Perhaps you've heard of the party game "mafia"...
I've recently discovered that people play this online in forums...
The premise is that you play the game in rounds.  You start with a group of people, a small portion of them are known to be "mafia" and out to kill all the others.  With that knowledge each round the "town" (non-mafia members) select one person to "lynch" and the mafia pick one person to execute.
Rounds continue until only town or only mafia remain.

The game is primarily about reading people in real person.. when played online it has an interesting bent toward statistical analysis of voting pattern/trends... for big games, people build spreadsheets...

Anyway.. I was intrigued when I discovered this, so I whipped up some asp code to run forums specifically for playing this game.

Check it out here: (free hosting that runs asp and will host the database, sweet!)
http://www.happyworldland.org/mafia

Recently a friend of mine sent me this snippet of an IM thread he was having with some co-workers.

[12:27pm] klh: oh, that reminds me of a gaming question.
[12:28pm] klh: i m curious if there is a predominant method for handling the camera view vs controls.
[12:28pm] pmarks: klh: for third-person, I assume?
[12:28pm] klh: one method, which I like a lot, is for the controls to behave just as if you were controlling, say, a R/C airplane.  "left" is always the object's left, regardless of which way it's pointing.
[12:29pm] klh: but what I've seen in many games is that "left" means "to the left on the screen" no matter which way the object is pointing.
[12:29pm] klh: and the latter really screws you up when the camera angle changes, which it will do at almost any time for almost no reason.
[12:30pm] klh: my playing experience with modern games is very minimal.
[12:30pm] klh: so i don't know if one method is predominant or not.
[12:31pm] pmarks: I would assume that character-based controls are better if you have a lot of experience, while screen-based controls are easier for a beginner
[12:31pm] klh: i just find it bizarre.
[12:31pm] pmarks: but I don't play enough games to know how common each method is

Here was my reply:

The camera control method that is mentioned as "preferred" above is the least common control method (but the easiest to implement and therefore the most common in "older" games)...
 
The "push up on the stick and the character moves forward" (sometimes referred to as "tank controls", the default control scheme of the Resident Evil series) works well for driving or flying games, but not usually for character based games because most people find the additional mental effort of mentally rotating your control scheme into character space to be too difficult while dealing with all the other action on the screen as well (unless the game is very simplistic).
 
The problem mentioned above with the control scheme shifting as the camera moves out from under you is a common problem in cheaply made games, and usually there are two different strategies used in order to compensate...
 
The first is pretty simple... don't manually move the users's camera for them, and then the camera relative controls always make sense... or if you move the camera, do it slowly and people will just naturually roll their stick counter to the camera movement and compensate without even thinking about it.
 
The other method is to lock the player's frame of reference to the controller when they press in a particular direction, and then keep running in that direction until the stick is moved, regardless of what the camera is doing and the new stick vector is relative to the camera.  We saw this in the Broken Sword game that we were just playing... the cameras shifted constantly, but if you knew that you were travelling in the correct direction, then all you had to do was continue to hold down the button and have faith that you would ultimately get where you were going regardless of the camera relative direction that you were technically pushing after the cut.  That being said, this system does tend to break down in a game with hard drastic camera angle cuts (hence Resident Evil preferring tank controls) and works best with typically over the shoulder third person action games (I believe that the technique was pioneered by Legend of Zelda, Ocharina of Time).
 
This second method is what I've implemented in all the games that I've worked on, including a survival horror game that I worked on for Capcom.
 
So pmarks seems to be in the minority as to what is better, but it could be that he just hasn't played a good game recently that does it right.

 

For those of you playing along at home,  you may have predicted that it's about time for my bi-annual livejournal post.

Welp... Here goes:

So I recently discovered the concept of the "IDE-to-USB" adaptor.  You can take an internal harddrive and plug it into this gizmo (it's got its own seperate AC power as well) and when you plug it into your PC it shows up like any other USB drive.  It's pretty awesome. (I even used it to hook an internal DVD drive up to a laptop that had none).

So I dug through my basement and found all of my old and dusty hard drives from machines long forgotten.  I pulled them from their various out-moded AT cases and began harvesting the data.  Transferring everything to a single external 500 GB HD, I found about 300 GB worth of stuff.

I began to try to figure out how I could sort/organize/store/sift through it all in order to save the stuff that's worthwhile, and discard the rest (more room for future digital pics and video).  I knew I could use Picasa (awesome program from our friends at Google) to find all the photos... That was pretty straightforward.  Then I could use google desktop (another good program from the googlenauts) to search if I had anything that I was searching for, but I realized that after everything was indexed, I realized that I wanted to do was browse and sort, not search.

There are lots of file finding utilities out there... but what I want is something that will take data analysis and organization to the next level.  Based on file type, context, data characteristics, and a little bit of hard coded smarts about how to organize large quantities of unsorted miscellaneous data, there should be something that helps you organize it into "piles" and allow for fast sorting and browsing.  Ideally the tool would allow you to spot trends and draw conclusions from the data that were not apparent previously.  What I want is perhaps a data concierge.  One that can make suggestions or point out interesting landmarks... Or perhaps a data curator.  One that will overlay a narrative, an organization method, a way to compact and preserve.

I've been a pretty heavy computer user since the 90's and so now I've got most of that all together now.  Right now that's pretty unusual, but in the future that's going to be pretty normal.  People pick up more and more data (tax records, personal correspondence, diaries, videos, pictures)  like a snowball rolling downhill..  Right now people are at the top of that hill and the snowball is small and managable.   It's going to become a bigger and bigger chore to organize all that data it intelligently.  The problem that I face now with this 500 gigabyte drive is daunting, but looking through my drives, my hard drive capacity every year for the last ten had just about doubled,

Data Curator.  It's going to be the next killer app.  Your heard it here first.

If you haven't checked this out already, go to http://elothtes.pbwiki.com (started by the guys over at http://www.penny-arcade.com) and check out this epic series. If you've got any info on the series feel free to tack something on to the site, the password is "elemenstorsaywha".

Also of interest is the new blog started by my dear sister Johanna. It can be found at http://justjohanna.blogspot.com/.

Hmm... let's see... while I'm at it. I've moved my web comic from www.fortunecity.com (where it was basically so crushed by ads that it was hard to even use the site) so now it's on my own domain, so the new URL is http://www.happyworldland.org/sacredtruth even though there is still no new content.

I had a funny dream last night that all the programmers that I work with were instead of building a game, we were working as system programmers on some sort of a space freighter. One of the programmers, Jeremy, had built this grid of toggles from Legos through which you could shine a laser beam, and the path it traveled determined a number that would be generated. Then he gave this device to my infant son Alexander so he could pound on the toggles so he could get random number generation.
It was pretty weird.

So the subject of Pop Tarts came up in conversation this morning at work. Boldly emblazoned on the box is "made with real fruit" and we were thinking about how far you could go and still make this claim. Something made from synthetics and plastics could technically claim to be made from real fruit that dropped from trees, was burried under tons of sediment, changed into crude oil, processed, and refined. In this sense your frisbee could be said to be made with real fruit. Taking it even further, the compositing Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen has probably been recycling through various states and compositions since before the formation of the Earth. So I think that it would be funny to see a product that proudly advertises "Made From Real Stars"...
I mean.. I'd certainly buy it.

Work
It's certainly getting down to the wire at work. 49 days until first submission to Sony? The marketing machine is starting up, we're getting a cover story on Game Informer that I think makes us look pretty good.
Baby
Alex has been rolling over for a few weeks now, although he still can't roll back onto his back, so every once in a while when I go to his crib he's in there with his face mashed down on the blanket trying to figure out how exactly he can right himself. It's heartbreaking.
Books
I've just finished reading Angels & Demons (by that Di Vinci Code guy, Daniel Brown maybe?) and that was an enjoyable read. Then I read The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. That book took some effort. His prose is pretty dense, almost as if he's trying to obfuscate his meanings so that after you've puzzled it out the reward is understanding the progress of his narrative. So it's half book, half puzzle game. (Oh I get it... he walked through the door!)
Games
Peasant's Quest is by far the coolest game I've played recently. Ah fond memories of low tech Sierra games.
http://homestarrunner.com/disk2of12.html
Also.. My pre-order of Galleon came in today which I'll probably be picking up this afternoon. I'll bet you've never heard of it.

Just after passing the Mall this morning on El Camino Real, I looked in my rear view mirror and saw flashing blue and red behind the car next to me.
The beat up old black SUV was being pulled over by a police motorcycle. He must have been speeding. But then… instead of pulling over, he cut across 3 lanes of traffic several car lengths in front of me and pulled right up over the median and into the oncoming lanes of traffic. The cop cycle couldn't follow him up and over so just stopped. That's when I saw the cop car that must have also been chasing him. By the time I looked back across the street the black SUV was stopped crossways across the lanes, with traffic starting to back up. The drivers side door was open and the guy that was inside was booking down the sidewalk. As the cop car sped up the road to pull a U turn and double back, the motorcycle cop was off his bike, pursuing on foot and drawing his weapon.
At this point I pulled back onto the road and kept driving to work... Just a really strange and random event to have a front row seat for.

So last Friday they fired 20 people. Right sizing is painful for all involved.
Now there are 2 weeks left until we ship a version of the game to New York and they make the decision as to whether we can compete with NFS Underground 2.
The game is really coming together, but there are going to be a lot of 12 hours days between now and then.

Time to go test my mettle.

My theme music this week as been "The Planets" by Gustov Holst.

and anybody who hasn't seen this.... needs to.

Only 6 hours remaining until Cassini orbital insertion. But we still have to wait a while to find out what's on Titan.

I had a dream that I was picking Brandon up from school, but in the dream he was going to the same school that I went to. So I was walking around the school looking for him, and I kept going to classrooms where he might have been, but instead of finding him, I found school library books that he'd checked out, and left in the class room. I gathered them up as I went along and finally stopped by the library to drop them off. Let me tell you the library had changed a lot in 10 years. They had installed a full set of bowling lanes and all the teachers were in there bowling.
I remember in the dream Brandon had changed his last name, and I could tell how long ago the books had been checked out because half of them were checked out under his old name, and half under his new name.

Oh well... This dream probably means that I don't go bowling enough.