COUNTER”

He’d speak the command, and then execute the action. I loved it. Then he asked me, “Do you ever pretend that your life is an interactive fiction game?”

Oh man. YES. I have a memory from 18 years[!] ago, still vivid, of walking around the CU campus in the morning after having stayed up most of the night playing A Mind Forever Voyaging for the first time. My brain was getting the usual input from my senses — colors, sounds, temperature, and so on — but alongside that, it was generating a stream of text, describing my experience in the world as if I were Perry Simm walking through a simulated Rockvil campus. It was genuinely psychedelic, one of the few times I’ve felt like my mind had been affected on a fundamental level by a piece of art.

Part of that brain alteration was to look at life through the lens of IF. When I do that, a few things get reframed in my head. I no longer have problems — I have puzzles. They seem a lot more solvable when I think of them that way. (Pity about the lack of Invisiclues, though.) The routine I rely on becomes suspect. What new areas of exploration might I be ignoring by choosing to go the same places, do the same things every day? My naturally introverted nature grows more interested in hearing what other people might say if I ASK them about various topics. IF is based on a world model, with certain assumptions embedded within it. So is the brain, though the model is far more sophisticated, and the assumptions probably aren’t the same. Replacing the brain’s typical model with the IF model can prove surprisingly illuminating.

Now, in my typically tardy way, I’ve begun playing The Sims, a game whose whole point is to create a world model for daily life. Inevitably, some of its world model has begun to creep into my head. Why am I feeling depressed? Oh, maybe I need to eat. Or sleep. Or call a friend. The game’s demands, while they can be rather prosaic and irritating, also feel like validation to me, confirming my view that yes indeed, much of life is actually rather prosaic and irritating. There really is a relentlessness to the way we must all keep meeting our physical needs for rest and food, for bodily upkeep, domestic upkeep, and financial stability. Relationships really do require maintenance, even when doing so contravenes our need for rest or “introvert time.” So many competing needs, so little time to fulfill them, and all while trying to succeed at work and as a family member. It’s compelling, but I’m not sure I could call it fun.

But wait. Yes, there is something seductive, at least to me, about seeing daily life as a set of needs to be balanced via time management and careful attention. Seductive, but also reductive. It’s an oppressively left-brained, mechanistic view of reality, not to mention overwhelmingly consumerist. There’s no pleasure in cooking or eating, just the discomfort of standing up and the relief of filling one’s belly. There’s no pleasure in work, just the opportunity to keep getting better stuff and expanding our space. Listening to music, reading, creating, interacting with others — they don’t feed the soul. They just keep us mindlessly having fun, making friends for career advancement, or setting up separate streams of income. I have no doubt that for some people, in some circumstances, any of these things could be true. Some of them are true for me sometimes, which is where the seductive part comes from. And yeah, it can be a useful tool to challenge routinized thoughts and unconscious actions. But if it were sufficient and true, I wouldn’t be writing this now. The pleasure I get from analysis, the satisfaction of sharing it with the world, doesn’t fit into The Sims‘ world, but it’s crucial in mine.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the net

By paulobrian

On September 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

On the very occasional occasions when I write some stuff on other sites, I try to mention it here. So…

I’ve just written a couple of Amazon reviews: one for the new Melissa Etheridge album, and one for an out-of-print book of quotations. Writing a review of an out-of-print book may be the very definition of pointless.

Also, while I’m much more of a Facebooker than a Tweeter, there was a meme on Twitter recently I just couldn’t resist. The game was called “#rockretractions” — basically, the voice of a song revising what it originally said. I tried my hand.

My favorite one that I wish I’d written was, “On the other hand, I may be right and you may be crazy.” Also, while I’m quoting things that made me laugh, another recent meme on Twitter was, for some reason, “#namesfortinywhales.” Perhaps it was just localized to a few people I follow. Anyway, my friend Iain wrote “wee frilly”, and it’s been periodically cracking me up ever since.

Domestic Adventure: Behind The Silver Door

By paulobrian

On September 6, 2010

In Uncategorized

Ah, the storage unit. A cozy, indoor, air-conditioned home for all the things you can’t fit into your actual home anymore. Now that you’re in the process of packing for a move, you’ve been making regular trips out here. You’ve learned the routine. You’re a pro. Pull up to the building doors, grab a handtruck, fill it up with boxes, wheel it inside… and so on.

BEHIND THE SILVER DOOR
A non-interactive Domestic Adventure by Paul O’Brian

Storage Building Foyer
Everything here gleams in sterile silver and white, colors chosen to assure you that this place is clean, secure, and well-kept. The east wall features a locked door as well as two different elevators — call them Left Elevator and Right Elevator. Or don’t bother, because Right Elevator is the one that always opens. A call button adorns the wall between the two elevators. Mounted on the wall to the right of Right Elevator is a security keypad. Automatic doors provide an exit to the west.

Your handtruck is here, loaded with boxes and waiting paitently in front of Right Elevator.

> EXAMINE HANDTRUCK
[You can abbreviate EXAMINE to X, if you like.]
It’s a large, wheeled platform, with a handle at one end. The storage place is nice enough to keep a supply of these in the foyer. It’s a quality piece of equipment, albeit a bit slow and cumbersome when laden with boxes like it is now.

> X BOXES
Oh, you know. Books. Decorations. Photo Albums. Books. Journals. Random electronics components. Also, books.

> X ELEVATOR
Which do you mean, Left Elevator or Right… well, actually, it doesn’t matter. They’re identical. Silver elevator doors, closed.

> X AUTOMATIC DOORS
They’re the doors you’ll walk out of once you’ve deposited all your stuff in the storage locker.

> X CALL BUTTON
Its upward-pointing arrow is currently unlit.

> X KEYPAD
Yeah, the keypad is part of the rather high-tech setup here at this storage building. You’ve got to enter your code at a different keypad just to get admitted to the storage complex at all, but once you get to this foyer, you must enter it again here to activate the elevators. Frequent trips here have taught you not to dawdle — there’s a pretty short timeout window from the time you enter your code, and if you don’t call an elevator, get into it, and hit the key for your floor before that timeout occurs, you’ve got to start all over.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Left Elevator doors open. This is the first time in your many trips here that you have ever seen the Left Elevator doors open.

> ENTER LEFT ELEVATOR
What, without your stuff?

> PUSH HANDTRUCK INTO LEFT ELEVATOR
You get behind the handtruck and heave. It’s a slow beast to turn around, especially in the somewhat cramped conditions of the foyer. Precious seconds tick by as you wrestle the handtruck out of its position in front of Right Elevator, wrench it around, and get it into…

Left Elevator
More sterile silver walls greet you from the inside of the elevator. As elevators go, it’s a pretty roomy one — no surprise, really, given some of the things people probably have to haul into it. There’s a panel of buttons on the wall next to the door leading west.

> X PANEL
One, Two, Three, Open Doors, Close Doors. Emergency Stop. Solemn weight limit warning. Earnest maintenance chart. Nothing you haven’t seen many times before. Your floor is Three.

> PRESS THREE
You press the button, which lights up, then goes dim again as soon as you release it. Damn. The security timeout expired. Now you’ve got to go back and enter your code again.

> OUT
You step out of the silver elevator.

Storage Building Foyer
Everything here gleams in sterile silver and white, colors chosen to assure you that this place is clean, secure, and well-kept. The east wall features a locked door as well as two different elevators — call them Left Elevator and Right Elevator, a distinction apparently far more important than you realized. A call button adorns the wall between the two elevators. Mounted on the wall to the right of Right Elevator is a security keypad. Automatic doors provide an exit to the west.

The Right Elevator doors open. A guy walks out of them and continues through the automatic doors, into the sunshine beyond. He smiles at you as he leaves.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

The Right Elevator doors close. The Left Elevator doors close.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Right Elevator doors open. Which is great and everything, except for the fact that the handtruck full of your stuff is in the Left Elevator. Apparently Left gets pressed into service whenever Right is busy, which is almost never. Today you just happened to land in that shadowy space between “almost never” and “actually never.”

> WAIT
[You can abbreviate WAIT to Z, if you like.]
Time passes.

The Right Elevator doors close.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Right Elevator doors open. Your stuff remains trapped in the Left Elevator.

> THINK
What a good idea.

The Right Elevator Doors close.

> Z.Z.Z.

Time passes.

Time passes. Nobody’s going to happen to come along and solve this problem for you, if that’s what you were hoping for.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Right Elevator doors open. Your stuff remains trapped in the Left Elevator.

> ENTER RIGHT ELEVATOR
Right Elevator
It’s absolutely identical to the Left Elevator. Same stainless walls, same panel of buttons.

> PRESS THREE
The Three button glows steadily.

> OUT
You step out of the silver elevator.

Storage Building Foyer
Everything here gleams in sterile silver and white, colors chosen to assure you that this place is clean, secure, and well-kept. The east wall features a locked door as well as two different elevators — call them Left Elevator and Right Elevator, a distinction apparently far more important than you realized. A call button adorns the wall between the two elevators. Mounted on the wall to the right of Right Elevator is a security keypad. Automatic doors provide an exit to the west.

The Right Elevator doors close, and you can hear it begin its empty journey to the third floor.

> ENTER CODE ON KEYPAD
With practiced skill, you type the magic number on the keypad.

> PRESS CALL BUTTON
The up arrow begins to glow.

The Left Elevator doors open, revealing your handtruck and boxes!

> ENTER LEFT ELEVATOR
You happily rejoin your abandoned possessions.

> PRESS THREE
The button glows steadily, and the elevator hums.

> Z
The silver doors close, and the familiar lurch sends you gliding upward, your errand back on track at last. Whew!

*** You have won ***

Your score is 100 out of 100, giving you the rank of Elevator Evader.

You have: A lamp (providing illumination)

By paulobrian

On August 21, 2010

In Uncategorized

I’ve written before about GET LAMP, the text adventure documentary. Back in March, I got to watch an hour-long mix of it at PAX East. Now, the full film is available on DVD, so I get to write about it again. Let me get right to the point: if you love text games, or you want to know more about them, you should watch this movie. Stephen Granade called it “funny, affecting, and informative, which isn’t a bad trifecta to hit.” I can’t think of a better description, though of course that won’t stop me from spending the next few paragraphs trying.

True, it’s pricey ($40 plus $5 shipping domestically, $9 internationally.) Director Jason Scott released the movie under a Creative Commons license, so it’s not illegal to torrent it, but of course, buying it is the more right thing to do. There’s no studio backing Jason — he produced this movie as a labor of love, and both the labor and the love shine through luminously. More about that in a bit. In order to make the DVD package attractive, he’s packed it with all sorts of fun goodies: nifty art, tons of featurettes, a DVD-ROM full of text games, three different commentary tracks, and a gorgeous individually numbered collectible coin. It’s a remarkably well-wrought product, especially considering that, again, this is the output of one guy. Plus, I’m in it, so, y’know, what’s not to love? 🙂

GET LAMP is very clearly a loving tribute to text games. Because I am passionate about the form myself, and because of my personal involvement with the film, I cannot judge it objectively. In any case, I’ve already written about what makes the movie good according to me, and all that still holds true. In fact, it’s better than the movie I saw at PAX — not only is it fuller, but the pieces I didn’t like in the hour-long mix have either been excised or fixed.

So this isn’t a review, but rather an appreciation, a recommendation, and a gleeful celebration of this cool thing that now exists in the world. There are a lot of fun layers to the whole thing. For instance, in the spirit of the “Have you tried…?” section that often appears at the end of text game hint manuals, there’s a whole game to be played with the movie itself: almost every shot has a lamp in it; collect them all like trophies. Even cooler, the movie itself is interactive. After the initial 25 minutes or so, you are presented with a menu of options for what piece of the movie you want to view next. Fair warning, though: if your DVD player is sorta lame like mine, you may be better served by just watching the non-interactive version. In fact, even in that one I keep getting kicked out to the top menu, and have to make my way through the film via clever use of the chapter forward button on my DVD remote. Hey, it’s a movie that’s also a puzzle!

I’m surprised how little that glitch bothers me. I think I know the reason why: every time I see this movie, or any piece of it, I come away feeling energized and inspired. That’s a big payoff, well worth a little remote-fiddling. I love GET LAMP, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. In fact, Laura and I have a date to watch it this weekend, so she can learn more about this crazy text adventure thing that has taken so much of her husband’s time over the last 15 years. That alone is a wonderful gift. The obsessive viewing of each commentary track, though — that’s just for me.

Paul vs. Comcast

By paulobrian

On August 3, 2010

In Uncategorized

I dunno, maybe this makes me look like a jerk. I hate to be Rude To The Waiter Guy. But this Comcast interaction really pushed my buttons, and not just because of the numerous grammar errors. (Though those do bring out my inner Strong Bad.)

The prelude is that we’re moving. (Hooray!) So I went to Comcast’s site to figure out how to switch my service to my new address. I found their moving page, filled out their form, and got an error message, because I didn’t fill in “Salutation” (Mr. or Mrs.) So then I filled it in, clicked submit, and got a “We’re sorry, something broke, please try again” message. So then I went back, filled out the form again, and was told that I needed to do a live chat to complete the transaction.

The Beatles — Love

By paulobrian

On July 9, 2010

In Uncategorized

I have to confess, the whole Love thing completely passed me by. I vaguely heard, four years ago or so, that Cirque du Soleil was doing some Beatles tribute show. Because I’ve never seen a Cirque show, and because my imagination has been stunted by television and video games, all I can picture is a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, forming human pyramids, and so forth. To Beatles music. I yawn, and move on.

Then my friend Trrish made a special trip to Las Vegas to see the show, and told me a bit more about the way the music worked, and I was intrigued enough to pick up the album. And now that I’ve listened to it ten times in a row and had my mind completely BLOWN, I have to write about it, and I have to evangelize it to everybody I know who loves the Beatles. So I will gladly acknowledge the gooniness of gushing over an album 4 years after it comes out, just because it happened to take me that long to get around to it. It’s like writing a bunch of breathless blog posts about Buffy The Vampire Slayer in 2006, 3 years after it was cancelled. Which, y’know, I also did. So I guess this sort of thing is really my stock in trade nowadays.

If you’re way out of the loop like me, let me tell you a little about this album. It’s the soundtrack to the Cirque show, yes. But more importantly, it’s an exquisite, loving collage of Beatles sounds, made by people who have the music in their DNA: George Martin and his son Giles. They take the songs and pull apart their elements, mixing them together ingeniously, so that a solo from one song might float through the intro of another, fading smoothly into a third. Every sound on the record (with one exception, which I’ll discuss later) is from a Beatles recording. Sometimes the songs stand on their own for a while, sometimes the mixtures are subtle, and sometimes they jump out and grab you by the throat.

The sound is uniformly fantastic. I’ve never heard the songs sound better, even (or, perhaps, especially) when they’re not mixed up. Listening to this CD is an enormously thrilling experience if you have the music deeply engraved in your brain like I do. Seriously, if you love the Beatles, and you haven’t heard this album, stop reading right now, buy it, listen to it, and then come back. I’ll be here. You probably want to experience it fresh. I recommend headphones.

And just so you know, if you’re sensitive to this kind of thing in an album review:

Sword Of My Mouth

By paulobrian

On April 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

One of the people I met at PAX was Jim Munroe, an interactive fiction author who’s also a novelist, filmmaker, and comic book writer. (Other reviewers might switch the order of those accomplishments.) Jim’s IF works include Punk Points, which I’ve played, and Everybody Dies and Roofed, which I haven’t, since they came out while I was frozen.

Turns out that one of Jim’s current projects is Sword Of My Mouth, a graphic novel about life in Detroit after The Rapture, written by Munroe and illustrated by Shannon Gerard. The book is itself apparently a spinoff from Munroe’s earlier post-Rapture story with Salgood Sam, Therefore Repent!. Now, the first thing I think of when I hear “Post-Rapture story” is Left Behind, a series of 167 or so novels, products, and novel-like products. Although I have not read or viewed any of them them, I get the impression that they want me to get on board with being some specific kind of Christian, and think that if I don’t, I’m in for a scary time sometime soon here.

This does not seem to be Sword Of My Mouth‘s agenda. Instead, it treats the Rapture as a straight-up fantasy premise. In fact, several of the characters suspect that what’s happened to the world has nothing to do with God, and is instead a pretext for some kind of extradimensional invasion. Given that angels are slaughtering people in Chicago and have put New York under martial law, not to mention the fact that suddenly magic works, causing all kinds of unpredictable mutations and freaky phenomena, I think it’s a pretty convincing theory.

The book centers on Ella, a newly-single mother of a baby born after the Rapture, a completely normal infant except for his full set of adult teeth. She’s newly single because her ex, Andre, went to Chicago to join the anti-angel resistance movement. She’s adrift in a Detroit even more abandoned than it is now, and after some unfortunate events she finds herself part of a post-apocalyptic urban farmstead commune. It’s as idyllic a setting as there is to be had in this world, but it’s surrounded by roiling trouble: not just the angels and volatile magic, but cultists known as The Risen, and the unsettling appearance of Famine, a physical incarnation of one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The story’s world is imaginative and engrossing, with plenty of embedded bits that feel like they could launch books of their own. The supporting characters felt convincing and real to me, even the ones with fish scales, missing eyes, or big scary fangs. In fact, part of the way the book effectively leverages its format is by setting prosaic dialogue in the mouths of otherworldly-looking characters. The dialogue doesn’t have to make a big deal of the character’s appearance — the art does that — and consequently the people feel more down-to-earth and knowable than they would if they used more elevated diction.

The art itself eschews the typical comic panel format — there’s not a gutter to be seen. Instead, Gerard conveys action by drawing the same figure in several poses on the page, poses which usually read left-to-right and top-to-bottom to depict sequential events. The style takes a little getting used to, but I was surprised at how natural it soon felt. Drawings overlapping and flowing into each other evocatively echo the erosion of boundaries in the story’s milieu — now that magic works, you never know when something you say or think will have a physical effect in the world.

The lettering, on the other hand, was a distraction and a detraction from the story. I think it’s Gerard’s own lettering, having seen some of her other work, but it kept reminding me of Delirium from Sandman. The story would have been better served by using either digital fonts or just a less trippy handwritten style. As it was, all the characters sounded half-drunk in my head. Really, though, a comic is pretty good when my main complaint is about the lettering.

Well, actually I do have one more complaint: I thought the ending was too abrupt. That may have been a product of the fragmented way I ended up reading the story, but what it comes down to is that I thought the book ended too soon. The fact that I wanted to spend more time in Munroe and Gerard’s world tells you what you need to know about my response to this book.

(Full disclosure: Jim sent me an advance digital copy of the book when I expressed interest in writing about it.)

PAX East 2010 Part 4: Saturday They’ll All Be Back Again

By paulobrian

On April 4, 2010

In Uncategorized

Compared to Friday, Saturday was pretty low-key. Then again, it’s not fair to compare anything to Friday. I let my exhausted self sleep in, then showered, packed up, etc. I met my friend Ruth Atherton for lunch, along with her partner Yigal and their adorable boy Natan. I’ve known Ruth since our freshman year of college at NYU — over 20 years ago now! — and it was wonderful to spend some time with her again.

Ruth dropped me at the Hilton, and I stopped into the IF Suite, where the PAX SpeedIF efforts were well underway. I opted out, given that 1) I didn’t bring my laptop to the suite, 2) it’s been years since I actually wrote any IF code, and 3) I didn’t want to spend my PAX time heads-down coding anyway. So it was off to the convention center, where I undertook my next mission: a present for Dante! I checked out a Boston souvenir store in the Prudential Center and picked up a cute little Boston ball, to use as a backup if I couldn’t find anything in PAX itself. But I did — his own bag of dice. He’s often wanting to play with my dice, so now he’s got his own. (He was quite delighted with these gifts when I brought them home, and as he often does, he immediately turned it around on me. “Pretend that you are Dante and I am Daddy! Dante, I brought you some presents! A Boston ball, and your very own bag of dice!”)

After a quick trip to Trader Joe’s for some trail mix and water, I took the time to explore the rest of PAX, but between the incredible crowds and my own lack of motivation, I didn’t really hook into anything. I wasn’t up for boardgaming with strangers, nor did I fancy standing in line for a chance at console, PC, or handheld games. And of course the panels were out of the question — you had to arrive at least 30 minutes early to have a crack at getting into any panel, and none of the panels at that time were terribly interesting to me anyway.

So back to the IF suite I went. I hung out and chatted with various people, and even skipped dinner so that I could spend more time in the ambiance. (That’s where the trail mix comes in.) There were a few people I missed — I would have loved to hang out with Stephen and Rob a bit more, for instance — but I really enjoyed the various people I talked to. I think part of the connection-missing may have had to do with the fact that while I have a cell phone, it is a creaky 2005 pay-as-you-go model with no internet access and the clunkiest of texting capabilities. Normally, this does not bother me at all, but sometimes during PAX weekend I felt like an timebound mortal in a Kage Baker Company novel, looking on in blissful ignorance while all around me the immortals communicate telepathically. It probably also wouldn’t hurt to hang out on ifMUD more than once every two years.

All part of the thawing process, I suppose. While I wasn’t musing on that, I also kept an eye out for newbies and visitors. I hooked several people up with IF swag and talked to them about the medium and the community, which felt great. Extended social exertion like that is a bit out of my comfort zone — I’m an introvert by nature — but I liked helping with the IF outreach mission.

That mission was the subject of the informal panel at 7:00. That panel featured Andrew Plotkin, Jason McIntosh (aka jmac), Chris Dahlen (gaming journalist), and John Bardinelli (of JayIsGames). It was moderated, in an endearingly prolix style, by Harry Kaplan. (I should mention here that Harry was quite helpful in getting me connected with the pre-PAX discussion, and was particularly welcoming to me in the suite. Also, he’s apparently the cousin of Paul Fishkin, who founded Stevie Nicks’ record company! Remote brush with fame!) Harry would make a discursive, intentionally provocative statement, and ask the panel to respond, offering the lead to a different panelist for each question. The discussion often expanded beyond the panel and into the room, which was great, because the room was packed (seriously, packed) with very smart people.

I am terrible at reconstructing discussions, so I’m not going to try to do it here. Much. I will say that I was particularly struck by the way Emily framed the problem of IF’s learning curve. The parser, she said, makes a false promise, strongly implying by its openness that it is able to handle anything the player throws at it, which is simply not true. Lots of people would like to see IF respond by expanding the range of actions and phrasings that the parser can understand, but Emily disagrees. She could do a much better job than I of articulating this, and probably does so somewhere, but essentially she argues that expanding the parser is a blind alley, because it never eliminates the false promise issue, and creates a ridiculous implementation headache. Even if the game could legitimately understand a much wider range of commands, coding meaningful responses to that radically expanded command set is a misuse of our energies. Instead, she suggests that we embrace IFese while finding ways to help games gently nudge players in the right direction when it seems that they’re struggling to speak IFese to the parser. She did some work toward this in City Of Secrets, and Aaron Reed apparently does even more in Blue Lacuna. She points to Façade as a cautionary example of what happens when you try to go the other direction.

After the panel, there was a bit more chatter, and then it was time to for SpeedIF contestants to turn in their games. I had no laptop, but Juhana Leinonen very kindly let me use his to play Sarah Morayati’s Queuelty, which I found quite enjoyable.

More chatting, more hanging out, but eventually, sadly, it was time for me to go. There would be more events on Sunday, but my flight left early Sunday morning — I hadn’t wanted to take undue advantage of Laura’s generosity with the childcare, so I kept my trip to two days. I’m sorry to have missed Sunday, though. From what I read, it was great.

The rest is uninteresting travel details, except for this revelation, which traveled home with me: it has become painfully, unmistakably clear that working every night and weekend is ruining my life and blocking me from doing the things that actually make me happy. The truth is that nobody ever told me to do that (well, with some exceptions) — it’s just that I’m so overwhelmed all the time, so behind all the time, that I feel like I have to do that in order to have a remote chance of success at work. But keeping my head above water there has come at the cost of drowning the parts of myself I treasure more. So I’m going to stop doing that.

I’m going to try, anyway. It’s rather shockingly hard to draw firm boundaries around work when they’ve been obliterated for so long. I’m taking it one day at a time. I’m on Day 6 now, and even in the last week I’ve been able to produce these blog entries, which would have seemed ridiculously out of reach a few weeks ago. That makes me happier than I’ve been in quite a while.

PAX East 2010 Part 3: Do You Like Movie?

By paulobrian

On April 2, 2010

In Uncategorized

In the afterglow of the panel, intentions were formed in the direction of dinner. Boston residents Dan Schmidt and Liza Daly kindly guided us to a fabulous sushi restaurant: Samurai. Delicious food, wonderful company, beer — what’s not to love? Only one thing, it turns out: the place was too small to accommodate the 12 of us at one table, so Emily, Rob, Dan, and Liza ended up at their own table beyond earshot of ours. And we got split up just as I was in mid-sentence with Emily: “I think some topics that didn’t get touched in the storytelling panel were–”

(For the record, the rest of the sentence was “integrating hints adaptively into the story in a way that feels seamless, and exploring PC emotion — how and whether to convey it.”)

After dinner, we paid the check (or rather, Stephen paid the check and we paid Stephen) and headed back towards the convention center to get in line for GET LAMP! Then, confusion ensued as we realized we’d inadvertently left behind Christopher Huang and Sam Kabo Ashwell. We went back, they weren’t there, we milled, we shivered, we went back to the convention center and found that they were in line ahead of us. It was like a French farce, only huge and freezing cold.

Anyway, we hung out in line for a while, then made our way into the “theater” — really just another convention center room with a projection screen set up. We got seats in the back, but the point is: we got seats. Others in the room ended up against the walls, on the floor, etc. There weren’t enough chairs, but everybody got into the room, which is a decidedly good thing. Jason was contemplating a second showing if they’d had to turn people away, but that showing would have started around midnight.

And now, a discursive aside about GET LAMP. About four years ago now (actually, now that I look at it, exactly four years ago today), I got an email from somebody I’d never heard of, a guy named Jason Scott. He claimed to be a filmmaker, working on a documentary about IF. He wanted to know if he could interview me. I checked out the website, and he looked legit — for one thing, he’d already completed one such project, a huge multi-episode docu about BBSes. So I told him I’d be delighted to talk IF with him sometime.

Then, nothing until January of 2007, when I suddenly got notice that Jason would be in town in a few weeks, and did I still want to be interviewed? I sure did, so on a snowy Saturday night we met inside my deserted workplace (this was back before everybody at my job was working weekends) along with Robb Sherwin (who was apparently the guy who gave Jason my name — thanks Robb!) and his girlfriend Dayna. Jason set up his camera and asked questions. I blathered for 90 minutes, wondering if any of this was remotely usable. Then Jason took us out to dinner at an excellent French restaurant. All in all, not a bad night at the office.

Jason interviewed a bunch of other people throughout 2007, and then GET LAMP seemed to go dark for a while. Work continued sporadically, but it was hard to see what the endpoint would be. But last year it caught fire again. Jason lost his job and rather than look for another one, he ran a Kickstarter project to raise $25,000, and damned if he didn’t do it, and even go beyond. To me, that was a huge statement about the confidence and trust he’s built in the community of people around him. He used the money to pay living expenses while he finished GET LAMP, with the result that he was able to premiere it at PAX East. What he showed wasn’t the final cut of the movie, but rather a 70-minute “mix” tailored to the PAX audience. The whole shebang is going to be a 2-DVD set, with boatloads of bonuses, games (including my own), and even a branching path at one point in the movie. Heh. He’s sending me a copy, because I was an interviewee — a very classy move, according to me.

So that brings me back to PAX. What I can say about the movie I saw is this: I loved it. Yes, there were a few pieces that needed some technical polish, and a couple of spots that made me cringe a bit, but overall, WOW. It conveys what’s special about IF with such passion and cleverness, and it brings in some angles that feel fresh. It’s touching, it’s funny, it’s very effective at conveying information, and it’s quite entertaining. Also, it’s 70 minutes of very smart people discussing something about which I care deeply, so it’s pretty much made for me.

Top 5 terrific things about GET LAMP

1. Egoboo. Yes, okay? It was quite gratifying to see myself managing to speak somewhat coherently about IF in the clips that featured me, and I felt quite honored to be placed in a context alongside people whom I hold in very high esteem.

2. Insight. A lot of thoughtful people had a lot of thoughtful things to say. Some of them I’ve heard a thousand times already, but they’d feel fresh to somebody for whom this was a new subject. Others felt fresh to me too. One example that sticks out: Jason Shiga observing that when you’re a kid, you don’t get to make a lot of choices. You don’t decide where to live, where to go to school, how to spend much of your time. When you’re in that situation, having a game offer you control of the story you’re in can be a very satisfying feeling indeed.

3. The section on blind players. Jason very astutely taps into the subculture of blind IF players, for whom this is one of the only feasible genres of computer game available. One of his subjects, Michael Feir, was somebody I kept in contact with when I was editing SPAG. Michael was the longtime editor of Audyssey, a gaming zine for the blind. Anyway, this section of the film had some wonderful pieces to it. I loved the woman who observed that one of the skills IF helps you build is mental map-making, and suggested that playing IF has made her more confident when she’s exploring an unfamiliar place. And Austin Seraphin is great, cracking that when a game tells him, “It’s pitch dark. You can’t see a thing,” he just thinks: “So what does that matter?”

4. Infocom. Dave Lebling, Steve Meretzky, Mike Berlyn, Stu Galley, Mark Blank, Brian Moriarty, Amy Briggs, et cetera. These names lit up my teen years so much they may as well have been rock stars. This movie had fantastic footage of each of them, telling great stories from the company’s heyday and offering perceptive opinions about the form in general. What a pleasure it was to see their faces, hear their voices, and get to know them a little better.

5. Explanatory power. I am very, very accustomed to getting befuddled stares when I talk about interactive fiction. I love that such a compelling visual text exists, that can introduce the subject to somebody new with both the intellectual clarity and the emotional weight it deserves. I’m very hopeful that it’ll bring a fresh wave of enthusiasm into the IF community itself, and that I can use it with my friends and family to shed some light on my ongoing fascination.

The best part of all, though, wasn’t so much the film itself as the moment it created. Jason sums it up: “this had, by dint of using my film as the stone in the stone soup, become the largest assembly of interactive fiction folks in history. Creators, players, and legends were going to assemble on PAX East, and make it something very, very special.” That’s exactly what happened, and nothing exemplified it more than the panel after the film:

* Dave Lebling (Zork, Enchanter, Spellbreaker, The Lurking Horror)
* Don Woods (Adventure, need I say more?)
* Brian Moriarty (Trinity, Beyond Zork, Wishbringer)
* Andrew Plotkin (So Far, Spider And Web, Shade)
* Nick Montfort (Twisty Little Passages, Ad Verbum, Book And Volume)
* Steve Meretzky (A Mind Forever Voyaging and so many other great games that just the thought of typing them out exhausts me.)

Again, Jason will release the footage at some point, so I’m not going to try to recap the panel. Suffice it to say that it was an unbelievable confluence of talent and history, a great discussion of IF, and oh by the way Meretzky is FREAKING HILARIOUS. Stephen later asserted that Steve Meretzky must be on every panel, everywhere, from now on. I quite agree.

After the film, I got to shake the hands of some legends and thank them for the huge positive impact on my life. We toddled on back to the suite, buzzing. The conversation there felt infused with joy; it glowed in the dark.

It’s hard to explain what this day meant to me. It was one of the best days I’ve had in years and years. Jason said to me later, “This weekend is like one big hug for you, isn’t it?” He’s not wrong. It was emotional, even more so than I expected, to be a part of this gathering — Rob called it the “IF Woodstock.” I tried to say so in the suite, though I’m not sure how articulate I was. I felt filled with love, for interactive fiction, for the IF community, and specifically for these people who shared this experience with me. It was vivid, elevating.

After the party broke up, I grabbed a taxi back to my hotel (the T had long since closed), and before I went to bed, posted this on Facebook:

Back when I was active in the interactive fiction community, and also going to conferences for work, I used to daydream about an IF conference where we’d have bunches of key people from the past and present, panels about various aspects of the form, face time with all these people I just knew as words on a screen, etc…. Today said: “I’ll see your dream, and raise you an IF movie!”