Google Wave

A few weeks ago, I watched a video about Google’s new product, Wave.  Ostensibly, Google Wave is Google’s view on what you would get if email had been invented now using modern techniques.  By combining the best of email and instant messaging, you would get a dynamic conversation that was both synchronous and asynchronous, stored in a central location so that there would be a single defined copy of ‘the conversation’, or wave as they like to call it.

In practice, what this sounds like to me is communicating with someone by editing a Google doc at the same time.

If this sounds kludgy to you - rather than brilliant - then congratulations, you have a critical mass of properly firing neurons.

Despite my skeptism, I decided to try it out.  I’ve been wrong before.  My impressions were thus:

1. Because HTML 5 (which will supposedly deprecate the need for silverlight and flash, it is to laugh) is not supported in Internet Explorer - the browser used by 65% of the world - and because google apparently can’t be bothered to make Google Wave work without it, the only way to use Google Wave in IE is to install the Chrome Browser Frame, essentially a browser within a browser that allows sites to switch out IE’s rendering engine and use Chrome instead, if they choose.  There are a million reasons why this is terrible.
2. At least when I was using it, it didn’t even work.  Friends of mine who have Wave can’t see Waves I invite them to, nor can I see waves they invite me to.  Waves I create are not even saved within my view.  This means that Google Wave currently does absolutely nothing at all.
3. In addition to installing a useless, market fragmenting plug-in to use their application which does nothing (or installing firefox, which is what I actually did), it apparently only lets me do nothing with people who are already on my google contacts list.  It will allow me to ’start a new wave’ with these people (ficticiously), or to ‘ping them’.  Both of these things seem to do the same thing, only one of them opens a wave above the top nav bar, and one opens it in the right view pane.  Neither works.
4. Even if this did all work, the usage model is bizarre.  When I say it’s like communication via google doc, I mean that in the worst way.  It also means it’s non-linear, so you can go back up further in the conversation and add new threads, which means as someone trying to follow the conversation, you need to continually scroll back up for new bits that have appeared further up the conversation.  Wave has a control panel similar to what you might see on a VCR to play and rewind a conversation, which should scare you.

This is perhaps the worst product I’ve seen out of Google yet.  Lots of people create useless products, but it takes someone really special to create something that does nothing, and would be useless even if it did what it was supposed to, with the kind of financial backing that Google has.

I really don’t know what the hell is going on at Google these days.  Once upon a time they were releasing things that were extremely complex and useful, requiring deep understanding of algorithms, or positioning information in ways that were useful and had never been done well before.

The offerings these days are applications based on web-kit, leveraging ’standards’ that haven’t been adopted in 2/3 of the browser marketshare, requiring anyone on the platform to get deeply in bed with Google, and providing no value whatsoever, unless in this brave new world confusion and failure are now valued monetary instruments.

No Son of Mine

If you’ve played Oregon Trail (as I understand almost all Americans have at one point or another during grade school), this will likely amuse you:

No Son of Mine Plays Oregon Trail Like That

A Snippet to tantalize:

I once completed the trail having survived three broken wagon wheels. It took me 10 days to find an Indian to trade with for the third wheel, and I still scored 6,000 points. The other day, I saw you quit the trail immediately after your wagon capsized in the Kansas River. You lost only an ox and a hundred pounds of food. I drank myself to sleep that night.

Michael Nelson Price, whoever you are, you are one strange dude.  And a tip of the hat to you sir, for that.

Twitter

I can’t remember if I’ve ranted about my feelings on Twitter in the past, but Penny Arcade tends to sum them up.  Nevertheless, last week I decided to sign up, mostly because I don’t want to be the guy that bitches about something he’s never tried (MySpace still fails hard).

The first thing I will say about it is that, despite the horrid banality, Twitter is extremely addictive.  There are folks who mostly write about whatever boring shit they happen to be doing, but you don’t follow those folks.  Unless of course they’re celebrities.  There is definite VOYEURISM going on in Twitterland, and Voyeurism is something that hooks into the general population with serrated barbs.

When email became widely available, people stopped sending letters, because it was easier to send shorter, more frequent emails, rather than go through the trouble of using snail mail.  When IM became widely available, email became relegated to text that either was longer or more complex, or needed to be ‘on record’.  Instant messaging means extremely short messages and conversations can be played out in real time.  Twitter (and derivatives) is another mutation of this.  Conversations are essentially asynchronous, but they are also public, which combines the traits of both IM and blogging.  You write about things that are odd or banal because you can, and because they’re not directed at anyone in particular.  Things that would never be said in IM get twittered because there’s no inherent expectation that a specific person may care, just that somebody _may_ care.  Likewise because you can write only 140 characters, things that would be too short to warrant a blog entry (or would be off topic) get written on Twitter.

This creates a very odd noosphere.

My twitter feed is an motley assortment of Facebook-like updates on what my friends are doing, game industry tidbits, and bizzare arcana, mostly coming out of Warren Ellis and Lore Sjöberg.  Because it can be read from or updated on the fly from your phone, it provides a sort of constant link to the interwebs, like a methadone drip for a heroine addict.

I guess I’ll be hanging around there for a bit longer.

Guilt Inducing Video Games

The Real Way to Get Your Girlfriend Into Gaming

One of my coworkers was moderating a panel at PAX last weekend called How to get your girlfriend into gaming.  Kotaku’s summary is as follows:

1) Give your girl a game that’s tailored to her interests; don’t force her to play a game just because you like it.
2) Play co-op, not competitive. Some girls are unnerved by 13-year-old trash-talkers.
3) Don’t force her to identify herself as a gamer; it’s enough that she’s playing a game.
4) Spend as much time doing what she wants to do in her life as you expect her to spend time gaming with you (basic rule of relationships).
5) Don’t act like an asshole while you’re gaming – it makes games into the enemy.
6) Don’t belittle her choices of game; maybe she likes Barbie’s Horse Adventure.
7) Let her backseat game you and don’t argue with what she tells you to do; if she tells you to make Master Chief jump to his death, just do it – it’ll be fun for her and get her one step closer to trying it herself. (That’s my own personal rule.)

This list has some good points to it, but at the end of the day, if your girlfriend/wife/whatever isn’t into games to begin with, then she probably doesn’t know what kind of games suit her interests.  You have a limited number of chances to introduce her to things as well, because every time you introduce her to a game she doesn’t like, it makes it harder to do it the next time.  Let’s talk about three games you should start with to narrow the spectrum of games she’ll be interested in.

Castle Crashers

This is an excellent game to start with, because the controls are extremely straightforward, and the two of you are playing together to fight a common enemy.  If she falls in battle, you can essentially resuscutate her for free, so she isn’t dead all the time, watching you play the game.  The game is also pretty lighthearted, and gets her used to a controller without being too obtuse about it.  If this goes over well, you can start introducing her to games with a little more complex control schemes until she has the controller down solid.

Carcassonne

On the other hand, maybe your girl is more strategic.  This is the title I got my girlfriend into games with, and she kicks my ass at it every time now.  Games like Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Lost Cities, and Settlers of Catan avoid a sophisticated control scheme or twitch reflexes.  What they provide is a sophisticated strategic gameplay, and more importantly, a social one.  While she might be competing with you in these games, she won’t feel like you’re winning because you can handle a controller better than she can.  If she digs these games, try introducing her to strategically more complex games like Heroes of Might and Magic or Civilization 4.  If you’re going to go down that road, I would strongly advise playing a hotseat game, and walking her through everything you do, and explaining what things mean, what one might do in one situation or another.  Never tell her what she should be doing, part of gaming is exploring the possibility space like you once did.  Just be her guide, and hopefully she’ll be marching her armies into your capital in no time.

Spore

If the above two don’t work, Spore should be your litmus test.  The game is easy and intuitive to understand, and has great fun appeal.  Will Wright’s previous game, The Sims, was one of the greatest selling titles of all time with women, in part because of its social aspects.  You can pretty much set her loose with this one, and heal some of the damage you did when she hated the first two games.

Now if you’ve done all that, and she’s still not interested, I think we can safely say you’re SOL.  Just take into consideration that not every relationship needs to be fused with all interests.

Nostalgia

In the lobby of my Office, there’s an Xbox 360 with a full Rock Band setup, several retail titles, and essentially every Xbox Live Arcade game published thus far available for people to play.  Once in a while, you’ll find someone’s kids out in the lobby playing with it while their parents finish up some work for the day.

Presently there’s two boys playing outside, and of all the games they have available, they’re playing the XBLA version of the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game.

I burned a lot of hours playing that game as a kid.  I guess some things never change.

Out of Town

I’m going to be out of town for a few days, so no new posts until next week.

Shiny

I’ve added a dose of shiny to my site, so if you’ve been reading on RSS, come stop by in person.

Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.

It’s been almost three weeks since my last post, and this is largely due to the evil that is final exams.  Or to be more precise, it’s due to the aftermath of it.  As any university student can tell you, final exams are a time where you are projected into a wasteland of caffeine and junk food, where you try to learn 4 months of material in a handful of days (or hours).  The re-emergence from this wasteland has for me been traditionally curtailed by starting work the immediate week following.

Having now passed all of my final final exams, I’m now done with the University of Waterloo forever.  Several weeks have now been spent arranging the particulars of my move to Washington, as well as soaking up some new releases.  Having thoroughly ignored both my blog and my massive list of RSS feeds for the last few weeks, I should be emerging from my cave to say, at least, something, with frequency somewhat better than ‘once a month’.

Don’t Touch That Dial

Post are currently lacking due to the prevailing Midterm Exams that we’re experiencing up here.  Word on the street is that it’s GDC next week.  Unfortunately, I’ll be in Cuba that week (last chance to do so before I move the USA), so I’ll be missing it until next year (with any luck).

So until after GDC ends, Ghostrazor will be on hiatus.  I’ve been working on some Game Concept docs, so in the off chance I do post something, it will likely be on one of those.

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