Playing Spore?

You know you are. We know you are. Look for us under the handle "DonGusano". If you friend us, our creatures will appear at random to be your mortal enemies, allies, and pets.

DG's are the ones with eyes in inappropriate places that he insists are NOT penis creatures. Mine are red and/or have too many legs.

Enjoy.

Dr. Horrible and the sex lives of love interests (spoiler alert!)

Well, I'll lose my cred if I don't say something about the sexy, sexy Dr. Horrible. Who already HAS his Ph.D., thank you very much.

I loved it. The characters are quirky and loveable, the music is infectious (I can't get "All the birds are singing THAT YOU'RE GONNA DIE" out of my head). I loved, loved, loved the groupies (which is why I picked the only banner where they appear). I'll admit I was skeptical for the first 60 seconds, but in the end I watched it twice.

If you haven't seen it, do. But stop reading now.

Ok, now the feminist meta commentary. And spoilers. You are warned!

There is something about the (always female) love interests of superheroes and supervillians. They can date the wrong people. They can get engaged to the wrong people. They can even get to the alter in a white dress before realizing this is the wrong person. But they MAY NOT HAVE SEX with the wrong person.

I never thought about this until it became clear that Penny had slept with Captain Hammer. And then my gut said, "She and Dr. Horrible will never be an item now. I wonder how they are going to resolve that." I actually thought that perhaps she would wind up rejecting them both and walking away from the whole superhero/supervillian scene. But it was clear to me that Dr. Horrible's crush would be forever unrequited. (The actual resolution was very interesting and well done; my point is only that there are certain unspoken rules for the genre as a whole.)

Of course, this is a trope in comic books but not in real life, where people (male and female) sleep with the wrong people all the time, and those who really love them often forgive them for it. But there is something about the women of super-guys that invokes the mores of a patriarchy. Their sexuality is restricted; pre-martial sex can only lead to marriage... or death.

Discuss.

Little Shop of Horrors, on my roof

DG came home from our recent trip a little sooner than I did. One of those nights we spoke on the phone, and I asked him if he had checked our vegetables, which grow in a large box on the roof.

There was a long pause, and I knew immediately that he hadn't. "I probably should do that," he said, quickly adding that it had rained quite a bit the week we were gone.

"Be careful. It might have turned into a Little Shop of Horrors up there," I warned him.

Truer words were never spoken. Since we compost, seeds wind up in the fertilizer and sometimes grow. Usually we pull them out, but when I saw a couple of squash-like plants, I figured I'd leave them and see what they turned out to be.

In two weeks these plants grew from cute little things with a couple of leaves, into a monstrous patch, four feet high and wide, shading everything else in the planter with leaves the size of two hands together atop stalks covered in small spines. While unpleasantly prickly, they do have lots and lots of flowers, and what looks like it might be the beginning of some sort of squash-like fruit.

So, I dutifully cut back the leaves and left the flowers and fruits. Because if anything is going to give Teh N00b superpowers, this will definitely be it. I'll leave it to greater minds (you know who you are) to decide what kind of costumed crime-fighting can come out of this.

Open Letter to Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del

Hey, Tim Buckley, no fair trying to make me cry at work.

Seriously, this comic is amazing – poignantly wordless. I had assumed in the previous comic that Ethan was just trying to get out of work; that made it all the more shocking. The last panel captures it all – shock, uncertainty, pain, not knowing what to say. "Loss."

Your comments are great, too. We're gamer parents. We love our son. We love our games. I can’t imagine ever giving either of them up (even if sometimes the games get sidelined for the diapers). One day, we hope Teh N00b will be gaming with us (at least until he becomes a rebellious teenager and finds whatever the "opposite" of gaming is by then).

Thanks for trying to do justice to the fact that gamers do have lives, and that kids can be part of that. If people don’t want to read about gamers reproducing, that’s their problem. Me, I see that reality in our son making cho-cho-trains out of “Ticket to Ride” pieces.

But that’s just me. You do whatever you want, Tim. I'll keep reading.

The Sad, Sad Face of an Academic Game Addict: Traveler IQ Challenge, reviewed

I don't play computer games. Why? They are addictive. Correction: I would be an addict. So I made a promise to myself in college (when I saw my buddies slipping in classes due to computer games) that I would stick to paper-and-pencil gaming.

But a map quiz isn't a game, right? Right?!

The TripAdvisor "Traveler IQ Challenge" on Facebook is totally addictive. For me. Which is sad. But since it is obvious I'm never going to be great at this game (although I AM in the top 400 for the quiz of my own regional specialty, thank you very much!) I will take the academic way out.

I will critique it.

Stop laughing.

The game is based on a standard projection world map. Names of places are flashed at the top of the screen, and you are timed on how fast and how close you can click to the location. Points are awarded and you get a score. You have to score a minimum on each level to continue to the next.

There are some obvious critiques for this game, no doubt made elsewhere. The map is too small, which means that Belize is barely visible and Easter Island doesn't appear at all. Locations have to be given a single point, which means large features like Lake Titicaca are marked for scoring purposes with a single point. There's no credit for knowing that Easter Island is in the Pacific far west of Chile, or knowing merely that a city is somewhere in China -- scoring is all based on distance and time.

My deeper critique has to do with the use of the standard projection map. Sure, it's the one we all grew up with. It's the one we consulted to learn where Timbuktu actually was and such. But it is an inherently skewed vision of the world, where the equator is 2/3 of the way down the page, Greenland is disproportionately huge, and the southern hemisphere is unnaturally condensed.

When I worked in Central America I was introduced to the Peter's Projection Map, which corrects these problems. It has been criticized -- what hasn't? -- but it sure does make the world look very different. My colleague told me he liked it better because his nation looked bigger. It does, but so does everything in the south. As it should. Africa is huge.

What does this mean for my addictive map quiz? Because you are judged on how "far" you click from the actual location -- in terms of miles in real space -- mistakes made in the southern hemisphere (where there are more miles per pixel) are punished disproportionately. This does mean that to do well in this game you need to know where Swaziland and Montevideo actually are; you can't guess as well as you can with locations in Macedonia, which barely covers more than a couple of pixels anyway.

Nevertheless, one's attempts look more accurate in the southern hemisphere because the distance on the screen is far less. Perhaps there is a hidden irony here -- we North Atlantic types usually think we mostly understand the rest of the world until it comes back to bite us in the ass.

Now if you'll excuse me... I have a top score to beat.

It's always zombie season here...

A few months ago I got a new computer.

This means that I can now play all the new games that came out 2 years ago. Don't be silly. The games that come out this year require far too much computing power.

It makes for an interesting insight into what must be very hard to program, moderately hard to program, and so forth. For instance, mirrors must be very difficult. You're more likely to find a mirror in the house of a self-conscious acne-plagued vampire than in a first person shooter. Bullet holes are moderate. Given how much shooting goes on in shooters, you might have thought this would have been solved already. But either they don't make holes, or the holes disappear after a while (which looks really weird when you see it happening).

But what must be virtually impossible to do is deviate at all from the script of the stupid FPS genre. Every damn one of them, since the start of the genre, uses the same elements. Start off by fighting "soldiers." Put a couple of cosmetic touches on them (insect soldiers in Halo, for instance), but they all do the same thing. Run around, hide, and shoot at you. After you get tired of slaughtering them for a while, add in zombies. Put a couple of cosmetic touches on them. (mutants in Far Cry, demons in Doom, etc.), but they all do the same thing. Run up and try to bite you. Then, do combos (soldiers and zombies together! zombies busting out of a closet! soldiers fighting zombies!) Finally, you'll need a boss fight. Of course, if you don't want to use zombies, you can always use Nazis. Ain't nobody like no Nazis.

You'd think that if the companies could spend $1 million getting their engine to push polygons 3% faster and shade their pixels 3% better, they could spend 100 bucks to come up with a new form. But the best anyone has come up with (aside from Thief, which is now probably so old that only net Gomers like myself remember it) is to make cosmetic changes to what is essentially the same game.

Is it the Hollywood problem? People are now sinking so much into these games, that they'd rather make an uninspired but profitable sequel? Is it an open contempt for the consumers (who, granted, are usually profane 10 year olds playing in an internet cafe and screaming obscenities at each other). Is it just what consumers really want?

--- supplemental rant follows ---

Oh, good, another jumping puzzle. That's just what I want in my shooters. Give me a character who can jump one, and only one distance; force me to jump on a series of improbably placed objects over a deadly chasm. They lack the kinetic joy of movement and balance, and they are generally frustrating as hell because the controls for jumping are usually an afterthought in a game that is, let's face, all about firearmy carnage. But they ALL have them. They're e-syphilis.

Oh Gamemaster, My Gamemaster

A few days ago, we lost our GM. A tragic, unpredictable, sudden death. An unexpected email.

Admit the tears the memories came back. A private conversation asking whether I was sure I didn't mind that character dying -- do you want me to pull a deus ex machina and save her? The good humor with which he allowed our munchkin players to min-max impossible characters. Setting the scenario that allowed one of us to warn another: "Watch out for trapdoor bears!" thus spawning an endless series of inappropriate trapdoor monsters, and eventually leading to the name of this website.

When he played as a PC with us in a First Edition With-All-The-Phat-Loot Campaign, his easy humor shone through. He was Fergus, our gnome illusionist complete with a foppish hat. We never let him forget the time he tested an unidentified magic ring by donning it and sticking his head in a bucket of water. He was (rather unfairly) made to role against Systems Shock. It was first edition, after all. Roll, roll against the dying of the light!

The ring turned out to be one of Feather Fall, not Water Breathing.

Poor Fergus the Gnome met his end fighting a dragon while invisible. I called for everyone to get back, but he didn't move fast enough to miss my fireball. I felt guilty for years. He took it in stride, saying he'd been wanting to roll a new character, honest.

When I saw this homage to Gary Gygax on Order of the Stick (a web comic I had introduced to him), I immediately thought of Fergus. I was going to email, but I had a work deadline and trip, and thought I would email him when I got back. I didn't realize then that it was already too late.

Of course, it wasn't all about the game. Our GM was as comfortable talking about the recent elections in Italy or the Israel-Palestine conflict as the mechanics of D&D. He was brilliant, an informed world citizen, a serious scholar in the true sense, and a genuinely kind person. But to us, he was always a gamer first. When we wrote to tell him we were pregnant, he emailed:

Have you guys thought of names yet? Personally, I feel it should embrace his or her cultural heritage, by which I, of course, mean the family tradition of extra-large gaming. Perhaps "Trogdor the Bloody"? I think it works well for a boy or a girl...

But when Teh N00b was born, he brought a "serious" present: a collection of books that our little boy still loves, including "Make Way for Ducklings," a classic set in Boston. When we met once for dinner in Bean-Town, he watched as Teh N00b -- barely a year old -- stole a lemon slice off his father's plate and proceed to alternate between tasting it and pulling egregious faces before tasting it again. He laughed, an honest laugh that showed he both saw the humor in a baby wanting to experience the mildly (but interestingly!) unpleasant, and the humor of the parents who were far too amused to "save" their baby.

The combination of serious and silly came out when we would talk with him about his Greek heritage, of which he was very proud. In a serious moment he told me about how his family had a long tradition of alternating names for first sons, and he fully planned to name his first son after his father, and expected his first grandson to be named after him in turn. In sillier moments, he would smile and shake his head silently while we invented new Greek "traditions" for him to follow, mainly involving tridents and hoplight armor and the Boston Aquarium. It didn't make any sense at the time, either, but it made him laugh, because he was willing to accept us as we were -- silly and all.

Since he moved away from Chicago to return to the East Coast a few years ago, we had seen each other only occasionally. But he was the kind of friend that you never forgot to call when in town, always emailed with the important news, and thought about often.

It is a loss I, and his friends, will never forget.



P.S. I am not putting his name here out of respect for his family, whose wishes I don't claim to know. Those of you who know me, already know of whom I speak. Also, rhetorical apologies to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas.

RIP, Creature from the Black Lagoon

I always read obituaries. It's like a history lesson, but sadder. Plus, it says a lot about us -- what we think is worth remembering and honoring.

Ben Chapman, famous for playing the Creature from the Black Lagoon, recently passed away. No doubt he had a great impact on the cult movie crowd. But I couldn't help but be curious about all those medals he won while a Marine in the Korean War, which (apparently) didn't deserve more than a passing mention...

Throwing snakes at dogs...

... that's got to be a -10 odious personal habit. But since it was a Chihuahua, maybe it's only a -5.