Now here is one book I was happy to delete from my Kindle. I recently finished “A Fire Upon The Deep” by Vernor Vinge. I was throughly disappointed by it.

A cheesy spaceship airbrush, 2 review quotes, one prize sticker and some seriously misguided typography. I should have known.

How I came to read the book I don’t really know anymore. I guess it came up more than once on my Wikipedia excursions. The synopsis sounded interesting. I was expecting the story of a research expedition slowly uncovering a dangerous ancient mystery. Well, that part was covered in the prologue. And it was written from the perspective of the dangerous ancient mystery. What followed was sub-par (or par I guess), indulgent, slow-paced, pointless Future Fantasy schlock:

It confuses me is that is why it is categorized by some as Hard Science Fiction. I guess because it briefly mentions a Ram Scoop? Well that idea was debunked numerous times already.

So in general, it’s self-indulgent, boring, tasteless, insightless and pointless writing. I thing the fact that it received 4 Best “Sci-Fi” awards, tell a lot about “Sci-Fi”.

I recently finished Amnesia: The Dark Descent. If you haven’t heard about it, I think Yahtzee pretty much covers it.

It’s probably one of the most effectively scariest games of all time. It’s quite ingenious. And perhaps the most important thing to note is that it achieves all of this because it dares to actually leave out a lot. Out of curiosity, I started Penumbra, the previous game by Frictional, the studio behind Amnesia. You can clearly tell how they slowly evolved the idea of Amnesia by gradually taking away concepts that don’t add to their cause. The cause of scaring the living shit out of the player. This is also reflected in a recent talk they gave at GDC Europe 2011.

Compared to Penumbra, Amnesia feels much more complete and streamlined in general. There are lots of details that contribute to this. In this post I want to focus on two.

First: Combat

The first being the most obvious one: combat. There is none in Amnesia. Many people notice that about the game and love it because of this. Combat lies at the center of pretty much every game nowadays. But you might recall that it wasn’t always the case. Over time, video games just gradually drifted into a understanding combat as the standard go-to activity to center around. There is nothing wrong about having combat per se. But it becomes a problem when it’s used as a default activity without considering the consequences. So most horror games nowadays have combat even though this actually completely undermines what they are trying to achieve. Scary things are more scary if there is nothing you can do about them. It should be a no-brainer.

No guns should make you feel more secure.. wait, I mean scared! Ok, it’s a bad example.

Of course, combat in horror games is often somewhat limited by ammunition and so on. But the Frictional guys realized that this doesn’t actually work so well either. Combat is what I would call “magnetic”. You can’t just have a little bit of combat. Because then, the players will complain about how limited the combat is. You have to decide if your game is ABOUT combat or not.

Second: Game Mechanics

The other big thing they left out is much more subtle and controversial. They left out what game designers have been worshiping ever since the the title “game designer” was invented. They left out game mechanics.

Now that needs some explanation. Because clearly, they haven’t left out EVERY game mechanic. But they abandoned the idea that all important aspects of the game need to be represented as game mechanics.

*** SPOILER ALERT *** – I will be discussing something that can seriously spoil the game for you. It’s not even a story detail but something more fundamental. So if you haven’t played it and you really want to explore it for yourself, you might want to quit now, play the game and return later.

What I’m talking about insanity. Frictional wanted to discourages players to hide from enemies in dark places all the time. After all, this wasn’t a stealth game. The idea was to keep players constantly on their toes. So there should be no “comfortable” place to stay. They came up with the idea that the player loses sanity when they are in the dark. So staying in the light makes you visible to enemies. Staying in the dark makes you go slowly insane. The problem was how to represent insanity. The knee-jerk reaction would be to have some game mechanic behind this. For example, Sanity could be like some sort of a health meter. Lose too much and you go game over.

But Frictional found this very difficult to balance. Instead they ended up removing almost all consequences to insanity. All insanity does in the game now is to introduce a whole symphony of various, distracting effects. The image warps, creepy sound effects come in, insects crawl on the screen. They are all highly undesirable so they achieve the goal of discouraging players to stay in the darkness. But they don’t have enough consequences for players to start min-maxing or “grinding” the principle. So players won’t lose if they just so happen to run out of oil for their lamp. But it will still feel intense.

In fact, they found out that it felt EVEN MORE intense. Thomas Grip gave a marvelous example in the Q&A session of the talk to make the point even clearer. Think of how you would create a romance game. You would usually create some sort of meter to measure how much the other loves you. Perhaps it would be “heart points” or something. Every decision would make you win or lose heart points. But this would lead to the players not paying attention to how THEY feel about the decisions. They would simply try to figure out which one is worth most heart points. A romance game without a heart points mechanic would allow players to forget about “grinding” that system and focus on actually role-playing the romance part.

You’re doing it rong. Galgun has both, heart points AND combat. Romance fail.

It occurred to me that this was basically the argument against Gamification but applied back on games. If having badges and achievements encourages mindless grinding and prevents people from enjoying an activity for what it’s worth, similar systems within actual games should also be questioned. Is “good” and “evil” something that needs to be represented by a number? Or can we just let the players decide how good / evil they feel depending on their actions? Is “charisma” something that needs to be mathematically determined in the character stats or can we just let players act out a scene and determine that way how charismatic they really are?

This realization is something that goes well with my own thoughts about challenge in games. Of course, you could put this off as simply a form of Cognitive Dissonance. And it might actually explain it at least partially. But working on TRAUMA I realized that there is a weird in-between category of gameplay. One that isn’t as focused on causality as game mechanics are. But one that is still clearly interactive unlike cut-scenes. It is a form of gameplay that derives it’s meaning from the players themselves instead of external reward structures. I feel like this is exactly where we will find the potential for expressive video games in the future. I’m looking forward to explore this idea in the future myself. And I’m looking forward to see what Frictional does next.

There was no space geekout post for quite some time. So naturally, I have quite a bit of a backlog of space discoveries stored up. Here is the thing that was rocking my world for a few weeks now. We have arrived at Vesta!

Well, not we exactly. A small space probe called Dawn did, an extraordinary little machine that uses some brand new ion propulsion technology. The above is a series of images Dawn did. The series was somewhat smoothed-out to create this amazing animation.

Why was Dawn able to make an entire series when most other probes only get deliver individual pictures? Well because Dawn actually went into Vesta’s orbit! This is quite unusual because it is much more complicated and expensive to do. But now Dawn will stay with Vesta for quite some time and do some prime in-depth observations.

So what is Vesta anyway? Well, it’s the second-biggest asteroid in the entire asteroid belt! It’s 530km across! It’s not an asteroid, it’s a small moon. Well, it’s an asteroid alright. But it’s a very, very big one. The biggest we have visited yet. Here is a comparison.

Remember lil old Lutetia up there?

As you can see, Vesta pretty much dwarfs all of the other asteroids, many of which we have been talking about here. But perhaps you want to compare it to something familiar. So here is how Vesta would look next to the Moon.

Disclaimer: For illustration purposes only. Might be inaccurate. Let me know if you think it is.

So there you go. It’s pretty much a small moon. Each of the craters you see on it is as big as an entire city. But of course, the gravity on it would be pretty negligible.

But we aren’t landing there yet. There are much more fundamental questions about it we need to get to the bottom of first. Vesta appears to have quite some history. Especially at it’s south pole is a huge mountain. You can see it exactly in the middle of the first image. It’s probably one of the largest mountains in the Solar System and it resulted from one of the largest recorded impacts in the history of the Solar System. Something smacked Vesta real good and pretty much defined what we see today. For starters, the streaks on it’s side probably resulted from that huge impact. But even more importantly, the impact crated a whole class of smaller asteroids called the Vesta Family. They spread all over the Solar System and they still make up 6% of the Asteroid Belt. Some of them might even crashed on Earth. There is good evidence that suggest a certain type of Meteorites are debris from the Vesta impact.

So as you can see, a lot happened on Vesta. The Asteroid had a huge impact (pun intended) on the slice of space we live in. And now we finally have eyes and ears right there where everything happened. Exciting!

But if you think this is it, think again. Dawn will eventually leave Vesta and go on to visit Ceres – the single, biggest asteroid we know about. The only asteroid even bigger than Vesta. It’s so big even the scientist didn’t feel comfortable calling it “Asteroid”. So they called it “Dwarf Planet”. All this on the next episode of The Adventures of Starship Dawn.

Time for some movie talk. I recently saw the movie In Time. Have a trailer.

The movie was directed and written by Andrew Niccol, who also did Gattaca. And indeed I found In Time to be similar to Gattaca in many ways. Both movies have a great premise and lots of striking and memorable details. Both movies fail to follow their concepts to their ultimate conclusions and offer a half-hearted mixture of shallow truisms instead.

The premise this time is really something special. The story takes place in a near future where people don’t age past the age of 25. To offset the growing population due to immortality, everybody has a built-in countdown timer. Once the timer runs out you die. Instead of earning money, you earn time for your timer.

Here is where lots of fascinating details kick in. For example, you can transfer time between two people by holding hands. This opens a whole spectrum of dramatic events. There are robberies, arm wrestling gets a whole new spin and so forth…

More importantly, radically fulfilling the “time is money” concept creates wonderfully fascinating dilemmas. What if using a bus costs more time than actually walking to you destination? How much life time is a cup of coffee worth?

Additionally, the movie also contains some nice awkward moments that result from everybody looking as if they are 25. The story starts with an excellent scene where a mother is confused for a girlfriend.

But once you’ve seen all the cool radical moments that result from the premise, In Time doesn’t go anywhere. In the first half, the hero goes from rags to riches and then back to being a fugitive with just minutes to spare. Once the situation stabilizes, the movie runs out of ideas. There are multiple moments in the entire plot just stalls. When there is nothing more for the hero to do. This is the point where some really unrealistic goals come in from nowhere. The hero decides he wants to “change the system” all of a sudden. The bizarre thing is that he actually succeeds. With the magic of editing the hero and the girl manage to rob super-secure banks, kindnap the most tightly protected millionaires and to totally revolutionize this constructed world. If two completely untrained people can uspet the system so much, one is left to wonder how the system was able to be stable in the first place.

It the story-writing equivalent to a strawman argument. Create a stable, unjust system and then reveal that it actually wasn’t really stable at all.

In case of In Time, it’s even worse since upsetting the system doesn’t really have a point. You see, there is no real advocate for the system to exist in the first place. There is nobody giving good arguments for why people have to die. Even the reason above (overpopulation) is pure conjunction on my side. The bad guy’s arguments pretty much boil down to “the system must exist… well because!”. On the other hand, the good guy’s argument boil down to “it’s not natural!”. So abolishing the system is a non-solution to a non-problem.

One is left to wonder. How did that system come to be in the first place? Genetically engineering people this way and establishing such an invasive economy must have been a tremendous project. It’s likely to have had some pretty good reasons. But of course, you couldn’t include those in the movie since that might leave the premise open to critique. Such reasons would be perhaps even too compelling to brush aside with hollow phrases such as “it’s not natural!”.

Of course, the entire premise might be seen as an analogy to modern economy and the 99% issue that is so prominent right now. In this case, the movie fails as well. The system in In Time seems to follow very different goals to the commercial economy. The goal of the In Time system is to systematically kill people. Which seems to suggest that they are economically completely expendable in the first place. In Commercialism, the goal is make people earn at least some money so they can keep on consuming. You need to keep them in debt and give them a job to pay off that debt so you can exploit them for labor. You don’t want to make people go completely bankrupt. Hobos are economically worthless and therefore not desirable.

So In Time fails as a 99% analogy. Even it it was a good analogy, it wouldn’t really deliver any arguments. But that’s kinda what Gattaca was like too. It didn’t really make any statements about genetic engineering because the system it described was so artificial and contrived.

I still feel like Gattaca came out better in one regard. It was a relatively slow movie that worked with simple, tense moments of the main hero trying to avoid getting caught. It’s a type of movie that works very well with Andrew Niccol’s style. In Time seems to go the Michael Bay route and just falls flat. None of the actions scenes really work. As a result the structural flaws that were hidden so well in Gattaca become blatantly obvious in In Time.

So I suggest you keep your expectations low and just enjoy individual scenes. It can be an inspiring movie. There are some moments in there I already see myself referencing in the future.

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: Inside Krystian’s Chinstrap. We are back from a break with this blast from the past. Wie play Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD and discuss beards.

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Enjoy!