Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Creative Writing Prompts

Prompts to start you writing provides a link to a site to help you get into the writing mood. The Imagination Prompt Generator actually generates topics for you to write about.

Some examples that came up when I tried it out:

“One thing I want to learn right now is…”
“If you could pass on a piece of advice that meant a lot to you when you received it, what would it be?”
“____ was my favorite cartoon because…”

And you can just keep going until you find one that appeals to you, write for a few minutes, and BOOM, you’re in the writing mood and can start writing whatever it is you wanted to write. It reminds me of the creative writing exercises I did in grade school.

I searched for a similar site for hacking prompts, but I decided that it probably isn’t a good thing to encourage people to code creatively. It’s not like writing. I thought that maybe I can get into the coding mood if I write a simple, 10-line program based on a suggestion. I think it is more accurate to say that if I am having issues getting into the mood to program, I probably don’t have a very clear reason to program. I shouldn’t just sit down to a blank file and start hacking. I should have some specific goal. Why am I coding? I should design it on paper and try to figure out what details I’ll need. I can be creative coming up with solutions in that phase, but I should not be creative with the actual code.

Categories
Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

Stupid ECommerce Website Design

I’ve been passively looking for a gaming laptop that can also run Gnu/Linux for some time now. It is easy to find laptops that run Gnu/Linux in general, and I know I can find some quality laptops with Gnu/Linux preinstalled from various websites such as Sub 300.

Desktop replacements can cost a lot of money as well, and I might be inclined to pay if I could guarantee that what I pay for actually works. I’ve read a number of articles on Linux on Laptops in which the laptops work…mostly. Things such as built-in wireless or hardware accelerated graphics or hibernate/restore functions can be unimplemented or poorly supported. Buying a laptop requires research for a Gnu/Linux fan in general, but a Gnu/Linux gamer needs to look even harder.

So I thought I found my salvation at Linux Voodoo when I found the X-Pad+ Wide Screen Gamer AMD. Holy cow! And it comes with Debian preinstalled and ready?! Sweet! How much?

Uh…how much?

You mean to tell me that I have to login just to see what the price is?!? Why?

Imagine if you wanted to buy some stuff online only to be told that you had to sign up at each and every website just to comparison shop. How many different accounts and logins would you have to keep track of? Would you like to keep tabs on that on top of the logins for the websites you actually shop at? I didn’t think so.

In the meantime, does anyone have a good suggestion for a gaming laptop that Gnu/Linux can run on?

Categories
Game Design General

Your Writing Style

Conversational Writing Kicks Formal Writing’s Ass is another insightful post on Creating Passionate Users that say that formal writing, as nice and professional as it is, is less effective at teaching than conversational writing is. Conversational writing does something to the brain that makes it act as if it is involved in an actual conversation and so forces the reader to pay attention much more than formal writing would. You just remember certain things easier this way.

I’ve mentioned before that I am always interested in learning how to write more effectively, and this post had some good points. Of course, besides writing better, I’m wondering how this principle might apply to game development. Specificially, how do I make games that you would respond to (notice I said you instead of “the gamer” or some other third person term)?

“You Win!” was always more exciting than “Player 1 Wins!” or “GIAN is the winner!”

In RPGs, it is common to meet NPCs that talk to your character. Even though the main character in Chrono Trigger never talked back, the conversation was more compelling because you really only controlled the main character when walking around. People were talking to YOU vicariously through the character, and it was all the more real when you used your real name in the game.

Is your game an educational title? Perhaps you should make the text in the game more conversational and appear to involve the player more. I don’t think it all needs to be second-person “you” and “your”, but you definitely don’t want anything to appear stuffy and formal.

Are the instructions for a game more understandable if you say, “If you wish to access the main menu, hit ESC” rather than “Hit ESC for main menu”?

What about marketing? Can your website become more conversational? Does it sound too much like a thesis? Would changing some sentences or whole sections make the game more memorable and therefore more likely to bring back a potential customer to make a purchase?

The post, like many on that blog, has given me some things to think about.

Categories
Geek / Technical Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Happy Software Freedom Day!!

Happy Software Freedom Day!

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International provides guidance in organizing SFD, but volunteer teams around the world organize their own SFD events to impact their own communities.

Elsewhere in the Starter Manual:

Software Freedom Day is not about any individual companies or people; Software Freedom Day is a positive community celebration of Software Freedom.

w00t!!

Categories
Marketing/Business

Brand Identity Funniness

The Social Customer Manifesto has a post about Lego(R) putting up a notice if you go to legos.com that the name that people have commonly referred to its products might not be preserving the brand. We are not supposed to call them Legos. They are Lego bricks or Lego toys.

The comments also mention that the use of the word Google as a verb also apparently dilutes the Google brand.

Hah. Hahahahahaha.

Come on. It isn’t like someone will call a competing product legos (lowercase). It isn’t like I will tell someone to Google something and watch them bring up Yahoo! or MSN without a second thought. How does it dilute your brand when they use the name for YOUR products?

When people say want to eat Chef Boyardee, are we going to go find them and teach them to not dilute the brand because they are really eating a Chef Boyardee food product? What about when someone says “Check out my new Nikes” when they are referring to their Nike shoes? Doesn’t “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” dilute the Dell brand since you are really getting a Dell PC?

Of course, there are some concerns. People DO call competing products Legos even though Lego doesn’t make them. People do refer to all tissue paper as Kleenax. People xerox copies of paper on non-Xerox copiers. So maybe it isn’t so funny.

But I still think of them as Legos and I’ll still google.

Categories
General

Change in Hosting

I just found out that my webhost will be changing the server I am hosted on this weekend. I will have to basically shut off the blog so that no moving parts are running while everything is moved to a new machine. That means no comments, trackbacks, or posts until the move is finished and the DNS entry gets updated.

Hopefully it won’t take too long, but hey, it isn’t like I am selling anything on this site yet so it won’t be a huge interruption in service, right?

Categories
Marketing/Business Politics/Government

EFF on DRM: Customer Is Always Wrong

Thanks to Blue Sky on Mars, I found The Customer is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music, the EFF guide to Digital Resctrictions Management.

Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.

In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.

This guide “translates” the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin. Understanding how DRM and the DMCA pose a danger to your rights will help you to make fully informed purchasing decisions. Before buying DRM-crippled music from any service, you should consider the following examples and be sure to understand how the service might limit your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.

Categories
Games Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Evil Games Or Misunderstood?

1UP reprinted an article from Computer Gaming World titled Pop Culture Pariah: Why Are Videogames The Favorite Demon of the Mainstream Media?

While it was informative, I really don’t like the idea that we just have to wait it out until people who are gamers grow up and take over society from the previous generation. It’s a new form of media, and the previous generation didn’t grow up with it so they don’t know what to make of it except from what they are being fed from the news headlines and pamphlets. In a sidebar, CGW interviewed Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, and he mentions that games today are so complex that it is hard to get people to discover them in the first place, which is one of the things I think game developers need to work on in order to not only get female gamers but all non-gamers into gaming.

I remember my mother could handle playing Atari 2600 games since all she had to worry about was a joystick and a single button. In fact, her favorite game was actually Breakout which made use of analog paddles with a single button. When I got an NES a few years later and tried to get her to play Super Mario Bros, she looked at the cross pad and four buttons on the controller and immediately decided that it was too complicated for her, yet, using those same buttons, she loved Tetris on the GameBoy.

In high school I remember people complaining that the Super NES had too many buttons and that’s why they liked Sega Genesis better. Funnily enough, some of these same people were first in line for a Playstation when it came out. Anyway, I think it is interesting that controller layouts can do much more to intimidate new players than anything else. I mean, driving a car is a complex activity, even with an automatic. You have three mirrors, four wheels, one steering wheel, and a number of settings such as Reverse, Drive, Neutral, and Park, plus an entire world that you need to pay attention to in order to get to your destination safely. Yet driving a car isn’t that intimidating to so many people as playing video games.

Sit down someone who plays console games in front of a keyboard and mouse and tell them these are their tools for playing a game, and they’ll freak out. I know that I felt weird playing SimCity on the computer after first playing for years on the SNES version. Today I find it difficult to play Goldeneye 64 even though I was awesome on it when it came out. I’ve been playing computer games for so long to the detriment of my consoles. But the controls don’t intimidate me. I’m used to overcoming new controller layouts.

What about the new gamer? Too much effort? Too much frustration? Too much confusion? It’s no wonder that solitaire sells so well compared to most games.

While I think a big part of the problem is that people need a scapegoat, I also think that the complexity of games for non-gamers only furthers to mystify what is great about games and gaming. With games like Bejeweled and Tetris being as popular as they are among otherwise non-gamers, wouldn’t you think that most people would understand that GTA:SA doesn’t necessarily represent video games?

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Cathedral and Bazaar…and Gaming?

In the latest Escapist, The Contrarian: Roll the Dice mentions ESR’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

I’m reminded of Eric S. Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote about the differences between top-down, monolithic software development and bottom-up, open-source development. But the metaphor applies here too.

People don’t always get what the Cathedral and the Bazaar really represent, and it is weird because it isn’t like Raymond hid the meaning in metaphor and poetry. He says it up front: the cathedral represents software development by project leaders on high while the bazaar represents software development done by everyone. Both ways can be open source, not just the latter. It just depends on if the project moves in a direction on the whim of the few or with the natural developments of the many. That’s all it refers to.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here; rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

Even so, people think the cathedral and the bazaar refers to open source vs proprietary software, Microsoft vs Linux, and all sorts of things. And apparently now it refers shallowness in video games vs the depth provided by tabletop gaming? Or the openness of a game as opposed to the rigidity?

I thought it was a good article, but the link to ESR’s work was a big stretch that doesn’t work.

Categories
Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Politics/Government

Blizzard Wins bnetd Case

Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking. If you are not familiar with this case, basically Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden are two guys were fed up with Battle.net being unresponsive and decide to reverse-engineer their own version of it called bnetd.

My take? Just from the article, it sounds like if it wasn’t for the DMCA, the reverse-engineering wouldn’t have been considered that much of a problem. Of course, when you install Starcraft, you agree not to reverse-engineer anything anyway, so they are in violation of the EULA, but I think it is just another case of the DMCA being abused.

Blizzard obviously has a right to make sure that people aren’t playing with pirated copies, and they obviously have the right to dictate how people play online with their games. Apparently they have the right to tell people that they can’t find better service elsewhere. It wasn’t about piracy. The bnetd project had asked for assistance from Blizzard to make it possible to verify the copies used aren’t being pirated, but they were refused.

Power. Blizzard owns the copyright, and so they have the exclusive power to dictate what can be done with their copyrighted works. That’s fine. They want to control it and have the right to do so. But bnetd was not about allowing people to pirate the games. It was not about creating new games using Blizzard’s copyrighted works. It was about making it possible for people to play the game when they would otherwise have a high amount of lag. It was about a customer taking matters into his own hands to make it possible to enjoy the game he loves to play.

I personally think that bnetd was perfectly fine since it wasn’t software meant to facilitate copyright violations but to “interoperate” with Blizzard’s software. I mean, how is this situation different from the SAMBA project?

Some people have decided to boycott Blizzard games. I haven’t made that decision yet, but they don’t make Gnu/Linux games anyway so I guess I don’t have to worry about anything. I’m just getting tired of copyright owners thinking that they are also “customer owners”.

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