No again, I will not show you what’s under the bandage on my arm. I won’t even look myself, anymore; it’s gotten too disturbing. I mean, the wound hasn’t changed, but every time I look at it it bothers me more, takes me longer to stop shivering. I keep wanting to touch it.
Listen: Did you ever play Shock City? I’m not trying to change the subject; hear me out. I played the hell out of that game when I was twelve, and I always wondered what was inside all those buildings you couldn’t get into. There were only eight buildings with working doors in the whole game, with all kinds of things to explore and enemies to stalk in each one; so if you could somehow get into the other hundred or so buildings, what would be inside them? Could you play them too?
I know, I was pretty dumb back then. I didn’t understand the way the world works.
Finally someone told me about a hack to get into any building. It exploited a bug in the hit detection: you had to run at a corner and jump right at it. If you got the position and angle just right, you’d slip through the join between the two walls and be inside. People were using this as a cheat to get into the higher levels early, but all I could think about was the “secret” buildings. By then I had already covered my bedroom walls with hand-drawn maps of what I thought their insides might be like. I booted up the game and ran straight for the Library — I knew it was full of maze-like miles of dimly-lit dusty stacks and cavernous reading rooms, through which I could pursue my quarry of mutant beasts.
Instead I hit the corner and bounced off, of course. The instructions said to be patient, so I backed up and tried again. All the good skills took practice. I got into my best gamer trance state of endless repetition and fine-tuning of reflexes. Finally after an hour I made it: instead of the bounce I got a split second of mangled polygons warping across the screen, and then … nothing. The inside of the building didn’t exist, and neither did the insides of its walls, so it was as though there were nothing there. I could see the streets and buildings on the other side. But the building’s floor didn’t exist either, and there was no ground under it, just a yawning abyss of pure electric video blue that I fell into like a rock. I had about ten seconds to turn and look up: the universe was a void with nothing in it but a few square blocks of street-plan dotted with empty building-shaped holes. It receded into the distance, and then I reached the outer boundary of the world and snapped into the death screen.
Yes, I do have a point. The real world is like this too. The things we think are solid are fakes; there’s nothing inside them. The things we can’t open up are hollow, infinitely-thin shells around nauseating blue.
I know what you’re about to do. Everyone does this when I explain things. “I refute it thus!” as you hit a wall with a rock. You’ve got a hammer in that backpack? Even better.
Yeah, that support pillar looks pretty solid right there were you decided to hit it. With realistic bits of fractured concrete inside it, right there. Or over there, yes. Don’t you get it? You were meant to break through there. Just like I was meant to go into those dozen buildings but no others. You’re playing the game the way you were meant to, and it’s a very good game so the limitations are fewer, the glitches are harder to exploit.
But with the right skills, the right mind-set, I can find the places that weren’t meant to open up and make them open up anyway. And now that I’ve learned, I can’t un-learn it. Everything I do is wrong.
I can’t find my way back to the right doors. I don’t want to live out here in the cold underneath a fucking highway overpass with brain-damaged junkies. Present company excepted. I had a job and a place to live and friends. But I can’t get back to them: they’re part of the painted-on scenery now. They’re not real objects, they’re texture-maps. The street level doors open onto blue abysses. So do the windows. I’ve tried them all; then I gave up. I almost fell into them, any number of times, had to grab hold of texture that looked just like brick or paint or wood on one side and didn’t exist on the other. Vertigo made me sick and I threw up into that upside-down sky and watched it fall out of sight and vanish.
The former friends just repeat the same list of canned lines in random order, like any good NPC. Mostly “You look pretty bad, man” and “You really need to get some help”. It’s pathetic.
The last time I tried to get inside, I ran into a corner. Yeah, you’d think I would have tried that trick earlier, but you try ramming into the corner of a building in “real life”. Explain to your hindbrain about cheat codes when it sees a wedge of brick looming up. Even after psyching myself up I’d always swerve aside at the last second.
But I finally managed it. What do you think happened? I fucking knocked myself out on the bricks, that’s what. I came to a while later — this was in a back alley so no one had seen me. My face was covered in drying blood from this big gouge on my scalp, and I’d knocked this tooth out, but no serious head injury.
So I lay there a minute, feeling like shit, gathering up strength to move. Then I looked at how I was lying, and saw that my right arm went right into the wall and disappeared at the elbow. A clipping error. I could still feel my hand, but it wasn’t touching anything. I sat up slowly, the arm came loose with no resistance, but it just … ended there, in a smooth flat cut at the elbow. And I pulled it toward me and looked at it and there wasn’t anything inside me! Just an oval hole into a blue void.
I was too afraid to touch it with my fingers. Still am. I found a curl of rusty wire, unrolled it and stuck the end of it in. It just went straight into my arm without resistance, no matter how I wiggled it around inside. On the other side of that hole I didn’t exist. I got all four feet of wire into there, then lost my grip on the other end and it fell all the way in and disappeared … I didn’t feel it hit anything on the way down.
Of course you don’t believe me. Ha! No, whatever I’m full of, it isn’t shit. Alright, I’ll take the bandage off the stump and show you. It’s not paint. Sure, try sticking your fingers in and wiggling them. Fun, huh? Not so fun, huh?
You know about phantom limbs? I can still feel my forearm and hand. They say it’s because the brain centers that controlled them are still there, and want something to do, so they make up sensations. But like I said, I couldn’t feel them touching anything, just touch the fingers together and to the palm, make a fist and feel that. … Only now, just this morning, I can feel something else.
It feels like hard plastic. In my mind’s eye it’s shiny black. Its contours fit my grip perfectly. It’s got buttons on it, and a joystick. I’m going to try moving it now.
This is a sequel to my story Ozone. I’d wanted to write one for years, but didn’t have any inspiration about what happened next. Then last week the ideas in here came to me, and I realized that they fit neatly into that story-world. But the ending only came to me today, after I’d started writing the story down.
I got these ideas while watching my son explore glitches in the notoriously buggy game Pokémon Blue. I would love to have him read this story, but I know it would give him nightmares for weeks…
Call the roller of big dice, The long-haired one, and bid him whip On kitchen tables consecutive 18’s. Let the fighters dawdle in such armor As they are used to wear, and let the mages swap Delicious spells from last month’s Dragon. Let a fumble be finale of its caster: The only emperor is the dungeon master.
Take from the manual of monsters Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet On which I enumerated his stats once, And spread it so as to cover his face. If his bag remains, rifle his hoard To see who gets his precious +6 sword. Light the lamp to run away faster. The only emperor is the dungeon master.
{ after Wallace Stevens }
iPhone playing cards by Meninos:
The GameKit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 is very interesting to a Bonjour / P2P head like yrs truly. It basically provides a very easy-to-use API for ad-hoc group formation and many-to-many messaging on a local network. Great for games, of course, but also for many other types of social apps. (I just saw a report on a dev forum that somebody had whipped up a basic chat app in about 15 minutes.)
GameKit uses BlueTooth networking; that lets it work where there’s no WiFi, but it also limits the range. BlueTooth covers just a few meters, whereas a WiFi network connected to an Ethernet subnet can easily cover a whole floor of a building.
My MYNetwork framework seems like a good way to bridge that gap. The TCP connection classes provide the Bonjour discovery and makes point-to-point connections, and the BLIP protocol lets you send data blobs over those connections.
It should be pretty straightforward to build some classes that are plug-compatible with the GameKit network classes but use MYNetwork. Then iPhone apps could easily support both protocols, and compatible Mac apps could be developed. Anyone want to try it?
[Note: I’m only referring to information that was publicly discussed at Apple’s press event yesterday. I’ve read through the APIs, but I won’t go into details about them here in public.]
My plea for more iPhone board games is really getting results! Now there’s a Go game with an AI, so I can get my butt spanked in privacy without the humiliation of losing to an actual human (such as my son).
iGo is pretty good, for $2.99. It supports board sizes from 7×7 to 19×9, and several levels of AI strength in addition to a customizable handicap. There’s even Undo, so I can back-pedal on my lamest moves and try again.
The only things I can say against it are:
(Also, totally off the topic of games, I love the Amazon and OpenTable apps. Each of them is so much faster and smoother than navigating their respective websites.)
I’m happy to say there’s now an excellent implementation of Hex for the iPhone, named Hexy. I’m sure my recent call for more diversity in iPhone board games was entirely responsible for this, even though the authors claim it’s been in development for months.
Hex dates from the 1940s. Two players alternate playing stones on a diamond-shaped grid of hexagons; one is trying to build a connection between the left and right edges, the other between the top and bottom. That’s it. Despite the trivial rules, the gameplay is fun and interesting. You’ll quickly discover basic principles like “bridges” and “ladders”, but there’s a lot more strategy to learn.
(An interesting factoid about Hex is that it was proved early on that there is an infallible winning strategy for the first player; but the proof says nothing about what that strategy is! Small board sizes have been solved, but at the sizes that people typically play, starting at 11×11, no sure-fire strategy is known, so the game is still interesting to play.)
Hexy lets you play solo against an AI, or against another human either on the same iPhone or over a local network. I’ve played three games against the AI, and won two; as I’m a rank novice, this indicates the AI may not be that strong. On the other hand, it was nice not to be crushed like a bug! And I haven’t tried the larger boards, which are supposed to be more difficult.
The presentation is quite elegant. The graphics are subtle but pretty, with a very legible board, and some subliminal translucent hexagons floating by behind it. But every once in a while a cartoon bee flies by, which I find sort of distracting. My only real wish is that the board could be rotated slightly so it would fit better onto the iPhone screen, making scrolling or zooming less necessary.
Hexy costs $3.99, which is a bit more than many iPhone games, but if you’ve already got an Attax game, and are bored of checkers and tic-tac-toe, I think it’s one of your best options for another solid strategy game.
Board games have common, overused themes, just like their video cousins. There are any number of games about ancient Egypt, about Renaissance Italian merchants, about railroads or zombies or space empires. Some of these are excellent games, but it gets to the point where you wish designers would show more originality.
Bruno Faidutti had the highly original, if macabre, idea of making a board game based on the Kursk disaster, in which a Russian nuclear submarine sank to the bottom of the sea after an onboard explosion, and the whole crew died before rescuers could arrive. It would be a cooperative game, where the players work together to repair damage, put out fires, and try to stay alive for a specified number of turns.
Unfortunately, all the publishers he showed his prototype to turned it down, saying the theme was too depressing. (Frankly, I agree.) So in another brilliant move, he re-spun it slightly: the game, retitled Red November (BGG), is now about Soviet gnomes. Alcoholic Soviet gnomes, who need a shot of vodka to fortify themselves to attack leaks or fires, but then need to make saving rolls against passing out on the floor. Plus, an added hazard is a giant Kraken that must be shot from outside the submarine (good luck finding the aqualung.)
It’s actually a lot of fun. The silliness (which is reflected in the artwork) keeps you from thinking about “Das Boot” so much; even my kids are fine with it. The game keeps on throwing new randomized emergencies at you every turn, as rooms catch fire or flood, hatches jam, and the reactor overheats. There’s a very interesting time-keeping mechanism that allows the characters to run around ‘simultaneously’, fixing the problems, though the players are really still taking turns. We’ve won both games we’ve played—i.e. we survived till the end of the time track—though I did tweak a few rules to make things a bit easier for us, to avoid turning the kids against the game ;-)
The game is pretty cheap (around $20), and comes in a small box the size of a fat paperback, which is impressively densely packed with bits. Getting the box shut again after a game is a strategic exercise in itself! The rules are medium in complexity—more than Monopoly, but less than D&D. My kids and I found it easy to pick up the basics, but there are some details, like the specific effects of flooded rooms, that take some memorization. All in all, it’s one of the best board games I’ve bought in a while, definitely recommended (for the non-claustrophobic.)
The Decktet is this new deck of cards I first wrote about a few months ago while I was making my own copy. It combines an interesting new mechanic (multiple suits per card) that’s fertile ground for designing games, and whimsical but enigmatic illustrations that have a Tarot-like symbolism.
Since then,
Finally: Rogue. For. iPhone. Dude! This game ruled my 1982 (along with Tutankham).
I like board games, and I’d like to play some against my iPhone. (My secret shame is that I’m actually rather bad at board games, but the silver lining is that it doesn’t take much of an AI to provide me with a challenge!) The Board Games sub-category of the iPhone App Store has over 300 offerings. But if you filter out the ones that are really single-player puzzles, or that only let humans play each other, or that implement chess or checkers [neither of which I like] … there aren’t many left.
Especially if you then filter out the many duplicates. For example, I’m surprised at how many versions of Ataxx there are. Ataxx is a fairly obscure game (at least I thought it was!) but there are at least four different clones of it on the store, including a new one called Spoilage that just showed up. Why is that? Don’t get me wrong, Ataxx is a really good game, with simple but unusual mechanics, and good tactical difficulty despite its short play time. I’ve played it online and I have iBacteria on my iPhone.
But why are so many developers picking the same game? With a better-known game like chess, checkers, Go or Othello/Reversi, I can understand going for the name recognition. But those wanting to develop different abstract strategy games have literally thousands to choose from. Don’t believe me? Peruse my
So please! Go develop some of these, and sell them on the App Store, and I’ll buy them! (Especially Abande. I really want a patient Abande opponent to help me improve my play!)
Even if you’re not a game developer, most of these games are easy to play with boards you either have already or can print out. (And if you have access to a laser-cutter, so much the better…)
Footnote: I haven’t mentioned Go. I really like Go, although I’m miserable at it, and every time a Go-related app comes out I read its description eagerly; but so far none of them have AI play. They either let two humans play each other, or they merely play back saved Go matches to study. I suspect there’s a technical problem here: Go is notoriously difficult to program AI for, and the only readily available implementation I know of is GNU Go. But this is GPL-licensed, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the GPL were fundamentally incompatible with the iPhone’s application model, since it’s impossible to modify or recompile other people’s apps. Anyone know for sure?
Footnote 2: And WTF is up with all the tic-tac-toe apps? News flash, everyone: Tic-Tac-Toe has been solved! No one ever wins a game if played correctly, and anyone with the brains to operate an iPhone should be able to play correctly. So what’s the appeal? Are parents buying it as an easy way to win against their four-year-old kids?
I hung out with Ricci this afternoon. I brought along my Decktet, and we tried some of the games, then decided to make up one of our own. I suggested adapting Crazy Eights to this weird double-suited deck; a direct adaptation didn’t do too well on its own (it was too easy to get rid of cards), but Ricci had an idea that worked brilliantly, of incurring penalties for repeating suits.
Then I came home and wrote down the rules … Give it a try! (Don’t believe a word of the historical background, though! I just made it up, and stole the great nonsense word “quäsenbö” from an old Roz Chast cartoon.)
My Decktet is a thing of beauty. I even printed & assembled the box (an activity that took me back to my happy childhood days of making paper polyhedra models.)
The only problem is that the cards still have a faint sickly-sweet stink of toluene and acetone (from the plastic coating) even after I left them spread out on the floor for a few days. It’s quite unpleasant, not like the nice smell of new books, cars or boardgames.
Is this the papercraft equivalent of Code Smell?
Sometimes it’s nice to make physical objects. It’s usually messier and more time-consuming than doing it on the computer, but in the end you have something you can actually touch.
Ever since I saw P. D. Magnus’s Decktet—a whimsical yet mysterious deck of cards for games or divination—I wanted one of my own. However, the Decktet is currently only available as a PDF, so any physical manifestation has to be of a DIY nature.
The deck has 36 cards (plus the optional “The Excuse”), of six suits, and its most unusual feature is that the number cards each have two suits. (There are also single-suited Aces and Kings.) This obviously adds a lot of interesting possibilities for games.
Magnus has given each suit a symbolic meaning, as well as a color, and done a good job integrating them into each card. For example, the Penitent (see above) combines the green color and violent connotations of the Wyrms suit with the orange and “decisive action and clarity of purpose” of Suns; while the Market combines Wood’s “gift of the earth … raw materials and food products” with Knots’ “craft, skill … commerce and money”.
(I should add that I am not a believer in the supernatural. I love tarot cards, and own the rare Hello Kitty deck as well as the usual Rider-Waite-Smith ; but I see these as a combination of objets d’art and Rorschach blots. They’re lovely and spooky and meaningful, but what you get out of them is coming from the depths of your own mind, which is I think just as mysterious as any Astral Plane.)
Fortunately I already knew where to get printable blank playing cards. I ordered the both-sides-blank variety and the magic coating spray. While waiting for the package, I adapted the Decktet PDF into the right layout for these cards, which was kind of a pain (does anyone know of a tool for cutting/pasting/cropping parts of PDFs?)
Then after the mail came, I carefully printed out each sheet of cards (the plain-paper setting worked best), fed them back in upside-down to print the backs, then held my breath while spraying sickly-sweet poisonous volatile plastic vapor over the sheets.
After an hour or so to dry, the cards were ready to punch out. The paper is micro-perforated (like those Avery business card sheets) so the edges come out very cleanly after you bend the perforations back and forth a few times. And voila…
Just like real playing cards! I love coding, but you can’t hold a set of methods in your hand like that.
The cards are shiny, and slippery enough to shuffle well, though they’re not as slick as a new pack of commercial cards. The edges are a little bit rough from the perforations, but not unpleasantly so. A few of the edges got a little bent while being detached. The cloying smell of toluene and acetone is dissipating.
Now I can use my Decktet! Should I tell my fortune first, or play a game of Window ?
