the problem with interactive storytelling

A little statement that is prompted by this brainy gamer blog post and is in no way an attack. I'm Just pointing out exactly where the real problem is.

For films to tell a story they require an audience prepared to shut the fuck up and sit in a dark room for an hour or two.

For games to tell a story they require an audience comprised of rational humans to interpret and react with skill to an ongoing situation of unknown length.

Do you perhaps see where the weak link in interactive storytelling lies?

:)

moar rendermosity : ass fro

which should now be available inside the 4lfa poop stream here

http://4lfa.com/page.php/20080730/054139/VIDEOPollyMorfs_Ass_Fro


on jewpube here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU82vMmAz4o


or, well, embedded right here



yay, I'm happier with the lighting on this one which is using blender internal+AO rather than yafray. AO is a "cheap" trick that really does seem to work well.

3dvideovision

4lfa.com now available in 3d and audio and video and pictures and words and everything in an extravaganza of full sensory entertainment

pull my finger for added smellovision

behold

ItsaCoop Beta

Final beta preview of ItsaCoop!!!

Multiplayer and cookie scoring should all now be working...

OK, giving up with inserting flash into this blog, its all just icky ick ick...

so instead

the power of linking...

Click here to play beta version of

ItsaCoop

oh yes

feel that power

it's a link you know

bill has left the building

Lots of places posting articles relevant to bill leaving microsoft, full of insight into the past and future of the company.

But when I close my eyes all I see is this.

So this rails thing sux then?

I stumbled across an interesting list just now, I suspect that it has solved a mystery that I have been curious about for some time.

My curiosity was first piqued by penny arcade, a popular gaming comic site. The thing that bothered me was how it managed to be somewhat broken and slow on occasion. I mean yeah traffic can kill a site, but penny-arcade is or should be mostly static content, we are not talking about running an application at most its serving static content that gets updated occasionally. Thats an easy to solve problem no matter what traffic you throw at it provided you have the cash and PA seems to have the advertising cash since well it also seems to have all the traffic. Yeah its got a forum but I don't frequent the forum so thats not the bit I'm talking about and the forum should really be running on separate machines anyhow. So how can this be borked? its a mystery so it is.

But today it all became clear when I discovered that kongregate was running on ruby on rails. Now I dont know anything about ruby or rails apart from noticing something of a fine rant about the fact that it doesnt really work. Not working is actually kinda normal with software, most of it doesn't really work but we do the best we can and mostly things get fixed and work out in the end but the blame here is pointed at the community developing rails. That's something of a unfixable problem, a nice schizim and name change is about the only thing that can sort that out.

Anyway, kong on rails, why that could explain why the site has this sort of not really working very well feel to it. Maybe, just maybe, rails really is a big problem here I wonder what else runs on rails. (Thinks jokingly: I bet twitter does, that thing is up and down like a whores knickers)

So then I find this http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Alexa+Rankings what an interesting list, oh look see theres twitter and there penny arcade. Why this may explain everything, it is in fact like a list containing every "web 2.0" site that doesn't really work very well. All the sites on there that I recognise and use have been chock full of technofail in my personal user experience.

So this rails thing sux then?

Sure some of these sites may work well, but good coders can make anything work well, that's how you know you have good people. There certainly seems to be some correlation here between rails and sites with issues and I'm always suspicious of peoples overly emotional attachments to such things as ruby on rails.

Yay, another mystery solved.

/me puts the kettle on.

My experience with the spore creature creator.

As you may be able to work out from the image, this is not a very happy experience.

I did however manage to get it to work for a little while, however it is back to refusing to work again. When it runs it is nice, I do feel a little bit insulted in terms of only being handed safe tools with very round edges. It could be so much more !!! :) maybe if it had an expert mode I would be happier but really its as perfect as can be when considering the audience.

The problem is however that of securom which I understand is the protection of choice by EA games.

A required security module cannot be activated.
This program cannot be executed (5024).

Thanks for the useful error BTW.

There are countless descriptions of this antipiracy measure causing problems for non pirates and very few complaints from the pirates. Could this be that as with most anti piracy measures that the only people it really effects are your paying customers?

I have perhaps more experience with reverse engineering other peoples code than most games programmers. So I do understand the problems that are faced and I have seen how people who make decisions feel that it must be possible to prevent piracy on this level. It is however a much more complicated problem than most people understand. There are solutions that work on another level and have been around a long time and although these solutions are not 100% effective they are still the best solutions available to an incredibly complicated problem.

The best thing to do is have a tethered approach where you are joining an ongoing service, (think CD keys and accounts, not just pay per month) this is of course perfect for spore. Although this is something they seem to be doing, what EA does not understand is that this is the *only* thing you need to do. This social fix to software piracy works as well as can ever be expected. Basically you are not trying to stop the game from being pirated you are trying to turn the pirates into customers by offering them more when they pay for it.

Having a poke around on the customers machine and refusing to run if certain blacklisted programs or whatever are found is by far the worst possible solution. Its hard enough to get anything to work on everyones PCs without adding this extra possibility to the things that can go badly wrong.

It is retarded to the max.

Therefore it is EAs modus operandi.

Now the people who sell you this software will of course tell you how wonderful it is and how it never ever goes wrong and how the evil pirates are quaking in their boots.

These evil pirates for instance.

The current "hack" seems to consist of simply copying paid for content to the demo version.

Thats the thing, most games these days don't even get hacked, its all just script kiddies copying files or installing generic fixes to the generic protection software that the people such as securom sell the publishers.

So I don't see much fear going on there, I do however have a non functioning game demo on my machine which has successfully dissuaded me from spending any money on it..

Such a shame, I was so looking forward to this.