I don’t trust demos. Even though they do sound like a good idea on paper. You let your potential customers try a limited version of the game and hopefully get them hooked encouraging them to try the real deal. My problem with that is the “limited” part. The various ways you limit the game to create a demo can cripple the gameplay and expose the players to a potentially inferior experience. This will do more harm then good. Here are some examples.

• Burnout Paradise – The demo allowed players to traverse Paradise City freely. However, only a handful of events were availible. In the real game, there is an event on every stoplight. The real Paradise City is a place full of action, challenges and collectibles. Compared to that, the demo was a hollow, empty wasteland. I played it when I first got my Xbox and wasn’t really impressed. I got it eventually and was blown away by the difference.

• Need for Speed: Shift – The demo was just a few races with fixed cars. I played it and I was sure I could skip this one. At some point we got a promotional copy at work and I dipped in one evening. I was instantly hooked. The difference here is more subtle than in Burnout. I guess it’s the initial progression in career mode: going from the initial training lap to your first car, doing the first races to buy money etc. Also, the fact that I could quickly obtain a car I was interested in (Mazda RX-8) helped a lot to catch my attention.

• Super Meat Boy – something other than a racing game this time. The demo of Super Meat Boy is a sequence of levels taken from various points in the game. It showcases some easy levels at the beginning but ramps up in difficulty extremely quickly. So quickly in fact that me and my colleges at work ran into a wall just a few levels in. That was the point where we all basically concluded that the game was a sadistic grind fest, just way too hard and not worth the effort. I got the game anyway to support teh indies. The real game is completely different. It has a well balanced difficulty curve that helps building up the necessary skills to properly enjoy the more difficult levels. Features like warp zones and the dark world levels, teh internets and unlockable characters add the kind of variety the demo was missing.

• Monster Hunter Freedom Unite – This is basically what inspired this post. Back when I got my PSP I tried some demos on PSN. One of them was the demo for Monster Hunter Freedom Unite. This was back when Monster Hunter Tri wasn’t even out yet. I had no idea what Monster Hunter was. The demo was a collection of 3 missions of different difficulty. They could be engaged with different gear setups to chose from. However, there was no character management involved so you couldn’t customize the gear. Without any tutorial or training missions, the demo was impossibly hard. I tried the easiest monster a couple of times and got completely annihilated each time. Frustrated and underwhelmed I moved to other games. Monster Hunter Tri later caught my attention because of all the included swag (Controller, Wii Speak). I was expecting a failure but the swag meant the investment would still pay out. To my surprise the full game is completely different. There is a huge amount of tutorials and easy missions to get players used to the combat system. Also, the gathering of resources to craft custom equipment easily takes half of the play time and is an important factor of why the game is so enjoyable. I recently re-played the demo. I was able to beat all monsters with ease. But not only that. The demo was much better at getting me interested in the full game this time around. Now that I know how the full game works I can fill in the blanks.

I believe the idea of a demo is inherently flawed. Granted, these may be just unfortunate examples. Perhaps it depends on the kind of game and on the way the demo is limited. So I’m interested in collecting similar cases to search for patterns. Do you remember instances where a demo failed to convey the idea of the full game?

Wow, it’s been a long time since the last Monster Hunter Tri Diary. I’m kinda running the podcast right now but I haven’t been playing to insistently. I returned to Monster Hunter Tri just recently. I wanted to see what it has to offer before Monster Hunter Portable 3rd comes out.

Monster Hunter Tri sometimes feels like an onion. For once because there is a lot of crying involved. But also because it consists of layers upon layers. I have spent 200 hours on it, yet I still uncover entirely new layers of content.

One layer I recently hit was the high rank. This is something you can only get playing online. Leveling up your Hunter Rank to level 31 unlocks high rank content. This means that the monsters will get more difficult. They will drop rare or even previously unavailable items. Because of this, players can upgrade their gear. The high rank gear unlocks much more skills, enabling much more freedom in experimenting with different setups.

But the interesting part is that in order to reach high rank, you need to hunt the Jhen Mohran – undeniably the largest monster in Monster Hunter Tri.

Needless to say that the battle is epic. Instead of walking around in some forest, your team starts on a ship. The ship is sailing through a desert. Jhen Mohran is a huge whale-like creature swimming in the sand. The monster is much larger than your ship. Fighting him involves shooting with ballistas and cannons as well as jumping on his back to hit vulnerable parts. There is also a huge gong to interrupt his attacks and a giant drill mounted on the bow of the ship.

It is a very different fight from the others. The entire team must work together in order to inflict enough damage before the time runs out. Direct combat with the creature plays a minor role. Instead, the fight is heavily scripted and goes through several phases. At every phase, there are different tasks for each team members to take care of.

It’s an impressive piece of content that is kept away for the players until quite far in the game. It may seem like inefficient game design. But when you finally meet Jhen for the first time, it feels so much more special because of that. Also, transitioning into high rank feels so much more deserved. After defeating a creature so large, you truly feel like a veteran monster hunter.

But entering high rank isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning of yet another onion layer, which I’m looking forward to discover on my own.

I recently saw Brüno. I found it moderately amusing. You probably have seen the Trailer but the post needs a visual so there you go:

In a way it’s quite similar to Borat (duh!). Sure, you can see it as a shallow and incredibly crude comedy. It has lots of almost infantile jokes and exploits all the clichés to be as offensive as it can be. But there is an interesting social commentary beneath it all. The comedy does explore the discomfort that open homosexuality still creates in our society. It’s counter-intuitive but I think movies like this can help a lot to increase acceptance of homosexuality. In a couple of scenes I thought to myself that I probably would have behaved similarly to Brüno’s victims. The movie did a great job at highlighting how ridiculous and irrational our behavior can be.

But contrary to what you see in the Trailer, the movie didn’t comment too much with the topic of Fashion. It reminded me about one particular thing I really hate about Fashion. Sure it’s it mindless and decadent worship of elitist egoism and sickening abundance. But hey – I could just ignore it. However, there is one reason why I never really can. It’s because the people doing this crap are calling themselves “Designers”.

Let me make it clear. No. If you are doing Fashion then you are NOT doing Design. The definition of Design can be fuzzy. Here is a trick I use. Whenever I see the word “Design” I substitute that word with “Strategy” and see if it still works. Let’s try it. “Car Design” would be “Car Strategy”. It fits, Car designers are people who spend a lot of times considering a lot of different aspects in order to create a car that fulfills a very specific set of criteria. Aesthetics are of course a part of it but so is usability, economy, ecology, production, safety, demographics, culture etc. The different aspects are addressed in such a way as to reach a distinct goal which in turn can be evaluated. The process is a tight mixture of analytic thinking and creative craftsmanship.

“Nail Design” on the other hand would be “Nail Strategy”. It doesn’t really fit. Because in a nail studio you don’t develop a new, distinct strategy for your nails. Nails have no strategy, they have been created by evolution and do the their job just fine. Instead, you get your nails cleaned and get pretty patterns painted on it. The only aspect to consider is aesthetics. Each customer wishes to maximize them. But the results cannot be even properly evaluated because aesthetics are highly subjective.

There is another word that is perfectly suitable for what we mean with Nail Design and Fashion Design. And it’s not even a derogatory. It’s “Styling”. It perfectly describes the aesthetic nature of both professions. Semantically, it puts them right next to Hair Styling which is actually a quite related discipline. “Design” puts them next to things like Information Design, Interface Design or Service Design. Not quite so related.

By the way, there are real Clothing Designers but that has often more to do with jackets, working clothes, sports clothes and space suits.

So my only request is to be careful with the word “Design” in context of Fashion and use “Styling” instead. Otherwise you can worship rich morons all you want. Okthanksbye!

On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: The three musketeers reunite, fill in some gaps from the previous episode, do a spontaneous mini-bowgun feature and enjoy the listener feedback awesomeness.

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I finished reading The Reader. I didn’t like it.

In case you have troubles reading it, let me spell it out for you: M – E – H

As I mentioned previously, I was well aware that the book had more to it than a provocative relationship. I was actually looking forward to those more in-depth parts. However, once I arrived there I found myself yearning for the shallow, provocative parts. The book quickly turns into a discussion on how to deal with the guilt of Nazi crimes in Germany. The trick the author used is adding another element to the mix – Analphabetism. In case you didn’t knew (spoiler I guess), the woman from the initial relationship turns out to have been a guard in a concentration camp. On top of it, she is also an Analphabet. But she keeps this fact secret. She is being accused of having committed crimes during her work in the concentration camp and she is put on trial. While generally guilty, during the trial she is being accused of additional crimes she didn’t quite commit. She has the opportunity to lessen her punishment by admitting she is an Analphabet. She chooses not to. The protagonist is in the audience of the trial and is struggling with the dilemma of whether to intervene or not.

I found that scenario quite problematic. Many people already criticized that it trivializes the crimes of Nazi Germany by presenting Analphabetism as something of equal weight. While I wouldn’t go that far I do agree that it’s a valid point. More fundamentally I find the problem of Analphabetism horribly obscure and irrelevant. Only a minuscule percentage of people really struggle with it and there are ways to cope with it so it’s REALLY not that big of a deal. The author should have understood that especially people, who read books would have a difficult time to relate.

Which leads me to the core problem of the book: the whole story is awfully contrived and artificial. I know there is shame associated with Analphabetism but no sane person would willfully go to prison just to keep their dignity. How is being accused of being a mass murderer dignified anyway? The book doesn’t even do any serious attempts at making that decision plausible. The shame is never discussed or addressed. To add insult to injury, the secret does come out in the prison in the end and the woman manages to learn to read after all. So what was the big deal about in the first place?

The only acceptable way to read this is as a metaphor. The Analphabetism could be understood as the woman’s inability to comprehend the morality of her actions. That’s why she learns to read in prison and that’s why she (spolier) commits suicide after she learns to read.

But that’s a dishonest way to treat the characters in a novel. Instead of describing them as real people they are being objectified to act as symbols in a high-level ethic argument. While the argument might succeed, the characters lose all humanity in the process. This in turn undermines the fundament of the argument. How can the book be about guilt if there are no true people in it?

There is one aspect that did strike a chord with me but I want to discuss that in another post. Until then, The Reader left a stale aftertaste. The story is artificial and contrived. The topics are tedious to relate to. It’s like one of those books I remember being tortured with when I was back in High School. I’m like the woman in the book only chronologically reversed. Back then I though it was my fault I couldn’t relate. I was a young and dumb after all. Now that I’m older and only slightly less dumb I have a different perspective. It wasn’t my fault after all. It was the damn books.