Valleywag to PR Folks: Get Your Bad News Out Now

I think Valleywag has it right when they encourage PR firms to get bad news out this weekend. The media will be so obsessed with all things iPhone, Apple, and Steve Jobs, that anything else will be below the fold deep inside the newspaper.

Other Explorations of Square Dance

I did a vanity search for myself on MSN's search engine, and I was astonished to find this page on mathpuzzle. Ed mentioned my Square Dance puzzle (which won an award a few years ago at the International Puzzle Party Design Competition), and some of his readers wrote in with their tales of solving it, and of other explorations they had done with the pieces. Weird.

Paul Potts Singing Opera on Britain's Got Talent

I should warn my co-workers about sending me moving videos like this one, a regular guy who appears on Britain's Got Talent and proceeds to stun the crowd with his rendition of Nessun Dorma from Turandot. Regular guy? Crowd going wild? Emotional opera music? I have to go; I have something in my eye.

Feed Fodder: WSJ's Style & Substance

Thanks to A Way With Words for a new blog, Style and Substance (http://blogs.wsj.com/styleandsubstance/). The Wall Street Journal's Paul Martin finds style issues "in the wild" in the Journal, and dissects them. (I note that WSJ prefers "Alice Waters's" to "Alice Waters'"; I should make a decision about which of these I prefer. The former seems more correct, but the latter looks nicer.) The blog updates once a month, so put this one in your RSS reader.

Amateur! Vs! Pro! Fight!

Prompted by the blogosphere's attacks on Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, Wired's Tony Long acknowledges the role of the amateur, but argues they have nothing on professionals. He uses journalism as an example because it's the field he knows best.

But opportunity and desire alone do not professional historians or journalists or pundits make. There's this process known as "learning your craft" and "paying your dues" that all professionals must endure. Sorry, but trolling the web and blogging from your darkened study doesn't qualify as on-the-job training.

Though I didn't go to journalism school, I draw a sharp line between my professional writing and my blogging, and it comes down to research. (When friends introduce me as a blogger, I'll instantly pipe up with "and a freelance writer" to connote that I'm a professonal.) For even my shortest published pieces, I talk to at least 3 or 4 sources. For my blog posts, I speak to none: I use my own knowledge, my reference library, and Wikipedia. What writing skills I possess at this point come from a concerted, two-year-long effort to improve my writing, including paying attention to what my professional editors do to my text.

His article reminds me of a joke Ann Patchett likes to tell. She was at a party, and a doctor there said, "Oh, you're a writer. I've started writing as well. I set aside Friday nights for writing." To which Patchett replied, "Really, what a coincidence. I've started doing brain surgery on Thursday nights." Opportunity and desire don't make writers, either.

I'm sure Long will get ripped by the vitriolic bloggers, but I think he has a point. Professionals aren't perfect, as he says, but they have the training to go deeper on a subject and add value, while most bloggers—and by extension the rest of the Web 2.0 crowd—don't.

Another good quote:

What about the person who is "there"? What if you're standing on the steps of the Capitol, with your cell-phone camera, when Sen. Johnny Walker, three sheets to the wind, pitches head first down the marble stairs and breaks his neck? Your grainy, low-res photo makes it onto the nightly news and the front page of The New York Times. You even lean over to hear him say, with his dying breath, "Rosebud." Are you a reporter? A photojournalist?


No, you're an eyewitness who happened to be toting a camera. The eyewitness has been around for years, far longer than the cell-phone camera or the internet. Your contribution to the resulting news story may be enormous but you're not a reporter, anymore than someone applying first aid at an accident scene is a doctor. You're a source, someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Frodo For King!

What has Aragorn accomplished since taking the throne three years ago? I don't know either. So maybe it's time for a change in leadership.

(spotted by Melissa after she watched "The Funniest Five-Second Video on the Internet")

Nintendo And Sony Are Idiots

A new game called Manhunt 2 has generated a lot of press. The premise behind the game is simple: Run around and brutally murder people. On the Wii, you'll have an especially grisly run; you'll get to physically mimic the actions you need to kill people. It's already been banned in the UK and Ireland.

I don't want to buy this game. I really really don't. I wish it didn't exist. But upon the ESRB's announcement of the game's AO rating—Adults Only—Nintendo and Sony announced that they wouldn't let anyone buy it. By refusing to license it, they've ensured that the game won't play on their consoles.

I feel that a retail chain should be able to say that they will or will not carry it, but why should Nintendo be policing my household? I can make an informed decision and so can other adults. That's why it's rated AO. Do AO games get sold to children? Probably. Or to the striking volume of adults who don't bother to learn anything about what their kids are doing. But banning the game doesn't fix those very real problems.

The best part is that Nintendo issued a press release about the decision, and it argues against their decision:

But as with books, television and movies, different content is meant for different audiences. That's why the ESRB provides ratings to help consumers understand the content of a game before they purchase it.

Yes, that's why the ESRB exists. So that we can make our own decisions. Not so that someone else can make them for us. I think this is a horrible game. But I also think that gamers should have the ability to play it in its uncensored form. As it stands, Rockstar is likely to edit the game to get the magic M on the box. It wasn't their vision, and the game will likely suffer for it.

via Joystiq

Accidental Cell Phone Number Given In Halo ARG

Extra footage on the Austin Powers DVD shows a messenger coming to tell a new window that her husband died at the hands of some slightly angry sea bass. Whatever happens to the innocent victims of a hero's killing spree? And what about those poor folks whose cell phone number accidentally appears in the Halo ARG? Well, they get 300 phone calls and counting.

Oops.

via Joystiq

Penny Arcade On ARGs

Drink your Ovaltine, Ralphie.

The Office: The Videogame

MumboJumbo has decided to make a game based on the American version of The Office. Cast members will be modeled as bobbleheaded dolls, and the player will need to do jobs and pull pranks around Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch. Available in the fall for the DS and PC.

via Joystiq

The Effects of Voice Chat on MMO Interaction

I thought this article on Wired about the effect of voice chat on MMO play was interesting. On the Internet, or so the saying goes, no one knows you're a dog. 2007 Corollary: Unless they can hear your voice. Women get hit on more, confident raid leaders become squeaky 11-year-old boys, and more.

NYT On Gold Farmers

The New York Times, in addition to its slide show of people and their avatars, ran an article about gold farms, operations that level up MMO players for real-world money. It's a good article, but isn't the point of a game to play it yourself? I guess I don't understand why a player would choose to sign up for a game and then let someone else do the playing.

But add cheap labor to any sort of market, and opportunity appears. It doesn't sound like gold farmers have a good life, though: "He works two floors below the plywood bunks of the workers’ dorm where he sleeps. In two years of 84-hour farming weeks, he has rarely stepped outside for longer than it takes to eat a meal."

Game Players And Their Avatars

New York Times Magazine has a slideshow of game players and their avatars (couldn't get the permalink-via-rss working, so you only have a few days to click through).

The players range from the heartbreaking (the seriously handicapped kid who even has a robotic avatar) to the banal (avatars who look like their creators). World of WarCraft doesn't get a lot of screen time; City of Heroes and Second Life dominate.

D.O.A.? DOA.

I've always had some respect for the Dead Or Alive fighting franchise, despite the sleaziness of the game's main designer, who seems to constantly be in court for sexual harassment issues. The games are good fighters, but the creators have never shied away from the fact that they're peddling soft porn for straight teenage boys. It's not as if they're trying to convince people that they're making some profound statement. The game's value comes from the fact that it's girls in bikinis fighting, and everyone knows it. For goodness' sake, one of the sequels was DOA Beach Volleyball.

No one expected the new DOA movie to be any good, and it looks like we were right. The movie leapt to the number 16 spot in its first week, trailing behind movies that only the art crowd knows about and only beating movies that have been out for so long that most people probably don't know they're still in theaters. The best reviews on rotten tomatoes go for the "it's horrible, but it's fun" angle, though one reviewer wryly notes that it's the best movie adaptation of a video game to date. I'm tempted by the "so horrible it's great comedy" angle, but I think I'll wait until it goes to DVD. I give it a week or so.

via Joystiq

Green Eggs And Ham's Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level

I've mentioned readability statistics in the past, but I was rereading the Wikipedia entry on Flesh-Kincaid Readability Tests when I saw this passage:

The lowest grade level score in theory is -3.4, but, since there are no real passages that have every sentence consisting of a one-syllable word, this never occurs in practice. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss comes close, averaging 5.7 words per sentence and 1.02 syllables per word, with a grade level of -1.3. (Most of the 812 words are monosyllabic: only one word ("anywhere"), which occurs eight times, is not.)

That's impressive. Try to write more than two good sentences with one-syllable words, and you'll see how tough it can be. Of course, Green Eggs and Ham relies on thudding repetition, but still; I was impressed.

Home Inspection Nightmares

This Old House is running galleries of home inspection nightmares. Gallery 6 is up for your viewing horror, and links to previous galleries sit on the side.

via boing boing

Mark Morford on Buying Versus Renting

Mark Morford does not have one million dollars with which to buy a decent San Francisco home. His most recent column captures the back and forth that Melissa and I have struggled with of late. The Bay Area's housing prices are unbelievable. We often wonder: Can they last? Who's buying these places? It's a crazy little world.

Crossword Flash Game

Not those crosswords.

In this Flash game, you're given a grid with some letters filled in. When you click on a blank square in the grid, all the squares that are the same letter light up. Click on the bank of available letters on the side, and fill in the grid. There are five puzzles, starting with super-easy and ending up at expert, but I solved them all in about half an hour.

Curiously, I often solve crossword clues this way, especially cryptic crosswords. I know words well enough to spot them based on fragments of the letter patterns, and it's not uncommon for me to figure out the word and then try to figure out the clue.

via Game | Life

Lessons In Play

Anyone who thinks about the mathematics of games should know about Winning Ways. The four books (split up from two volumes) are the bible of these games, providing a mathematical analysis to the category most of us think of abstract strategy. Go, chess, and nim are all examples, but there are lots more, some only played by math PhDs on whiteboards. The authors, John Conway, Elwyn Berlekamp, and Richard K. Guy, sketch out the ultimate in rational play, and along the way Conway realized that you could construct an entire number theory based on these systems, which he went on to publish—to the annoyance of his colleagues—as On Numbers and Games. (I should also note Beasley's The Mathematics of Games, which predates Winning Ways but only broaches some of the topics of the Conway, Berlekamp, Guy opus.)

Once you know how to analyze small games, you realize that many large strategy games eventually break down into small, manageable games. Go is too complex to analyze via Winning Ways methods, but by the end of the game, you've actually created small pockets of active play. Each is a small, analyzable game. (Berlekamp went on to explore this in Mathematical Go.)

Winning Ways started it all, and I have both the old two-volume set, picked up piecemeal from used bookstores, and the new four-volume set, updated slightly and issued a few years ago. I also have the other books I've mentioned. Puzzle geekery runs deep in my blood.

But I can't make heads or tails of Winning Ways. I've started to work through them a few times, but the authors quickly make mathematical leaps that I can't follow. I only know a few people who have worked through the books, and I wouldn't want to play nim against them.

That's why I'm so intrigued by Lessons in Play, which I've nicknamed "Winning Ways Lite." The authors set out to explain combinatorial game theory, just like Winning Ways, but they target the relative layperson like me. They don't go on to justify real numbers based on the mathematics of games: They just give a step-by-step explanation of the theories that underlie these games and mathematical constructs. I just got my copy, and I can already understand them more.

If you care about these sorts of things, check out the book. It provides a fascinating look at the math that hovers just below the surface of abstract strategy games.

Peacemaker

One of the new games released at Manifesto Games is PeaceMaker, a game where you have to manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, choosing one side or the other and making changes that balance your population's needs with global needs and so forth. Sounds interesting.

From the MG website:

Games--light-hearted, mindless entertainment for adolescent boys, right?

Pshaw.

PeaceMaker places you in the shoes of people who have to make difficult decisions in often horrendous circumstances. In so doing, it illuminates and explores its subject in a way that only a game can do--because you participate, rather than merely witness. PeaceMaker is compelling, painful, saddening, curiously hopeful...

But fun?

Depends on your definition of fun, I guess. But why should this one word be the single factor by which we judge games? Is Burroughs's Naked Lunch "fun"? Is Kurosawa's Rashomon "fun"?

PeaceMaker is a game you should experience not because it will entertain you (though it may)--but because you will never forget it.

That is perhaps one definition of art.

PeaceMaker has received quite a lot of attention from the press, because of the issues it addresses, and good for it; but in our context, it is at least as important for an entirely different reason. Games are growing up. PeaceMaker is leading the way, demonstrating that they are capable of grappling with the most contentious issues of our time in a thoughtful and sophisticated manner. In short, it demonstrates that game design techniques are applicable to subjects that the conventional industry would never touch--and that the palette of the possible in games is far broader than is generally conceived.

PeaceMaker is a game that anyone interested in games qua games should play.

Jane McGonigal on Boing Boing Boing

In episode 13 of the boing boing podcast, the boing boingers interview Jane McGonigal, an alternate reality game designer. I found the interview fascinating. I love her description of ARGs—a virtual world that exists in the real world—and I enjoyed listening to her enthuse about all the things ARGs can accomplish. She talks about the sense of community, real-world interactions, and cooperative solving efforts that bring people together in global alliances. She talks about the importance of story, and notes that her background as a theater geek is more useful to her than her background as a tech geek.

I didn't note where the interview starts; there's a bit of "The Week In Boing Boing" patter that happens at the beginning. For once, though, I didn't find that annoying.

The Noughties

What do you call this first decade of this century? Instead of the eighties or nineties? According to A Way With Words, the OED and other sources list "the noughties" as the correct term. The hosts also say that it doesn't conform to the OED's rules for non-contrived words, but it's the closest there is to an "official" name. The 1900s were, I believe, "the oughts."

Wei-Hwa's Memory Lists Puzzle

As I've said before, Wei-Hwa Huang produces a puzzle gadget for your Google home page, in which new puzzles show up from time to time. The last one was more trivia-oriented than his normal fare, and might appeal to those of you who like that kind of thing. Given a category, name all the members of the set in a given time. Some examples are "Snow White's Seven Dwarves" or "The Fifty States." Of course there's also topics such as "the Mohs scale for hardness."

Feeling Gypped

A friend of mine once slapped my wrist for using the word "gypped" because of its offensive connection to Gypsy: i.e., the stereotype that Gypsies are swindlers and that's where the word originated. I noted the offense and became mindful of the word.

The subject came up on a recent episode of A Way With Words, and I was surprised to learn that "gyp" has an uncertain origin, one that may or may not be connected to Gypsies, who after all call themselves the Roma. One of the hosts, however, described his SOSH principle: Save Oneself Some Hassle. As he notes, "What a rip!" fills the same need, even for a rhymester, and you don't have to deal with naysayers. He also described Salman Rushdie's comment about "behalfism," where one person expresses offense on behalf of someone else, even though that person wouldn't be offended.

Twilight Princess Speed Run

There are lots of ways to get the most enjoyment out of a long, sweeping game such as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. You could, as my co-worker Aaron did, get just about every heart piece and play every minigame. Or you could play it over and over, trying to do it as quickly as possible. A speed run of the game has been posted in which the player finishes the entire game in just under 6 hours. I think it took me that long to figure out how to fish.

via Joystiq

Poof. Perplex City Ends.

Huh.

Season 2 of Perplex City has been canceled, according to this post by Adrian Hon. The ARG, whose next installment was to start today, has been terminated, and probably won't happen in the future. The writing team has left Mind Candy (the development company). No explanation of why is given, "because I'm not at liberty to say." Violet's blog gives the "in-game" rationale. It's unclear from Adrian's post if the Wave 2 cards will be released—it sounds like they will, if only to recoup costs—but we who are playing it shouldn't expect anything beyond that.

Well, that's a drag. I'm most of the way through Season 2, Wave 1, having all the cards except for one black and half a dozen silvers and having solved most of the cards I've currently got. I've gotten into the cards more this time, and I've got a game rank of 207 as I write this (with a break of 200 imminent, once I finish this &$#@! Braille word search). I've seen some neat puzzle ideas that I've filed away for future reference. So I'm sad.

I guess I can get back to focusing on my mechanical puzzles now. And my video games. And, you know, my writing projects.

Update: Naturally, there's already speculation that it's a hoax, since today was the first day of the ARG. Also, it sounds as if they will release the cards through Season 2, though this is hearsay.

via Joystiq