Puzzle Quest

I shouldn’t like Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords.

For one thing, it’s a role-playing game, and I tend not to like computerized versions of the genre. I find them boring: full of tedious dialog, boring storylines, random battles, and the inevitable “leveling up” times that require you to fight a lot of small battles just to get enough hit points to take on the next Big Bad.

For another, Puzzle Quest’s mechanic is novel for RPGs but trite in the larger universe: You fight each battle by playing Bejeweled, the ubiquitous puzzle game from PopCap, against your opponent. It’s a ridiculous conceit if you think about it, though no more so than other video game mechanics, I guess. As you clear colored gems off the board, you build up enough mana, or ingredients, to cast offensive and defensive spells. Clear a set of skulls, and you do direct damage to your opponent. Clear gold coins and you earn money. Clear a set of four and you get an extra turn. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

So why am I so addicted to an RPG that uses one of the most overexposed casual games as its sole means of battle? An equally addicted friend and I have chatted about this, and we can’t figure it out. I’ve done every little side quest. I’ve collected every possible companion. I’ve trained up my mount. I’ve forged items from runes I have found throughout the kingdom. I have, in short, opted to do all the things that I dislike about RPGs. Melissa has even quipped that she should buy me a d20. (As an aside, this game cost me $15 on XBox Live, and I’ve poured hours into it, giving it the best gameplay-to-price ratio in my collection.)

I think one key factor is that it transforms the solo game of Bejeweled into a two-person strategy game. You can’t clear any row you want: You have to consider how your opponent will be able to use the board. And the different strengths and weaknesses of the various monsters create different strategies. I favored green and red jewels in any fight against trolls, because the combination would let me drain the troll’s blue mana, which he can and does use constantly to regenerate health. I favored green gems in battles against elves just to prevent them from getting them, since they need very few to cast some nasty spells.

There are other facets of the game the make it appealing — the scant dialog you find is often humorous, and the music is at least good enough to not get tiring — but the heart of the game is the “strategic Bejeweled” component.

There was one thing about the game I didn’t like. By the time I got to the final boss, I had hit the top level for my character, I had forged some impressive items, and I had done virtually every side quest. But with him I was massively outclassed. Within minutes, he had obliterated me, and I had barely made a dent in his health. I expected an epic match, but this felt way out of balance with respect to the rest of the game. It felt disheartening, not challenging. On the other hand, I did beat him after a dozen or so attempts, so maybe it wasn’t as unbalanced as I thought. But I wonder if the casual player who doesn’t go to the lengths I did will find the final boss truly impossible. Perhaps the game adjusts his levels based on the player.

Maybe there’s a little RPG fan in me after all, just waiting for a game like Puzzle Quest to draw it out. I doubt I’ll be digging into Final Fantasy any time soon, but I am now one of the countless hordes waiting for Puzzle Quest’s forthcoming Plague Lord expansion.

Writing Pause

Once I start at Maxis, I'm going to cut back on my freelance writing. One reason is that the team will be moving toward crunch mode. But the main reason would have been true in any new job: I want to build my team's trust in me before I do writer things such as going to wine tastings in the middle of the day or visiting wineries or whatever. My current employer has given me a lot of freedom in this regard, but it didn't at first.

My clients have been pretty understanding. One asked me to do a piece because it wouldn't require any fieldwork (plus, they said, my copy is pretty clean, and they were a bit desperate for it). (I turned them down.) I bowed out of a Chronicle lede because I won't have time to give it the research it deserves, but then my editor asked if I'd be willing to write a 400-word review/commentary of a new book.

Overall, my life as a published writer is taking a breath. But I'm not letting it sit idle. Instead, I have writing skills that I want to develop. I'll be working on essays — a genre that I adore above all other non-fiction but which I find difficult to write, despite the real argument you could make that each OWF post is an essay exercise. I'm also planning to work on my narrative nonfiction abilities; I want to be the type of writer who casts features in the form of conflicts, crises, and resolutions. I want my pieces to have a story flow that brings the reader into the prose. And I want to continue to grow my newfound library research knowledge. If I may use a metaphor from my newest development project, those skills are currently in the Tidepool phase and I want them to be at the Civilization phase. My existing research skills have earned compliments from Ed Behr, which counts for a lot, but I want to go further.

But aside from my writing skills, I intend to devote some time to my programming projects. My recent job quest and my parallel investigation of the latest, greatest technologies have reminded me how much I like programming. I go through little phases where I believe I no longer do, but it doesn't usually take much to remind me of the sheer joy of coding. I'm working on a "wine notebook/cellar management" system, which I may or may not make more available. The application allows me to have a project where I have to explore technologies in depth but not spend months and months and months working with them. I can do a Spring/Hibernate/YUI version, as I am now, or a Mac OS X/iPhone version, or a Ruby on Rails version, all using the same database. Doing any one of those gives me enough of a grounding in the technologies to work on more complicated projects (at least in theory — I already know a fair amount about Spring, something about Hibernate, but nothing at all about YUI).

Dashcode/Spore Countdown Widget

For obvious reasons, I’ve been reading all the press about Spore. At one point, I decided to do the cheesy, geeky thing and find a Dashboard widget that counts down to Spore’s release. Only I couldn’t find one that I liked. So I did the even geekier thing and wrote my own.

Melissa made noises about Kool-Aid and cults, but if you’ve ever played with DashCode, you’ll realize that my widget is a barely-modified version of the default countdown template. I fiddled with some colors, set some attributes, and added a graphic from the fansite kit. Other than downloading the fansite kit, which took eons on our slow connection, the whole widget probably took 30 minutes of my time.

I’ve played with DashCode before, but always with ambitious projects in mind that demanded more than the Dashboard infrastructure would allow. I was impressed with the application at the time, but ultimately my widget ideas didn’t go anywhere. Having a project go from start to finish in a short time made me appreciate just how easy DashCode is. I didn’t need to do any coding for the widget; any moderately technical person could have set it up.

AppleScript: Open A Bunch Of Links In Safari

I recently judged the American Wine Blog Awards. My list of nominees came as a spreadsheet with the URLs of the blogs and their names, grouped by category. Because there were 30 or more nominations in some categories, I didn’t want to open each link individually in Safari. I turned to my old friend and nemesis: AppleScript.

It took a bit of online sleuthing to figure out the quirks in Safari’s dictionary, but I eventually got a script that opens a set of URLs, each in its own tab, in a new window. I’ve included it below for anyone who might find it useful. It works well enough, given that I only needed to run it 8 times. It’s pretty brain dead as it is: There is no error checking and you have to have the URLs in a return-delimited list, which is what you get when you copy URLs out of a column in Excel. If you run it, you’ll also notice that it opens an extra tab at the “beginning” of the new window. If it bothered me, I would figure out how to remove the tab, but for 8 runs I could just click the close box. I only tested it on Mac OS X 10.5 and Safari 3.0.

set clipText to the clipboard

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"
"}
set urlList to text items of clipText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}
tell application "Safari"
 set newDoc to make new document
 set currWindow to front window
 repeat with currentURL in urlList
  make new tab at the end of tabs in currWindow with properties {URL:currentURL}
 end repeat
end tell

Writing I Like: Nicholson Baker Writes About Wikipedia

I think I’ve liked every piece of Nicholson Baker nonfiction that I’ve ever read, but I thought I would call out his piece about Wikipedia for my new-and-exciting Writing I Like category. Ostensibly, the essay is a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, but in true NYT Review of Books fashion, that’s a lightweight skeleton supporting the piece’s muscle.

Baker has whole battlefronts of conflict at his disposal to spice up his piece: He paints the modern-day Wikipedia as an mostly-unseen war between the keepers of the encyclopedic truth and its would-be spammers and trolls. Even within the legitimate ranks, he finds tension: There are aggressive purgers debating against article inclusionists. (And, really, is it any surprise that the author of Double Fold sides with the “let’s include everything” camp?) There is even his conflict between his life as a newly enthusiastic Wikipedia editor and his life as a father and husband with household obligations.

But this piece really shines with its use of specifics. Baker has a finely tuned eye for detail backed by an obsessive knowledge-seeking mind. Consider his accounts of Wikipedia vandalism:

Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with "one ugly animal"; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a "medium-sized inflatable banana."

He doesn’t bother cracking jokes. Who needs to with source material such as this?

As with the Wired piece about the Netflix Prize, Baker’s piece shines because of his presence in the piece (a more overt presence than that of the writer of the Netflix piece). He talks about how he got drawn in to Wikipedia editing, the battles he won (and lost) to keep articles in the system, the addictive pull of debates with other editors and conflicts with vandals.

I finished the piece feeling a little lighter, a little happier, and a little more inclined to edit Wikipedia articles.

Writing I LIke: Wired's Psychologist And The Netflix Prize

I spend a lot of time here griping about laughable published writing that shouldn’t have slipped past an editor’s red pen. Let’s look a piece that makes me smile in a good way: Wired’s piece about an English psychologist/operations engineer who has rocketed up the leaderboard for the Netflix prize, a $1 million reward for anyone who can improve the company’s recommendation system by 10 percent.

First of all, hats off to the author, Jordan Ellenberg, for distilling complex math into a usable form for the smart, but not expert, reader. Ellenberg is a mathematician in his own right, and he summarizes the high-math concepts used by the competitors into common English, using analogies to illustrate his points. As someone who increasingly finds himself writing technical, “wine geek” wine pieces for a mainstream, layperson audience, I am impressed by his skill.

But the biggest draw of this piece is the compelling narrative: A classic “little guy beats the big guy” scenario. Good fiction, which is the model for narrative non-fiction, revolves around conflict, and the author has rightfully used the inherent battle — a single psychologist and his high-school daughter, the math consultant, trouncing teams of math and computer science professionals working with sophisticated programs — as the axis of his piece. From conflict comes crisis, the boiling point, and Ellenberg provides it with the current status: all the contestants close to the final prize from a numerical point of view, but very far from a realistic point of view. Ideally, one wants a resolution as well, but that remains in the future, an acceptable ending for a newsy narrative nonfiction piece.

The author doesn’t lock himself into this story, though. “Digress often, but never for long,” reads one of the few axioms laid out in the classic The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. Ellenberg spins a quick history of Netflix, a brief description of the prize, a look into the minds of the Netflix statisticians, the surprising collaboration of the competing groups, and more, all through short digressions that linger just long enough: As soon as you start to think, “Get back to the psychologist!” he does.

My final point — though there are other things to like in this piece — is that Ellenberg allows himself to be in the piece. Feature wells don’t often permit first-person narrative for obvious reasons: Too much first-person, and the reader begins to wonder why s/he should care about the writer so much. Among my clients, only The Art of Eating finds it natural, though others allow it when it makes a difference. But Ellenberg sometimes steps away from his story to give his own view: “He refers to the psychological model underlying their mathematical approach as ‘crude.’ His tone suggests that if I weren’t taping, he might use a stronger word.” Ellenberg exposes himself to the reader, but in doing so draws a more detailed picture of the person you actually care about. And he doesn’t forget to show and not tell, though he has a harder time in his straightforward reporting sections: Small details like the notebook and the elderly Dell allow the reader to paint a more vivid picture.

I might try to incorporate a bit more color and rhythm into the prose, were I writing this, but the story is good enough that only someone looking for nits will drill down on that.

Google Chart

I recently discovered Google’s Chart service, which allows you to query Google with a bunch of parameters and get back a dynamically generated chart. The idea intrigued me, but I couldn’t think of an immediate use for it until I remembered that I had yet to publish the results of a survey I ran on OWF in September. Now was the time, I thought.

After a day of playing with the system, I have to say I’m pretty impressed. You get a wide range of styles, you can set the data in a variety of ways, and you can fiddle with labels and legends. It has some quirks: I couldn’t get the horizontal axis to quite line up with my data points on my bottom graph, and you have to give the data for the bar chart as a percentage instead of a straight value. But once I got the hang of it, the graphs came together quickly and looked nice.

Now I just need an excuse to put a Venn diagram on OWF.