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The Gameshelf tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2011-02-16:/1 2016-07-22T01:35:18Z Independent Game Criticism and other interesting stuff Melody 1.0.0 SFWA eligibility for game writers tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.748 2016-07-22T01:31:53Z 2016-07-22T01:35:18Z SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has announced that game writers will soon be eligible to join. (The rule change goes into effect on August 1.) This applies to writers who work on videogames, RPGs, and tabletop... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has announced that game writers will soon be eligible to join. (The rule change goes into effect on August 1.) This applies to writers who work on videogames, RPGs, and tabletop games.

SFWA is a professional society for SF writers (and fantasy, yes, and no you don't have to be American. The acronym is way out of date). Their membership page gives an overview of what they do: support and professional/legal advice for authors, particularly authors just starting out. Also a newsletter and so on. Also SFWA runs the Nebula Awards (the SF awards that aren't the Hugos).

The notion of admitting game writers has been floating around SFWA for a while now. Last September they added Choice of Games to their qualifying markets list, and they've also reported that a broader rule change proposal has been in the works. Apparently it was voted in, so here we are.

The formal criteria are described here. Cat Rambo, SFWA president, has added more detail on her blog. The summary is:

Sell a game containing at least 40000 words to a qualified (paying) market.

Or sell three games of 10000 words to a qualified market.

Or sell (to players) a game of at least 40000 words that makes at least $3000 in a year.

Word count includes the narrative content, not instructions or game mechanics.

To count, games must have a narrative element, be in English, and be SF, fantasy, or horror.

Work done for hire is not eligible.

Rambo notes that the rules are subject to further discussion and change (particularly on that last point). They're feeling their way forward on this.

To compare, the SFWA criteria for prose authors are "one novel of at least 40000 words, or three short stories of 10000 words." Or screenplays or stuff of equivalent lengths. Or a self-published work that makes $3000. So these rules are a direct translation, with the caveats about game mechanics and work-for-hire.

(I get the impression that when they say "not game mechanics", they're thinking of an RPG sourcebook which contains both narrative scene-setting and instructions for playing the game. For a videogame, it would make sense to separate user-displayed text from source code.)

Turns out there's some history to this, which Brian Moriarty mentions on Twitter:

It happened before, briefly, in the late 80s. Only three people (Meretzky, Lebling and me) joined before it was disallowed. (-- @ProfBMoriarty)

I don't know the story behind that. Brian points a finger at Greg Costikyan but I couldn't find discussion from that era. Anyway, it was long ago and no doubt the fannish furor has been forgotten.

(Meaningful pause for someone to recount fannish furor in horrifying detail...)

We'll see. In the meantime, I did a quick word-count and verified that, yes, I qualify for membership! Hadean Lands has about 73000 words of displayable text (out of about 240000 words of Inform source code). For a more accurate number I'd want to discount credits, tutorial, and parser messages, but it will still be comfortably over 40000. And I have passed the $3000 minimum for a self-published work.

So... I'm still thinking about this. The $100/year SFWA dues aren't high, but they're not completely trivial either. But, on the other hand, there are benefits. Plus I'm doing this non-profit thing; I want to keep a toe dipped into all the relevant professional circles, and SFWA now counts as one. And... there's a following-in-the-footsteps aspect which is awfully attractive.

(I should note that many, many game writers are already SFWA members! It's perfectly common for people to have game-writing credits and write novels or short stories. I just happen to be someone who is well-known as a game designer without also having professional writing credentials.)

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/07/sfwa-eligibility-for-game-writers/ Soma: meanderings by a wuss tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.747 2016-07-18T03:24:28Z 2016-07-18T03:35:12Z (This post will be generally spoilery for the setting and background of Soma. I will avoid specific plot details, however.) I've had Soma on my stack for several months. Last month I pulled it off the (virtual) shelf to take... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
(This post will be generally spoilery for the setting and background of Soma. I will avoid specific plot details, however.)

I've had Soma on my stack for several months. Last month I pulled it off the (virtual) shelf to take a look.

Contemporary-world prologue: good setup. Transition to the creepy future undersea base: excellent. Creepy undersea base: admirably creepy. I pushed through the first bit of the base, moving very cautiously -- though, from a design standpoint, this was clearly the "shadows in the corner of your eye" phase. The monster was not yet on screen.

So then I get to the room where the Frictional monster comes on screen. "Oh," I said, "look, it's the Frictional monster."

I've played through Amnesia: Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs(🐷). They have the same monster. It shambles towards you and kicks your ass. And I remember specifically, in Pig Machine, that the monster is fundamentally harmless. If you just stand there and wait, it shambles up and whomps you and then disappears. I mean, you die -- or almost die, or the game gives you another shot, or something -- but the monster is gone and you can get on with the plot.

I can see how the designers got there. Getting stuck isn't particularly good for the game flow, and the threat of sort-of-death is a still a decent incentive to sneak around and play the game "right". For most people. I guess. Not me. "Face your fear!" I shouted, and let the monster walk up and pop like a soap bubble.

In that light, the Frictional monster is hapless and pitiable. Poor poor fleshy monstrosity.

So there I am in Soma's underwater base, and the Frictional monster is coming at me again. It's dripping black biomechanical goo this time, but still instantly recognizable. I tried hiding -- pro forma, just to see if I could -- but no, it spots me and shambles in. Whomp!

I wake up -- but wounded: limping, blurred vision. Interesting. And the monster is still there. Hm.

Clearly the designers have backed off from the Piggy soap-bubble stance. Okay, that's fair. Facing the monster down really isn't the intended play experience. So I manage to sneak around the monster and make it to the next room. Explore a while. Find a healing... thing. Makes sense. Getting hurt has consequences but you can recover.

Oh, look, the monster has followed me. I hide. It finds me and whomps me. I wake up wounded. Oh, wait, it found me again. Whomp. Game over. Game over? Yes.

Unfortunately, I am caught in the fork. Playing the fearless Piggy way might have deflated the tension, but I could do it -- I finished Machine for Pigs and had a good creepy time. But bold isn't an option in Soma. Playing the "right" way, hiding from the monster, is tense but it isn't working.

Conclusion: maybe I'm bored with the Frictional monster. After three games, maybe they should have come up with something new?

(Yes, I know Pig Machine was made by a different studio. Doesn't help.)

But, before I delete Soma forever, I think: maybe I'm not the first? Indeed! With a very little bit of Googling:

Wuss Mode: Monsters Don't Attack by The Dreamer

This addon renders nearly all enemies in the main story non-hostile during regular gameplay. Surprisingly, it completely changes the atmosphere of the game, often for the better, since the servants of the WAU quietly patrolling the abandoned halls of Pathos-2 have a chilling poignance to them. [...] Playing it is an incredibly surreal experience, and while I personally prefer the vanilla gameplay, I think for those with weaker countenances, this is certainly a worthwhile way to play. Perfect for wusses who can't take the scares but still want to experience the amazing story and atmosphere of SOMA!

I quote a large chunk of the creator's blurb because I agree and disagree. It is surreal and poignant. The monsters -- not just one, I got far enough to distinguish variations -- are once again pitiable, wretched things. But they're threatening wretches. There is a great difference, I find, between a soap-bubble monster and one that shambles around in your face until you manage to escape it.

To be concrete: it is really hard to sit down at a computer console when there's a howling monster behind you. Even when you know it won't whomp you.

There are also a couple of chase scenes where if you're too slow, you die. The mod doesn't affect those. (I imagine they're not implemented as monsters, but with some other engine mechanic.) But I didn't have too much trouble getting through them.

Back up; re-read that blurb. Note the whole social-signalling issue, where the mod author has to be very clear that people who use this mod are weaker and can't take the scares. (It is, in fact, the stealth mechanics that I couldn't take.) I don't read that phrasing as real contempt -- for a start, the author made the mod. They must have some empathy for me, the prospective user. But they couldn't address me directly, either! I imagine them standing in a crowd of gamer-bro stereotypes, holding up this sparkling mod... but not too high... not too far outside the circle... lest someone mistake them for some kind of... wuss.

Well, I'm happy to speak for them, and to you. Soma is a haunting game. The environments are oppressive and beautiful. The pacing ratchets nicely between exploring in the light and creeping through the dark (but always edging deeper and dimmer). Even if the monsters cannot hurt you, there is tension in where monsters might be, and where they are. And so the game works with this mod. I recommend it.

(To enable Wuss Mode for Soma on Steam, search for it in the Steam Workshop and subscribe; then launch Soma and select "Play Mod". I'm not sure if it's available in the Playstation version.)

I should talk about the narrative, but I don't have a lot to say. I'd already played The Swapper and The Talos Principle (my review) so a story based around identity-and-philosophy-of-AI? Not really new territory.

I will say that Soma manages to tie the player's actions into its philosophical concerns. (Talos didn't do that -- it had a lot of nice writing which never intersected the gameplay. As for Swapper, I'm afraid its story never made much impression on me at all.) Soma's story is a bit scattershot, but it lands a couple of solid hits which have thematic weight behind them. It's horror, but existential horror in the end.

(I will cordially disagree with the designers' decision about the final scene. Shoulda left that right out.)

(Or, okay, left it in but distanced? Third-person? I'm trying not to be spoilery here, but you see what I mean.)

(🐷 Such a shame that David Cameron resigned before I wrote this.)

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/07/soma-meanderings-by-a-wuss/ Hadean Lands, two weeks in tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.746 2016-07-06T19:51:29Z 2016-07-06T19:54:10Z So, Zarf, how did that launch go? Pretty good! Hadean Lands has been on sale on Steam for sixteen days now. And three hours. (Am I counting the minutes? Not really, but it's fun to check.) In that time it... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
So, Zarf, how did that launch go?

Pretty good! Hadean Lands has been on sale on Steam for sixteen days now. And three hours. (Am I counting the minutes? Not really, but it's fun to check.)

In that time it garnered several articles about the DLC certificate, notably from Kotaku and Eurogamer.net. (Those two articles interviewed me a bit on the subject.) Emily Short posted a stellar writeup of the game on Rock Paper Shotgun, and I also got a very nice review on ExtremeTech. And of course many other people said positive things.

Thank you!

Extra props to RayganK, who is leading a crew through HL on his Twitch channel. This is very cool! And... Twitch works very badly for me, for some reason, so I've only seen bits of it. They're two sessions in. Good hunting, folks.

But really, how is it selling?

I won't get into hard numbers, but... HL sold a fair number of copies in the first three days. Then the Steam summer sale started, which took the wind out of the sales. Or maybe it was just a three-day launch spike; it's about what I expected either way.

Then the nice reviews appeared, which led to several more days of good sales. Yay! At this point we're settling back down to the long-term tail rate, but I don't yet have an idea what that is.

And yes, to answer the obvious question, I've sold some certificates. A few. Not nearly as many as I've sold copies of the game. That's fine; I worked a lot harder on the game.

Other news?

This past weekend I posted a small update. (Also available on Itch and Humble.) It doesn't affect the game content, but adds some UI features:

"Full Screen" menu option. (F11 on Win/Linux, cmd-ctrl-F on Mac.)

"Find..." and "Find Next" menu options (ctrl-F/G or cmd-F/G). These let you do a simple text search in the story window. Note that the scrollback is not infinite -- sorry.

In the "Preferences" dialog, there is now an option for "Other Font..." This lets you enter the name of any font installed on your system. (Although you have to type it in rather than looking through a list. Enter the name as you would see it in a CSS file -- the game's display engine is HTML, after all.)

In the Alchemy Journal window, the list of rituals now shows "(*)" to mark rituals that you've learned but not yet tried. (Same as the RECALL RITUALS command in the story window.)

Fixed a bug where a formula description in the Journal window might not be updated when it should be.

(Due to the nature of Inform 7, I will probably never update the game content of the Steam release of HL. Any change would inevitably wipe everybody's save-game positions, and that just isn't acceptable for a Steam game.)

And that's the current color of the ritual bound, as it were. At this point I've done everything to Hadean Lands that I ever planned to, and more; it is entirely and completely shipped.

(Except for that bit of the KS reward that I still owe a few backers... yes, I know.)

I'm finishing up a contract project this month, and then it's back to thinking about Designing A New Game. Since I'm a game designer and all.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/07/hadean-lands-two-weeks-in/ The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation: a new nonprofit tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.745 2016-06-30T15:39:45Z 2016-06-30T15:41:57Z Here's something new! Today we are announcing the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the software and services that underlie modern IF. The web site (iftechfoundation.org) has all the information. But the quick... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
Here's something new!

Today we are announcing the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the software and services that underlie modern IF.

The web site (iftechfoundation.org) has all the information. But the quick overview goes like this:

For the past 25-ish years, IF has been primarily a free hobby supported by free-time volunteers. This is great; it's organized around a community (or communities) rather than being pinned to one company's fate. But it's also a weakness. People's free time varies. Services and tools go unmaintained.

The goal of IFTF is to support these efforts; to provide an umbrella organization that can manage projects when the original creator doesn't want to; and to be a visible donation point for benefactors who want to support IF.

(To be clear, IFTF does not plan to directly support creators or become a paying market for IF. The "technology" in the title means tools, services, and web sites.)

Our first project involves assuming stewardship of IFComp, lending the event (and its website) the legal and financial backing of a formal organization. Jmac will still be in charge of IFComp, but he will now do it wearing an IFTF hat. And IFComp will now (through the parent organization) own its own web-site code and copyrights and so on.

Our plans for the near future include support for Twine and doing a study on accessibility of existing IF tools. Beyond that, well, we'll have to see how much money comes in.

Who are we? A bunch of IF fans, authors, and people generally known in the community:

Chris Klimas (Twine, Blue Chairs)

Flourish Klink (Muggle Studies)

Jason McIntosh (IFComp, The Warbler's Nest)

Andrew Plotkin (Glulx, Hadean Lands)

Carolyn VanEseltine (ParserComp, Ollie Ollie Oxen Free)

We also have a large advisory committee drawn from across the various IF worlds.

I could burble on about this project, because we've been swinging at it for several months and the ideas are flowing rapidly. But today's the day we announce it, so I'll stand back and let the news percolate.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/06/the-interactive-fiction-technology-foundation-a-new-nonprofit/ So I bought a Steam Machine. How did that go? tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.744 2016-06-29T03:57:53Z 2016-06-29T04:32:37Z A year ago I wrote this post I am a person who will buy a Steam Machine, then Followup on Steam Machines, and I felt all clever. To reiterate the basic argument: PCs are a horrid swamp of choosing hardware... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
A year ago I wrote this post I am a person who will buy a Steam Machine, then Followup on Steam Machines, and I felt all clever. To reiterate the basic argument:

PCs are a horrid swamp of choosing hardware parts with model numbers a mile long and people calling you an idiot for picking the wrong third letter. Plus, I don't want to maintain Windows. But they run all the games.

Macs have a few easy-to-choose models, which is good, but they don't get all the games. Some of the games, but not all the games.

Consoles have just one model (per decade) and run all the games. But I don't want to do business with Sony or Xbox (Windows).

I've been getting along all-Mac for a long time. But, well, The Witness. And other cool-sounding indie titles. And then there's Obduction, which will be available for Mac, but... the recommended graphics hardware just isn't cheap on the Mac side of the universe.

SteamOS looked like a tolerable compromise. It's not Windows. (I know how to maintain Linux.) But it's as cheap as Windows. There are too many models, but if I pick one brand it's only about four models and I don't have to read about graphics cards until my eyes bleed. I figured Valve was a big enough gorilla to corral the game studios into Linux/SteamOS support. Maybe not top priority, but some support.

So, last winter I bought a Steam Machine. Alienware, one of the middle models, I don't remember the letters and numbers. It arrived in December.

(Long embarrassing pause...)

The machine then sat in its carton for six months.

Here's the thing. Games fall into these rough categories:

Games from giant publishers that can do cross-platform development. Some of these ship for Mac and Windows simultaneously. Others ship for Windows first, Mac later. Others ship for Windows and the hell with everything else. Linux/SteamOS support might come along with Mac support, or later, or never.

Games from indie publishers using cross-platform tools (usually Unity). These ship for Mac and Windows simultaneously. Maybe Linux/SteamOS too, maybe not.

Games from indies who write directly in Windows. Mac comes a long time later, if ever. Linux is hosed.

In no case does the SteamOS version come before the Mac version. Oh, occasionally it happens. I looked through Steam's list and found... the Saint's Row series was Win and SteamOS but not Mac. There might have been another example. But not the stuff I cared about.

My Steam hardware was getting me exactly zero leverage in playing new games. So much for the big gorilla argument.

(Further embarrassed pause...)

So last weekend I uncrated my Steam Machine, stuck a Windows 10 thumb drive into it, and wiped that puppy clean. Fresh Win10 install. Worked great. Installed the Steam app, installed The Witness, launched it. I'm up to two lasers.

That's pretty much my whole blog post.

It's kind of embarrassing for everybody, really. If it weren't for the brute momentum of the industry, would we want the epicenter of gaming to be glued to Windows? Of course not. Windows is the only consumer OS that costs money -- and when it inevitably goes free, it will be because Microsoft has tied Windows to some other miserable business model. Desktop ads or force-integrated Office subscriptions, who knows. It won't do gamers any favors, you can bet.

Consoles are run for the benefit of their owners -- not game developers or players. The Mac world is, yes, run for the benefit of Apple.

(Sure, I'd argue that Apple wants to make Mac users happy. But that's not the same as "game developers and players". The iOS App Store is harsh terrain for devs these days; the Mac App Store is worse; nobody wants to see those conditions spread industry-wide. Anyhow, Apple already launched their living-room console-oid, and it didn't make much splash.)

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that a dominant Linux gaming console would be better than what we've got now. PC-equivalent hardware prices; no Windows license fees; a common hardware model anchored by Valve, whose biggest motivation is "make sure all games run well". It's clearly the vision Valve was shooting for. They just failed to make it happen. Insufficient gorilla.

(If Valve were the size of Apple, they would have rolled their own hardware. And if I were as powerful as Doctor Manhattan, I'd have a birthday party on Mars.)

So what will actually happen to Steam Machines? I see that Alienware, at least, is doubling down on the idea... but why not, right? It's just a PC gaming rig with a different software setup. They're already in that business. And they got my money; I just wasted the marginal cost of buying Win10 retail.

(As for the Steam controller, it has turned out to be a distraction. You can like it, hate it, or ignore it -- it's doing fine on Witness for me. But it's platform-neutral hardware, irrelevant to the SteamOS/Steam Machine effort.)

I doubt Valve will kill their SteamOS effort, but I doubt it will gain much momentum either. In the meantime, I will (dammit) be playing games on a Windows box.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/06/so-i-bought-a-steam-machine-how-did-that-go/ Hadean Lands is now up on Steam tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.743 2016-06-20T16:42:19Z 2016-06-20T16:43:19Z You can buy HL on Steam. That is the whole blog post.... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
You can buy HL on Steam. That is the whole blog post.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/06/hadean-lands-is-now-up-on-steam/ Bring Out Your Dead: Flashpaper tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.742 2016-06-18T03:53:46Z 2016-06-18T03:56:25Z A few weeks ago Emily Short declared the Bring Out Your Dead game jam, an event dedicated to sharing our abandoned projects and failed experiments. The jam opened this evening; submissions remain open until the 24th. I see 31 entries... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
A few weeks ago Emily Short declared the Bring Out Your Dead game jam, an event dedicated to sharing our abandoned projects and failed experiments.

The jam opened this evening; submissions remain open until the 24th. I see 31 entries already, including works from Alan DeNiro, Bruno Dias, Adri, Cat Manning, Sam Ashwell, and this honorable blogger.

I posted... the first prototype of The Flashpaper War! And the second prototype too. (Playable on web pages. I've also done iPad prototypes of the game, but posting those isn't really possible. You're missing some cute animations, is all.)

I said a year ago that Flashpaper would be my next IF project. And I still intend that to be true! I built these prototypes last year and demoed them in private; I showed a version at Boston FIG as well. But they just didn't work out, so I scrapped them and started from scratch.

(And then I had to spend some time on paying work, and some more time working on the Steam release of Hadean Lands... which is this Monday, by the way. Just thought I'd say.)

The start-from-scratch plan is still marinating. I have plans. They may even see daylight this year... but for the moment, enjoy these Flashpaper prototypes.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/06/bring-out-your-dead-flashpaper/ Hadean Lands: update available on Humble and Itch tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.741 2016-06-01T18:16:06Z 2016-06-01T18:18:03Z Hey! I am back from Balticon, and so it's time for the HL release train to rumble into motion. Here's the first stage: I have posted a new release of Hadean Lands to my Humble Store and Itch.IO pages. This... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
Hey! I am back from Balticon, and so it's time for the HL release train to rumble into motion. Here's the first stage:

I have posted a new release of Hadean Lands to my Humble Store and Itch.IO pages. This is the new Lectrote-based app, for MacOS, Windows, and Linux, with autosave and integrated map and journal windows.

Details...

Bug reports are very welcome. Any bug I fix before the Steam launch is a win.

This release includes both a native app and the bare HadeanLands.gblorb game file, so you can play HL on any Glulx interpreter. (But you don't get the dynamic map and journal if you play that way.)

If you have saved games from the original (2014) release of HL, they are not compatible with this release. Sorry! I've stuck the original HadeanLands-2014.gblorb in the package too, so if you really want to go back to your old save files, it's possible.

(The differences between the current 2016 release and the old 2014 release are small. A few typos, a couple of fixes for obscure ritual corner cases, some improvements to parser disambiguation.)

Here's the important announcement: On June 20th, the price is going up! When HL launches on Steam -- that's June 20th -- it will launch at a price of $12 US. On that day, I am raising the price on the Humble and Itch stores to match. (The iOS version will remain at $5.)

This means that you have three weeks to buy the new version of the game at the old price. Think of it as a secret preparing-for-Steam sale.

Obviously, it's not a secret secret that the game is still available for $5. This is the Internet and you're reading it. But it's a fine line between "I underpriced HL when I originally released it" and "you're jacking up the price on us, you jerk." I don't want to get into that argument on the Steam store page for HL. My position there is "This is a $12 game." Keep it simple, keep it focussed on the Steam launch.

Okay, what else is going on...

If you've looked over the Steam store page you've probably noticed the DLC! Yes, Hadean Lands will have DLC, and no -- I'll spill the joke right away -- it's not extended game content. It's the Hadean Lands Solo Adventurer Pledge Certificate. That is, you can pay extra money for a certificate that you sign promising not to look at hints. Purely optional, I assure you.

The certificate will only be available through Steam. I've put up a detailed explanation on the DLC page. So far, comments are running 100% for "clever idea"... okay, that's 100% of one comment. Still, a positive response. Might even make me some extra money.

Speaking of commentary, Hadean Lands was discussed in three Xyzzymposium posts recently:

Caleb Wilson on Best Setting

Aaron A. Reed on Best Use of Innovation

Joey Jones on Best Implementation

(These posts discuss the nominees for the XYZZY Awards in those categories for 2014. HL won all three of those categories that year, along with Best Puzzles.)

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/06/hadean-lands-update-available-on-humble-and-itch/ The irritating case of Hadean Lands pricing on Steam tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.740 2016-04-22T01:09:41Z 2016-04-22T01:14:26Z (Cases that are "curious" are as overdone as things "considered harmful". This one is just a nuisance, but I still have to solve it.) When I started planning HL for iOS, I figured that I'd charge $5. It wasn't a... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
(Cases that are "curious" are as overdone as things "considered harmful". This one is just a nuisance, but I still have to solve it.)

When I started planning HL for iOS, I figured that I'd charge $5. It wasn't a casual-tiny price, it wasn't full-on-desktop-game. (2010 was early in iOS history but we could already see what "race to the bottom" meant.) I wrote up the Kickstarter page and offered $3 as the basic backer pre-order level -- "a $5 value!" So that was pretty well locked in.

During development I decided to release the game for Mac and Windows as well, but I kept the $5 price point. I'm not sure I had any hard logic for this beyond "I don't want to think about it." With a dash of "nobody will complain if it's the same price everywhere." I've had a couple of limited-term sales, but HL has basically been $5 since it launched.

Now I'm (slowly) approaching a Steam release. Scary! And worth revisiting my old assumptions. Should I raise the price?

(I'm not lowering the price, don't be silly.)

The good example on everyone's mind this week is Stephen's Sausage Roll, which launched with a $30 price-tag and an equally brazen attitude of "I'm worth it". Or, more, precisely: "Do you want this particular kind of puzzle? Are you going to jump up and down on it until your knees catch fire? If so, I'm worth $30 to you. Everybody else, just walk on by."

Also, as my friend Chris noted: "if this was a $5 game i'd just put it down and say 'whatever, too hard' [...] but being invested means i have to play it." Buying a game is buying into the game. We all know this, but the difference between $5 and $30 really throws it into the spotlight.

So maybe this all describes Hadean Lands too? Parser IF is niche appeal in a nutshell. Maybe I should kick it up to $7 or $10 on Steam. Or more?

I asked around my IF friends, and several of them said sure, they'd pay $10. Of course, they all own the game already, so it's not exactly a useful sample!

Many factors collide here.

What price? Dare I go beyond $10?

Do I also raise the iOS price?

Do I also raise the Mac/Win price? (On Itch.IO and the Humble Store.)

I'm adding the journal and map features (which exist on iOS but have never been seen on Mac/Win). I could say it's an "enhanced version" because of that.

I'm also fixing some minor but long-standing bugs. It's probably asinine to call it "enhanced" on that account, though.

I really don't have time in my schedule to extend the game in any way (beyond the journal and map UI).

When it comes down to it, will Steam users come after me in a torch-bearing mob for raising the price of an already-released game? Or is "new to Steam" good enough?

(But one major point of the "I'm worth it" strategy is to signal to the torch-bearing mob to go elsewhere, because they wouldn't be interested in the game to begin with! SSR has a delightfully high rating on Steam, because it's only purchased by people who want it.)

Comments? Opinions?

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/04/the-irritating-case-of-hadean-lands-pricing-on-steam/ IF awards and how we think about them tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.739 2016-04-17T04:09:08Z 2016-04-17T04:20:09Z We just got a new issue of SPAG. (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games, a long-historied zine of the IF community. It's old enough that it was originally "Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games" because we thought... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
We just got a new issue of SPAG. (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games, a long-historied zine of the IF community. It's old enough that it was originally "Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games" because we thought IF might die out or something. 1994, right?)

I want to respond to Ted Casaubon's article, "Safeguarding Your IF Voting From Animal Attack". The author looks at our IF voting traditions (IFComp and the XYZZY Awards) and puts them in context with last year's furor around the Hugos, the (much more famous) annual awards of the science fiction and fantasy community.

This is an excellent article overall. Ted's comparison is absolutely one that weighed on my mind last year, and still does today. The 2016 Hugo nominations were last month, and XYZZY nominations just started. Does the videogame world have a radical-angry faction analogous to the Sad/Rabid Puppies? Why yes. So it could happen here and we should worry about that. The article talks about that possibility and it does a good job.

However, I think the article skates over the heart of the issue. Let me quote from the concluding paragraph:

The voting systems described above are all intended to ensure that a minority bloc doesn't thwart the will of the majority. But the reality is that a majority voting bloc could be just as harmful to the integrity of an IF award, if it was the result of a raid on the polls from outside the community. The only real way to prevent that would be to limit who gets to vote.

(-- Ted Casaubon, "Safeguarding Your IF Voting From Animal Attack", SPAG#63, 11 April 2016)

(Yeah, look at me footnoting.)

Here's the thing: the IFComp, the XYZZYs, and the Hugos are all popularity contests. That's fundamentally what they are. When you talk about ways "to prevent that" -- prevent the majority from winning your popularity contest -- you've made some deep conceptual mistake.

And yet, it's not a simple mistake. Ted is correct to note the 2012 incident in which an unguarded blog post flooded the XYZZY noms with votes for a single entry. That was a problem, and the admins dealt with it (correctly in my view) by disregarding those votes. So how does that make sense? Is that a case of ignoring the majority?

Ted's article describes this in terms of "bloc voting" -- which was also the common diagnosis of last year's Hugo problems. If you look back at Dan Fabulich's blog post, he also talks about "the voting block". But he also says:

The XYZZY Awards are normally decided by a close knit community of interactive fiction enthusiasts; more than a hundred votes is a good turnout for XYZZY. ... But this year, our votes completely overwhelmed the entire interactive fiction community.

(-- Dan Fabulich, "We Almost Flooded the XYZZY Ballot Box", 5 March 2012)

This is not a distinction about tactical voting, but about community self-definition -- "our votes" versus "community votes". And this is what I want to step back and consider.

The Hugo situation was not primarily a case of outsiders flooding the ballot box. The leaders in the Sad/Rabid Puppy groups are well-known SF authors and regulars at SF fan conventions. (The least-known, Ted "Rabid" Beale, is still a writer sufficiently established to join, run for president of, and then get thrown out of the SF Writers of America.)

It is true that Puppy campaigning must have brought in votes from people who would not otherwise have purchased a Hugo voting membership. It is also true that the counter-reaction also brought in votes on the other side. For example, me! I cast a Hugo vote for the first time in probably fifteen years.

But am I an outsider? I hope nobody would say that. I'm a convention regular too; I've been going to East Coast regional cons (Balticon, Philcon, Arisia, Boskone) since high school. I've been to several Worldcons, and every Worldcon attendee can cast a Hugo ballot. I just haven't bothered very often. The Puppy situation pulled me back in.

So, while 2015 Hugo voting hit record levels, it's not obvious that much of it came from people who never read SF. My guess (although I have no statistics) is that most of the increase came from SF readers and folks enmeshed in fandom who suddenly cared a whole lot more about the Hugos than usual. That is a good thing. When we talk about a problem in the Hugo voting, we're not talking about that.

Nor are we talking about the fact that the avalanche was tipped off by a couple of racist, homophobic right-wing conspiracy theorists, plus a bunch of other conspiracy theorists who thought that the first guys were fine travelling companions, and then their toxic views gained currency across a stretch of the fandom landscape. That is a problem -- a big problem -- but it's not a voting problem per se.

No, the voting problem is a hole in the Hugo first-round (nomination) rules, which allowed a minority of the voters (30% if I recall the estimates) to completely control most of the voting categories. Which they did, and filled them with entries that the majority (70%) thought were junk. I don't mean people saying "enh, not my favorite story of the year"; I mean people saying "not in the top ten, not in the top twenty, not worth being mentioned on this ballot". Result: predictable collapse in the second round.

(Note: the particular form of the collapse followed from the Hugo rules, which allow the voters to select "no award in this category" as the winner. This is really just a detail, however. Despite a great effort from the Puppy supporters to say otherwise, the use of "no award" was a response to the problem described above, not a problem in itself. If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else.)

What was the hole in the rules? Bloc voting, or, more specifically, bloc nominating. I think this is a problem in most open-nomination voting systems. It's like this:

If 100 people with a range of opinions name their five favorite things, they'll all give different lists. But with a lot of overlap. The top thing will be listed maybe 20 times, the next maybe 15 times, the next maybe 12 times. I'd call it a normal distribution, except that's about single-axis variables, but you get the idea -- a bunch of small heaps piled up to make a larger, fuzzy heap with a peak.

If 30 people name five things, but they all agree to name the same list, then the top thing will be listed 30 times.

30 beats 20. The 30% controls nominations. Kaboom, as described above.

The implicit assumption of the open-nominations system is that the fuzzy top zone of the heap is acceptable to most of the voters. Your favorite thing may not be the top nominee, but some of your top five are probably in the list. And if everybody votes their own opinions, it's a pretty good system for doing that.

Obviously it's not perfect. If there's a completely bimodal split, the minority is probably hosed. That is, if 70% of the voters only like green things, and 30% of the voters only like purple things, purple gets shut out. You can say that's what majority voting means -- which is true, although perhaps less true in the nominations round. (Should one or two purple nominees show up in the top five?) But in any case this is an extreme edge case; not what you would expect from realistic, honest votes.

So are the open nominations of the XYZZYs (in progress now!) vulnerable to this sort of collective minority action? Sure. No question about it.

This is compounded by the notion of votes who really are coming from outside "the community". That's what happened in 2012. Choice Of Games has a larger internet following than the XYZZY community; they (inadvertantly) swamped it. You could imagine some Youtube streamer or other net celebrity telling their followers "go to this web site and vote for this game!" Then there would be thousands or tens of thousands of XYZZY nominations for it, and what does that mean?

Ted's article (remember Ted's article? This post is a response to Ted's article, at least it was before it hit 1500 words and climbing):

The enthusiastic ChoiceScript supporters were seen as invaders by the IF community in the 2011 XYZZYs, but with Creatures Such as We taking second place in the 2014 Comp and Scarlet Sails taking 7th in 2015, they probably wouldn't be considered such outsiders today.

But this is the wrong way to look at it. The same flood of blog-spawned votes for an Inform game would have been equally a problem. The point of the XYZZYs, if there is a point, is to discern what the IF community thinks is best in IF this year. And if "the IF community" is a circularly-defined thing of shifting and argumentative boundaries, it is still a thing. Or else the awards stop being interesting.

A couple of years ago I read an article about the Billboard hip-hop charts. Everything in it sounded familiar -- and this was before Gamergate and Puppies appeared on the scene. It wasn't about malicious or coordinated vote-rigging; it was about the inherent fuzziness of self-defined community.

Ideally, any effective genre chart—be it R&B, Latin, country, even alt-rock—doesn't just track a particular strain of music, which can be marked by ever-changing boundaries and ultimately impossible to define. It's meant to track an audience. This is a subtle but vital difference. If an R&B chart tries to cover whatever might be termed R&B music, you get into the subjective, slippery business of determining what, or who, is "black enough" for the chart.

(-- Chris Molanphy, "I Know You Got Soul: The Trouble With Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop Chart", Pitchfork, 14 April 2014)

If I may sum up: the R&B/hip-hop charts were interesting when they measured what the core hip-hop audience was listening to. In the 80s and 90s that meant sales at stores where the fans -- and artists! -- were buying; it meant playlists on hip-hop radio stations. That's how you knew where the genre was, what was new and hot and (perhaps) about to cross over to the mainstream.

But now it's Internet time. What's a music store? What's a radio station? What do you even measure? Well, you measure digital downloads; but that's everybody, not R&B fans. And so you get a chart which shows, not the top hip-hop songs, but the top songs which are hip-hop. It tells you nothing about the genre, only about how you label songs. "Crossover hits" become meaningless.

Our community awards are about what's hot in IF -- what we, the fans and (presumed) literate critics of IF, think is new and good. We do that by polling our community! And, yes, excluding everybody else from the poll. You can say the same of the Hugos: they're supposed to measure what sci-fi fandom, the widest-read and most discriminating nerds, say is best.

That's why the raw cry of "include more voters!" is a problem. Take that to its limit: you poll every gamer (or every reader). Then your awards go to the most popular game which can be called IF. Or the best-selling book which looks like SF/fantasy. But that's boring! Best-seller charts are easy to find. Robert Jordan and his literary successors sell in truckloads. You go to the Hugo lists to find out if those books are any good.

(Spoiler: Robert Jordan has been nominated for Best Novel once. Lois Bujold has been nominated ten times and won four times. No, that doesn't define quality, but at least it tells you what fandom likes.)

So we want to keep voting inside "the community". But we also want the community to be open to newcomers. Um...

(Hugo voting is limited to Worldcon members; anybody can become a voting Worldcon member for $50. Now you understand the conflicting imperatives between those two facts.)

The IF world has the great advantage of being small, informal, and not very important. The XYZZY and IFComp admins retain the right to exclude votes (or works) at their discretion. That works because we know Sam and Jason; they're open and flexible about their decisions; the discussions remain personal. The Hugos are more ponderous and (necessarily) more legalistic.

But, in both cases, one cannot determine right action through rigid rules. You have to know what's going on in the community. To define the community, even, you have to know what's going on. (Circular, like I said.)

Let me quote one more bit from Ted's article:

[...] last year's comp saw rumblings of the fact, or perhaps coincidence, that every Twine game in the 2015 comp, without exception, received two 1/10 votes.

As I said in the linked thread, that sounds about right to me! There are people in the IF world who like parser games more than choice-based games; our awards should reflect that. It doesn't surprise me that a couple of those folks feel so strongly that they'd one-star every Twine game. Those votes are coming from inside the house.

If fifty voters were doing that, it would indicate a problem. Not because there's a hard-line limit (more than 25 votes is a bloc?) -- but because it doesn't reflect what I see and hear on the forums. There just isn't that much negativity. So I would want the admins to look into where votes were coming from; I would check out non-IF gamer sites for organized opposition.

In between two and fifty... judgement call. It's contextual. It's all contextual.

Of course, this is where the "conspiracy theorist" element rears up. If what you see in the community absolutely contradicts what I see -- say, if you believe that one publisher gives marching orders to the majority of Hugo voters -- then we will never come to terms about what is right action.

In the end, we're talking about three distinct-but-enmeshed problems:

A two-stage voting process with open nominations is mechanically vulnerable.

Defining the boundaries of your voter pool is both absolutely necessary and necessarily subjective.

Awards or no awards, there is a toxic subculture within both the gaming and sci-fi fan communities.

On the third problem, I have nothing smarter to say than any of the rest of us.

On the second, I try to participate in the process. I trust that the IF community can grow organically without losing itself. It's worked so far, and it's worked by communicating across boundaries.

As for the first... IFComp doesn't have open nominations in the sense that we're talking about. (But it has open submissions, and we can't dismiss the idea of a voting bloc pushing its own entrants.)

In the XYZZYs, the discretion of the IF award organizers should serve. We hope. One day it won't, but I think that will be when the IF field is too large for personal ties to hold it together -- and that will a success in its own right.

On that subject, I should note that the Hugo rule change proposal is in progress but has yet to be adopted. For obvious reasons, the Hugo rules are hard to change. If the proposal is ratified this summer, it will be adopted next year.

Therefore, this year's Hugos may well be as much of a mess as last year's. Or not! Or a different mess! We hear that first-round voting ran at twice the volume of last year, but what do these new (or returning) voters want? If there are two teams -- to oversimplify -- which team are they on? Tune in on the 26th to find out, I guess.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/04/if-awards-and-how-we-think-about-them/ More progress towards Hadean Lands on Steam tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.738 2016-04-12T04:15:39Z 2016-04-12T04:22:23Z Here's a work-in-progress shot of Hadean Lands on MacOS. I'm using an extended version of Lectrote, with HL's map and journal windows added in. (The iOS release of HL has always had these, but not the Mac/Win releases. Until... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html

Here's a work-in-progress shot of Hadean Lands on MacOS. I'm using an extended version of Lectrote, with HL's map and journal windows added in. (The iOS release of HL has always had these, but not the Mac/Win releases. Until now!)

Yes, two different windows are titled "Map of the Marcher". I'll fix that.

(Background: Lectrote is a new interpreter for Glulx IF games -- meaning most recent Inform 7 games. It runs on Mac/Win/Linux, and it supports all Glulx features except audio. I still have a "beta" label on it, but it's been stable for people so I think it's about ready to 1.0-ify.)

Once this is ready, I'll soft-launch it as an update for existing HL users (people who bought the desktop version through Itch or Humble, plus Kickstarter backers). I'll also post the process of turning your Glulx game into a Lectrote app like this.

In other news, I was interviewed on another podcast! Guy Hasson of Blind Panels talks to me about pretty much the entire history of IF. Plus other stuff I've done.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/04/more-progress-towards-hadean-lands-on-steam/ Notes from GDC tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.737 2016-03-24T17:23:12Z 2016-03-24T17:36:40Z I could have titled this post "Survived GDC!" Maybe even "Surviving GDC," since I've worked up some tips about the experience. But before I get there... GDC was great. Had a blast! Involving no literal explosions! So a big win... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
I could have titled this post "Survived GDC!" Maybe even "Surviving GDC," since I've worked up some tips about the experience. But before I get there...

GDC was great. Had a blast! Involving no literal explosions! So a big win all around.

I got to see a whole lot of people. If I start listing names it'll get boring and I'll forget some anyway. So I'll just note that I met Alexis Kennedy (of FailBetter Games) and Jeff Vogel (of Spiderweb Software). Among lots of others. And of course even more people that I know from the IF world or the game conference circuit and was happy to see again.

Excellent talks:

Narrative Innovation Showcase (lightning showcase by many designers, assembled by Clara Fernández-Vara and Matthew Weise).

Meg Jayanth on NPCs in 80 Days. (Here's a related talk she gave at Practice last year -- Vimeo.)

Alexis Kennedy on narrative in Sunless Sea, and also boozing it up on stage.

Sam Barlow on Her Story.

Adam and Rebekah Saltsman talking about how they decide what games to develop at their indie studio.

Jane Ng on the art design and implementation of Firewatch.

The development of the Hitman and Tomb Raider franchises into Hitman Go and Tomb Raider Go.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi looking back on 15 years of Rez.

I didn't even attend any of the Friday talks, such as the extremely interesting open-source release of Inkle's game engine.

I am not going to do per-talk writeups, but you can read Emily's posts (Mon, Tue/Wed, Thu/Fri). Also Aaron Reed's post.

Then there was the show floor. Enough corporate wealth on display to make the most hardened Wall Street analyst weep. After my first walkthrough, I tweeted:

Getting all my GDC sizzletakes out of the way up front: There are some great games. But I'm still not buying an Xbox or PS4. And VR is bunk. (@zarfeblong)

Yes, that's snarky (even for twitter-compressed punditry) but I meant it. Not that VR is vapor -- there were plenty of functional devices on demo. But the amount of... stuff... invested in that VR tech is really absurd. Feature-adds like air movement and AR; middleware and tools; colleges offering VR training; every single game bragging about VR support. You know most of it will fail. The whole point of industry expos is to show off products most of which will fail. The only question is whether it will all fail.

I suspect it will all fail. I say that because it provides the maximum humor value if I'm right. Go on, tell me you have a better metric.

Anyhow, on the fringes of the Unreal/Oculus/Sony/Unity/Microsoft/Amazon hellscape, one could find the good stuff:

The IGF showcase. I helped judge this, and was delighted to see all the cool games on display.

alt.ctrl.gdc, a collection of games with unique and creative physical controllers. (Shoutout to Lea's team with the hacked embroidery machine.)

The Days of the Devs space.

The GDC Indie Megabooth.

And, of course, the most exciting demo -- don't judge me -- the live preview of Cyan's Obduction. It got a trailer a couple of weeks ago, but only GDC attendees have gotten a chance to wander around the opening area. It looks great! It's very definitely a Cyan game: strange empty landscape, machines, staticky holograms. But up to modern graphical standards, of course. (Cyan got space in Unreal's expo booth because they make the engine look good.) I wore my Myst Online shirt, shook hands with a couple of Cyan folks, and felt generally elevated about the coming game.

I want to talk about the GDC experience, because the conference is big, scary, expensive, and not for everybody. My first GDC was four years ago. I had a pretty good time... but it wasn't worth my time and effort. This year was my second GDC and it was absolutely worth my time and effort. The difference is important.

Four years ago, the talks were okay. I had the "summits and tutorials" pass -- intermediate between the indie pass (cheapish) and the full-week pass (no way unless your company picks up the tab). I went to a bunch of talks, and they were pretty cool, but they weren't about the most interesting games or the most interesting authors out there. The show floor had the IGF showcase, but nothing else relevant to my life.

This year, the narrative track was on fire. Positively. Just one awesome presentation after another. The indie track had some great stuff too, but really, you wanted to be at the narrative talks. You wanted to go chat with the narrative speakers in the post-talk wrap-up area. Or just sit around listening to the conversations! That's cool too. So big props to the organizers.

Another thing: four years ago, I didn't know anybody. I mean, I knew people in the IF world, and some of them were there. Emily gave a talk on Versu. We had a big IF dinner meetup. A couple of people said "Hey, you're Andrew Plotkin! I love your work!" But it was not a very social event for me. And, great talks or not, it's the social that makes GDC memorable.

What was different this year? I know a lot of people. I've been to lots of smaller game events -- Indiecade, Boston FIG, Wordplay, Practice, gaming tracks at sci-fi conventions. Our own Boston IF meetup. PAX -- well, PAX isn't a small event, but it's cheaper than GDC and you can find cool folks there.

Perhaps you are terrible at meeting people. I am terrible at meeting people! I didn't meet very many people at GDC 2012. But if somebody says hi to me at an event, maybe I'll say hi back the next year, and at another event we'll chat a little, and the following year we'll go out for lunch somewhere. And after four years of that, GDC actually worked out great for me, socially. I was surprised too.

So if you're new to the dev scene and meeting people is a scary prospect, maybe don't start with GDC! Go to smaller events. Say hi to interesting people. Heck, try coming to the Lost Levels meetup -- it's in Yerba Buena park during GDC but you don't need a badge, you can just show up and chat. The cool people will be there.

I realize, of course, that I have an unfair advantage. I have a history of famous games -- people say hi to me. I can't apologize for this or say I don't rely on it. But I don't think that you need to be pre-famous to meet people at conferences.

(I used to freak out when people came up and squeed at me. Now I try to freak out very briefly and quietly, because the conversations wind up being pretty awesome.)

So that's my thesis about GDC. Work up to it if it's intimidating. Try to swing the "summits" pass if you possibly can, because the narrative track is the best. If money is so tight that you can't even afford the "indie" pass, there's all those other events -- some of them are free. Suggest talks, too; not everybody with a speaker's badge is a Big Name in gaming.

A few quick non-GDC notes:

I am featured on two recent episodes of the Clash of the Type-Ins podcast. In the first, I recite Bigger Than You Think while Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna shout commands at me. In the second, we do the same for (part of) The Dreamhold. Also we have a lot of fun and joke around and talk about very tangential things.

Sam Barlow curated an indie game feature on Apple's App Store earlier this month. He included Meanwhile and Hadean Lands. Which was great! Thanks, Sam. (Sam has now won every possible award in the past twelve months for Her Story, possibly including the Fields Medal and the America's Cup. If it were me I honestly might switch to competitive origami just to take off the followup pressure.)

And finally, I got my head scanned. Jason Scott threw a party celebrating five years at the Internet Archive, and one of his friends brought a handheld 3D scanner. So now you can download my head. Sorry about the nose blivet; it's not a perfect scan.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/03/notes-from-gdc/ Firewatch: afterthoughts tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.736 2016-03-05T21:58:22Z 2016-03-05T21:59:21Z I finished Firewatch last night, only a bit later than everybody else on the planet. (Catching up!) (I am not in fact catching up at all.) I see that Jmac has already posted about it, and I don't have a... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
I finished Firewatch last night, only a bit later than everybody else on the planet. (Catching up!) (I am not in fact catching up at all.) I see that Jmac has already posted about it, and I don't have a whole essay's worth of thoughts. So this will be a bit of a response post.

My immediate thoughts upon finishing the game:

Firewatch was a nice little story game that worked well for me. I enjoyed walking around in the slightly-stylized wilderness. The park was big enough for me to explore over a few days, but not so big that I got tired of crossing it (in a given chapter) or inhabiting it (over the whole game).

The designers had a great sense of how to vary the feel of the environment. Different "biomes" had different color, texture, and audio palettes. Time-of-day changed the environment, which is old hat; but FW had the additional axes of season (beginning of summer to the end) and the slowly-encroaching wildfire.

Yes, I had a sense of compression -- it was a pocket world made up of micro-worlds. But that's appropriate, really. I didn't want to spend a real-life week hiking back and forth. Similarly I appreciated the magical map locator. Yes, orienteering would have been more realistic without it, but I would have gotten fed up with that aspect of the game quickly.

The biggest strength of the game, obviously, is the voice acting. The biggest weakness (for me) was the midgame tease of the "you are a psycho" trope. I spent a fair part of the game thinking "Oh, they're going to do that damn ending" and disengaging from the story thereby. In fact they didn't do that damn ending -- spoilers, you are not a psycho -- so I got back into it towards the end. But it was a misfire of the story construction.

I also felt somewhat harassed by the radio-response UI, which was notably terrible on MacOS. Momentum scrolling made it difficult to stop on a given choice, especially with a short time limit, especially if the frame rate was down (as it often was on my middle-aged iMac). I feel like one particular misclick changed the whole ending of the game -- that is, not my character's ending, but the interpretation-of-what-happened discussion that occurs at the end. So that was annoying.

As for the overall narrative structure... FW doesn't push any particular boundaries; it grabs some familiar structures and makes a good job of them. E.g., the interpretation-of-what-happened discussion at the end. Or the way it reflects dialog choices into the game world later on. Or the game's introduction, which is not just CYOA-style IF, it's practically a Twine clone. (For example, it adopts the convention of highlighting the last few words on a page as a "next page" link, rather than having an explicit "click to continue" button. This isn't something inherent to Twine, but it's evolved in Twine story-game culture.)

That's all I've got. Glad I played it. Glad it was the size it was.

Now, onto Jmac's post, which I see is also about pacing...

Well, I didn't have the same problems. The transition to the focus on the two lost campers was kind of rocky, yes. But the game offered it up and I went with it. I'm generally complacent when the author gives me a push. (That's why I'm terrible at reading mysteries. I'll follow any misdirection without complaint.)

I did feel that the game did a poor job of linking together the two backstory-stories: the protagonist's sick wife and the lost campers. It's not that either of them disappeared from the game; but when one came up, the other faded away, and vice versa. So there was a disconnection there, but it wasn't between me and the scenery.

No, I did not find the cabin. Yes, I adopted the turtle. Then I forgot about the turtle until the last day. That could have been kept more on-surface. The turtle was fine, don't worry.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/03/firewatch-afterthoughts/ My fast hike through Firewatch tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.735 2016-03-03T06:32:02Z 2016-03-07T00:04:09Z I suspect that I did not play Firewatch at the pace it expected. In retrospect, I approached the game as a dual role-playing exercise, in unwitting partnership with the actor Rich Sommer, who so memorably provides the voice of player-character... Jason McIntosh
I suspect that I did not play Firewatch at the pace it expected. In retrospect, I approached the game as a dual role-playing exercise, in unwitting partnership with the actor Rich Sommer, who so memorably provides the voice of player-character Henry. While I did love participating this unusual sort of time-displaced acausal improv, I may not have kept to the trail the game had marked for me, to my own detriment.

An earthy dude in every respect, Henry spends the whole game in radio contact with an off-screen colleague, and makes his opinions, desires, and emotional state all entirely transparent. Which is not to say blunt — Sommer portrays him with subtlety and sincerity. Henry is just not a man who hides his mood. And that mood is often I have to go do this thing, now.

I always took this, willingly, as a cue to hustle. While the game always tempts you to explore the woods freely using Henry's (entirely diagetic) map and compass, doing anything other than making a beeline to his next goal would have felt like the letting the backside of the pantomime horse drag his feet while the front surged ahead. Despite my suspicion that the game would have allowed me to put Henry's concerns on hold as long as I'd have liked to instead have him investigate odd spots on the map, the thought of it just didn't feel right. Onward!

In so doing, though, it seems that Henry and I hiked right past a lot of interesting stuff, there in the game's recreation of the Wyoming wilderness. Shortly after I finished the game, a friend asked whether I'd found the elk, a detail that a lot of players had apparently overlooked. No, I hadn't found the elk. Today I learned that there's a turtle of some interest elsewhere within the game, and a cabin. I did not find any of these things. I do not mind that I didn't! I seldom obsess over "one-hundred percenting" games; I play until I feel done, and the ending Firewatch handed me felt like enough.

However, the fact that I did jog past all these sights made me reconsider how the presentation of the game's story seemed unusually out of sync with my experiencing and processing of it.

Early on, we see some unsettling things, and we hear reports that people we've met earlier are missing. Presently, the main character becomes convinced that strange and terrible events are afoot, and that he or others might be in imminent danger. Shortly into the mid-game, these concerns become interleaved with a "B-story" regarding a boy and his dad who used to camp often the woods, long prior to the player-character's arrival.

If I sound uncertain about these latter characters, it's because I started learning about them while my focus as a player remained entirely on the tension of the "A-story", all the scary stuff and unnerving encounters. I wanted to follow those, and see what happened next! The game, on the other hand, wants the player's focus on the first thread to cleanly dissolve into the second, just in time for the reveals near the end of the story.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way for me. My Henry, in his hurried pace, started putting two and two together far sooner than I did, and began to speak his conclusions out loud while I was still jumping at shadows and thinking "Wait… who are these guys again?" The given denouement made sense, I suppose, but I still felt like I'd missed some important cues, despite my earlier efforts to closely wear the role.

Interactive narrative is hard, and interactive narrative that leaves pacing in the player's hands — tying it to an explorable map, in this case — presents its own unique challenges. While text-based interactive fiction sits on decades of examples, beautiful, accessible, visually immersive "walking simulators" like Firewatch have only begun to figure it out for themselves. I very much look forward to more work like it.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/03/my-fast-hike-through-firewatch/ Meanwhile for Apple TV! tag:gameshelf.jmac.org,2016://1.734 2016-02-29T05:45:01Z 2016-02-29T05:45:42Z Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book by Jason Shiga is now available for the 4th-gen Apple TV. That's pretty much the whole announcement. You can buy it. If you've already bought the iOS version of Meanwhile, you can download it for... Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/home.html
Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book by Jason Shiga is now available for the 4th-gen Apple TV.

That's pretty much the whole announcement. You can buy it. If you've already bought the iOS version of Meanwhile, you can download it for Apple TV for free. (Go to the App Store app in the TV interface; select "Purchased"; scroll down and select "Not on this Apple TV".)

Oh, and the iOS version has been updated to fully support the iPad Pro. Somebody with an iPad Pro, try it and tell me how awesome it is.

On the way home from the ice cream store, little Jimmy discovers a mad scientist's wonderland: an experimental mind-reading helmet, a time machine, and a doomsday device that can annihilate the human race. Which one would you like to test out first?

MEANWHILE is not an ordinary comic. YOU make the choices that determine how the story unfolds. MEANWHILE splits off into thousands of different adventures. Most will end in DOOM and DISASTER. Only one path will lead you to happiness and success.

 http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/02/meanwhile-for-apple-tv/


text:
Malaysia's Inflation Rate Holds at Lowest Since February 2010
Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Nov. consumer prices rise 1.3% Y/y, after climbing at same pace in Oct., statistics department says in statement
* Median of 18 ests. in Bloomberg News survey was for 1.4%
gain * Story
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The enduring brilliance of choreographer Bob Fosse is celebrated on this 19-track collection of Broadway musical perennials; highlights include renditions of "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Mr. Bojangles" and "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries."
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Bob Fosse is the best and he does great broadway musical and teaches the real meaning of jazz put together with classical music.
This is one of the most amazing and entertaining musicals and soundtracks that you could find ANYWHERE. And it's a dream because it was born by (the god)fabulous, phenomonal choreographer Bob Fosse. I love every minute of this whole stage production. It makes the beat flow through your veins and you want to get up and dance. It's quite envigorating and I doubt there will ever be another musical quite like this one.
If you like any form of Broadway music, you'll love Fosse's Soundtrack. The songs are alive, the music is passionate & entertaining, it's a great collection!
My friend and I have season tickets to a major theater here in Los Angeles for 3 years now. Fossee was one of my favorites. The smile never left my face from curtain up until the last number. I simply loved it
My life is dance,dance,dance!!!And belive me if you love musical this is the one for you!!!!!!!


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Wine lovers, aficionados, and sommeliers can tell you that wine service is an art, and vitally important to the overall experience of enjoying fine wine at a restaurant. From the selection process all the way through pouring wine and practicing proper etiquette, there are certain things that the patrons at your restaurant have come to expect, so it's important to train your staff to do everything the right way.
Helping Guests Choose a Wine
Proper wine service starts with a well-balanced, diverse wine list, but that service is primarily carried out by your wait staff or bartender. It's important for your staff to know a great deal about wines—particularly the ones on your wine list—so that they can help your guests select the right wine for any occasion, whether that be finding the perfect white wine to pair with fresh seafood or choosing a particularly special wine for celebrating an anniversary.
Server tips for providing better suggestions:
- Find out what brought your guests to your restaurant. You might find out that they are celebrating something, in which case, you can start your recommendations at a higher price point. For first-time guests, it might be a good idea to talk about a wider array of options to help familiarize your new customers with what you have to offer.
- Try to gauge your guests' wine knowledge before you start making recommendations. If you find that your guest is something of a wine expert, you can speak more conversationally about the wines, as there will be less explaining to do. Conversely, you must be ready to go over the basics with someone who knows little or nothing about wine.
- Find out what kinds of wine your guests prefer or have enjoyed in the past. Knowing what kinds of wine your guests like can give you a starting point. Knowing that your guest enjoys sweeter red wines, for example, can narrow your focus considerably and help you to streamline your service.
Pouring Wine
Once you've helped your guest select the perfect wine, the focus shifts to serving and etiquette. When it comes to wine presentation, there are a few practices and traditions that your guests will have come to expect. First and foremost, however, it's important for your staff to understand how to properly pour wine.
How to Pour Wine
When pouring wine, wrap the bottle in a clean linen napkin to protect it from the warmth of your hands. This isn't essential for serving red wines that aren't as cold, but your guests will probably appreciate the extra effort you're putting forth to ensure perfect conditions for their wine. Waiter's gloves can serve the same purpose while also projecting professionalism.
With the bottle wrapped up for temperature control, it's time to make the first pour for the person who will taste the wine for approval. Pour so that the glass is filled only about half an inch, just enough for your guest to know if it's acceptable. Once tasted and approved, pour each glass about half-full or a little less than half-full. This can vary depending on the number of servings.
Some wines need to be poured slightly differently. For example, a sparkling wine should be poured along the inside wall of the glass rather than directly into the center. However, one mark of an experienced server that applies to all wines is minimal dripping. To prevent extra drips and spills, turn the bottle with a slight twisting motion at the end of each pour. You can use the clean linen napkin to dry the mouth of the bottle if some wine does spill.
Wine Presentation Etiquette
It's important for your staff to be aware of the etiquette associated with different types wine service. For example, does a bottle of wine need to be decanted? Are multiple guests partaking of a bottle? Or, perhaps your guest only ordered a glass of wine with dinner.
This is the process of pouring a bottle of wine into a decorative decanter before serving in order to separate any sediment that has formed (primarily in older reds) and to aerate the wine, which can help give the wine a boost in flavor and aroma. This process is typically saved for red wines that have been stored for more than five to ten years, but some guests might specially request that their wine be decanted. Start by making sure you have everything you need:
- A clean decanter or carafe
- Corkscrew
- Flashlight or candle (optional)
The flashlight or candle is used to help you see the sediment in the bottle so that you don't dump it in with the wine by mistake. By pouring slowly and carefully, keeping the light under the neck, you should be able to tell when it's time to stop when the sediment reaches the top of the neck. Remember to pour slowly and continuously until all that remains in the bottle is the unwanted sediment. Discard the remaining residue and serve.
The aeration process is not an exact science. The type of wine and the preferences of your guests are just two determining factors in how long you should let a wine sit out uncovered. Generally speaking, play it safe and try not to let wines decant for more than half an hour to an hour at the maximum before serving. You can also conduct your own research or have your sommelier experiment with how long to decant different types of wine.
Wine for the the whole table (Bottle)
Let's say a party of four wishes to share a bottle of wine. Unlike decanting, where the bottle is opened and poured away from the table, your wait staff will need to be able to professionally open and serve the wine right at the table in front of the guests.
- Start by showing the wine to the person who ordered it, no matter who is paying the bill. Do not open the bottle until you get confirmation that the wine is, in fact, what your guest wants, and that everyone who is partaking has a glass. It's poor etiquette to retreat to the kitchen for another glass after you've already poured wine for the rest of the table.
- When opening a bottle of wine at the table, make sure you have the right tool. A waiter's corkscrew with a foil cutter built in is ideal. Remove the cork with purpose and control, keeping movement to a minimum. Then present the cork to the guest who selected the wine by placing it on the table. Some guests feel the cork to make sure it's not dried out, while others will smell the cork to take in its distinct aroma or examine the color of the cork to ensure that the bottle has been stored properly on its side.
- Allow the person who ordered the wine to taste it for approval. Once approved, begin pouring for the rest of the table. A common practice is to serve the women at the table first, going from eldest to youngest, and then serving the men the same way.
- If your guests agree to it, you can keep white wine on the table as long as it's sitting in a wine bucket with ice. Red wines are typically fine to leave on the table as is, but always check with your guests to make sure.
A glass of wine with dinner
What if a guest merely wants a single glass of wine with dinner? This patron is not interested in buying the entire bottle, so it's perfectly acceptable to put the bottle back into storage after serving. Remember that it's always good etiquette to show the bottle to your guests, even if they only order a glass. This just allows your guests verify that they are drinking what they ordered.
Providing excellent wine presentation at your restaurant is about doing all the little things right and, above all, making sure that everything goes off without a hitch. Many customers will notice superior wine service, but poor service is even more noticeable. Train your staff to treat proper wine service as a serious and important part of their jobs, and you'll see the positive results in your customers' satisfaction and your restaurant's bottom line.
Related resources:
Guidelines for Training Restaurant Servers


text:
Obama Signs Defense Authorization Into Law
President Obama signed the $607 billion Defense Authorization bill Thursday in Hawaii. The defense law includes few reforms to the military sexual assault complaint process.
WASHINGTON — President Obama Thursday signed legislation authorizing defense-related spending, including reforms to how the military handles sexual assault complaints that fall far short of the changes sought by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers.
The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the Pentagon to spend $607 billion.
The law was the last bit of business completed by the Senate before it adjourned for the Christmas break last week. Although traditionally not the most contentious legislation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to not allow amendments to the bill enraged Republicans, stalling the bill for weeks.
The fight over sexual assaults in the military was also a major sticking point in the legislation. A coalition of reformers led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand for months has pushed to take the investigation and prosecution of assault charges out of the chain of command. A second group of lawmakers like Sen. Claire McCaskill has resisted those changes, arguing taking sexual assault prosecution out of the military could undermine the military's command structure.
Although opponents to Gillibrand's amendment ultimately won out, Congress did include some modest reforms in the bill, most notably new protections for whistleblowers reporting sexual assaults.
The NDAA also does not include language on new sanctions on Iran. The White House has threatened to veto new sanctions as the administration negotiates a final diplomatic deal to curtail the nation's nuclear weapons program.
- DNC Day 2: Bill Clinton took the crowd down memory lane, and then Hillary broke through a virtual glass ceiling 💥
- An Australian teen who was subjected to detention abuse has written a letter thanking the public for its support.
- 🍎📉: Apple's business is declining due to slowing iPhone sales, but the company is still making a ton of money.


text:
|By PR Newswire
Article Rating:
|August 19, 2014 07:00 AM EDT
RA'ANANA, Israel, August 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --
NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) today announced that it won a Star Performer Award from Speech Technology magazine for its NICE Real-Time Authentication solution.
The NICE Real-Time Authentication solution uses voice biometrics to validate customers as they conduct a conversation with a contact center agent, using their voice as a unique identifier, all without PINs, passwords or key phrases to remember. This has been proven to simplify the often rigorous authentication process and reduce average handle time by up to 45 seconds per call. NICE not only improves the customer experience but provides additional layers of security to protect customers, including dynamic security questions as a second layer of authentication for elevated risk scenarios such as suspected fraudulent calls or high worth transactions.
Voice biometrics has long been hindered by an arduous registration process, which resulted in low enrollment and therefore lower returns. NICE Seamless™ Passive Enrollment creates voice prints from previous call recordings, solving this problem and enabling a scalable, cost effective solution.
David Myron, Speech Technology magazine's editorial director
Speech Technology's Star Performer Award recognizes the industry's biggest speech technology innovators. "These technologies will undoubtedly help shape the future of the speech technology industry. The awards reveal some of the hottest industry developments. The most notable advancements are in various speech-enabled mobile applications (such as voice biometrics, visual IVR, wearables, and mobile voice search), as well as natural language and analytics technologies."
Miki Migdal, President, NICE Enterprise Product Group
"We are thrilled to be recognized by Speech Technology magazine for NICE Real-Time Authentication. Our solution is changing the way companies service their customers by helping them quickly and safely improve the customer experience while protecting against fraud. This award is further proof of how NICE develops innovative technology to help organizations get closer to their customers."
About NICE Systems
NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) is the worldwide leading provider of software solutions that enable organizations to take the next best action in order to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance, fight financial crime, and safeguard people and assets. NICE's solutions empower organizations to capture, analyze, and apply, in real time, insights from both structured and unstructured Big Data. This data comes from multiple sources, including phone calls, mobile apps, emails, chat, social media, video, and transactions. NICE solutions are used by over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. http://www.nice.com.
Trademark Note: NICE and the NICE logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NICE Systems. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners. For a full list of NICE Systems' marks, please see: http://www.nice.com/nice-trademarks.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements, including the statements by Messer Migdal, are based on the current expectations of the management of NICE-Systems Ltd. (the Company) only, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results or performance of the Company to differ materially from those described herein, including but not limited to the impact of the global economic environment on the Company's customer base (particularly financial services firms) and the resulting uncertainties; changes in technology and market requirements; decline in demand for the Company's products; inability to timely develop and introduce new technologies, products and applications; difficulties or delays in absorbing and integrating acquired operations, products, technologies and personnel; loss of market share; pressure on pricing resulting from competition; and inability to maintain certain marketing and distribution arrangements. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting the company, refer to the Company's reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise them, except as required by law.
Corporate Media Contact
Erik Snider, +1-877-245-7448, [email protected]
Marty Cohen, +1-212-574-3635, [email protected], ET
Yisca Erez + 972-9-775-3798, [email protected], CET
SOURCE NICE Systems
"Software-defined storage is a big problem in this industry because so many people have different definitions as they see fit to use it," stated Peter McCallum, VP of Datacenter Solutions at FalconStor Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Jul. 24, 2016 06:15 PM EDT Reads: 1,369
"Operations is sort of the maturation of cloud utilization and the move to the cloud," explained Steve Anderson, Product Manager for BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Jul. 24, 2016 06:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,825
The cloud competition for database hosts is fierce. How do you evaluate a cloud provider for your database platform? In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Chris Presley, a Solutions Architect at Pythian, gave users a checklist of considerations when choosing a provider. Chris Presley is a Solutions Architect at Pythian. He loves order – making him a premier Microsoft SQL Server expert. Not only has he programmed and administered SQL Server, but he has also shared his expertise and passion with b...
Jul. 24, 2016 06:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,841
Unless your company can spend a lot of money on new technology, re-engineering your environment and hiring a comprehensive cybersecurity team, you will most likely move to the cloud or seek external service partnerships. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Darren Guccione, CEO of Keeper Security, revealed what you need to know when it comes to encryption in the cloud.
Jul. 24, 2016 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,341
We're entering the post-smartphone era, where wearable gadgets from watches and fitness bands to glasses and health aids will power the next technological revolution. With mass adoption of wearable devices comes a new data ecosystem that must be protected. Wearables open new pathways that facilitate the tracking, sharing and storing of consumers' personal health, location and daily activity data. Consumers have some idea of the data these devices capture, but most don't realize how revealing and...
Jul. 24, 2016 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,016
What are the successful IoT innovations from emerging markets? What are the unique challenges and opportunities from these markets? How did the constraints in connectivity among others lead to groundbreaking insights? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Carmen Feliciano, a Principal at AMDG, will answer all these questions and share how you can apply IoT best practices and frameworks from the emerging markets to your own business.
Jul. 24, 2016 04:15 PM EDT Reads: 1,539
Ask someone to architect an Internet of Things (IoT) solution and you are guaranteed to see a reference to the cloud. This would lead you to believe that IoT requires the cloud to exist. However, there are many IoT use cases where the cloud is not feasible or desirable. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, will discuss the strategies that exist to extend intelligence directly to IoT devices and sensors, freeing them from the constraints of ...
Jul. 24, 2016 03:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,719
You think you know what's in your data. But do you? Most organizations are now aware of the business intelligence represented by their data. Data science stands to take this to a level you never thought of – literally. The techniques of data science, when used with the capabilities of Big Data technologies, can make connections you had not yet imagined, helping you discover new insights and ask new questions of your data. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sarbjit Sarkaria, data science team lead ...
Jul. 24, 2016 03:30 PM EDT Reads: 886
SYS-CON Events announced today the Kubernetes and Google Container Engine Workshop, being held November 3, 2016, in conjunction with @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. This workshop led by Sebastian Scheele introduces participants to Kubernetes and Google Container Engine (GKE). Through a combination of instructor-led presentations, demonstrations, and hands-on labs, students learn the key concepts and practices for deploying and maintainin...
Jul. 24, 2016 03:30 PM EDT Reads: 597
Extracting business value from Internet of Things (IoT) data doesn't happen overnight. There are several requirements that must be satisfied, including IoT device enablement, data analysis, real-time detection of complex events and automated orchestration of actions. Unfortunately, too many companies fall short in achieving their business goals by implementing incomplete solutions or not focusing on tangible use cases. In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products...
Jul. 24, 2016 03:15 PM EDT Reads: 1,666
Cloud analytics is dramatically altering business intelligence. Some businesses will capitalize on these promising new technologies and gain key insights that'll help them gain competitive advantage. And others won't. Whether you're a business leader, an IT manager, or an analyst, we want to help you and the people you need to influence with a free copy of "Cloud Analytics for Dummies," the essential guide to this explosive new space for business intelligence.
Jul. 24, 2016 03:15 PM EDT Reads: 563
Traditional IT, great for stable systems of record, is struggling to cope with newer, agile systems of engagement requirements coming straight from the business. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, William Morrish, General Manager of Product Sales at Interoute, outlined ways of exploiting new architectures to enable both systems and building them to support your existing platforms, with an eye for the future. Technologies such as Docker and the hyper-convergence of computing, networking and sto...
Jul. 24, 2016 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,002
WebRTC is bringing significant change to the communications landscape that will bridge the worlds of web and telephony, making the Internet the new standard for communications. Cloud9 took the road less traveled and used WebRTC to create a downloadable enterprise-grade communications platform that is changing the communication dynamic in the financial sector. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Leo Papadopoulos, CTO of Cloud9, discussed the importance of WebRTC and how it enables companies to focus...
Jul. 24, 2016 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 755
With an estimated 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, several industries will begin to expand their capabilities for retaining end point data at the edge to better utilize the range of data types and sheer volume of M2M data generated by the Internet of Things. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and President of Infobright, discussed the infrastructures businesses will need to implement to handle this explosion of data by providing specific use cases for filterin...
Jul. 24, 2016 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,186
IoT generates lots of temporal data. But how do you unlock its value? You need to discover patterns that are repeatable in vast quantities of data, understand their meaning, and implement scalable monitoring across multiple data streams in order to monetize the discoveries and insights. Motif discovery and deep learning platforms are emerging to visualize sensor data, to search for patterns and to build application that can monitor real time streams efficiently. In his session at @ThingsExpo, ...
Jul. 24, 2016 01:30 PM EDT Reads: 805


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Good post, OP. Thanks for the info.
Of course, that's what they want...civil unrest.
The scary part of this is, there are a lot of inexperienced people purchasing firearms. Inexperienced or with no experience. Many of us older people grew up with guns and have lived in rural environments. Using a firearm properly is second nature for many of us. This is not so for newbies who are scared and purchasing their first sidearm or long gun. Firearms in the hands of untrained beginners is what I consider dangerous.
Just my personal opinion. Comments?
Nikola Tesla
I was trying to find the statistics. The number of people who've not cleaned their guns in a long time is very high. Same with actually shooting at the range. Worse a lot of people have NEVER shot their guns. Even worse in my opinion is a lot have never fired their guns without hearing protection. When you shoot with no hearing protection, at least once but better a couple of time, you realize how LOUD they are, and so you won't be able to use your hearing in a real gun battle. That could really confuse all these new owners.
You have to practice. There's no sense in buying one and not learning how to use it, plus stay calm because you're going to pumped up from the fear and excitement. PRACTICE.
That is correct. The finest tools are useless in the hands of an unskilled person. That is what a gun is, a tool. As for not cleaning their weapons....good grief!
Nikola Tesla
Good points all, and the control needed to safely use a firearm is also a point of jeapardy. I've been in the woods during deer season here in Wisconsin and the fools out there are scary. And that's the ones that supposedly know what they're doing. Not many people grow up with the need to know how to use a gun, much less a weapon, and get the two confused.
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Reason for reporting:
Robots, drones fill police ranks
Companies around globe packing earth orbit with satellites to meet communications demands
Rise of black nationalist groups
Report: Mr. Robot's one-time only VR experience will return next week
'Kill More Cops' Graffiti Mural Appears on Freeway
DNC erects four-mile eight-foot tall fence around Philly convention site
Should the Postal Service Handle Your Loans as Well as Your Mail? Elizabeth Warren Thinks So.
HERE IT IS=> Detailed List of Findings in Wikileaks DNC Document Dump
BREAKING: That Was Fast! Hillary Immediately Brings Disgraced DNC Chair Onto Her Campaign! Do you think that Hillary has something to hide?
According to Soros, there's about to be an all-out class war riots, police state and civil war for America
Torrential Downpour To Kick Off Hillary's #DNC Election Steal
Montel Williams Goes Off On Bill O'Reilly For Flipping The Script On Their Interview
Dennis Miller, "Any Vote for Anyone That is Not Trump Is a Vote for Hillary"
Protester shouting 'DNC Leak!' ejected from Hillary Rally
CNN ASKS BLACK TRUMP SUPPORTER The Wrong Question…They Get Slammed!
If Obama brings armed UN troops into American cities, that might be the next shot heard round the world.
LOL Of The Day - "Hillary for Prison" banner plane spotted over Philadelphia
Congress approves Monsanto Dark Act 2.0, destroying consumers' chances of having on-package labels
Don't let the globalists start a race war!
If you grow food in cinder blocks, you may be poisoning yourself with heavy metals
Doctor at psychiatric hospital accused of experimenting on children with 'truth serum' drug used on soldiers during WWII
Ohio moves towards mandatory vaccines, proposing to eliminate philosophical exemptions entirely
Scientists 'REVERSE' menopause...
Obama Administration Technocrats On Fire: Obama's Brain Mapping Initiative Is Racing Forward
French government orders destruction of Nice attack CCTV footage officially to prevent leaks
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