Ian On The Red Dot

You know you play too much DOTA when:

1. Before you sleep, you don’t count sheep. You count creep kills.

2. When your girlfriend says to you ” You are my bf “, you wonder why she is calling you a battlefury.

3. When all your java code which is supposed to reference a variable named ‘gs’ (i.e. government securities ) accidentally got refactored to reference ‘gg’.

4. Whenever you wait for your gf, you wonder if 30 minutes is quick enough for a game at the LAN shop.

5. When you buy a new high resolution super big monitor, the first thing your friends ask you is whether you zoomed in to check CM, Drow and Lina out.

Hmmm…anymore to add guys and girls who play DOTA?

Last Friday, FO, Aaron, Aaron’s wife and me went to L’estaminet at Greenwood where we have an amazingly large family sized pizza for dinner. The pizza as usual was delicious.

After dinner, FO took out his set of Arkham Horror and started teaching us how to play the game. The game has an extremely rich storyline and gameplay. I’m a big fan of Buffy and the game allowed my inner slayer to roam free. I’m pretty sure we didn’t get to appreciate the full texture of the game that night. If only we had more time, and more experience in playing the game, we could have invested more in the storytelling elements - the lighting where we sat suited the game. No matter. The game was still terribly enjoyable.

I was probably the most useless player on the team. Notwithstanding the fact I was a bit distracted what with the beer and chatting with the staff, the character I chose, while in theory should have been a mighty slayer of monsters and seasoned sealer of portals, was a nun who pretty much didn’t contribute the whole night. I’m pretty sure I played the character wrongly. Should have focused more on spells.

Only managed to vanquish like two monsters and sealed one portal. Terrible.

I can imagine Asha Gill pointing at me and proclaiming I was the weakest link.

My character card for Sister Mary below:

Somehow this photo turned out wrong yet seemed so suited to the theme of the game:

FO and Aaron’s wife stuck in another dimension:

Aaron’s sexy psychologist stuck in another dimension:

A bunch of us from my company and a few of our friends will be gathering today at the Padang at 6.45pm to try to train for the lost sport of the ancient greeks. The lost sport involves running out of a labyrinth blindfolded. On a side note, I just learned there is a difference between a labyrinth and a maze.

Anyway, if you are around the area and want to come down and try playing the lost sport, do join us. There might even be beer.

Below are some videos of athletes from other countries training for the lost sport:

The Swiss:

The Americans:

The New Zealanders:

Came across a rather old article on Gamasutra about how a team of students ran a project with the goal to prototype a game in under 7 days.

“Rapid prototyping can be a lot like conceiving a child. No one expects a winner every time, but you always walk away having learned something new, and it’s usually a lot of fun!”

Jane McGonigal shares about why reality is broken and how we can fix it through games.

So right now, pretty much every one of our games works better than reality, because we are the best designers of human experience, and we’re applying all of our talent, all our insight to optimizing virtual experience.

My rant is about the fact that reality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to make.

We make the games, we have the knowledge, and we have the power. We can take what we’ve learned by making games and apply it to reality, to make real life work more like a game – not make our games more realistic and lifelike, but make our real life more game like – so that when people all over the world wake up every morning, they wake up with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants them to be happy.

As usual, it is another great post which really got me thinking about how I can apply gaming principles to my life. I remembered when I was younger, I would play KOEI games where at the start of the game, we were allocated points and had to decide how to allocate them to customize our character’s abilities - do I give the character more charisma so that I can win the loyalty of my enemy’s general, do I give my character more fighting ability …

Each turn, I would be having only a certain amount of resources like food and gold and would have to make agonizing decisions how to allocate them. Once a decision was made, I would be informed of the results and the impact to the game’s goals immediately or after the number of turns for the action to be completed. The feedback was important to gauge and tune the resource allocations.

In life, do we have such efficient and informative feedback systems regarding the allocation of our resources like time, money and energy? Feedback systems that let us know the impact of the decisions we take to the rest of our life. For example, each month an individual who has a credit card would most probably get a statement stating his or her expenditure for a certain period - we know where the money goes. Do we have a way to measure the impact of the money spent besides that on the balance sheet? Do we have a way to say X money was spent on transport, Y amount saved towards a goal? Do we have a way to say X amount was spent on activities that shorten our lives, Y amount on activities that enrich it? Do we have a way to gauge how far or near we are to a goal after each time we debit or credit our account? Do we have a way to reduce our life-bar when we spent money on smoking and drinking?

Some people do implement systems to help record and track their expenses. But the use of the system takes discipline - it isn’t fun like a game - which makes the consistent use of the system difficult. I think if we can do what Jane is saying, making our life more game-like, it would give people an incentive as well as a fun tool to make goals and attain them.

An essay about the need for game criticism by Greg Costikyan. Whenever you write something, are you reviewing or criticizing? Do you know the difference?

A review is a buyer’s guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it. A good review goes beyond that, and suggests who should buy it, since not everyone enjoys everything.

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn’t intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers’ purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work.

I played this game and nearly cried.  As kottke advised, play it first then read the creator’s statement.

via: www.kottke.org

My thoughts (please read it only after playing the game): Continue Reading »

Jane McGonigal shares her experience with the Nike+ running system. At the end of her post, she mentions designing a MMO around Nike+. Immediately, the movie ‘Run Lola Run‘ came into mind. The movie has the same premise as ‘Groundhog Day‘ where the protagonist keeps repeating the same day over and over again. It is a really good movie that reminds you that our lives are all interconnected in ways that we cannot possibly understand and how little interactions can make a profound impact on someone’s life.

If you thought that Desktop Tower Defense was bad due to the way it reduced your productivity level, I learned of a new game via ARGNet that is proving to be more addictive - Chain Factor. However, there is more to this game and it finally explains this post on PSFK.

Related links (from ARGNet):

Discussion of the game at UnFiction.

The Chain Factor Wiki.