Stopping to smell the roses

The Washington Post had a very interesting article (which I found via Raph Koster’s gaming blog, of all places) describing an experiment they did to essentially see if people would inconvenience themselves for something unexpected and beautiful. They took a world renowned violinist and plopped him down as a street musician in a commuter packed metro station. It’s a really interesting article, so you should just go read it.

There’s a lot to think about in that article. But I’m going to take a tangent off of one small comment from it on our willingness to experience new things:

“For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.”

It’s one of those odd human truths that at some point in everyone’s life they experience a cut off point past which they cease seeking out new things (in particular, music). It’s the scariest thing to me about aging. Having my body fall apart pales in comparison to losing my desire for new experiences. The unknown and unfamiliar are particularly uncomfortable things for me, but I consider it part of my human journey to push myself and try to grow as much as possible.

It’s ironic that our technological revolution has empowered individuals so much that we’re growing apart and losing our ability to do anything truly interesting with that technology. Technology has always been pioneered by the socially inept (i.e. nerds). But the time has come to blow past that and start making technology something social and collaborative. Most of the interesting individual software pieces have already be written - the true next frontier is technology working together, and technology working for real people. And this technology can’t just aim to satisfy our every selfish indulgence - we should have software that actually makes us better people.

There’s so much to be done here. In the realm of music, Pandora has made a great start. The whole concept of “play me something that I want to hear, but haven’t necessarily heard before” is brilliant. It needs to explode into other places. Movies, TV, news, food… really just about everything is in need of some quality individually-tailored recommendation system. All the content is there - the problem is that no human can parse all the information available today. People will stick with what they know because finding something else is too hard. We need to make it easy.

Why Superman sucks

I recently caught Unbreakable on TV. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy that movie. It’s so… understated. I guess you could say it’s about a superhero, in that you’ve got a person with a superhuman ability who does something heroic. But that sounds too grandiose. It’s more like the story a dude who learns something about himself and does some stuff. At no point would a moment where this guy gets into yellow spandex or form fitting leather seem normal. For a comic book themed movie it’s very down to earth.

Comic book movies got a resurgence after the releases of X-Men and Spider-man back in 2000 or so. Everyone on some level likes these kinds of stories, because the underlying message is plain and simple: “you’re special.” But if you just blindly go for the whole superhero theme, you’re missing the point. X-Men is great because each character has a ridiculously specific power that often alone would be useless (making much of it about character interactions), and it’s also got this interesting political story of the how the many treat the few. Spider-man is great because the character is a total geek (young, awkward, and flawed), but also because his heroics are on a small human scale. Both these franchises are relatable on some level. Especially in the beginning, where it’s basically just glorified adolescent awkwardness. The discovery portion is consistently entertaining, but afterwards… not so much. When it goes from personal to epic… ugh.

And of course we’ve got Batman. He doesn’t even have super powers… unless money counts as a super power. He’s rich and pissed off - what’s not to like? Well, when he gets too campy, that’s no fun. As long as its dark, gothic, morally ambiguous batman… that’s good stuff. Again, imperfection is relatable.

So far so good, but then there’s Superman. Superman can do everything. He can fly, melt stuff with his eyes, deflect bullets, lift just about anything, and of course rewind time by flying around the sun real fast. He’s so ridiculously overpowered that they had to write in some crazy green crystal to give him a weakness. And on top of this he has the most boringly good personality ever. Why should we care about this guy? Honestly, who gives a crap? I get that in the beginning he came in a time where we needed heroes, and that he wasn’t always so ridiculously super. But at this point I’d rather we just call it quits and never return to this franchise ever again.

These days we have Heroes. It’s part Unbreakable, part X-Men. And the TV format lets us spend more time getting to know the characters. The announcer for the commercials and spoilers drives me nuts, but the actual content of the show is quite good. They stuck us with a big break mid season, but thankfully there’s only a week left before I can get my fix again. I just hope they don’t all meet up to form a Justice League to discuss their new spandex uniforms.

Unlockable Content

Penny Arcade’s post today stirred some thoughts on the whole concept of “unlocking” in games.

It’s pretty standard practice these days. Not all of the content of the game is available at the beginning and you have to do something to make it available. In some situations that’s totally natural. In a sense the whole RPG game mechanic is based around unlocking content. But when the content isn’t naturally tied into game balance it does raise some questions.

The source of this recent round of discussion has been around Guitar Hero II. When you pop in the game, only a handful of songs are available and you have to beat them to unlock more. And you really have to crank up the difficulty if you want to be able to unlock everything. This isn’t anything new – the first Guitar Hero was this way and so are many other rhythm/singing games. But is this cheating you out of content that you should be able to access right out of the box?

I have mixed feelings about this. From a singleplayer perspective I enjoy the challenge of having to work through a progression of harder and harder content. I like that it took some work to get my reward (as long it was fun, not work). But from a multiplayer perspective I find it extremely annoying when I can’t just jump into the action with my friends right out of the box. Warioware, for example, requires that you essentially clear the entire singleplayer experience before being able to do any multiplayer at all.

So essentially I feel that unlocking is a nice incentive for personal growth, but should never get in the way of social gaming. And when you think about those personal milestones, we already have a system to reward those: Xbox 360 achievements. So in the modern world of account-based gaming is the whole concept of unlocking irrelevant? I think partially yes, but not completely. In my recent run through Saints Row I liked the fact that completing activities netted me both achievement points and new outfits, cars, weapons, and whatever. But in this case the bonus content is the minority, not the majority. So I think there’s still a place for unlockable content, but only on the periphery. Solve those whole personal milestones with non-gameplay currency (i.e. achievement points).