All kids want from games is a little power.

Published
by
ben
on October 4, 2008
in Education and Games
. 0 Comments

I sat and watched a 13 year-old friend play MechAssault and Halo 3 a while ago, and it occurred to me that the ability to exercise power is very motivating in games. It is especially motivating for kids because they live controlled lives. People get in a tizzy about the exposure that kids have to violence in games, and I am not in complete disagreement with that idea, but violence is another mechanism for the assertion of power and it has appeal in that regard.

But let’s take a second and think about why that is motivating at all. I think it has a lot to do with averting feelings of helplessness, which the book “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman describes as a significant contributor towards depression. The feeling that what you do doesn’t matter (whether perceived or real), has been linked to depression in not just people but also in animals.

Games are excellent avenues for exerting power in a safe environment, and I think that not only describes their appeal to young people, but it may also speak to some therapeutic properties. Now, I don’t know what data is available to back this statement, but anecdotally, I have seen that some of the most hardcore gamers I’ve known have also occasionally shown depressive characteristics. So it would be reasonable to guess that playing games relieves the tension of helplessness and in turn relieves depression. I know that’s been true for me. Anyone have any data on that?

Anyway, I think it’s also interesting that over the course of my career, I’ve veered away from being as much of a player of games, but I’ve replaced it with the act of creating on the computer. This is just another avenue of exerting power, but it happens to be highly constructive. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t feel that great pull to spend time playing games even when I realize that they are well crafted.

So if you are a parent and you’re concerned that your child is playing too many games, you might want to ask yourself in what ways the child is able to exert power and control in their lives. If they are lacking in that area, maybe providing them with additional means to make decisions that affect their day may help satiate their desire to hit up the XBox. I would not be surprised if this link exists, but of course, I’m not a psychologist… just a guy who’s be around games for a long time and was one of those kids who was looking for a little control in a safe place - somewhere to experiment.

Cuil - No love for Flex.

Published
by
ben
on July 29, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I hate to bust on a site that just launched, but come on, don’t put out press releases that says you’re going to challenge Google Search and then have this come up…

Cuil

I’ll try back in a few months, but for crying out loud.

A Guide to Shipping Software

Published
by
ben
on July 17, 2008
in Flex
. 0 Comments

So, I’ve been making software for a while now, but for the last year I’ve been working full time on a solo project where I’ve been the sole programmer, designer, and project manager. That’s two hats too many, but this has been the most rewarding and also the most testing experience I’ve been through in my career. In a few weeks, I’ll be putting what I’ve done in front of people, and my temptation is to tweak and fix and make everything perfect before doing so. Well, I made a guide to finishing today that I wanted to share. It’s tacked to my wall. Feel free to take it, add to it, and print it out yourself.

(A shout out goes to every lead engineer I’ve ever worked with or under - namely Aaron Ondek, Chris McEvoy, Paul Martin, Matt Conte, Chris Pruett… I never knew how the last 10% takes 90% of the time like I do now.)

Finish

Reappropriating Games

Published
by
ben
on May 18, 2008
in Games
. 0 Comments

I came across this brilliant McDonald’s “simulation” game by the Italian developer Molleindustria which takes a dual pronged approach of educating players about the interplaying tasks and mechanisms involved in running a business while injecting a slightly more than subtle amount of sarcasm. The style and game flow are excellent, though I wish they toned down the bias in the written copy - not because I disagree with their overall feelings on corporate burger production, but because their game design is strong enough that the player should arrive at those conclusions by playing it. To me, it’s kinda like the yellow scrolling text at the beginning of Star Wars saying something like “and then there were really cool space battles and explosions and incredible effects!”. Show, don’t tell.

Still, a great effort by the developer! And check out their other games (I didn’t yet),  Faith Fighter and Operation Pedopriest. ???

Fun with Physics

Published
by
ben
on March 12, 2008
in Games
. 0 Comments

I love physics. I even majored in it for my first two semesters of college - yeah that didn’t work out so well.
Anyway, here are two awesome physics toys to check out… Phun and The Powder Game at Danball. Phun is a desktop app that you need to download, but Powder is a Java applet that runs right in your browser.

Phun

Powder Game

Edit: Just saw this link to a page that lists over 70 available physics games along with reviews.

Vista Followup

Published
by
ben
on March 9, 2008
in Misc
. 0 Comments

Blown Up ComputerOnce I followed the steps outlined in my previous Vista-hate post, the drive calmed down and I became less sad. It might be usable.

But I have noticed that the indexing engine still makes the drive go insane. Every time the contents of the user area change it reindexes and you definitely notice. I’d think to shut the indexing off but then this might happen. Fantastic post on Slashdot.

Moving Flex Project from Perforce to SVN

Published
by
ben
on March 6, 2008
in Flex
. 1 Comment

This is going pretty smoothly so far. Coming from game development where Perforce has become the de facto standard, I felt comfortable using it when I started learning Flex. In the past few months it’s become apparent that Subversion (SVN) is the standard Source Control system in web land… and the reasons why are pretty easy to understand.

Instead of repeating many other blogs on the topic, here are some of the best links I’ve found:

So all that said, there were two things that really got me to switch as a Flex developer, and both of them were spurned on by a talk that Doug McCune gave at 360|Flex. The first is Subclipse, which is a great Subversion plugin for Flex Builder. This thing is so easy to use and the integration is awesome. I tried using the Perforce plugin for Eclipse a few months ago and came away with enough hitches in it that I just went back to P4Win.

That said I didn’t have much of a reason to move from Perforce… it did the trick and I was used to it. But what really got me going was when Doug ran through all of the open source projects available in the Flex community and how the easiest way to hook up to them is via Subclipse and SVN. Once you see that workflow it becomes a no-brainer and now integrating everything from Degrafa to as3flickrlib is dead simple.

Does Vista suck? Yes!

Published
by
ben
on February 29, 2008
in Misc
. 2 Comments

Here are my top 3 reasons for being turned off in my first 2 hours of Vista. Keep in mind I went in optimistic and hopeful that everything I had heard was from folks who wanted to see it fail was exaggerated.

I wanted to believe that after a year, Vista would be safe to use. I felt that way was because I had been using OSX about half the time and XP the other half. It just felt like… if I could see everything that was right about OSX, couldn’t Microsoft? Couldn’t they make some simple changes in a year to emulate the successes of their more expensive and often snot nosed competition?

No.

No. No. and did I mention No.

Driver support.

I plugged in my HP C3180 All-in-One printer. This is a mainstream product. When I plug it into my Macbook, it doesn’t even report that I did something, it just prints to it.

Upon plugging it in to the Vista box, it asked me what I wanted to do, then went through 5 minutes of attempting to download the correct driver and failed. Then it asked me to insert the driver disc (1999 rang, it wants its Driver Discs all back. All of them), which of course I tossed the day I got the thing, and upon declining that generous offer it proceeded to fail. No printer for me without some digging. Unacceptable.

Constant Hard Drive Churn

If you are like me and have been using computers since olden times (1991), you will recognize the sound of your hard drive activity as meaning one of three things.

A) Program I’m using is accessing drive because I said so (best)
B) Program is Crashing (normal)
C) Hidden process is sucking resources (intolerable)

When you start Vista, item C becomes the norm. Luckily, they built a new and very comprehensive resource monitor that lets you see exactly what part of Vista is currently pissing you off. What you will quickly see is that the hard drive is treated like an abused horse by Vista.

The reason for this is because MS implemented what they call Low Priority I/O in Vista. This means that even if your Hard Drive is throwing itself a dance party, it isn’t necessarily stealing resources from other tasks. It also means that various random engineers working on Vista believed that since performance wouldn’t be compromised, they could use the hard drive to get better benchmark performance while ignoring the fact that it is insanely annoying to listen to your computer grind all the time.

After some digging, I realized that the culprits were Superfetch and System Restore.

Superfetch tries to figure out what you are going to do next and get the computer all primed and ready for you to actually do it, at which time it will magically and instantenously have predicted your actions and will launch Excel so fast that the nerve impulse to click the Excel icon will have been intercepted on its way from your brain to your finger. Excel will launch so fast, you’ll be confused and could think, “Did I even want to use Excel? I hadn’t even decided and here it is.”. Unfortunately, Superfetch is so pumped about doing it’s job that it is always one step ahead of the user. And the user thinks about doing a lot of stuff. Thus, the hard drive is sad and so are we. Shut it off.

System Restore has also been upgraded. Now it works at a much lower level than before, and every time you install a new application it goes totally insane. Shutting it off will calm your hard drive as well, not to mention save you many, many gigs of space. Apparently this fundamental change in how System Restore works in Vista means that restore points are often 3+ GB in size, where as XP restore points were around 50MB. Writing 3GB takes a lot longer than 50MB, so your drive gets busy for longer and you get sadder.

UAC

This is the gem that Apple makes fun of with the Secret Service agent constantly asking for confirmation. The best part about that ad is that it is absolutely spot on. Shut this off, and compromise your system security by getting no more notifications at all. Or leave it on and be angry all the time. It’s up to you.

What now?

I packed up my spiffy new Quad-Core Dell box and set it on the floor. I’m going to wait a few days before I decide what to do. While they offered an XP configuration, I’ve been using the Mac enough lately that I’ve gotten really tired of the experience in XP. I thought that Vista might be XP plus some of the things I like about the Mac. Instead, Vista is XP minus reliability, driver support, and performance. Since I spend the majority of my waking hours using a computer, it might be time to spend the extra money and get with the snot noses.