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Archive for November, 2009

Night Ranger

Nov 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

sleepwalking-man[1]The Thanksgiving trip was pretty good; as good as could be expected, really.  Jonathan was awake for significant chunks of the car ride, and when he was up in the car he wasn’t happy, but other than that there weren’t major problems.  We got to see both sides of the family — there was a family reunion for Robin’s dad’s side of the family in Weeping Water, which we were able to attend.  We then ate dinner with her parents in Lincoln and then traveled to Blair to stay overnight.  We ate breakfast and lunch with my folks and then headed home — unfortunately we were not able to see my brother and his family, who were unable to come up while we were at my parents’ house.

Katherine continued her streak of night wakings; it’s now been about a week and a half since she’s actually slept through all night.  Things are improving just slightly on that front, however.  The last few times I haven’t needed to intervene — she eventually goes back to sleep on her own, but it takes hours in some cases.  I’m hoping that she’s retraining herself and that we’ll be out of the woods soon.  In the meantime, however, I’m pretty close to the bottom of the barrel on sleep, which is unfortunate as Robin is also.

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Turkey Day

Nov 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

eat_ham_turkey[1]We’ll be taking the show on the road this Thanksgiving, although given how Katherine and Jonathan have been sleeping, we’re going to keep the overnight stays down to 1.

It will be interesting to see how Jonathan weathers the trip; this will be his first journey of any length.  I’ll make sure to post an update when we get back, although it may be Saturday rather than Friday due to travel issues.

Have a good holiday, everyone!

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New IF Links

Nov 23

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

infocom[1]I’m adding several of the better IF sites to my blogroll.  These are good places to get IF interpreters, IF games, information and reviews about games in the genre, and, in some cases, lively discussions about the current state of IF and directions it can be taken.  Check them out, and let me know if I missed any good ones!

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Game Review — Batman: Arkham Asylum

Nov 20

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Reviews | No Comments

batman_begins[1]Batman:  Arkham Asylum — Rocksteady Games

Rating:  4.5/5

I’ve played a lot of FPS-type games (including tight over-the-shoulder 3rd person games) over the years, starting with the original Doom.  It’s not my favorite genre — I tend more towards role-playing games, interactive fiction, and turn-based strategy.  It takes quite a bit for an FPS to impress me these days, but Batman:  Arkham Asylum has what it takes.

The premise is fairly simple.  You’ve just captured the Joker and are carting him into Arkham Asylum for the usual ineffective treatment.  Unbeknownst to you, however, the Joker has already salted Arkham with inmates that are actually his goons from a nearby prison, and has a plan in motion to bust out and take over the island.

You, as Batman, must stop him.

The game gives you a very impressive range of gadgets with which to play.  From the Batarang and Batgrapple to the late-game Batline and Batclaw, you always have tools to support what you want to accomplish.  These gadgets support not only different movement options, but also give you great tactical flexibility in combat.  Explosive gel can be used to set traps for enemies or blow open thin walls.  A cryptographic analyzer can short out security nodes and allow access to otherwise-inaccessible areas.  The Batclaw can disarm enemies and pull them toward you, and the Batarang can knock them out.  You can fly with the Batcape, as well as stun enemies with it.  And, of course, you can beat the crud out of enemies with the good old Batfist.

Speaking of combat, the game does an excellent job of hybridizing the “shooter” and “sneaker” genres.  Batman can simply wade in, fists flying, and take out almost unlimited numbers of unarmed goons.  However, armed enemies give Batman more trouble, and for these he is often better off swinging between gargoyles up in the rafters, maneuvering behind the guards in order to take them down silently, in gameplay that’s like an amped-up version of Thief.

Another facet of gameplay leverages Batman’s legendary detective skills.  You can enter “detective mode” at any point, which highlights objects you can interact with, lets you see through walls, and distinguishes between armed and unarmed enemies.  In detective mode you can also use environmental analysis, which allows you to detect, say, a trail of Harley Quinn’s fingerprints or trace levels of alcohol breathed into the air by a treacherous guard.  My only real complaint about detective mode is that it was so useful that I spent the whole game using it, which means that I didn’t see enough of the beautiful environs of Arkham.  If they do a sequel, I’d suggest integrating detective mode more with the natural view of the environment.

Of course, no Batman game would be complete without a selection of big-name enemies for Batman to fight.  This game’s big baddie is the Joker, supported by a host of classic Batman villains including Bane, Szasz, Killer Croc, Harley Quinn, the Sandman, and Poison Ivy.  The Riddler also makes a cameo, having littered the grounds of Arkham with secrets for Batman to find.

These supercriminals usually fall into one of two categories — big bruisers that Batman has to defeat using superior agility and tactics, or more traditional “bosses” that must be defeated in a particular, scripted scenario.  Both these types of fight are done well, although the “Batarang-and-dodge-the-charging-brute” tactic tends to get old by the end of the game.

The environments are very well-rendered, and most areas are visited more than once, since the additional mobility options you get later in the game serve to open up areas you couldn’t get to on the first run-through.  The result is a game that feels open while it subtly guides you, and where you get to learn the lay of the land early on so you can use it to your advantage in the endgame.

I was a bit let down by the final battle, particularly after the high bar set by the rest of the game.  But really, this is a very good title if you are a fan of Batman or like tactical or sneaky combat games.  I’d have no qualms recommending it.

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Book Review: The State of Jones

Nov 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

e3d7591a-a5f3-489b-88bb-d872f2b52269img100[1]The State of Jones — Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

Rating:  4/5

The State of Jones is a Civil War history, but one from a fairly unique perspective.  The main focus of the book is Newton Knight, a barely-better-than-subsistence farmer in Jones County, Mississippi.  Mr. Knight’s grandfather was a slaveholding planter with a moderate-sized plantation, but his father was opposed to slavery and struck out on his own.  Newton grew up in a Primitive Baptist milieu, with a doctrinal emphasis on the equality of man and a distrust for the hierarchy of politicians, planters, and preachers that helped stabilize the institution of slavery in the Southern states.

It comes as no surprise that when the war came, Newton was opposed to it, but the groundswell of support for secession ensured it would take place regardless.  Newton was conscripted and served in the Confederate Army through several harrowing battles, until finally, after the particularly insane slaughter at Vicksburg, he deserted and returned home to Jones County.  He hid out in the swamps along with other deserters and runaway slaves, avoiding dogs and patrols sent to root them out and return them to service, eventually forming a band of deserters into a pro-Union militia and effectively driving the Confederates out of Jones County for a period of time.

After the war Newton Knight’s star rose high for a while.  Reconstruction-era elections ensured that the Republican party was in power, and officials sympathetic to what he had done in the war were able to reward him in certain ways.  As the North withdrew and suppression of the black vote started to turn the political tide, however, Newton Knight was increasingly put on the defensive, and eventually he stayed on watch at his family farm, presiding over two families — a white one with his wife, and a black one with Rachel, a former slave who had helped him in his swamp-running days.

The book does a great job of characterizing Newton Knight, thanks to some oral interviews he gave near the end of his life.  It also does a nice job of providing historical context for the events of the book — we know that the “Twenty Negro Law”, which effectively exempted rich planters from military service, correlated closely with an increase in desertion from the Confederate Army, as soldiers realized that the law made official what was widely known already:  that the conflict was, in the words of one soldier, “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”

The book also goes into fairly extensive detail about the devastation inflicted on the South during the war, both by the direct assault of the Union armies and through confiscatory policies imposed by the Confederates themselves.  The effects of both of these were brutal to the farmers (mostly women) left behind to survive and try to raise families with their men off serving in uniform.  The fact that so much of this oppression was self-inflicted is particularly tragic, and the authors pull few punches in describing it.

The last section of the book, however, is the most fascinating, describing Newton Knight’s dual family and what happened to his descendants in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.  This section of the book contains much that probably seems absurd to 21st-century Americans, but should serve as a powerful reminder of the oddities and cruelties of race relations in the recent past.  One of the scenes examined is the miscegenation trial of one of Newton Knight’s descendants, which hinged on an exhaustive legal examination of how much African ancestry Rachel actually had, with witnesses asked probing questions about, among other things, how kinky her hair was.  Perhaps the most powerful image of the book is the final one:  Newton Knight, over 80 years old, still camped on his porch every night, a rifle on his lap, on a silent vigil to protect his large family from the unpredictable threat of racial violence.

This is Civil War history at the scale of individual humans, and also the story of a fascinating, obscure personality.  I think it succeeds on both levels, and I have no qualms about recommending it.

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IFComp 2009 Overview — Grounded in Space Postmortem

Nov 16

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | 6 Comments

pcm_trophy_lrg[1]The Rule 5-induced cone of silence has lifted, and the results are in!  Grounded in Space did reasonably well, placing 10th out of the 24 entries, very close to where I expected it would be (I had mentally blocked out 8th to 14th as the range I was expecting, based on reviews and my own experience playing the competition games).  I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people participating in this year’s competition.  Here are some of the major lessons I took away:

1.  I probably wasn’t ready to release Grounded in Space.  I vastly underestimated the amount of work required to make the game release-quality, especially post-beta work.  And I definitely did not know Inform 7 well enough to accomplish everything I wanted to; the triage required on the design to get the game playable was pretty severe.  Many of the cool parts of the original design ended up on the cutting-room floor, due to either lack of facility with the language or a self-inflicted lack of time.  I slacked a bit in the middle where if I’d put in more effort I might have accomplished quite a bit more.

2.  I’m glad I did release.  The experience of competing in IFComp ‘09 was invaluable; there are things I learned from the process, from the other games in the Comp, and from the discussions on the authors’ forums, that I probably couldn’t have learned in any other way.  In particular, I believe that I could not have learned the final process of making a game releasable — the testing and tradeoffs required in the end stages of development — had I not forced myself through it, even with a game that ended up deficient in some ways.

3.  Reviewers are all over the map in terms of what they like or don’t like.  I was pretty unlucky in that the first few reviews all either said or implied “I don’t like Heinlein.”  Well, that pretty much meant those reviews were going to be bad, since Grounded in Space is directly patterned on Heinlein juveniles to the best of my ability.  Later reviewers were more kind in that respect; there are some Heinlein fans out there after all!  Similarly, some folks liked complicated puzzles and some probably would have punched me if I’d been to hand when they got to the engine console.

4.  Notwithstanding #3, there were a number of valid criticisms of my game that were widely given:

  • The premise was really off the wall, and a lot of reviewers bounced off of it.  Sam Kabo Ashwell was very insightful here — it really was the result of me taking the shortest distance between two plot points.  Even a little more thought and effort here would have lowered the suspension of disbelief bar substantially, I think.
  • The introduction lacked interactivity — some objected to this and some didn’t, but there were certainly ways I could have improved interactivity in this section, and I simply didn’t have time to do so.  That was the first section I coded, so it was the one with the least language facility backing it.  I wanted to rewrite it, but bugs with the engine puzzle kept me busy right down to the wire, and I didn’t get the chance.
  • I got criticism that the engine puzzle was not suitable for the text format.  I disagree with this somewhat; I think that with a better text interface I could have made this more palatable for a lot of people.  But a subset of players was never going to be happy with a puzzle that required you to SET THETA DIAL TO -1575, and I didn’t realize quite how large that subset was.

5.  The game is likely unsalvageable.  At this point there are enough flaws baked into the design that trying to improve the game experience would require gutting and rewriting large sections of it, and I’m not going to do that.  I started on another work the day I submitted this one, and I’m planning to move forward with that instead.  There will, however, be a sequel to Grounded in Space at some point in the future.

6.  Inform 7 is awesome.  The learning curve is… interesting — you can get off the ground quickly, but getting really good with it requires you to cross the natural-language equivalent of the “uncanny valley”.  But the expressive power of the language is amazing, and I’m sure the pleasure (and it is, truly, a pleasure) of developing in Inform 7 is one of the main reasons — along with the great people in the community — that I’m so excited about continuing to write IF.

7.  Develop like you were developing any other kind of software.  I didn’t do this at first, treating it as if I were typing up an email.  Oh, I designed up front, of course, and had plenty of design documentation.  But I didn’t have source code control, nor any kind of issue tracking/prioritization system, and so I found myself wasting time on trivial issues or, worse, fearing to make changes in complex code (the reflectors, anyone?) for fear of breaking more things than I was trying to fix.  For my next project, I’ve addressed this; I’m now using Perforce for source code control and I already feel more fearless, comfortable, and productive as a result.

8.  Some of your beta testers should be from the IF community.  I used exclusively non-IF friends for testers, and although they found staggering amounts of bugs, helped me with aspects of the story, gave me a great insight into how newbies might interact with the game, and really got me to widen my net of synonyms, a few IF vets in the mix would probably have latched on to the more structural shortcomings of my work and made suggestions early on that might have helped me avoid some of the big design/architecture pitfalls I stumbled into.

9.  The whole experience was great, and an encouragement to proceed.  Even the negative reviews usually had something nice for me to take away.  The good ones (and there were more of these towards the end of the Comp, for some reason) were extremely encouraging.  Knowing my work clicked in a good way for some people, no matter how few, is a very powerful motivator to continue, and I will certainly be writing more IF and entering the Comp again.

So thanks to everyone who played the games this year, particularly to those who took the time to write reviews and let us know what you thought of our works.  I enjoyed writing for you and hearing both what you considered good about Grounded in Space and what you considered bad.  Next year I hope to improve quality on all fronts and produce something that will knock your socks off!

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Halloween Pictures

Nov 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Halloween_K_Birthday 063uWe’ve taken a lot of photos recently; here are some from Halloween.  Jonathan was a sleeping frog most of the time, although he was a crying frog from time to time as well.  Thomas was Jango Fett, and Katherine was a princess (I forget which one).  The kids both greatly enjoyed the Halloween festivities at school, which included a parade and the chance to wear costumes all day, and we had a good time trick-or-treating for an hour or so.

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Sorry, Nothing to Report

Nov 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

is_sleepy_070924_ms[1]I’m not doing much other than marking time at the moment, trying to recover from a cold, and trying to eke out enough sleep to get by on.

I’ve got a bunch of pictures from the weekend, and a report on this month’s dinner club to write up, but it’s going to have to wait.

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Jury Duty — It’s Over!

Nov 9

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Politics | 2 Comments

court-$4000900$300[1]Well, it’s over.  After two days of testimony, the defendant changed his plea to guilty, joining the 17 other defendants in this cocaine-conspiracy case.

I have to say that this was a fascinating experience; almost every aspect of it was interesting, although the way the information came in was often extremely boring.  On Thursday from 1:00 to 5:00 we listened to over 110 wiretapped phone conversations, many of which were in Spanish with a translated transcript, and almost all of which were filled with profanity and drug slang.

After the defendant changed his plea, the judge was kind enough to spend some time answering questions in the jury room with us, so we got a good overview of the way these trials usually go, the sentencing guidelines and requirements, and a lot of the other aspects of the case that we were unaware of from our vantage in the jury box.

One of the interesting things that came out was that I was an alternate, not an actual juror.  Assuming the trial had lasted two weeks as they had originally anticipated, I would have sat there for the whole thing, only to be told to go home without voting at the end.  Considering that, I’m even more happy to have gotten out of the experience early!

I wasn’t that excited about jury duty to start with, but I must say that now that it’s over I have a much greater appreciation for its role in the fabric of our society.  There’s something very hands-on and reassuring — very democratic — about a group of ordinary citizens being empowered to interpret the facts at trial to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused.  I’m sure that process can be abused or fall short of ideal, but it’s still a valuable method of binding us closer together as citizens.  I hope to serve on another jury someday!

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Coasting

Nov 6

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

05-07_Honda_Odyssey_Touring[1]So let me tell you all about the trial I’m hearing!  Oh, wait — I could get thrown in jail for that?  OK, let me tell you about what’s going on with my entry in IFComp ‘09!  Wait — that’s a violation of Rule 5 and could get me disqualified?

OK, then let me tell you about something stupid I did last weekend!

The five of us had just gone out for our first family weekend at the zoo with Jonathan.  We had a good time, although we kept it a bit short for our first major outing.  The zoo is a good 20 miles away, at least, and so when we were almost back home, I happened to glance down and noticed that the low fuel light was on.  And the indicator was below empty.

The question then was what to do.  I was almost home — less than 5 minutes away.  But I was not sure at all that I had even 5 minutes of gas left.  So, thinking quickly, I diverted north on the final exit rather than south, and headed towards a nearby filling station while trying to preserve as much speed as possible.  Probably 2 miles short of the exit I needed, the engine gave out.  We were headed down a hill at the time, and I just switched into neutral and moved over to the shoulder to try to eke out as much extra distance as I could get.  We got to the bottom of the hill still going near 70, and started up the next one.

The exit we were waiting for was still over a mile away over the hill, and the minivan was slowing down every second.  We continued to climb the hill and slow, unsure all the time whether we were going to have enough kinetic energy to keep going.  As it happened, we hit the crest at about 30 mph, and coasted down the very slight incline on the other side of the peak all the way to the base of the off-ramp we needed, with the filling station in sight not 200 yards away.

A quick jaunt up to the station and back, and we had enough gas to get going again.  But I’m sure glad we made it up that hill.  That would have turned a 15-minute round trip into a 45-minute one, and with three tired kids in the car that would not have been pleasant at all, particularly for Robin who was stuck feeding Jonathan, who had just woken up hungry.

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