You might have heard about the controversy surrounding Blizzard’s new Real ID system. They basically want to set up a Facebook for their games – WoW and StarCraft 2. The controversy started when they also decided to show real names instead of nicknames on the WoW boards. A lot players complained that they wouldn’t be able to use the forums anymore in fear of their personal safety. To be honest, I find this situation quite bizarre. Maintaining a community where the only way to prevent people from physically assaulting is each other is to put everybody under a witness protection program doesn’t seam like a healthy thing to do. If real-life stalking and verbal abuse is indeed such a big problem, maybe we should start thinking about limiting user interaction in WoW in general. From the accounts of the protesters it seems like paying WoW is like taking a vacation in Cueva de Villa Luz (a cave filled with hydrogen sulfide).

Regardless, it looks like Blizzard cave in (pun not intended but serendipitous) and decided to remove the Real ID system from the from the forums. Um, “yay” I guess?

It seems like a missed opportunity. Implementing Real ID in a large forum such as the WoW would have been a great test to test the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory. A lot of the protesters argued that it wouldn’t improve the post quality. On the other side, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the role of anonymity plays in ALL the mentioned problems.

Can’t argue with science.

There is another aspect that hasn’t been brought up at all. I guess it’s mostly due to the fact that it’s the WoW players who seem to object the most. However, the reason why I’m looking forward to Real ID is it’s implementation in the StarCraft 2 community. StarCraft 2 will most likely become one of the most important e-Sports games in the next few years. It will shape the global face of the entire scene. In many countries, Germany included, e-Sports are struggling with being recognized as a serious activity. For example, if e-Sports would be recognized as an official sport by the government, e-Sport teams would be able to receive tax subventions. It would be also much easier to organize e-Sport events and media would be more inclined to report on them.

I think introducing Real ID into the StarCraft 2 can vastly improve the quality and professional appearance of that game. If new e-Sport players are bred from a pool of anonymous Internet trolls, it’s difficult to get that mentality out once the players reach a professional level. This has detrimental effects on the appearance of e-Sports in general. Even among gamers, StarCraft’s reputation is not that of a civilized and mature game.

kekekekeke!

I think introducing a concept of being a real person competing with others even at a casual level will vastly improve the quality of the StarCraft 2 community. This boost can trickle down on the rest of the e-Sport movement and it’s reputation. It even could become an important step in accepting digital games as a serious part of our culture.

Of course, I do see how this has little to do with World of Warcraft. Considering how Real ID will still be implemented it seems like everybody got what they wanted just for now. GG

Work on TRAUMA continues. Still doing rather administrative stuff. This time I finally came around to redesign some of the main menu UI. I kept postponing this part until I warmed up with programming again. That’s because surprisingly, UI design and programming can get incredibly tedious.

TRAUMA’s main menu was conceived quite a long time ago. I really wanted to use the photos already at this point. They should become the key aesthetic of the game. I tried different versions and realized that the photos work best when enlarged as much as possible. So the ended up simply dividing the entire screen in 4 photo stripes so the entire menu is made up of photos. It nailed my intentions pretty much and I noticed that users reacted quite positively to that solution

This was the menu screen for most of the development. The Movie Gallery tab at the bottom would slide up and reveal a menu of cut-scenes.

That worked well but with time, more requirements crept in. I needed to somehow display the progress in the four levels. I was able to implement that quite nicely with an Apple-like flip animation of the stripes. But then I also needed to provide a way to re-watch important cut-scenes. I added a small Movie Gallery menu at the bottom. That wasn’t quite as elegant anymore.

Recently I realized I also need some way to control the visibility and language of subtitles, reset the save game data and display some general game credits. The existing layout wouldn’t be able to take in these functions anymore. So I decided I would need a modal interface where additional controls would appear ON TOP of the main menu. It would give me the space I need to implement these functions as well as possible.

This is a mock-up of the next step. The gallery is now a button leading to a separate screen. I also introduced a game options button. Also note the new volume slider at the bottom.

But with UI, things are never that simple. I start out creating a few mock-ups in Photoshop. While doing the mock-ups I often realize that some things may not work or require more space than anticipated. I sometimes even remember some functions I forgot, etc. Building the interface in Photoshop is often even quite tedious since you have to keep track of a lot of elements with lots of details. It sometimes seems like simply programming them would be easier. But the mock-ups are excellent at making you realize how deep the rabbit hole really is. Otherwise you might abandon the right solution in favor of an easy one.

The game option screens allows to configure the subtitles, clear the save data and show credits.

And surprisingly, programming the UI is also quite difficult. Again, there are a lot of objects that need to cooperate with each other. It gets especially complicated if you want to include animations. Buttons need to have mouse-over effects, screens don’t just disappear but transition into each other. Those effects aren’t just fluff. They can make the navigation trough menus better understandable and less jarring. But the effects do increase complexity a lot. Programming them takes a lot of time and is prone to create bugs.

Putting the movie gallery into a separate screen allowed me to add thumbnail images and longer descriptions.

But I’m getting there. I’m quite satisfied with the mock-ups and I already implemented the first few buttons. There are still some details I’m not so sure about but I confident I will be able to figure them out as I go. I should be able to finish that big milestone this weekend. I will let you know how that worked out. If you have any suggestions, fire away. I can do changes easily at this point.

In the opening of the movie “The Fourth Kind”, actress Milla Jovovich claims:

Every dramatized scene in this movie is supported by either archived audio, video or as it was related by Dr. Tyler during extensive interviews with the director. In the end, what you believe is yours to decide.

It’s a two-fold lie. First, the original documents the movie is based on are an outright fabrication, including Dr. Tyler herself. Secondly, the movie never leaves any room to make any decisions. It’s almost like the hilarious joke by RedLetterMedia:

I let you decide… but the answer is yes.

I’m struggling which of the two lies is a more obvious mark of a bad movie.

Suggesting that a fantasy movie story is based on facts is a common technique. It actually produced some quite memorable works such as The X-Files or The Blair Witch Project. It enriches even a modest plot with a sense of excitement. It can greatly increase the tension and fear in a mystery movie.

But there are two crucial differences about The Fourth Kind. First, the Fourth Kind is an extremely boring story. It’s not even a story at all. It’s just two hours of dull repetition. One witness after another pops up telling how horrible the abductions are without even explaining what happened. They tried to add some story to it by including some silly mysteries about the Sumerian language and whatnot. All of this leads nowhere. What you already know about the alien abduction myth is probably far more exciting than what the movie has to offer. Hence, the “this is based on facts”-trick is THE ONLY EXCITING THING about this movie. The Blair Witch Project was at least original.

Secondly, the movie makes some extremely bold claims about the factuality of the portrayed events. They repeat it over and over again. There is even no fine-print disclaimer in the credits. It’s outright insulting to make so much a fuzz about what is a flat out lie. It’s also quite unreasonable to hinge so much on a claim that can be falsified so easily. It’s not only a scam, it’s a stupid scam.

But the movie tries to make a fool of the audience in a different way as well. The movie suggests that it merely represents the facts and that it allows the audience to make up their own mind. You wish! That would maybe even save the movie a little bit. But it’s far from it. From the get go, there all evidence is ALWAYS pointing directly to alien abduction. There is one skeptical character who is supposed to be the devil’s advocate. It’s a ruse, of course. The skeptical character never attempts to seriously debunk any of the conclusions. Instead he blurts outs some ridiculous, completely unrelated lines about weather balloons even if the evidence is right in front of his face.

A good skeptical character would act logically and attempt to respond to any shown evidence. For example, if there is evidence that somebody repeatedly enters a house at night, the reasonable thing to do is to call the police or at least set up some surveillance equipment. What the characters do instead is to rely on hypnosis. This is what really gets on my nerves.

Hollywood is responsible for the spread of some dangerous myths. One of them is that hypnosis is a reliable tool for psychotherapy. It’s not. Hypnosis is poorly understood, highly controversial and not used frequently at all. It’s not a scientific tool at all because it is highly susceptible to manipulation and suggestion. In fact, the very nature of hypnosis is suggestion.

It is almost certain that the entire myth of alien abduction was fabricated during hypnosis sessions. It is a powerful myth because it taps into very basic fears of supernatural nocturnal predators (monsters in the closet), being helpless and medical examinations. No wonder the meme spread so well. So it is quite ironic that The Fourth Kind relies almost exclusively on Hypnosis as evidence.

But even with an ensemble of idiotic characters, the movie could have created at least some room for interpretation. The police always suspects that the main character herself is responsible for everything. Her motif would be a psychological trauma caused by the death of her husband. It seems like a reasonable explanation at some point and it would be a great way to open up the plot for interpretation. Sadly, the movie does a great job at providing enough evidence to discard that branch of though entirely. The police ends up being just the ignorant bad guys and the movie goes down the drain.

And I haven’t even begun how bad the acting and the special effects are. The Fourth Kind is a rare occasion of a thoroughly ill-conceived movie. It looks down on it’s audience as being gullible, stupid and incompetent. It tries to succeed by exploiting these faults. This is not only morally reprehensible but also extremely reckless. If such an approach fails – as it does in The Fourth Kind – the underlying prejudices are exposed and the movie’s reputation is destroyed beyond repair. This reminds me of a TED talk I can’t find anymore. Somebody mentioned a great quote I can only party reproduce here: the best way to lie to somebody is when the other guy understands that you are being dishonest.

With temperatures reaching unbearable levels I decided to take it slow this Saturday and catch up with some movies. Sci-Fi movies that is.

First I watched Repo Men. The movie caught my attention when I came out in cinemas. It is built around a quite gruesome but catchy premise. In the near future an evil company sells expensive artificial organs on the basis of loan contracts. When the receivers of said organs are unable to pay, the company sends in assassins who remove the organs killing the receivers in the process.

Sadly, the premise falls apart under careful scrutiny. It is difficult to imagine a legal system that would allow this kind of business practice. But on the other hand, it doesn’t sound like a reasonable business model either. Killing your debtors doesn’t help anybody. On the contrary. Prolonging the loan under more severe conditions would pay off in the long term. This is how loans usually work.

The movie also fails in the department of action and characterizations. The action scenes are confusing and uninspired. The character’s motifs are sketchy at best. Starting with description the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, I hoped the story would explore some of the philosophical questions of organ transplantation. A similar scenario was subject of the famous short-story “Do you exist Mr Jones?” by Stanislaw Lem (the full German text is here, I recommend). But sadly, no such ambitions.

As a redeeming quality there is a nice plot twist at the end. Nothing too revolutionary but just enough to keep the whole thing from feeling like a complete waste of time. All in all, a very average movie.

The second movie I saw was Pandorium. It was directed by the German director Christian Alvart. It takes place on a spaceship on it’s way to colonize a second earth. Crew members wake up from cryogenic sleep and realize that something went very wrong. It’s the tired formula of ugly space monsters chasing after frightened survivors in a dark, claustrophobic ship. Sadly, I’m a sucker for Sci-Fi so they had me at “spaceship”.

I was expecting the worst and I was pleasantly surprised. Yes it is very clichéd. The monsters are silly and have no real reason. All characters seem to struggle with amnesia and other psychological problems. But in the end, all those well-known clichés are well executed and come together to create a solid mystery. The reveal at the end is well done and surprised me even a bit. The characters have some depth to them. The set design is excellent, especially if you compare it to the poor set design of Start Trek.

It may not me a masterpiece but it is a solid, entertaining watch. If you like Sci-Fi, I do recommend it.

Two games make a trend, right? If so, I really enjoy the recent trend of making license-based games demonstrated by Batman: Arkham Asylum and new Transformers: War for Cybertron.

What both games did is they completely ignored any opportunities to do any movie tie-ins. The games releases were not synchronized with any movies from the same franchise. The stories are completely unrelated. Even visually, both games completely ignored any templates set by their movie counter-parts. I presume this allowed the developers to spend as much time as they needed to adapt the franchise to the specifics of the games medium.

As a result, Batman: Arkham Asylum became one of the most memorable Batman games yet and certainly one of the moist acclaimed games of 2009. I haven’t played Transformers beyond the multi-player demo yet. But I enjoyed from what I’ve seen so far.

Full disclosure: Transformers are one of my favorite series I grew up with as a child. Even though the shallowness of the story and the characters are utterly unbearable for me today, I can’t deny my emotional attachment to them. This soul-tearing mixture of visceral fascination and sheer embarrassment is what I see faithfully reproduced in this game. In this regard it is the most attractive Transformers game I’ve seen so far. Plus, everything that reverts the damage done by Michael Bay is good in my book.

(And secretly I still hope for a Christopher Nolan or Neill Blomkamp to come in and make a Transformers movie I’m not embarrassed to watch).

But generally speaking, I really hope this mode of dealing with license games will catch on. I think in can do a great job at allowing games to emancipate themselves as a medium on the own.