When I was at Spacetime, I wrote a lot. I’d read the news in the morning while I drank my tea, and if I saw anything interesting, I’d revisit it over my lunch break and write a blog post.
I haven’t had that luxury for a long time.
I still have expertise to share, so to help out in the meantime, I’ve installed Shared Items Post to share my Google Reader shared items. There should be some interesting stuff in there on a daily basis, more or less.
I have also updated the name of this blog to better fit my interests these days. I think that large-scale data management is kind of a solved problem for me — I’ve given two conference talks on it now, one at ION 2008 and one at the Independent MMO Game Developers Conference 2009. The new hotness is evidence-based design — don’t do it because it’s the way it’s been done before, do it because it’s the way it’s been proven to work, whether it’s in our industry or not.
Think evidence-based medicine. But I’m not a doctor, I just read about it in Supercrunchers.
Lucas Gillespie believes that at-risk students do poorly in school because they’re not motivated by traditional teaching topics. Enter WoWinSchool, a wiki for educators to share World of Warcraft-themed lesson plans for after-school programs.
A sample writing and literacy lesson: “In fantasy literature, the bard plays a key role as a traveling musician and storyteller. What song or poem would the bards of Azeroth sing about your character’s adventures?”
The math lessons are the best part. “Healing Analysis: Which types of heals produce a greater number of recovered hit points during an encounter? quick burst heals, slower more powerful heals, or heal-over-time spells?” And then they send the kids to EJ. God bless ‘em.
Via GameSetWatch.
I’d known who Jeff was for a long time, but for all the local developer events I went to, I’d never met him. So when I was told, on the first day back at work after a vacation, that Jeff would be joining the team, I joked that I was surprised to hear that he actually existed.
Turns out that he did, and he was great. He had amazing insight. Ask him a question about something, and he’d have an interesting answer. In the middle of a design meeting where he hadn’t talked much, he’d suddenly pipe up with something totally off the wall and totally right. He was adding wonderful little touches to everything.
Jeff would mail out the weirdest links. He loved random internet shit. He had an oddly insightful picture or Youtube video to respond to any email thread. I wish I had some of my old work email — there was some good stuff in there. I remember he mailed out this link shortly before we left the company. He thought this book was freaking hilarious — he was chuckling about it for weeks. This album cover game drove an email thread for a few days too; that’s where all those examples came from.
I wish I would have said goodbye the last time I saw him. I think he was smoking in front of the building as I drove away. I figured we’d all hear about what he was going to do next. I wish this wouldn’t have been it.
Unemployment’s not so bad yet. There are advantages to operating on a different schedule than the rest of the world — finally completing old hobby projects that’d fallen by the wayside, having the gym to yourself, grocery shopping on weekday afternoons. The other nice thing is that I can leave town without worrying about what I’m missing at work.
My spouse and I just got back from a fine extended weekend in Houston and Galveston, a trip that was planned and paid before before this whole business.
On Friday, we went to see the Diamondbacks destroy the Astros. I kept score with one of those worksheets they sell in the ballpark store. It didn’t come with instructions, so we had to go by the husband’s faint memories. “So you’re sure I’m not supposed to write that down?” “Which position number is that guy again?” On the bright side, we were blessed with excellent color commentary by the drunk Southerners behind us.
After the game, there was a Guitar Hero 3 competition. (Sadly, the drunk rednecks left.)
On Saturday, we went to see Nine Inch Nails at the local basketball stadium. I normally prefer general admission — it doesn’t really feel like you’re at a show if you’re not getting pushed around and sweated on and kicked in the head up front — but we had pretty good seats, and it meant we got to see the whole light show, which was awesome.
The next day, we moved on to Galveston. About the most exciting thing we did was wait in line for a very long time to take a ferry on the advice of a stupid book.
But there were dolphins on the way back. The weather and water look different in this picture because it was LIKE THREE HOURS LATER.
And then we went to the “beach.”
Another day of driving, and we’re home now. Time to get back to work, so to speak.
Blizzard’s statement in the Blizzard/Glider lawsuit says that players take an average of 480 hours to reach level 70, and they play for an average of two hours a day. (Links to statements, concise quote.) Part of Blizzard’s argument was that botting robbed them of subscription fees because of increased leveling speed. That’s pretty funny.
Playtime is a metric that companies don’t often post. I’m so sick of “20 hours a week” — Nick Yee’s eight-year-old Everquest 1 figure, determined by self-selected survey. Is it true? Was it ever true? Who knows?
Netflix decides to keep the profiles feature after all.
Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience. Simplicity is only one virtue and it can certainly be outweighed by utility.
* post title totally stolen from here — aside from many, many MMO examples, of course.
I played the demo for Civilization Revolution, Civilization revamped for the console. The demo’s up for download on Xbox Live. It is awesome.
From one playthrough, I get the sense that it’s been streamlined but not simplified. For example, the two biggest changes that come to mind, given the way I play: your newb galley ship now comes complete with exploration units — you don’t have to build a ship, then build guys to put on it. (Don’t know if that holds true for later ships, but it’s a very welcome feature in the early game.) And road building is automated — pay out some money in one city, pick the connecting city, and it’s done. (I’m actually kind of sad about that, because I goddamn love building roads … I goddamn loved building roads and sewer systems in SimCity when I was a kid too. Hmm.)
Still, it’s a thoughtful feature as well, because the game has lots more going on. There are events popping up all the time. It helps break up the early game monotony — okay, I moved my explorer warrior one space, I moved my settler one space, next turn, do the same thing again.
I’m really looking forward to the full game next month. I just wasn’t expecting a console revamp of anything, really, to turn out so well. On the next playthrough, I might notice more stuff I don’t like, but for now, I’m delighted.
Firaxis has also announced that the next iteration on Civilization 4 will be a remake of Colonization. I loved Colonization when I was a kid. I’m really looking forward to that too.
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