Emotional Games

Mostly recovered from surgery now, however the recovery time included a nice few days of video-game bliss.  I managed to polish off Naughty Dog's 'The Last Of Us' in a couple of days, and then spent the potted hours during the rest of the week ploughing through That Game Company's 'Flow' and 'Journey'.

The Last Of Us

For those that missed it, The Last Of Us is set in a post-apocalyptic america (yay zombies), where veteran survivor and smuggler Joel ends up having to escort a fourteen year old girl, Ellie,  to a group of freedom fighters called the Fireflies.  The game really is about the relationship between Joel and Ellie that develops across this journey, mixed in with stealth, action and adventure and tied up with a crafting and experience system based bow.

Well 'game' is probably a bit strong, as that conjures up connotations of it being fun, which it really isn't.  Compelling story, yes.  At times rewarding game-play, sure.  Stupidly frustrating at times?  Yup.  Fun? Never quite gets there.  It's probably more enjoyable to watch someone else play the game than it is to play it.  At least then the movie-like story and action don't get interfered with by your inability to not get your neck chewed on by blind mute cauliflower headed dead people.

However don't let this put you off, it really, really is compelling.  The game has a way of drawing you in and switching things up.  (Minor spoilers ahead)... About three quarters of the way through the game, major emotional stuff had gone down, we had a horse and were armed with a flame-thrower.  It felt close to the end, I thought the final goal was in sight, and, like my characters, I just wanted to get there.  I wanted the adventure to reach its resolution.  And so, for five minutes, I stopped being diligent, fully searching every corner of every building for desperately needed supplies and ploughed forward, aching to reach the door that was obviously round the next corner, with final cut-scene, and credits.

Except the door didn't come, and instead a load of stupidly difficult hunters did.  And I was out of resources, stuck with a now painfully tense fight, and (silently) cursing myself for daring to dream that end was near.  Luckily I had several more hours of game-play to not make that mistake again!

The interesting thing about TLOU is that while the game-play made you feel tense, or excited (or when you repeatedly become dinner, really really frustrated), the major driving force (the bond between Joel & Ellie), and the emotional heartstrings it tried to pull, were almost exclusively developed by the story, told through cut-scenes and action sequences.  Engagement and empathy being two sides of a coin that were never quite allowed to meet in the game.

Journey

That Game Company's Journey on the other hand was a short (about three hours for a play-though) marvel. Everything about the game is designed to engage you the player with your avatar, and make you really feel their world.  You start a lonely figure lost in a desert of graves, with a mountain in the distance.  As you progress to the mountain you get lost in a sea of sand-dunes, slide into a forgotten city, and eventually claw your way back up to the peak.  An interesting quirk is that as you explore you meet others, silent avatars controlled by other players, your companions, who may help (but can't really hinder), but that make your adventure less lonely.

There are language-neutral murals that tell the story of the game, which are really telling the story of your journey - what has been, and what is to come.  And the foreshadowing towards the end is poignant.  (Minor spoiler ahoy) I cannot overstate how much it hit me when I found myself on the mountainside, three foot in snow.  My companion had been lost to a beast, and I suddenly realised how utterly alone I was. Slowing down, being broken by the blizzard, my avatar finally crumpled into the cold white blanket, and I genuinely gave up hope.

I guess the difference is that the Last Of Us offered an adventure, Journey offered an experience.

Lost Voices

Mine
(the squeamish might want to avoid this half of the post)

I was thinking of this room the entire time. 

So, this week I did something I've never done before.  I underwent surgery.  Having never really gone through the process of being cut up by the NHS, I thought things would be a lot more complex than they actually were - turn up at a set time, throw some details at a computer and go find a waiting room.  Then a person calls your name, you go into another waiting room, then another person calls your name, and you finally go into a small room with a chair and who I assumed were two friendly looking medical types, are ushered into said chair and talked at for a few minutes.  A consent form is signed, and then the surgeon asks "Have you got any questions?".  "Is this real?" I muttered inaudibly, as the transition from watching Judge Judy on TV while waiting, to being in a room reminiscent to one from the opening of Half Life Two had caught me slightly off guard.  What I should have asked is: "What are your names?", as I'm pretty sure  the two strangers who proceeded to operate never really identified themselves. 

The procedure itself was nothing major or serious, but it did involve three injections of a local anaesthetic.  I'm sitting there, with one half of my tongue being held in place by the assistant, and a big needle coming towards the other side, and the surgeon suggests "you can close your eyes, if you want".  I opted to stare at the massive needle that inflicted an almost disappointingly small amount of pain.

A few minutes later the inability to feel anything kicks in, and then everything becomes a bit routine.
I just sit there and watch, detached, as tongue holding, scalpel cutting, blood flowing,  gauze soaking and four stitches (the surgeon seemed to be enjoying his needlecraft a little too much) all floated past.

Ten minutes later, everything was finished, and I walked out fine.  Done. Nothing to worry about.  May as well go into work.  An hour later, on a bus five minutes away from work, the anaesthetic wore off.

Ow.

Now, if I'd thought for a second about what had happened in the hospital, it was obvious that it was going to hurt...

I'm now recovering at my parents.  They live near a field.

Needless to say, I've since spent quite a while living with a very sensitive, slowly shrinking, golf-ball in my mouth.  This has meant no talking, no solid foods, and some rather interesting shopping receipts.

In retrospect, I should have bought soup, lots of soup.

Leah
A while ago I started watching The Voice UK, Season 2.  It finished last week, and the obvious winner didn't win!  This is probably more a statement of the kind of person likely to phone in to vote for a TV singing competition than it is about any level of talent.  Regardless, I am somewhat irritated by this obvious miscarriage of justice, and am therefore resolved to never watch another season of The Voice UK again.

Having said that, since The Voice has ended I have been watching quite a few of Leah's performance videos on YouTube.  One striking thing about her videos is the rather high number of views that they have, and watching the numbers change between my ridiculous number of repeat plays of "I Will Survive" showed what I was doing was insignificant compared to the rest of the internet.  One wonders if these is the same for all of the show's finalists.

So, for a bit of fun, during a (quite literally thanks to my oral incapacitation) quiet afternoon I decided to spend some time messing about and looking into this.  A nice excuse to do some programming with a couple of web technologies that I'd been meaning to play with.

So, below is a screenshot (click to go to the real thing) of what I came up with.  For each of the four artists, you have their performances (roughly in order), and the number of views on their respective YouTube videos as of 12:00 today.    

Click to see the web-version

My conclusion: people who watch YouTube videos don't like making phone calls.

City Layers

Drawing Lines

My growing interest with graphics and communication has recently started meandering towards drawing as a hobby/pastime. I guess this is somewhat unsurprising given the proliferation of tablet-based drawings appearing on this blog.  In addition to the digital artworks, I am also scratching pens into a couple of sketchbooks (which is proving a nice excuse to sit in Holland Park during the intermittent sun that London seems to be enjoying at the moment).

One of the things I'm finding it hard to draw is lines.  Or, more precisely not drawing lines where there are no lines.   I've realized that I find it very easy to see objects, and to draw my model of what they are, instead of what they actually are.  So, practice, practice, practice - but what to practice on?

Ever watched the video to Adele's Rolling In The Deep?  In the middle of it there's a huge paper "city" (ice-white cuboids and dodecahedrons), that rather symbolically gets burned to a crisp by some sparklers.  What's particularly interesting about such a construction is that the edges aren't marked by heavy lines, but by dramatic changes in light and shade caused by shadow and sharp changes in angle of reflected light.

Deciding that "I want one of those", I headed out to my local CASS shop.  Now, it turns out I've moved to about 10 minutes walking distance from one of these shops, and I have a horrible feeling that my bank balance is going to suffer for it.  I should do more crafty things, and the number of ideas that such a shop spawns makes me want to buy most of it.  Lucky that I went in there with a set project in mind!

So, some white card, a polystyrene base, a knife set, uhu glue and a few hours later, I have my own mini white city.  It's not perfect, but it is really interesting. In particular, the shadows caused by the different structures and multiple light sources really change the scene quite dramatically.  I expect I'll be putting some sketches of this up over the next few weeks.  I also have half a mind to wire it up internally with some LEDs for more weird effects.

On the subject of white worlds, I've also been playing "The Unfinished Swan" on PS3 (trailer video left, which is somewhat representative of the gameplay).  The game has an interesting set of mechanics - centered around you throwing balls of liquid into the world, which affect it in different ways.  For example in the first level, black ink turns things black.  This may seem slightly redundant, but for the first level, the entire world initially a shadeless white. No shadow, no imperfection, no way to see where on earth you are going.  It's only through the motion and occlusion of your created black ink-splotches that you can recover a sense of form, of depth and of shape of the world around you.

If you have a spare couple of hours, I hugely recommend this game, it's very pretty and very entertaining.

And to end, I have also been having fun seeing lines instead of limbs.  A friend has been keeping a photo-a-day blog, one of my favourite pics of his is a particularly moody night shot of a netball game.  I took a few minutes to reinterpret the photo on the tablet.

Southend-on-sea

Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside! I do like to be beside the sea!

Rather unexpectedly, I found myself in Southend-On-Sea.  It was something to do with a local families trip that a friend was helping to organize.  Regardless, £10 and a small 90 minute coach trip for sticks of rock, arcades, a theme park and a pier? Yes please!

I find there is something incredibly calming about the sea.  Well, at least a calm sea, stretching out to the horizon (or, at least in the case of Southend - nearly to the horizon).  A mass of water, rippling away.  Sea and sky meeting in an arched line of blue.

The pier there is a monster.  Over a mile long, it has its own train going up and down it to take those sightseeing, fishing, lobster-potting or lifeboating from one end to another.  In order to fundraise, there is an adopt-a-plank scheme.  For a regular donation, you can have your name on a plaque on the wall, and I assume, your plank will write to you quaterly to tell you of what it's been up to.  Most likely it'll be complaining about the weather, like a good British plank.  I assume your informational letters will come with photos similar to that on the left, to let you know how your plank is getting on.

Back on slightly dryer land, and away from things made of wood, there is a fair amount to do in Southend.  There's a theme park, Adventure Island, which can swallow an unlimited amount of money in a very short space of time if you're not careful.  Soft-toy side stalls intermixed with rides are a great amount of fun.  I did go on the big rollercoaster, Rage (the big yellow thing, right) - which was a hilarious 90 second shot of pure adrenaline.  Adventure mini-golf was also good fun, if not very tactical by the end of 18 holes of interestingly decorated (but otherwise fairly vanilla) putting.

I did snap a few shots from my phone while going round Southend.  On the pier I took a few.  Once I'd got them into Google Plus' photo collection, I discovered that some deep magic on a Google server had stitched three of the photos together automatically without my intervention.  It's not perfect, but I was quite impressed by the effect of the result!

 I didn't even ask for this picture, Google's Picasa Web Albums auto-magic stitch just made it appear!

I tried to take a shot going the other way, from land out over the pier.  However the M&S coffee shop window  I  took it out of caused a huge amount of reflection in the picture, and it looked pretty gloomy (the clouds had started to set in by that point).  So in a recent effort to be more arty, I had a got at it with my graphics tablet - the end result, I think, isn't too bad. 

My bleak photo of the view back taken through the window of an M&S coffees hop didn't work out so well.
Lucky I've been playing with a tablet, so I photo-edited it a bit to make it more cheeful.

Two Trees

The weekend has run away from me, and my phone is being unhelpful by deciding it doesn't want to wirelessly sync photos from the seaside with the interwebs.  Manual intervention, phone disassembly and boxes of electronic kit may need to be dived through to find the right wire to get photos from the microsd card to the computer.  I'm sure I'm overcomplicating this somehow...

Anyways, in the interim, enjoy another graphics tablet experimental doodle.

Flow

For the past couple of years I've survived without having a computer on a desk at home.  Or even a decently-sized rectangular desk at a reasonable height.  Now with the rise of laptops and popularity of reclining on a sofa one may think this not really a problem, at least, when I took on the shoebox-in-shepherds bush that was to be my abode I rationalized away that the provided sofa looked comfy, and my netbook was cute.  Besides, if the worst came to the worst (and it did) my computer is small, that the chest of drawers can fit a monitor keyboard and mouse on top, and that standing up to code/browse/spotify would have a side benefit of keeping me fit, or something.  What I had forgotten to take into account is that desk space is useful to keep other transient items on when using the keyboard.  A glass of water, a snack (currently soya-coated savoury seed mix), a pad of paper, a pen, etc.  A chest of drawers doesn't really provide the space to hold all these things, and allow you much room to use a mouse!

A new setup

Lesson learned.  I've just spent the last bank-holiday weekend, and most of the weekend preceding it setting up my new room in my new flat.  A desk, a chair (oh how I've missed these) at the correct height to use (that only took two attempts walks to argos to get right), a keyboard.  What more could you want?  Oh - a mouse?  Ah, not really enough horizontal space on this desk for that and the keyboard and for you to sit towards the edge of the desk that feels right.  A journey to PC World and a trackball is acquired. Ok, great, everything's ready to go.  What else, oh, yeah, internet?

Now at this point, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.  Forgive me for venting some frustration, but arghghg!  First - on the (completely reasonable and fairly prompt) day that BT were supposed to activate our internet connection they instead decided to disconnect our phone line. Second - three days later, the engineer that was supposed to come out and look at the problem was cancelled.  Why? - The fault was mistakenly reported as fixed in the meantime.  Third - three days later (again) the engineer comes and fixes the line and broadband is established! Huzzah!  So I connect and upgrade my machine.  Only now my computer's wireless card stops working!  Fourth - a trip to PC world to get a piece of kit that will absolutely definitely work with our setup yields a piece of hardware that half works.  And by that I mean it will give me an internet connection for  five minutes and then resets for literally a second, and the works fine for five minutes.

Now in reality, this isn't a problem - iPlayer still works (it just pauses occasionally), and the odd webpage needs refreshing.  There were (well, there still are) about a million things I wanted to do this weekend that didn't even involve the internet.  But the knowledge of an incomplete set-up, that was waiting to distract me with an unnecessary buffering ring or missing web-page alert at any second, really broke any flow I could get into.  Similarly, the stress of worrying whether my mouse would hit the windowsill was probably more problematic than the restriction in movement by the adjacent windowsill.  I've found this hindering worry-of-distraction in several other places as-well, notifications (email, IM, SMS, facebook, twitter, etc) are like poison to me. Not only do I catch myself checking these systems in-case I've missed something, I'm also checking my phone hasn't gone away so I don't miss things as they happen.  Heck, even the incessant on-the-minute-every-minute beeping of the microwave after my porridge has finished, but deliberately ignored so it may cool down, keeps me from leaving the kitchen so I can open the microwave door to shut it up before it even has a chance to complain.

All these problems have solutions - for every mouse, there's a trackball; for every broken internet device, there's a lovely walk in the sun back to PCWorld, followed by exchanges with three sales reps to replace the device; and for every notification there's a silence button and an attempt to realise that if anything urgent happens that needs me, I'll get a phone call.  Hmm. Unfortunately I've not yet found a way to silence the microwave.

On a lighter note, in amongst all the to and fro to PC World, a graphics tablet caught my eye.  After trawling through the collected works of Tufte, my ideas for projects have been gaining a slightly more graphicsy angle so I could just about rationalize the decision to get one.  They are devices I like having around, even though I know I don't use them anywhere like as often, or as well, as I should - text editors really should find some way to integrate pressure sensitivity into their interfaces somehow!  Anyway, with the sun pouring through the window, and a spare 30 minutes set aside to playing with it and a paint program, I managed to draw something abstract (I don't claim that it's any good).

"The Journey" or "Green Cat".