Still enthusiastic about making great video game software

Remember how cool it was when Google turned their homepage, and logo, into a playable version of Pac-Man?

I thought it was rather charming at the time – and just further proof that Google is the kind of modern, fun, and productive company that other software development studios should emulate.

But then came the news that Google’s Pac-Man ate, or gobbled, or devoured, or simply took a bite out of our global economy/market/productivity – to the tune of 5 million work hours and … get your best Dr. Evil voice ready … $120 million dollars!

Damn. Talk about a buzz kill … and complete nonsense to boot.

The source to the claim was a blog post from RescueTime under the alarming title, The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man. From their post:

This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.

And RescueTime crunches the numbers further to find:

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).

Hmm … well, that’s interesting – because I did my own back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with a different figure:

First and foremost, there’s just no way that a sample of their userbase can represent the global population of Google visitors. When they write …

If we assume that our userbase is representative …

… they are committing a mortal statistical sin. At best, their sample can only represent the population of their userbase. Nothing more.

Further assumptions needed to make their conclusion work are just as nonsensical:

• The half-billion unique Google visitors came to the site on their employers dime
• These folks (500 million of them!) came at an average cost of $25 per hour
• That Google Pac-Man caused an increase in slacking off, instead of substituting for other mental-break activities available to us each day

I don’t really blame RescueTime for playing fast and loose with numbers like this. Copious amounts of lost productivity is an important narrative for them, and although their tortured statistics may turn off people like me there’s little doubt it was anything but a net positive for them.

I just wish agents reporting on the news (including trusted news outlets) would apply some skepticism before parroting stuff like this – but of course they didn’t – and that’s tragic.

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The Left 4 Dead games may very well be my favorite video game of all time now – something I never saw coming when I first heard about the title years ago.

“Multiplayer? Nah, that’s not my bag.”

And look me now – jumping into any game I can find off my friends list. It’s kind of pathetic.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying The Passing add-on since its release and this week’s Mutation, aptly named Last Man On Earth, is a pretty big deal. For the first time ever I’m able to play a version of  L4D as a true single-player experience – and I like it a lot.

It works like this: it’s just you against the Special Infected (sans Boomer). From the L4D blog:

You will become legend to the infected as the last human left.
You are the only Survivor left in the world. No split screen help. No Survivor bots. But don’t worry you aren’t entirely alone. While there are no common Infected, Special Infected will hunt you down and become close, close friends with you.

It’s pretty challenging, but not impossible (Hint: turn subtitles on). You are automatically revived once incapped, but will quickly bleed out if you don’t heal yourself. Valve did a great job capturing the “Holy crap! I just barely freaking made it!” feeling from the multiplayer game. The numerous close-calls have kept me on edge the past couple of evenings (and make up for the much more numerous deaths). It’s a great experience – and there’s no better practice for fighting against the Special Infected mano-a-mano.

Plus, this is a great way to finally beat those campaigns on Expert difficulty without trying to get your friends to commit to 4+ hours per campaign (the bots are completely useless on Expert) or dealing with the rage quit morons on Xbox Live.

Oh, and the finale for The Parish – the one on the bridge – was ridiculously easy. I just ran through the whole thing – even past the Tank, I never saw him – in about 45 seconds. It turns out this will grant you the much vaunted Bridge Over Trebled Slaughter achievement if you don’t have it already.

Go get on it this week while you still can.

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By programmer standards, I think it’s fair to say I’m a fairly social guy. I imagine most people I’ve worked with would say I’m a friendly, approachable guy – perhaps even a bit extroverted.

I figure that’s mostly due to enjoying my work so much and because, at the office, we tend to share the same goals and interests. But people who meet me outside of work, especially those who know me primarily as “Christy’s husband”,  tend to think I’ve got a some issues. Pretension is a common complaint.

But it’s nothing personal, I just have a very difficult time to talking to you.

I wasn’t always like this, but thanks to Scott Adams’ entry on Brain Management, I think I know what happened: my career as a software engineer.

During one period of my life I wrote a number of computer programs that involved intense manipulation of objects in my mind, for hours each day. I discovered that it was difficult to be social at night when my mind had been manipulating object during the day. It felt as if I were deep inside a cave and yelling to the people who stood at the cave opening. It seemed as if the practice of programming interfered with, or exhausted, the part of my brain that handles social skills.

(Emphasis is mine.)

I often thought I just grew up in my mid-twenties and got into computer programming because it fit my new mental state – but now I’m thinking that perhaps the act of programming has changed me. I certainly do find people utterly exhausting at times, especially when the working day is done.

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Full disclosure: I work for Disney Interactive Studios, so I have a vested interest in seeing that growing part of The Walt Disney Company do well. Then again, as a enthusiastic game player/developer I have a vested interest in seeing every video game developer do well for itself.

All that aside, I took a break from my Left 4 Dead addiction this evening and gave Black Rock Studio’s recently released Split/Second Xbox 360 demo a try. I’m usually not one for racing games, but this is something I could totally see myself getting into. I just love the theme of an over-the-top reality-television culture gone mad in a The Running Man meets Days of Thunder kind of way.

The demo is short and doesn’t have multiplayer – both common fare for demos – but it does a pretty good job hooking you in. Plus, I think it proves that Disney means business about taking serious gamers seriously. This is no magical fairy princess adventure (uh … not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Try the demo. The full game hits retail on May 18th. I’ll be playing some online multiplayer for sure that night.

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Huge Mega Man fan here: I’ve loved the franchise ever since the first game, that I accidently bought at a Consumers Distributing in Peterborough, Ontario – because I confused it with Bionic Commando.

(No offense to Bionic Command, which is great game in its own right, but that’s the best mistake I’ve ever made in my gaming life.)

Naturally, I purchased Mega Man 10 when it became available on Xbox Live* last week and it’s pretty much what we’ve grown to expect and love – although the Sheep Man robot master leaves me scratching my head a bit.

Yeah. Sheep Man. I know what you’re thinking … maybe Pussy Willow Man was already trademarked or something.

And you know what my 7-year-old daughter has a picture of on her pajamas? Sheep.

(Still, I have to admit that his Thunder Wool ability, even though it sounds lame as well, is actually pretty cool.)

All kidding aside, I think the game is great, and well worth the $10 or so in points to download. But like the long-awaited Mega Man 9 that came before it, I’m more than a little overwhelmed by the difficult achievements**, which include …

• Make it to a robot master without taking damage
• Play a whole game without dying
• Don’t use continues
• Don’t use any weapon or health refills
• Finish the game in under an hour
• Play the whole game without taking damage, ever (Hello!)

Personally, I just don’t see how playing through Mega Man without taking any damage could be fun, I guess that’s one just for the ultra-hardcore. But worse than the difficulty of the achievements is the addition of the Easy difficulty setting. And we’re talking big time easy here, with weaker enemies, less damage, and nearly 100% muted environmental dangers. I’m all for making a game more accessible – but this just doesn’t feel right.

And worse, all but one of the achievements can be unlocked in Easy mode, pretty much ensuring that the majority of players will be playing, in my mind, a much weaker game.

By the way, here are some of the things you can not unlock achievements for …

• Beating the game on its normal (and satisfying) difficulty level, provided you’ve already beaten it on easy
• Playing and beating the game as Proto Man
• Completing any number of challenges in the very fun (yet easy to miss) Challenge mode

Those just seem like no-brainers to me – some good, solid achievements that would extend the replay factor of the title and reward players for sticking with it.

Of course, I still heartily recommend Mega Man 10, but there is a missing attention to making the features, difficulty, and achievements work together to influence the game to be played at its best and fullest. Achievements (and Trophies) are now an integral part of our gaming fun*** and developers need to give them the same kind of design love that the in-game experience commands.

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I used to be able to get by doing my work with only a handful of applications, but now that I’m programming a Wii title and supporting all the tools in our content chain, I find that I often get lost in the mess of windows open on my desktop …

The number of Windows Explorer instances I find myself dealing with are especially troublesome, and I often find even opening more (with multiple instances pointing to the same directories) because it’s easier to do so than to hunt down the Explorer window I’m interested in.

Time was, I’d just learn to live with this kind of annoyance, but one of the things I’ve promised myself this past year, in an effort to grow up as a developer, is to seek out solutions to these kind of inefficiencies.

What I really needed to clean up this mess was a way to section off my work into three categories:

1. Programming – where I (should) spend most of my time.
2. Deployment and testing – on the Wii platform.
3. Email and internets – a combination of work-related communication and goofing off. I generally don’t want to be here too much.

Linux users have been using virtual desktops since forever for exactly this reason, so what I needed was an XP solution along those lines. (And to my surprise, upgrading to Vista or Windows 7 wouldn’t help – they still don’t feature virtual desktops out-of-the-box.)

Virtual Desktops on Windows

Microsoft has a Virtual Desktop Manager PowerToy available, but either I’m too stupid to figure out how to use it (a definite possibility) or it just doesn’t get the job done. As best as I could tell all it did was group applications to be minimized based on what “desktop” is currently active. The same mess of applications was still in the taskbar and the task switcher. Bleh.

VirtuaWin is awesome – and free!

I then tried VirtuaWin, and I have to say this thing is pretty slick and solid. It does exactly what I want, without trying to be ridiculously fancy about rotating 3d cubes and such. And as a developer I have to give monster credit to the authors for crafting it in such a way that makes it extensible through dozens of plugin modules. I recommend installing VirtuaPlus, as it allowed me to choose a separate background image for each desktop.

Hey there, Miss Doesn’t-find-me-attractive-sexually-anymore: I just tripled my productivity!

I’ve been using VirtuaWin for a couple of weeks now and I’m convinced it’s one of the best productivity tools I’ve installed in a long time. Those of us who do knowledge work are always fighting to keep our flow running, something that switching gears kills, particularly when I have a hard time finding my way to the applications that now demand my attention.

But now, say I want to test something quick on my Wii dev kit? A quick Ctrl+Alt+Right gets me there with all the tools needed for that purpose. Need to bring a Wiki page over to my programming work? Two Alt+Win+Left clicks and I’ve pulled Internet Explorer from my goofing-off desktop, past my Wii staging ground, and to my true working environment.

And speaking of goofing off, I just love having a separate desktop for my low productivity tasks. The custom look for that desktop reminds me that I shouldn’t be there for too long – so I get in and out of my mental breaks much faster.

As an added bonus, I find myself with fewer applications active at the same time now. The logical grouping of my windows keeps me from opening multiple instances of the same application, especially all those damn Windows Explorers. And I’m no longer shy about what to shut down because I better know when it is done serving its purpose for awhile.

VirtuaWin is one of those programs I can’t believe I’ve been working this long without. If you’re looking for a bit of order to your workspace then go get it now.

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Fellow game developer Chad Stewart has written up a list of 10 commandments for junior game programmers to follow:

1. Thou Shalt Learn
2. Thou Shalt Learn Some More
3. Remember the Code Review to Keep It Holy
4. Understand Thy Code Base
5. Honor Knowledge, Keep Reading Books
6. Thou Shalt Ask for feedback
7. Thou Shalt Be Wrong
8. Liketh Nike, Just Do It
9. Thou Shalt Comment
10. Thou Shalt Not Break The Build

That’s not a bad list at all, although I have to wonder … what’s with this junior programmer business? This is the kind of stuff that programmers at all levels should be thinking about no matter what their title is.

And really, is there anything more annoying than a senior-level programmer that gave up learning and reading and improving his craft years ago? The kind of person that thrives on being viewed as the smartest guy in the room, so much so that he won’t ask a question that just might betray him? The kind of person that doesn’t want other people reviewing his work?

That kind of person drives me absolutely crazy. Have some damn humility.

Yeah, um, anyway, I recommend reading Chad’s full post. I think it’s telling (and appropriate) that a full five of his commandments (1, 2, 5, 6, 7) are really just about the general act of learning. It’s good stuff.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have some constructive feedback.

Chad writes …

8. Liketh Nike, Just Do It

I read this one in Game Developer. When you have some great idea, don’t let it get lost in the chain of command. Spend a few hours on Saturday and get it done. If it takes multiple weeks, so be it. Spend the time and get it done. That’s step one. Step two? Let everyone know how great you are!

I recommend strong caution with this, especially for people new to the business. Enthusiasm and initiative are fantastic qualities but trust me, if you go a bit rogue on the weekend putting something cool you just learned into the codebase then there’s a good chance your fellow programmers will explicitly not want to hear about how great you are once they sync up on Monday morning.

A long time ago I worked with a guy who, equipped with the first Game Programming Gems book, had littered our project with a dozen or so Singleton classes over the weekend – and he was crushed when his work, once discovered, was met with, “What the fuck is this shit?” instead of celebration.

If you have a decent lead then he’ll work with you to channel your intensity, and even find a way to put it into a task that excites you. So find more constructive ways to earn those atta-boys.

Further, Chad says …

9. Thou Shalt Comment

Get into the habit! It’s a good habit. Comments make life better.

I would first stress that it is far more important to write code that makes sense on it’s own and is therefore self-documenting. But failing that, yes, please do comment.

Otherwise, I can’t find much wrong with those commandments. If only it wasn’t written for just the junior programmer audience.

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