“Hey…what are you reading?”

I know I need to get caught up on my experiences at the Army’s Warrior Transition Course and the holidays and <gulp> my oldest daughter’s engagement, but I just wanted to do a quick post on a couple books I’m reading.

Level Up

I’ve been a big fan of Scott Rogers since I first saw his talk “Everything I Learned About Game Design I Learned From Disneyland” at the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Some people share my my appreciation of Scott’s work; and some people don’t. That’s cool, I’m not saying he’s the end-all-beat-all genius of game design. (After all, I’ve played Pac Man World and it kind of sucks.) But having seen the talk and felt his enthusiasm for the subject first hand, I had to pick up his book Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design. I’m about 3/4 of the way though it on my Kindle and I’m really enjoying it. It is an outstanding exploration of the details of designing fun and engaging experience in interactive storytelling in all its facets – from Mario Brothers to Alan Wake. I really recommend this for anyone in the industry and for anyone who really enjoys gaming.

A Theory of Fun

On the other hand, I also checked out A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster (courtesy of the Microsoft corporate library). Superficially, these books cover some of the same ground, but my what a difference. Raph’s book is not without merit, but the presentation of the material is really quite poor – especially in comparison with Scott’s book. Beyond just the material itself, the production values of the book – which is filled with very crude doodle-like illustrations – really detracts from the material that is there. It’s not fun, it’s not interesting, and it isn’t fun to look at. Scott’s book is all of those things and more. I feel like Raph’s book sets out to be a little more academic while specifically claiming that it isn’t.

Other stuff…

I was getting my stuff together for my upcoming Reserve weekend and was putting on my ACUs to make sure everything was in the right place and they were presentable. It was kind of weird to be reminded – oh yeah, I really am in the Army. In December, we just had a one day assembly where we had an ASU inspection, a legal briefing for an upcoming deployment, and then a Christmas party in the evening, which was very nice. It’s weird to remember that just a couple months ago I was wearing it constantly.

Here’s a picture of me and the delightful Mrs. Pulsipher in the living room on the way to the party.

As a final note, can I get an “amen” from the congregation on those great Xbox numbers in the Microsoft quarterly earnings released today? And remember, you can never have too many Xbox consoles, games, Kinect sensors, and LIVE subscriptions. Stock up!

P.F. Changs wishes you “good fortune”

Speaking of my trophy wife, I had not been out on any kind of a date with her in awhile. It is pretty sad to leave our youngest daughter home alone with the dog while we go out. But, alas, it must be done.

We tried to find a movie, but, holy cow, are we in some sort of major climate change induced movie drought? Are Hollywood leftists so busy enjoying the new socialism that they don’t have time for work?

So, anyway, we went to P. F. Chang’s in Bellevue Square. I believe I am the last person on earth who had not yet eaten there, so it was fun.
The food was delicious. We had the lemon chicken, cashew-almond chicken, and orange peel chicken. Yes, yes. Somehow we ended up with all chicken dishes. But it was fab nonetheless.

At the end of the meal, we got our fortune cookies and this was mine: I’ll let you know how that goes…

Extremist chatter: A report from the Tea Parties

As a new member of the Homeland Security watchlist, I went to two Tea Party events yesterday. One in Bellevue at lunch time and one in Seattle in the evening.
Thanks for the idea Rick Santelli.

Bellevue

The Bellevue event was on the lawn at City Hall and was really well attended for a mid-day event. Using the technique of counting a section of the crowd and then multiplying that across the area, I came up with about 1200 people. There were some empty pockets here and there though, so let’s call it about a thousand. I’ve not seen an estimate of the attendance in any of the press reports.

In general, I’m really opposed to Republican politicians glomming onto these events. Let’s not forget that they spent like drunken sailors while in power and that the first round of bailouts was a product of the Bush administration. (And, as someone at the event said, at least the drunken sailor is spending HIS OWN money.)
However, a Bellevue City Councilman, Conrad Lee, spoke. Mr. Lee is an immigrant (a legal one, thank you Mr. Lee) who came to the US 15 years ago. He said that at the time he was just looking for economic freedom and opportunity. He found that but he found something more that he hadn’t expected in the political freedom and the opportunity to make a difference. It was a great story and I love hearing from first generation (legal) immigrants.
Another speaker was Toby Nixon. Toby is also a Microsoft employee and happens to be an LDS guy. He is a former state legislator and now the head of a policy group. In his talk, he said, “There are four boxes that protect our freedom. The soap box. The ballot box. The jury box. And the ammo box. Preferably in that order.” (insert wild applause and hoo-uhs) He elaborated on each of the first three and one of the things I appreciated was his call to stop trying to get out of jury duty. I’ve never been sure why people do that. Do we want juries left in the hands of complete morons?

My hastily made sign read “Pay your own #!?@~$">#!?@~$ mortgage!” on one side and “Dude, where’s my country?” on the other.

I had to leave a little early to get back to work for a 1pm feature review meeting. Good time though.

Seattle
This was a family affair for us (except our oldest who is at college). We got to the event a little late. I was puzzled why the woman MC’ing was dressed as Alice (from Alice in Wonderland). As I write this, I’m just remembering the tea party scene, so I suppose it makes some kind of sense.
There were more people at the Seattle event, but still less than two thousand. I haven’t seen any estimates, but it was much more organized in the sense that they had sign up lists to stay involved going forward and “official” people in little yellow hard hats who were moving through the crowd doing various “official” things.
And it was in Seattle, so there were a few nuts. There was one anti-Walmart guy and one guy who was either for or against bioengineering, but we couldn’t really tell. He was dressed in a black facemask and goggles and had a cape made from a UW Huskies flag. <head scratching> Not sure what was up with that.

The worst part is there were a couple of people with really offensive signs. One depicted a Barak Obama figure with strings going up to a Star of David and a stereotypical “evil Jew” controlling him. That doesn’t even make any sense. I don’t think Obama has shown himself to be even a friend of Israel. In addition to being anti-Semitic and evil, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
The other sign was a single “counter-protestor” with a reference to sexual activity that is the current way of talking about the Tea Parties on MSNBC. I would wager that more people saw this guy’s stupid sign at the Tea Party than were watching MSNBC in that same 2 hour timeslot nationwide.

Anyway, great energy in the crowd and a fun family event. Here we are being escorted away by the horse mounted riot police.*

* OK, not really, we just happened to be walking in front of them on the way to the car, but seemed funny they were there.

I think daughter #2 was hoping for some window smashing and car burning and may have felt a little disappointed when we all dispersed peacefully at the end.

So how about you? How’d you spend your April 15th?

Gather 'round the (game) board

Board games are kind of a strange thing. Supposedly, they bring people together for laughter and good times. At least that's what Hasbro would have us believe. However, I remember when my big brother was teaching me how to play Risk when I was 10 or 11 and I flipped the board in anger - at least once. I notice that Risk is NOT on the Hasbro Family Game Night web page.

When our kids were younger we used to play Chinese checkers quite a bit. For some reason, we bought - and continue to use a Chinese checkers board that is fairly thin metal with kind of a rim around it. Unfortunately, this has a side-effect that if someone pushes down on the board just so the board is now cocked and ready to fire. There is no way to get the round out of the chamber, once you heard the tell-tale "click-clunk" of that board when someone made a careless move. It was just a matter of time until, Perfection-like, the marbles all popped up - and then the fun ended and the kids had to go to bed.

In our family, games seem to go in waves. We've had phases for checkers, chess, Chinese checkers, Battleship, Pictionary, Encore, and Domination.

I'm not really a fan of Sorry. In fact, I once passed out while playing it during a family game night. Of course, I had pneumonia at the time, but I still blame Sorry.

Encore is a tedious game for Mormons to play - things will be going along fine with normal pop and other well known songs, but eventually, in desperation, someone starts belting out a Primary song. As with other arms races, this is countered with a Primary song from the opponent. And then long, tedious madness ensues.

Domination (also known as "Focus") was an old Hasbro game. Unlike most board games, which seem to live on forever in various repackagings, Domination seems genuinely gone. My wife liked the game as a child and has spoken of it often over the years. I finally found a very nice copy on eBay and it is really fun. I'm surprised it is gone and yet "Cootie" goes merrily along.

Jeremy Clarkson, of BBC's Top Gear and also a columnist for The Times of London, recently had a very apropos article about board games. Jeremy asserts that despite all the hand-wringing about video games, people actually seem much more driven to violence by board games. As Jeremy points out, if only Hitler had a Playstation, maybe real war would have been unnecessary.

Anyone who has ever suffered through a game of Axis and Allies can probably sympathize with the anger and frustration Hitler felt - moving all those little pieces around on the big command center map boards.