Things—I presume them to be thoughts—swirl in my brain like two halves of a solution that won’t quite blend. Think of Nestlé Quik and milk: No matter how vigorously you stir, there will always be lumps of chocolate goo. Whether that is a negative or a positive thing is largely subjective. I still submit that it isn’t meant to be so.

I forgot what I was talking about.

Games a-Plenty

My spare thinking time has been devoted quite a lot to gaming lately. The recent convention has some to do with this; the upcoming KublaCon is another factor. Regardless, I’ve been concocting adventures, scenarios and envisioning minutely detailed painting on tiny figures… not to mention the scouring of gaming websites and magazines which tell tales of victorious and varied board games, video games and their ilk.

One thing which struck me as significant in all this is that there is a lot of overlap among gamer geeks (previously I’ve referred to these people as “hardcore gamers,” though the distinction is purely academic) but the focus levels are so diverse and numerous that even with overlap, there is still a lot of splintering among the community. What I mean is that there are loads of people who play games which reach beyond the comfort level of your “average” individual whether in terms of committment, depth of involvement, complexity or social stigmas. Yet among the teeming throngs of people it can be difficult to find consensus about where the line is drawn.

In some cases it can be a money thing. Investing in a tabletop miniatures game like Warhammer takes a lot of time and effort but above even that it can be really pricey; I estimate that my 40K army is worth (note that I did not pay this amount because I got a lot of good deals and recieved significant portions of it as gifts) around $1,000. Video games, too, can be really expensive: At $50 minimum per game and noting that a single game can hold one’s attention for maybe a month if you’re lucky, we’re talking about $600/year and that’s not counting the cost for a console system itself which would bring video gaming up to around that $1,000 mark (more if you’re a PC gamer). Board games cost upwards of $70 each and if you schedule a game night per week you might get away with a single game per month but I’d say it’s more likely to play one game three times unless it’s really great. Point being, most people don’t have the financial resources to focus too heavily on more than one or two aspects of geek gaming as a whole.

I notice this as a problem because what ends up happening is that you have all these potential customers who would be involved in this aspect or that if they weren’t already being consumed by another aspect. Games Workshop, for example, I’m almost positive has had meetings where top brass discuss how to get video gamers to start spending some of that cash they’re burning at EB Games over at the GW store instead. I’m reasonably sure that the existence of Dawn of War is evidence of these meetings since the game (while quite enjoyable—don’t misunderstand me) seems in many ways like a big advertising campaign for the tabletop game. “Did you like this video game? Try the home version!”

The response, aside from some of these sorts of cross-genre experiments, to continual splintering of the marketplace has seemed to be the industries constantly raising the prices citing rising production costs. Head over to any forum dealing with Games Workshop games to see an example of how this sits with most customers (I presume in recommending this course of action that you’re comfortable with 14-year old guys drawing insights such as “that sucks!” and I feel safe in presuming that because, well, you’re here and that’s the sort of insight I typically draw). The problem with hobbies like this is that when it comes down to it you can either accept what the content providers are doing in whole in order to stay with the activity you enjoy or you can discard it entirely: Middle grounds are hard to come by short of dropping into “casual” status.

With all these elements in place what really suffers is the secondary markets: Add-ons and supporting products which should be providing competition but instead suffer from legal issues and limitations that make them rarely necessary and often difficult to implement properly, especially if the original intellectual property owner finds value in offering something put out by a thrid party. Consider the external hard drive for the PS2: It shouldn’t have been a big deal for someone other than Sony to put out a cheap, reliable hard disk with a decent capacity that plugged into the PS2 and offered nearly unlimited storage space for games. And what a return on investment over the $30-40 memory card from Sony which offers a paltry eight MB space. But until Sony released their official hard drive, none that I know of were put forth to consumers. Why not?

Probably the reason why not is that third party accessory developers know that customers have a limited appetite for non-official add-ons because they pay so much just to stay in the hobby to begin with (remember how easy it is to drop $1,000/year on this stuff) that any extra—no matter how useful—are regarded as a vehicle for gouging the customer.

Here’s the point that I’m getting to: There is a very useful program called Army Builder that helps miniature gamers build their army lists. It isn’t specific to any one game system so it covers some of the overlap/splintering among the gamers. But the product costs $40 for a one-year license after which you may continue to use the product although you are no longer eligible for updates and feature enhancements. I’ve heard several gamers on forums grumbling about having to drop even the $10-15 per year for a license “bump.” I understand Wolf Lair’s desire to keep piracy down and their explanation for how they’re doing this makes a certain amount of sense. Yet from a gamer’s perspective I can see how $40 (that’s the price of an elite unit in 40K, like five metal Terminators) plus a yearly $15 fee (the price of a metal HQ unit in a blister pack) could feel like a gyp.

Which leads me to what I was thinking which was, why couldn’t Army Builder be done with PHP or Ruby on Rails and Ajax? The interface is pretty simple and the heavy lifting is pretty much done behind the scenes as part of what I’d call definition files specific to each game and/or army, so essentially the hard part would be setting up a flexible framework and then getting someone with a thorough understanding of each game’s (or army’s) rules to build the def files. My thought process is that if the tool itself were built such that the deliverable medium was a web browser, the need for licensing goes away and with something as useful as this the overhead for a webserver/host could be covered with some unobtrusive ads while the development costs can be covered with a simple login and one-time fee of much less than half the cost of AB. I can even envision a situation where the ads cover the cost of the entire product or you could add special features in for small fees like the ability to save your army lists on the site (rather than to a local file) for access later. I even like the AB trial idea of allowing unlimited use for armies less than x points (AB uses a 500 point threshold).

Anybody out there interested in a joint programming project? Better yet, anyone know of someone else who beat me to the punch?

Indigo Romeo Oscar November Sierra Oscar Alpha Papa

I’m getting better about talking to customers on the phone.

That doesn’t mean I like telephones any better than I used to, only that out of necessity I’ve learned to value their immediacy because when my choices are to deal with one customer ringing up fifteen SLAs in a day due to back-and-forth emails or picking up the phone and resolving it in twenty minutes, my stress level protracted over a day versus a painful twenty minutes is simply not worth it.

The one problem I have is that often I get into that weird situation where I’m having to give explicit instructions to enter a series of commands or I need to verify some spelling or other. When accuracy is important, the limitations of verbal communication as a medium for written (or typed) interfaces becomes clear. As a matter of fact, I think that communication in general suffers most obviously whenever the intended effect is to transpose from one to another. People talk often about how it’s hard to convey tone or mood in an email; this seems strange when you consider that authors have been conveying tone and mood via written words for centuries but the distinction is that emails are intended to be spoken conversations by proxy which is where the breakdown occurs.

Anyway, I hear a lot of other techs around here doing the whole “F as in Frank, B as in Boy” routine and I decided quickly that the problem there is no two people use the same “as in” examples so potential disconnects between speaker and listener still happen, even with all the extra effort. “No! B as in Boy, not T as in Toy!” et cetera.

So I decided I was going to learn the military alphabet. It goes as such (and I’m doing this from memory as an exercise):

Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
Indigo
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu

As a means of drilling these into my head I’ve been walking around transposing every sequence of letters I can see into these codes. License plates are good for this: I have a habit already of examining the three-letter sequences in the middle of California licenses for short words or acronyms (like initials of people I know or computer/geek terms… I’ve seen SSH, NES, PNG, DRM and EXE before, each time I feel a secret delight that has no rational source). Now I look at them and repeat mentally, “Sierra, Sierra, Hotel; November, Echo, Sierra; Papa, November, Golf” and so on.

Does that make me weird?

Don’t answer that.

The Horror

A couple of months ago I wandered into the breakroom at work. On the table there sat an innocent-looking sheet of paper. The header said, “Girl Scout Cookies Order Form.” I broke out into a nervous sweat. My addiction to the drug most commonly known by its street name, Samoas has been well chronicled. At the time, though, my health habits had been maintaining a steady, strong pace in the realm of “good” for over a year. One box won’t hurt, a voice in my head whispered, not entirely without menace. I decided the voice was right. I’d been good. I deserved a treat.

Fast forward two months. The new job has me running ragged. I haven’t worked this hard—literally—in over four years. Hey, I worked in government; what do you expect? My days are long and exhausting; I spend my spare time trying to balance sleep and spending some time with my wife. Did I mention I still have outside contract work duties? Needless to say things have had to give and the first to go was my daily gym visit and the second to go was my focus on healthful eating. I suffer as a result, I know this. I feel badly (both in terms of general well-being and guilt-wise), I’m gaining weight and I’m not at my peak in terms of any of the things I need to do. My mood is sketchy; my energy level is limp; my stress in occasionally unmanageable. The time to change is now.

Somehow, the menacing voice in my head knew this would happen. I stare at the box of coconut and caramel bliss on my desk, delivered fresh this morning by a jovial but wicked co-worker to whom I gleefully handed over my lunch money in exchange for his product. “There’s more where these came from,” he offered. I glanced down, shamed, and out of the corner of my eye his face twisted and distorted into a devilishly inhuman grin like those creepy guys from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Hush.” When I looked back quickly, it was gone. He was normal. “Enjoy!” he cried and inside I wept.

The voice is back now, harsher and less soothing. It implores me to eat. And eat and eat. The discomfort I’ve felt of late: It is not some silly weakening of resolve and atrophing of muscle tissue. I am not weary from long hours and hectic schedules and pressure from many disparate sources. No, the voice assures me, all I have been missing are these cookies.

I turned the boxes around so the bottoms face me and the tops are pushed against the tan/grey fabric of the cube wall. A printed message on the box bottom reads, “Open Other End.” As I read it, over and over, it comes through in the voice’s now grating rasp. It doesn’t seem like a helpful consumer warning, it reads like a dictum urging me to action. My resolve, already weak, slips like a sweaty finger clinging to edge of a sheer cliff. The voice returns now, given shape and form and it brings its foot down on my clutching grap, cracking fingers beneath a patent leather shoe. I tumble and my final vision is that of the voice’s physical manifestation, wearing a green sash dotted by hand-sewn patches, glaring down with triumphantly burning red eyes.