Hidden Peanuts

I’m a bit delayed, but based on a random number generator the winner of the Anathem T-shirt is….. Ian!

His choice of favorite created word from Anathem is “a toss up between Kefedokhles and Hypotrochian Transquaestiation. Mostly because they both just look really funny when you first encounter them.”

Congratulations! I’ll be in touch about getting this shirt to you.

Thanks again to Wiredset for the chance to give this away.

I was recently contacted by someone from Wiredset, a marketing company working on promotion of Anathem. They very generously offered to send me a limited edition Anathem shirt to give away in a contest of some sort. So, I’ll keep it simple. What’s your favorite of the Orth or Fluccish words created by Neal Stephenson for Anathem? I’m a big fan of ’speelycaptor’, which is roughly comparable to ‘video camera’ in English. There’s a sense of whimsy to the word that catches me. Leave your answer in a comment, and I’ll enter you into a random drawing. Have your comment in by midnight this Friday night (9/18), and I’ll do the drawing on Saturday. Be sure to enter your e-mail address! One per person, please.

Here’s what the shirt looks like:

(note: I don’t have the shirt in my possession yet, but will send it out ASAP once I receive it.)

The whole reason I went to PAX, and my favorite thing there, was the community.

PAX was started a few years ago by the guys at Penny Arcade, who basically viewed it as an excuse to throw a 3 day party for thousands of their closest friends. It has become a shining beacon of gaming culture, a place where everyone can just hang out and geek out all weekend. Everyone is extremely helpful and extremely welcoming and extremely open to meeting new people.

Many of the weekend’s events are entirely organized by attendees. I participated in a convention-wide game of Assassins, and bought delicious snacks from the self-appointed ‘cookie brigade’ - all their proceeds went to the Child’s Play charity, and they raised $5000 in those three days! But that’s barely scratching the surface. Something attendee-organized was constantly in the offerings.

The first night I was in Seattle, a bunch of us went out for dinner. We debated things like the merits of different incarnations of Star Trek for a solid hour, completely unselfconsciously and without rebuke. At one point silence fell over the table, we all realized what the conversation was, and someone intoned (without hint of sarcasm) “this is gonna be a great weekend.” And it was. I had originally intended that PAX would be a one time event for me - something to check off my list before moving on to other vacation destinations. But now I can’t wait to return. It really exceeded all my expectations!

Now that the annual E3 gaming trade show is a shadow of its former self, the industry is scrambling and trying to figure out how to replace or rebuild it. I saw a few shades of that influence at PAX this year. There were separate press demo lines for some games, for example. And then there’s posts like Kotaku’s “The Problem with PAX”, which seems to think PAX is trying to become the new E3 but failing at it. But, see, we don’t want PAX to be a trade show. It was never supposed to be one. What the author doesn’t understand is that PAX isn’t for the gaming industry. It is for the players, for the fans, for us.

I’ll be posting more about my trip to PAX in the near future, but for now let me just say that it was an amazing experience! Some of the most fun I’ve ever had on a vacation, and a powerful example of what a community can do when it comes together.

The one major panel that I got to was Harmonix’s (The studio behind Rock Band). They had four of their producers there to talk. It was in a giant room with horrible acoustics, but I was there plenty early so sat close up and didn’t mind.

Mostly the panel was them running through a history of the company. Fun facts:

-One producer on the panel was the lead singer of Honest Bob and the Factory to Dealer Incentives. Self-described as “probably the most hated band in Rock Band”.

-Their first project was an installation for EPCOT, which is still there. ‘Music in the Air’, or something like that, I missed the exact title. You wave your arms around and it generates music based on the motion.

-Later they made a PC music creation game called ‘The Axe’ which they are “…pretty sure sold in the double digits”.

-Some of the songs in Frequency and Amplitude (PS2 games) were Freezepop recording under different band names, to fill out the track list

-Nine Inch Nails was the first band that came to them and said ‘please put us in Rock Band’

-One of the producers on the panel was a former librarian!

-The transparent note tracks in Rock Band were the result of a bug - they liked it and kept it.

-Multiplayer was almost dropped entirely from Guitar Hero 1 before release. The developers didn’t think that the odds of two people knowing each other who each had a guitar controller was high enough to even warrant thinking about. They barely even expected two people in the same city to have them! This explains why the multiplayer in GH1 was a bit sub-par.

-They will listen to a demo CD by any band who wants to be in Rock Band. I feel bad for whoever has that job

-They love to employ musicians, and recently hired the dancer from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones in some unknown capacity. (The panel seemed more impressed by this than the audience was, admittedly).

-Harmonix is now the largest manufacturer of drum sticks in the world - they make more than the next three largest combined!

-Lots of other fun stuff, I wish I’d taken better notes.

The Q&A section was pretty much wasted with obvious questions and statements that weren’t questions at all. Examples:

-”Do you guys think you could get your foot up the ass of Guitar Hero any farther? Cause you’re totally kicking their ass all over the place right now.”
The panel stared uncomfortably at each other for a bit, then responded that they’re just genuinely happy that the music game genre can support multiple products; they’re ecstatic that the market is that big. 90% of the audience applauded, and the question asker sat down in a bit of shame.

-The last question asked was a guy who wanted the panel to troubleshoot his licensing issues with downloadable rock band tracks on his xbox. The panel very nicely told him to talk to microsoft, that there was obviously nothing they could do for him there at PAX. But he wouldn’t let the issue drop. This was despite the panel being past the end time, and the panelists having announcements to make at the end that we were all anxious to hear! If there was a giant hook, it would have been employed to remove him from the premises

The final announcements were:
-The existence of this week’s downloadable songs, the ‘PAX Pack’, and that fact the proceeds from now until Christmas will all go to the Penny Arcade Child’s Play charity.
-There is an achievement in Rock Band 2 called ‘Bladder of Stee’ - you must play the endless setlist without failing or pausing at all. This was added after they saw that over 100k people have completed the endless setlist in RB1, something they never expected very many people to finish.

The panel all seemed like awesome people, who genuinely love what they do.

Tomorrow I head off to the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle! I’ve been planning this trip for 18 months, and am about as excited as I can possibly be. I’ll be posting pictures in my flickr account while I’m there. And probably posting to twitter too.

Ridethecity.com is one of the coolest Google maps mashups I’ve seen lately. It centers on NYC, and is dedicated to finding bike routes around the city. It combines Google’s automatic pathfinding routines with the site’s creators’ personal knowledge of biking around the city. There are three options for planning a route: safest route, safe route, and most direct route. Direct will stick you mostly on roads, while safe and safest stick with varying degrees to bike paths and greenways. The safest selection will often take riders out of their way to find bike-friendly routes. I wonder - with topographic data now in Google maps, could a site like this also calculate bike routes with the least uphill distance possible? I’ve been riding my bike around Chapel Hill quite a bit, and Ridethecity makes me wish there was a similar site for my area.

This is a great example of making refined automatic routines even more useful by injecting a heavy dose of personal human expertise. It makes me wish we could get more open access to the inner workings of the databases that libraries pay so much for. What fun and useful mods would result?

This review will be free of major spoilers, and is based on a pre-release review copy.

I finished Anathem the other night, staying up far later than I’d planned. It is That Good. The fact that I stuck around for 900+ pages says a lot.

I haven’t read a lot of Neal Stephenson’s other books - Snow Crash was something I mostly enjoyed, but it lost me in the mythology and such. I tried reading Cryptonomicon back when it was first released, but for reasons I can’t remember I never made it past the first 50 pages. I’m told that the man has problems writing endings, that most of his books really don’t have them. Well, Anathem does. And a good one at that.

What is Anathem about? That’s an extremely difficult question to answer concisely. The best I can do is to say that it’s about epistemology, which really doesn’t tell you anything. The book focuses on a group of monks on another planet. But monks isn’t quite the right word - they’re not religious at all. They call themselves ‘avout’ instead. The avout have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of knowledge, largely in matters of the study of consciousness, reality, and other philosophic topics. Avout are segregated into four groups - unarians, decenarians, cenarians, and millenarians. They wall themselves off from the outside world, allowing almost no contact, for different periods of time. One year, ten years, 100 years, and 1000 years respectively. This has been going on for about 4000 years. Civilization ebbs and flows around them as the centuries pass, sometimes sci-fi futuristic and others post-apocalyptic. It’s a fascinating concept. And there’s some definite shades of Harry Potter in both the setting and the story elements inside the concent (the Arbrean word for monastery). The concent serves as a sort of university in this society, but they no longer deal with technology any more than absolutely necessary (for reasons made clear in the book).

I can’t really say much more about the plot than that, without major major spoilers. There is an external threat, and the avout must use their unique expertise to combat it. I guess that’s suitably generic. Anathem covers a lot of ground, and I saw almost none of it coming.

Because this is the planet Arbre, not Earth, they don’t have our history or cultural references. As a result it takes a hundred pages or so to really figure out what’s going on. Stephenson makes extensive use of a fictional vocabulary he created for the book, so much so that it requires a glossary in the back. I had to make near constant use of it for a while, but eventually found myself becoming more and more immersed in the world of Arbre. By the halfway point I didn’t need the glossary at all, and was starting to think in those terms. Truly immersive. That’s the biggest achievement of Anathem, I think - the masterful worldbuilding.

By creating a cast of characters who have devoted their lives to studying knowledge and philosophizing, this book sidesteps my biggest problem with Snow Crash. The extended lectures/treatises in that book completely pulled me out of the story and turned it into a slog. But here they appear as dialog between characters, conversations they have as part of the life of an avout. And the discussions themselves serve to shed light on the characters’ inner workings, so even the duller ones don’t seem like a waste of time. But very few are dull at all; I found most to be downright fascinating. When the book gets officially released, there will be a website with extensive annotations, detailing which of our Earth-based philosopher’s ideas informed Stephenson’s creation of their Arbrean counterparts. I can’t wait.

There is so much more I want to say about this book, but can’t for the sake of not spoiling major plot elements. Read it. Get through the first 100 pages, you’ll be immersed and hooked. I’m planning on re-reading a number of sections of it, and that’s not something I ever do with books.

Oh, and the book comes with its own soundtrack. The included CD is full of the pseudo-Gregorian chants the avout use in Anathem.

I’m off to register some domains based on the book’s glossary

Anathem will be released on September 9th, 2008.

Here’s the short version: you should go play Braid. It is amazing.

Longer version:

Braid is a brilliant independent game developed mostly by one man, Jonathan Blow. At first glance, you could easily mistake it for yet another 2d sidescrolling Mario clone. But it goes much deeper than that. You play as Tim, who is questing for his princess. The story of their relationship is revealed as the game progresses, and their relationship has a surprisingly mature and adult tone. The story takes some major twists and turns, and is open-ended enough that it practically demands critical thought and interpretation of what happens. It’s the kind of story that sticks with you and completely draws you in to a mood and tone.

Tim can manipulate time. As you journey through the game, this ability is necessary to solve puzzles. Each puzzle is extremely creative, and some require twisting your brain into severe knots to solve. Players could blaze through this game in just an hour or two, as the puzzles are almost entirely optional. But that would be robbing yourself of the vast majority of what Braid has to offer. I spent about 5 or 6 hours on the game total, taking my time. Some puzzles I solved as soon as I looked at them, and others took an hour on their own. Most fell somewhere in between, and solving each one brought a huge sense of accomplishment. This is alternately a very frustrating (in a good way) and rewarding game to play.

The creator maintained a blog chronicling the development process, and it makes for fascinating reading. I want to point out his post identifying the game’s haunting soundtrack in particular, since I fell in love with the music during the game. Each track is available as mp3s from Amazon for $.89 each.

Braid costs $15, and is only sold as a downloadable game for the Xbox 360. A PC version is forthcoming at a date yet to be determined. Some people have taken a bit of umbrage at that cost, which is more than for all but a handful of previously released Xbox downloadable games. But Braid is art, and I like knowing that I’m supporting an independent developer with something new to bring to the gaming world. I got far more than $15 worth of enjoyment out of it.

Braid plays like no other game I’ve ever had my hands on. Play the free Xbox demo, and I’ll be surprised if you’re not hooked.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Only two weeks since our last podcast show, we’ve got a new one! We’re on fire here, and hopefully this breakneck pace will continue.

http://www.welikestuff.net/2008/07/we-like-stuff-episode-5/