• Before – Looking forward to something is often as enjoyable as doing it. In some cases, experiences seem positive in the future, but negative once they’re done, or while you’re doing them – fish and chips, for example, never tastes quite as good as it seemed when I was paying for it. Similarly, one can be disappointed, perhaps by a bad movie or a corked bottle of wine.
• During – What we normally mean when we say something is enjoyable. That we are happy or content while doing it. Flow fits in here.
• Immediately after – A positive feeling immediately after completing a task. For me, exercise is a good example – I feel like crap while I’m doing it, but great afterwards. Similarly, writing a paper or doing the dishes.
• Far later – Nostalgia, remembering through rose-tinted glasses. Holidays always seem better in retrospect, particularly if you were covered in mosquito bites and sunburn at the time. For me, a trip to Fiji in 1997 fits well here, as I got food poisoning shortly after arrival and spent the whole trip being ill, yet I still have vivid and fond memories of the place we stayed.

Two short observations, then:

• It’s not necessary that an activity result in positive experiences in each of these four time periods, and in fact, few do. That’s OK, and is maybe good to remember when immersed in a time period that some activity doesn’t perform well in.
• Innately, we seem to greatly privilege the during time period. It’s good to enjoy oneself while doing something, but during is often much shorter than after. I certainly find thinking about how I’ll feel after I’ve done something to be a great motivator.

The wine tasting, though, worked out well. It grew from our inability to secure transportation for a Waipara trip, and ended up as a day long tasting in Tony’s living room.

All up, we had 14 bottles, of which 11 were tasted by all, one (a rosè) was consumed by Naomi and Steph during the whites tasting, with a little help from myself, another was corked, and the dessert wine got left too late. Hamish, now a professional wine blogger (thanks to the spectacular largess of Naomi & Tony), blogged tasting notes for reds and whites. I struggled throughout the day to put notes into CellarTracker, but the backwardness of the UI got in the way, and I eventually gave up to play Borderlands with Paula. Later, though, I discovered the beta-version of CellarTracker, whose interface is much improved, and put my notes together into what they call a ‘tasting story’, being basically a collection of notes structured into a write-up. Worked out quite well.

That CellarTracker is finally doing something about its user interface is really great news – it’s always been the most comprehensive wine tracking service out there, and being built and maintained by a committed wine-enthusiast who just wants to make a living building a tool that he loves, it’s likely to remain that way rather than settling into being ‘good-enough’ like many commercial systems end up doing once the user base and revenue streams are solid. I can now happily recommend it to others, provided you’re using the beta interface; if you’re not, expect to be frustrated.

Anyway, much great wine was consumed; my picks were the Taylor’s Shiraz 2009 and the 3 Stones Pinot Noir, with honorable mentions for the 2011 Saints gewürztraminer, and the 2009 Two Tracks chardonnay (though only if you like them oaky and buttery). Shall have to buy a few more of these for posterity, I think..

I’ve plotted two sets of graphs: a pair of time series showing error over New Zealand’s electoral history since 1890, broken out to show which parties benefited and lost from error (shown below – click on the graphs to expand them), followed by a complete set of graphs of NZ’s electoral results since 1890 (on a separate page).

The time series are the most interesting: they show that electoral error has dropped significantly from the 1996 election onwards, when MMP was adopted, from an average of 12.4% error to an average of 5.5%. It’s important to note that the variance dropped significantly, too – from a standard deviation of 6.3% to 2.1%. For those not versed in statistics, this implies that the error under FPP is less clustered around the average – despite an average of 12.5%, much higher levels of error were possible under FPP. Looking at the data, we can see that six out of New Zealand’s 34 elections under FPP had error of 20% or greater – that’s an election in which 1 in 5 New Zealanders effectively had their votes handed to another party. That’s not democracy.

Looking at the details of who gained and lost, you can see that pretty much universally, gains went to one of the larger parties; the Liberal and Reform parties in the early years, followed by National and Labour since the 1930s, with National gaining about two thirds of the error votes since 1949 (in those elections, an average of about 9.4% of New Zealanders had their votes transferred to National, compared with 4.4% for Labour).

The losers, then, were predominantly small parties, though Labour, now a large party, took a hammering in the 1910s and 1920s during their formative years. More recently, the Social Credit party had virtually no seats in Parliament between 1954 and 1981, despite winning more than 6% of the vote in each of those elections, and sometimes up to 20%. Again, that’s not democracy – if they’d won that many votes under MMP, they’d have 16 or 17 MPs, compared with the maximum of 2 they had in 1981 and 1984.

My goal in doing these graphs was to make the numbers a little more accessible for people considering their options in the coming referendum. While MMP has its flaws, it’s important to remember that a vote against it should be tempered with a vote for a better system:

• First Past the Post is very definitely not that system. If, after looking at my graphs, you think that FPP is a better system than MMP, you’re either having trouble reading them or you’re in favour of an oligarchy, presumably including yourself. Let’s just be clear on that – if representing all New Zealanders is the goal of our elections, FPP is an appalling system.
• Supplementary Member is effectively FPP-lite in that it includes proportional voting to some extent but, depending on the size of the proportional component, it seems able to lead to results that are even worse than FPP. Since votes under supplementary member are collected in a similar manner to MMP, I can model the last 5 elections under different versions of it for comparison. Hopefully, I”ll have time to do this in a future post.
• Single Transferable Vote and Preferential Voting have their pros and cons; theoretically, Condorcet voting, a form of preferential voting, performs optimally for the selection of an individual candidate in a single electorate, but since Parliament is a series of electorates, it remains vulnerable to the same problem that FPP is – that is, one party can win many electorate seats with this method, leaving a large number of voters whose opinions are not included. If I have time, I may do some work with the results from elections in places that use these systems.

Under our current system of MMP, error still exists. There are three primary reasons for this:

• Firstly, there will always be a rounding error as we turn divide votes in the thousands into a small number of seats; this will always create a small error – perhaps 1%, depending on the allocation scheme.
• Secondly, there will always be small parties who don’t meet the threshold for even one seat; votes cast for them round to zero, and are error. If history is anything to go by, these account for another 1 or 2 %.
• Finally, our current system requires that parties either win an electorate seat or meet a threshold of 5%. This accounts for the bulk of error under MMP; in 1996, 6% of the 7.6% error was caused by the failure of the Christan Coalition and the Legalize Cannabis Party to reach 5%; had that rule not been in place, they would have won 5 and 2 seats, respectively. Similarly, in 1999, the Future NZ, Legalize Cannabis, and Christian Heritage parties accounted for 4.6% of the vote, which became error.

My current opinion is that the 5% threshold rule causes too much electoral error to be warranted for any reason. I’ve heard the argument that helps prevent small parties from holding the balance of power, but it seems to me that deal-making and compromise are what politics is all about. I’m keen to other arguments if they’re out there – I’ve not looked very deeply into the reasons for this, so my opinion is really just gut reaction. In the end, I have to weigh all arguments for the threshold against the fact that with it, between 2 and 6% of New Zealanders will have their consent given to another party, which is, as I keep saying, not democratic. To put that in perspective, that’s between 50,000 and 150,000 people disenfranchised.

A couple of details, then:

• I’m defining electoral error as the difference between the votes received by each party and the number of seats awarded, divided by two so I’m not double counting gains and losses. Error is shown as a percentage, being the percentage of the electorate whose votes were effectively ignored in the allocation of seats.
• The other category in the graphs is created from parties that have never won a seat in Parliament. Some of these gained significant numbers of votes at various times, but I’ve had to exclude them to keep things manageable.
• All of my data comes from Elections NZ, by way of http://www.electionresults.govt.nz/. If you want to look at the processed data I used to draw my graphs, you can do that here. If you find any errors, please let me know.

Since I can see others wanting to use these graphs, here’s a license for doing so:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Note that copyright applies for the raw data from Elections NZ and HighCharts, the Javascript graphing library I’ve used for the interactive graphs).

In 2000-2002ish, Nick did just that. I played, along with the usual suspects, and though the game was excellent, it was different to what I expected. For me, the books were emotionally saturated with in-character tension, atmosphere, and tragedy, while the campaign ended up emphasizing combat much more than the intense characters and grand scope I remembered.

Looking back, I think this was just the type of game we wanted to play. I recall the group’s preferred style being fairly humorous and oriented towards tactical combat, with in-character interaction being fairly rare and mostly reserved for critical plot elements. Characterization in such a game still happens, but it tends to focus more on individual characteristics than on relationships, often centering around combat roles or special abilities. Furthermore, D&D 3 had just come out, and we were enthusiastically exploring (and breaking) its rules, and since the bulk of D&D 3′s rules focus on combat, so did we.

None of this is to criticize Nick’s handling of that game – as I said, it was an excellent game, with some fantastic and memorable moments. Nor am I trying to say that there’s something wrong with tactical play (there’s not – it’s a lot of fun). It’s just that it was different to what I thought playing the Dragonlance campaign would be like.

I think this partly stemmed from the way in which the experiences one has when one is young and impressionable are indelibly etched in one’s emotions with a nostalgic perfection, and it’s simply irrational to expect that adult experiences will as easily match up to them. Furthermore, while I think role-playing games as a medium are certainly capable of such emotional saturation, I think D&D is less so, for several reasons:

1. Its rules focus attention on characters as collections of abilities rather than as people – it’s about what your character can do much more than who they are;
2. Its rules are robust, rigorous, and all-encompassing, which doesn’t match well with the arbitrary and complex nature of emotional storytelling – time spent worrying about the rules will always detract from flow and the feeling of being in the moment, while rules consistency will often necessarily interfere with the storyteller’s ability to bend reality in the service of creating compelling scenario;
3. It requires a lot of book-keeping and superstructure that can interrupt and interfere with the flow of play – there’s always spells to keep track of, magic items to identify, treasure to count, maps to draw, and inventory to manage, not to mention hit-points, sundry modifiers and abilities, and all the trappings of a combat character.

One reaction to this, of course, is to do away with a lot of this detail with a low-mechanics system like Savage Worlds, or similar. That works great, but the problem is that there’s a lot of good, fun, things that come out of the complexity and rigor of D&D, and I very much want my games to include the best of both.

I want to be able to run games where the arbitrariness and fast flow of rules-light systems allow me to play fast and loose with details in favor of atmosphere and story, but I also want the rigor and detail of a game like D&D to lend structure to my environments, to create consistent and realistic confrontations, and to more firmly establish the game world as a shared place that the whole group has in common, rather than a set of lightly related games limited to each player’s interpretation and memory of what I told them the weeks previous.

A couple of months ago, I began running the Dragonlance campaign with my current group of players. So far, it’s been an immensely rewarding experience, precisely because I’ve gone into it with the goal of finding ways to fuse these two styles of play. It’s not that I’ve never tried this before, or that it’s a new idea, but that I’m taking such a conscious attitude towards doing so that I’m finding rewarding. It’s like that quote of Socrates, applied to games – ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ – except that I’ve played plenty of games unexamined that were certainly worth playing.

Anyway, I’ve been learning a lot from running this game, and plan to think, and hopefully write, more about it. Here’s a couple of topics that are on my mind:

• Emotional salience – For me, creating great and memorable moments in gaming is all about creating emotionally salient experiences – experiences that directly change how you feel in some way. This seems to apply to everything from free-form narrative games, to D&D, right down to abstract games like chess and soccer. I want to unpack what I mean by this in the context of my game, and hopefully get some reactions from others, too, as this is, I think, the key question in determining what games are good, and what games are not. Note that I’m pretty much ignoring psychological flow in this concept of good game design (maybe this tension is a topic unto itself).
• Creating a sense of place – Places act as emotional anchors; like smells, places can evoke an emotional state fully formed and specific to that place. While others have done a much better job than I can at articulating why this is, I want to take a stab at it, but more importantly, I want to talk about the role of maps and other game-aids in creating that sense of place; the ways they detract, and the ways they enhance.
• Inter-character conflict – Conflict between characters is challenging stuff, mostly because it has the potential to roll over into inter-player conflict, and that’s no fun for anyone. Regardless, I think it can add an awful lot to a game. One interaction, peculiar to tactical combat games, is when the attitudes of characters to one another affects their tactical decision making – real world combat can hardly follow the same near-optimal decision making of players sitting around a battle-map, and furthermore, this adds to the complexity, intrigue, and emotional saliency of encounters. This is an area I’d like to explore more in my play, but it depends a lot on the willingness of my players.
• Maintaining atmosphere and flow in the face of meta-game interruptions, such as discussion of rules, or getting the pizza, or whatever. This seems to be a common topic in guides for GMs, but the advice usually seems limited to being prepared, minimizing interruptions or doing things like dimming the lights. It seems that there’s more than can be done to make the context switch smoother by making in-game events and material more resilient. Battle maps, for example, help immensely in maintaining tension and atmosphere during combat, because it’s so easy to regain a sense of how everything fits together following an interruption. Can this sort of resilience be created outside combat? How?
• Table top RPGs as literature – I’ve not taken a serious literature class since high-school, so maybe I’m not the person to talk about this sort of thing, but I’ve found that my reaction and thinking about the games I run and play has taken a very literary bent of late. I spend a lot more time thinking about narrative structure, the negotiation of shared setting and story, the range of GM roles from an disinterested, absolute arbiter, to an active, democratic, story participant, and the things that gaming can teach about what it is to be human. I want to do more reading before diving into this too deeply, but it’s a topic of interest.

I’d very much welcome suggestions and reactions to all of this. Hopefully you’ll see some posts from me getting into it more in the weeks to come.

Despite its not so imaginative name*, the site is a veritable gold mine of information both awesome and mundane, listing skyscrapers all over the world, with their construction dates, heights, floor count, and other information, along with scale sketches for most. Sadly, though it lists every building in Christchurch over 10 floors, the only one with a sketch is the Hotel Grand Chancellor, but I guess that’s reasonable, seeing as they’re all being shaken to pieces.

Really, though, it’s all about comparing ridiculous mega-engineering projects – check out this diagram of the likely world’s tallest buildings in 2015..

That’s a seriously huge clock-tower (click to zoom).

* I can’t help but think that web pages named with the word page at the end just sound silly, like “Lord of the Rings Book” or “Moby Dick Book”. I guess “The Jungle Book” is a good counter example, but doesn’t “The Page of Skyscrapers!” have more of an impressive ring to it?

Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more easily he will triumph over it. For him, it is not a question of copying, but interpreting in a simpler and more luminous language.

– Charles Baudelaire, On the Ideal and the Model, 1846

I like that, and it’s interesting to think about how applies to games as an art form – unlike the overt intentions of painting or sculpture, games are not about representing the visual or tangible features of a thing, but about representing its internal structure – its workings, the interactions within the thing that lend it its essential character. Coupling the game structure itself with the three art forms necessary to make an actual game product – these being writing (literature), visuals (painting/sculpture), and sound (music) – a game designer strives to interpret and re-present real or imaginary thing in a simpler, more luminous language.

NB – you’ll notice I separate design of the game itself from design of its aesthetics and writing. Not everyone likes this distinction, and it’s true that they tend to merge somewhat in practice, but I find it useful for analysis.

First off, here’s a screenshot of my cell being attacked by viruses (click to zoom). Note the various organelles, as well as the use of ATP, nucleic acids, amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose as game resources.

Cute, huh? Here’s what I like about it:

• Most obviously, it’s fun, and even addictive. This should really be a minimum expectation for educational games, but evidence suggests it’s not.
• It treats the science being taught as a functioning, interactive system, then leverages that interactivity to build game mechanics. Instead of just using the science as a backdrop (like, say, SpaceChem, which uses chemical elements as the context for a mechanical puzzle solving game), all of the game decisions you make in Cellcraft are directly tied into the science. It maps the necessary elements of cell biology directly onto gameplay in a way that’s simple and elegant. Likewise, it doesn’t trivialize gameplay by making the game all about learning – you’re not forced to work through obviously educational activities – the learning’s there, but it’s part of the game.
• It employs narrative to make the whole experience more compelling and engaging. Granted, the story is simple (involving an alien race of platypuses attempting to create a colony of amoeba seeded with platypus DNA to be shipped across space to reconstruct their species elsewhere), but it’s humorous and compelling – the characters have all of 3-4 minutes screen time in total (appearing as narrators during play and as actors in short animated cut-scenes), but they’re quirky and odd enough to grab your attention in a way that most educational games fail to.
• It puts the scientific details in the foreground. All of the modeled cell machinery is exposed, so that, for example, when you choose to have your cell produce lysosomes, you see RNA extruding from the nucleus, being converted into proteins in the rough endoplasmic reticulum, in turn triggering the creation of vesicles from the smooth endoplasmic reticulum, which are finally converted to lysosomes at the Golgi apparatus. The point being that you’re constantly seeing the details happen; they’re not hidden away, but likewise, they don’t interfere with play – they’re like the replacement of progress bars in certain kingdom simulations with the animation of a building being constructed – informative, interesting, but not intrusive.
• It follows the lessons of tutorial-style play. It’s often said that game tutorials epitomize ideal learning in that they’re narratively led, interactive, direct, and encouraging in the face of failure. While many game tutorials are just awful, some successfully implement mastery learning by constantly challenging the player with small increases in difficulty and knowledge, followed by opportunities to demonstrate their mastery of that knowledge. Every game level teaches something new about cell biology, and each level is divided into smaller chunks that present clear, achievable, if challenging, goals, while avoid the feel of play becoming formulaic. Really, my biggest complaint about the game is that it ran out of new biology to teach me, and so ran out of levels for me to play.
• It provides access to deeper knowledge throughout. Obvious, the cells in Cellcraft are a toy system – they’re simplified from the real biology, creating an accessible model with sufficient complexity to make play interesting, but not so much that it becomes taxing. Despite this, however, it laces in references and access to the corresponding scientific ideas, much in the same way that Civilization used to in its Civilopedia. Extra knowledge is there, tantalizingly, but it’s not required – it’s an optional extra whose presence suggests that it might offer useful further insight to the advanced player.
• It’s explicit about its compromises. Obviously, the simplifications necessary for elegant game play will cause the game to diverge somewhat from the science behind it. Instead of just ignoring this problem, Cellcraft clearly states when it’s deviating in this way, partly by including relevant notes in the narrative (such one character’s shock at the idea of implanting chloroplasts in an animal cell), and partly by offering comparisons between game elements and the real science in its in-game help.
• Finally, it’s a class act. It has a simple yet humorous and strong aesthetic style, an elegant interface, good sound and music, and is well written. I only encountered one minor bug, in which the simulation of the cell’s outer membrane (based on moving splines of some sort) became unstable and spun out of control, shunting the cell’s nucleus into the surrounding fluid. Though this didn’t kill it directly, all of my cell defenses were trapped in the cytoplasm, and so it was quickly co-opted by viruses, quickly overwhelming it.

All in all, a very strong game – if you’re not familiar with basic cell biology, play it; you’ll learn a lot. You can download it to play on your own machine, or you can play it online. For more information, check out the designer’s blog for some interesting discussion including a entertaining piece about how they’re NOT creationists, even though they’ve got platypus “designers” creating cells..

A couple of people asked what I’m doing to celebrate…

For a start, Vladimir, a friend of mine who happens to share not just the same birthday, but same birth year with me, has organized a get together of sorts at the Seattle Art Museum’s Remix party. I’ve no idea what to expect, really, but it should be interesting, at the very least.

Then, tomorrow, I’m hosting a six-hour lunch, which, for the uninitiated, is basically an excuse to sit around and drink a lot of port. The story goes that the English owners of port wineries in Portugal would all gather in Oporto every Wednesday to wait for the mail boat to arrive. Unfortunately, the arrival time was always a little uncertain, and so they had to do something else with the time. Like sit around and drink a lot of port. Oh, and eat lunch, talk, and other incidental things like that. Following that, there will be BBQ, board games, and blissful sleep. For an idea of what this is all about, check out Gold’s sequence of blog posts and my photos from a previous event.

Finally, later in the month, I’m treating myself with a trip to Origins, in Columbus, Ohio, where I shall geek out for several days. Following that, I’m off to Cleveland to visit Cat & Dan.

So, yeah, looking to be a good celebratory month for me.

It’s not that I need my Facebook data so much as that it’s like a diary: all sorts of conversations, notes, random remarks, and social interactions that might once have been written in a diary or in letters; the sort of thing that would be nice to be able to page through and reminisce when I’m old and backwards-looking. There’s a practical component too – I’d like to be able to search my messages so I can find random notes, or remember what I sent to X about Y (again, the Facebook interface sucks in this area, though I note that in the last few days they’ve upgraded the messages UI once again, so maybe that will improve things – hey, pigs may one day fly through spaaaaacccce).

Anyway, I noticed this afternoon that at some point Facebook added a ‘download your data’ function to the account settings page, so I had to try it. Here’s what you get:

• Copies of all your photos, in the resolution that Facebook stores them (so, if you uploaded higher res versions that Facebook scaled down, you get the scaled down version, not your original; about what I’d expect).
• Copies of all your videos, again, scaled
• An HTML page containing your profile
• A single HTML page listing your photo galleries, including cover images, posting details, and gallery-level comments by other users
• A single HTML page that seems intended to contain all of the photos of you. Mine’s empty, which is odd, because there are many photos tagged as containing me.
• HTML pages for each of your photo albums, including captions, image posting notes, and comments by other users. Might be that all the photos of me are owned by other users; I’m not sure I normally tag myself
• A single HTML page containing all of your events. Seems only to include recent events, and doesn’t include anything more than the event overview – you can’t recover lists of attendees or discussions
• An HTML page containing your friends list. Names only, no photos, no other info.
• A single HTML page containing all of your notes, including comments by other users
• A single HTML page, apparently containing all your videos, including posting notes and comments by other user. I say apparently because I only had the one video up, but it looks like it’s meant to be a list page
• A single HTML page containing your whole wall. Contains all your wall posts, including all comments by other users. Doesn’t include everything posted to your wall, though; third party notifications seem largely absent, for example. Of course, they’re mostly junk and advertising, anyway, so I’m OK with that. Obviously, this page can be quite big
• A single HTML page containing all of your messages, organized into conversations (as in GMail). This page can also be rather large

All of the HTML pages are stripped of Facebook’s look and feel, and contain no extraneous links (they only link to other files in the download set, such as photos). Internally, they’re fairly well structured, with tagged divs and spans for most of the key elements, so they should be fairly trivial to parse if one was so inclined.

While the pack doesn’t contain everything I’ve ever posted on Facebook, it’s pretty thorough. The main things I can’t recover are comments that I’ve posted on other people’s walls or items. It seems those only come out if that user does an export. It’d be nice if this was all a little more structured – some XML linking everything together would be nice, for example, as would, perhaps, be links to the original content. But the main problem, for me, is solved – I can recover the bulk of what I’ve put on Facebook, which means I’m no longer locked in if (when) they turn out to be evil, nor do they have any monopoly over these artifacts of my existence. They’re all going into my document repository for storage..

HTML 5 is a new standard for the web that adds a lot of new features. Some of them look like gimmicks (Speech input and the pulse CSS tag), some look set to become fundamentally important (HTML 5 video), some offer technical capabilities (in browser DB and local storage), some offer simple ways of solving old problems (CSS support for rounded corners), and others look set to significantly change the sorts of content that can be displayed effectively on the web (WebGL and inline SVG).

There’s definitely challenges and issues with HTML 5 – video formats are one, while another will be the inevitable storm of partial implementation errors and browser-specific idiosyncracies. That said, it looks set to seriously expand the tools available to web designers, and that’s cool.

For a good overview of what you might be seeing coming soon in your browser, take a walk through this slideshow from HTML5Rocks.com. It’s best viewed in Chrome 11, and provides a thorough set of examples of what HTML 5 will offer.

Take a look – while it’s of most interest to the technically minded, it’s got plenty of interesting examples accessible to those not so inclined.