Stupid Interface Tricks

I've been dabbling in a lot of free games lately and I have a short message for amateur game designers out there: learn how to make an interface. I'm not talking about pretty graphical menus or coding your own keyboard driver, I'm talking about the basics of how the player interacts with the game. I've played way too many games lately where it is clear that the designer put no thought at all into the interface; it makes sense to them but it acts as a barrier for anyone picking it up for the first time. You want to avoid entry barriers and doing that is Real Video Game Design 101.

Take I Want to Be the Guy, for example. It's intended to be a loving tribute to old NES games while simultaneously being the most unfair game ever devised. This is a fine goal: it creates a unique and peculiar feel for the game encouraging paranoia as everything in the game is out to get you. If it was just the game elements I wouldn't have a problem but when your character stands on a platform moving down the jump button becomes unresponsive to about fifty percent of the presses. Needless to say the game relies on split second jump timing and a frustration is introduced before the player gets too far into the game that is completely unnecessary.

Without seeing the code I'd say that there is simply a timing disconnect between when the game checks for keypresses and when it moves sprites (moving objects on the screen). So sometimes the platform moves, then it tests the jump button condition and finds the character is not standing on anything, and then the player character falls to catch up to the platform where another test occurs. I haven't dealt with this in Flash but the simple solution would be to expand the "standing" check for the jumps to allow for that one pixel difference between the player and the platform.

Blocksum is a cute puzzler that I'm mentioning just as example of sloppiness. Once you're in the game everything is fine. What happens when you first start the game, though, is the player is confronted by the message "PRESS A BUTTON" and pressing a button doesn't do anything. So where's the "any" key? Well as it turns out the game designer defined the interface as "Button A", "Button B", and "Button C" and then defined "Button A" as the 'z' key. So "PRESS A BUTTON" means "Press the 'z' key." The only way to know this is to find out is to press the 'z' key to get past the "PRESS A BUTTON" message. I'm sure this made perfect sense to the programmer but it's just sloppy to a person first starting up the game.

And then there's Dwarf Fortress. A game with an interface that was congealed rather than designed. For all the cleverness in design and behavior contained in the game the vast majority of people who look at because of the recommendations of other players can't even get started with it. The interface has no less than four completely different ways to select an area and chooses between them at random. Each menu has its own unique method of selecting something. Status and feedback on the player's choices is often deeply buried. There's never less than two different ways to do everything and which one works and which one does something completely different for just that section seems to be random. Dwarf Fortress is a perfect example of how to try to kill a good game concept with a bad interface.

Really there's no simple solution to Dwarf Fortress's interface problems. It needs to be gutted, simplified, and completely reimplimented. Just making it coherent would be a dramatic improvement. It's a tribute to the game that people can push through that monster block and find entertainment in it but so many people pass over it just because the interface is so unmanagiable. It's the poster child for exactly how not to make an interface.

I know to some extent it's a case of getting what you pay for but I'm starting from the possibly foolish assumption that the people who made these games want as many people as possible to play them. Interface design isn't as cool as adding a new boss, lightning effects, or special monsters but it is what the player is really going to be dealing with the majority of the time and doing it poorly hurts you. So please, amateur game designers, put at least some effort in it.

Fan Artists of the 1990's

I'm slowly working my way through Chronospace which is an expansion of Allen Steele's "...Where Angels Fear to Tread" and so I'm delaying moving on in the Hugo short fiction reviews until that is done (here's a hint though; if I'm finding it hard to pick up a book then odds are I don't like it much). So I thought now would be a nice time to show another decade worth of Hugo winning fan artists.

As I did with the earlier list I'm skipping over winners that I've already covered. Get ready for a lot of cartoonists...

Stu Shiffman
1990 Hugo Winner for Best Fan Artist

While Shiffman has been active in the science fiction fan community the only sampling of his work (as opposed to the occasional single image) that I could find online is a collection of t-shirt designs he did ten years ago.

Teddy Harvia
1991, 1995, 2001, and 2002 Hugo Winner for Best Fan Artist

A constant nominee for the Best Fan Artist Hugo (he has been nominated almost every year since the late 80's), Teddy Harvia has a very extensive site covering his work.

Peggy Ranson
1993 Hugo Winner for Best Fan Artist

Ranson has worked a professional illustrator for language books and provided illustrations for stories in fanzines. That makes her stand out from the other artists who won the fan award in the 1990's since the rest of them primarily worked as cartoonists. There is a gallery of her work available at fanac.org.

Joe Mayhew
1998 and 2000 Hugo Winner for Best Fan Artist

Mayhew passed away in 2000 but a very extensive collection of his work is maintained online. With his art he was primarily a cartoonist but he worked in other mediums as well which is why I chose to showcase one of his wood carved canes above. With many of these artists the only work I can find online are illustrations so I had to take the opportunity even if the photograph isn't the best quality.

Ian Gunn
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Fan Artist

Gunn's Hugo award was posthumous; he died in 1998. Gunn was an Australian cartoonist who produced several a fanzine of them called Silly Illoes. The best sampling of his work that I could find online can be found here along with his obituary.

Review - Battlestar Galactica: "33"

Battlestar Galactica: "33"
2005 Hugo Winner for Best Short Form Dramatic Presentation

After Battlestar Galactica the only television series left that has won the Hugo award is Doctor Who. Between the two of them they represent the two different directions that high concept television shows go these days. Doctor Who is the whimsical one (usually) but I'll cover that in a few weeks and represents shows like Pushing Daisies. Battlestar Galactica is the brooding side of things representing shows like Lost.

I have a confession to make here: I no longer watch Galactica. There was a period of about six months where I was unable to watch the show and the continuity is so tight between episodes that I decided it would be better to just wait it out and get the DVD sets when the series was over. I am the media creator's worst nightmare: a patient man.

Battlestar Galactica is about the last human survivors of a devastating attack by their sentient robotic creations. The few space craft that were away from the planetary colonies have managed to come together for defense with the only remaining warship, the Galactica. It only survived because it was to be decommissioned the day the attack occurred. Together they are journeying toward humanity's lost home world, the Earth.

The show debuted with a miniseries that established the situation. "33" was the first episode of the regular series and it debuted with a bang. Every thirty-three minutes the robotic enemies manage to locate the fleet and attack causing the refugees to flee by a hyperspace jump again. This situation has been going on for five days straight and everyone is strained to the breaking point. A possible cause of these constantly reoccurring attacks comes to light and the characters have deal with sacrificing a significant portion of the few remaining free humans to keep the rest safe.

I couldn't imagine a more perfect pilot. First, it clearly establishes the themes of the series. Our heroes are terminally outgunned and the only option for them is running as fast as they can. The military is segregated from the civilians in a way that will naturally cause conflict. And it also clearly establishes that multiple major characters are sleeper agents for the enemy. If you aren't interested in seeing what happens next after watching this episode then I have to say that you probably aren't interested in science fiction on television in general.

The usual flaw for any high concept television (not just SF) was that the show's creators usually have to settle for less than stellar actors. That has changed as serial drama has become a popular entertainment choice and Battlestar Galactica has a superb cast. None of them grate on me and several, such as the bridge crew of Galactica, stand out.

The visual style of the show needs to be mentioned. The technique of shooting everything, including most of the special effects shots, as though they were being done by a hand held camcorder can be distracting initially. I got past it quickly but I personally found it to be more gimmicky than dramatic. People with large televisions and a tendency for motion sickness might have a rough time.

SF has finally come into its own on television in these past five or six years and Battlestar Galactica is at the heart of that. The original television series is a good example of what was wrong with SF shows before; the new is a good example of everything that is right. While I can't say much about what follows the first half of season two I can say that the first season is well worth watching.

Short Review - The Umbrella Academy

A lot of comic book fans online have recommended The Umbrella Academy so I finally got around to reading it the other day. I can see what people like; it is an exciting cacophony of psychedelic imagery. Unfortunately there's nothing else to it and so I was left disappointed that so many interesting ideas were tinkered with and then forgotten.

There was a group of children with special powers who had mad cap adventures. As they grew up, though, they came to despise their adopted father and went their separate ways. When their father dies they reunite only to be informed by their time traveling sibling that the end of the world is coming.

As I said, the imagery is interesting. The book opens with a wrestler defeating a cosmic squid and potentially causing the virgin births of dozens of superpowered children around the world. This leads directly into the Eiffel Tower being piloted by a steam powered zombie robot Gustav Eiffel rampaging in Paris before launching itself into space. This is the kind of thing that happens constantly in the book with little rhyme or reason for it. That can work if the reader has some kind of anchor elsewhere, a plot or characters to connect them to the insanity. Writer Gerald Way attempts to do this and fails miserably.

There's two storylines that he attempts to pursue. The first is the end of the world driven by an evil orchestra that one of the siblings joins. This is driven by random events with no context and the resolution of every aspect to it is a deus ex machina where something new comes in from left field or someone demonstrates an ability the reader was never informed they had. The reader is supposed to react to how cool the events are but I was left wondering why I should care.

The other story, and the one that it seems like the book is really trying to hook onto, is the siblings dealing with the death of their hated father. The problem here is that we just don't know enough about any of them or their relationships. What little is in the pages of The Umbrella Academy is hamhanded (the father telling one of them "You're just not special," early on in the story for example).

The impression that I got is that I was supposed to know who all of these characters were before I read the book by reading exposition that was not provided in the story (and as someone who hates giant blocks of exposition it kills me to say that the story did not have enough). I typically didn't work out even the basics of who the characters were until it was far too late. An example of this is that one of the character's special powers is vital to the way the other characters treat them but the reader is never told what their power is until a story that is printed in the book after the miniseries. She uses her ability once in the first few pages in a very ambiguous method and apparently Way thought that was sufficient to establish everything the reader needed to know.

That's a problem for the whole series: far too much is ambiguous. Not just the little story developments or character twists but fundimental information that the reader needs to comprehend what is occurring. It was four issues in before I realized one of the characters had a human head on the body of a gorilla (I thought it was his space suit until that point). And I'm still not sure how everyone put together enough information to show up for the climax of the story.

The Umbrella Academy depends on the reader reacting to the events and ignoring them in the context of the whole and I'm just not capable of doing that. When I was younger I might have been distracted by the shiney moments and then accepted its flaws. I am not that young anymore, however, and so I can't recommend it.

Review - "Call Him Lord" and "The Secret Place"

More Hugo winning short fiction reviews are coming in the next few weeks but for the time being I'm pressing ahead with filling out the Nebulas. It is not uncommon for there to be at least some cross over between the Hugos and Nebulas with short fiction though. My plan is that when a year only has one winner that has not been reviewed I'll roll it up with another year's stories.

Now is a good time to mention the Nebula winner anthologies. For thirty-three years the SFWA published a collection that included the winners of the awards, essays, and other Nebula nominees that were worth noting. They have since been replaced by a yearly Nebula Awards Showcase which for some reason the handy isfdb.org doesn't index (for some reason information on this series online is very thin). I haven't gotten any of the Showcase collections yet but from the first few Nebula Awards books I'd have to say they work very well as a "Best of 196x" series. The stories are all solid and so far they've all contained some of my favorite SF stories. The Annual World's Best SF series didn't start until 1972 so the first few Nebula Awards books can do a good job of covering that hole.

On the other hand if you want to read just the Nebula winners then I don't recommend them. Okay the first volume was about two-thirds winners thanks to the fact that there was a tie in the novella category but the winners get more sparse after that. There is a collection titled The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 3 which covers the Nebula winners between 1965 and 1969 (the first two are good as well). Volume 4 carries this forward to 1974 but that is as far as these go. Still two books are a more efficient purchase for someone who isn't being a collector than ten.

Getting to the stories...

"Call Him Lord"
by Gordon R. Dickson
1966 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

I really should have hated this story but I didn't. It's cliched, simplistic, and carries a some disturbing unintended messages but Dickson also managed to make it entertaining.

The heir to the Emperor of the Galaxy is coming to Earth as part of his touring education. The Earth is kept as a primitive backwater where people ride horses to get around and generally reject any twentieth century technology. The prince is one of the new breed of humanity: smarter, stronger, more intelligent, and naturally completely lacking in any social skills. He is to be guided by an Earthman who served the Emperor in the past. Together they get into a lot of trouble as the prince treats everyone like crap and is shocked that they don't defer to him automatically (despite the fact that he's hiding his noble heritage).

This must have been a popular year for arrogant aristocrats getting their come-upance. The Novella winner for both Hugo and Nebula was "The Last Castle" where a bunch of snooty aristocrats get kicked around by the people they pushed around. This concept was a cliche when Shakespeare used it and it's just as much of a cliche now. Dickson made it work for him however and the reason for that is that his snooty aristocrat makes it personal.

A bunch of strange guys replacing an alien race's stomachs with nutriant pods? There's no connection there for the reader. A stuck up rich kid thinking he can get away with anything? Now that's something that the reader can identify with. For that reason I liked "Call Him Lord" and I suspect that most people will too.

"The Secret Place"
by Richard McKenna
1966 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

McKenna died in 1964 and this story was published posthumously as were most of his writing. That is disappointing since while I don't think this story worked perfectly it is a surprisingly modern fantasy story that would not be out of place in any publication today. I would have loved to seen more from him; he was at the start of his literary career and things would have only improved from here.

In the early thirties in a small desert town a boy declares that he has found a gold mine. When his neighbors don't believe him he runs off and is found dead a few hours later with a nugget of gold and a crystal that turns out to be uranium ore. The townspeople can't find the mine and it becomes a local legend.

Ten years on the army becomes interested in the uranium ore. They send a geological survey team who insist that the terrain is wrong for gold or uranium but search anyway. When they cannot find anything one team member, our narrator, is left behind to continue the search. Instead of looking geologically he tries involving the boy's sister. She reveals that her brother created a fairy tale kingdom that they played in and the narrator finds that it might have been too real for both of them.

That's the simply view of the story. There's also the complicated one that the science is right and the fairy tales are part of a schizophrenic break that the narrator is cruelly exploiting. This is what makes things interesting; the way McKenna builds the story around contrasting views of reality. The divisions between everyone are highlighted as the central theme and it makes all of the characters interesting to read about. The prose is solid and carries the story well but I think the ambiguities of the climax weaken the story. So I can't give it a whole-hearted recommendation but I still think it's worth checking out.

Review - The Incredibles

The Incredibles
2005 Hugo Winner for Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation

Hey comic book writers: this is how you create a good post modern superhero story. Please take notes.

Mr. Incredible is your traditional super strong and invulnerable superhero. He gets married to Elastigirl but their lives as superheroes come to an abrupt end when lawsuits over all the incidental damages that superheroes cause drives them into hiding. Fifteen years on and they're a traditional suburban family with a teenage daughter (who turns invisible and makes force fields), a young boy (who doesn't burst into flames), and a baby. Mr. Incredible is depressed by his life as an insurance adjuster, though, and he jumps at the opportunity to return to action. His midlife crisis entangles his whole family in a conspiracy.

I can honestly say that I think The Incredibles is the best superhero movie ever made. The recent Nolan Batman movies also are spectacular and I enjoy the Donner Superman movies but they don't manage to both capture the spirit of superhero comics and reinterpret them.

Starting with the obvious, the entire film is a parallel to the transition between the golden age and silver age of comic books. First the superheroes were driven out of business by legal actions (see the congressional hearings that shut down the majority of the comic book industry in the early fifties). The revival of superhero comic was triggered by two major books: The Flash which was about a guy who could run fast (like the young boy in the movie) and The Fantastic Four which featured a "family" of superheroes including a super strong guy, a stretching guy, a woman who turned invisible and made force fields, and a teen who burst into flames. The most common type of villain to show up in those early days of the silver age was the mad inventor; a normal person who created fantastic scientific devices and robots but used them for evil. You'll also note that the style of decor, archetecture, and fashion in the movie is straight from the late fifties/early sixties.

What makes it post-modern is the fact that while it's a film with superheroes in it the themes break from that mold. The conflicts are multilayered in a way that you don't typically find in superhero films (it has become more common in comic books). It's about raising a family, growing old, give up on your dreams, and the tendency for the masses to tear down the idols. Being post-modern with superheroes means breaking down the traditional conventions, not adding more violence and swearing as far too many people think. The Incredibles did this by attaching to different themes.

It helps that director Brad Bird really took advantage of the animation medium to create a superhero movie that live action directors can only dream of. Live action is constrained by budget when it comes to showing us the hero performing incredible stunts. This means every effects shot has to count there while in The Incredibles the effects of those superpowers can be demonstrated constantly. Similarly costs require that action sequences in a superhero film be kept to a minimum which is why despite costing $160 million there are only two of them in the first Fantastic Four movie. The action set peice is the hook to get people in to watch the movie and the Incredibles has by my count nine of them (and I'm running a few closely tied in portions together). Then there is the actors; a real problem for superhero movies is that the actor wants to have more screen time than the stuntman which means that they tend to lose their masks a lot (see Spider-Man who couldn't go an action scene without taking the mask off). With no actors on screen there's no one to complain that they're not getting enough face time.

Speaking of acting I have to say that I'm grateful the Pixar constantly avoids the stunt casting that plagues modern animated movies (see the Shrek films for examples of that). Using big name actors might get a little bit of attention but the big name actors often don't have decent voice acting ability. When the biggest name in the film is Samuel L. Jackson, a man who I'm convinced gave up on a normal acting career ten years ago and has now decided to do anything that sounds like it would be fun, then it's clear that they're not casting to get an Entertainment Tonight mention. Instead we've got a lot of people doing fine work most of whom have experience in voice acting.

As someone who collects comic book movies I was incredibly impressed when I saw The Incredibles and my appreciation of it has only grown over time. I am certain that it will be regarded as a classic film long after superhero comics have gone the way of the western.

What Have I Been Reading Lately?

Since I finished up my last reading project I have been reading primarily three things. First, short stories since I now have about a dozen short story collections where I've only read about half the stories in them. Second, novels that I purchased in omnibuses with ones that won awards. I finished off The Book of the New Sun (the second half wasn't as good as the first half but it was far from terrible), for example. Third, and most broadly, I've been catching up on my comic books. Not new comics, mind you, but things like:


With my energies and money focused elsewhere for a while I haven't dug into comic series that I had been intending to read for a long time but haven't. I read some of the First Comics (that's the defunct publisher, not the premier) Lone Wolf and Cub issues but never got around to reading the whole thing so I've been getting volumes of it. Though this will be the third time around on some volumes I've gotten current with the Absolute Sandman releases and I've been rereading that.

However, I have acquired the first book for the World Fantasy Awards winners so I'll be back to award winners sooner than I thought. I may take the reviews slower this time but they will come eventually.