We watched Jurassic Park the other night. If you remember, they thought the dinosaurs were all female but because they had used frog DNA to fill in the gaps in the dino DNA, the dinos developed the ability to switch sex and reproduce.
Harlan: “Dad, if I had a dinosaur I would name him Bob. But if he suddenly started laying eggs, I would call it Alissa.”
Harlan’s friend Matthew came over the other day.
Harlan: “Let’s pretend we’re half man, half wolf!”
Matthew: “Yeah! And half monkey!”
Harlan and I were joking around yesterday, trying to think of horrible traps for the other one to escape from, or perish in. Here was one of Harlan’s best efforts:
“Dad, I throw you in a giant pool of lava. And in the lava there are alligators. Lava-proof alligators. Oh, and sharks.”
I escaped by using my pocket transmogrifier to turn the lava into chicken soup, and the gators and sharks were just noodles and bits of chicken.
Man, I have this huge backlog of stuff I’ve wanted to blog about. Nearly every day for the past two weeks, I’ve told myself that I’ll come home after work and at least bang out something. And each night, I get tied up in housework, schoolwork, and uh, playing video games.
Here’s a quick story of some weird stuff that went down late last night. At about 2:30 a.m., we were woken up by a nearby police siren going off sporadically. There would be a “Bwooop! Bwoooooooop!”, silence for about a minute, then another pair of bwoops.
Finally, Tala gets up to check. She’s back in a flash, saying, “The police are out front.” So I roll out of bed and, sure enough, there are several cop cars parked out front, including one blocking our driveway and one in the neighbor’s driveway with his lights flashing.
The weird thing is, we don’t see any movement. There are no cops milling about or talking to either of our neighbors. Nobody has knocked on our door, either. After 5-10 minutes, the cop in front of our driveway drives off and parks at the end of the street. Another 5-10 minutes later, the cop next door switches off his lights and drives away.
This morning, I told a friend with several cop buddies and he said it sounded like they had set up a perimeter to try to snare somebody on foot. They typically park or cruise a street with lights flashing and making some noise in hopes of turning the guy back and into cops pressing from the other side.
Later in the morning, I called the sheriff’s office and they confirmed there had been a burglary in the vicinity and there had been a search for the perp.
Eventually, Tala talked to our neighbors and it turns out that someone found an unlatched ground floor window, crawled through, turned on the kitchen light, then exited out the back door. These neighbors have an alarm system but the volume was set so low they didn’t realize right away what was happening.
Now, here’s the twist that makes you go, “Hmmmmm.” Earlier in the evening, our row of houses was visited by a guy selling home security systems. This same guy had been by a couple months ago when all of us first moved in, and he was checking back to push us yet again. Our neighbors said they mentioned that to the police and wondered outright if the salesman had set the whole thing up. The cops actually agreed that that was a distinct possibility. The recommended everyone get an alarm, but not from that guy.
The problem is that according to my friend’s cop buddies, the home-monitoring style of security systems are worthless because it takes police 30 minutes to two hours to respond. What is useful is the audible alarm part of those setups because they scare the burglar away. By the time the cops get around to checking things out, he’s long gone.
Unfortunately, most modern alarms are actually service plans and more resemble cellphones or cable TV than household appliances. Why sell someone a set of low-margin hardware once when you can sell them discounted hardware and lock them into a $50/month subscription? The difference is that with cellphones and cable TV, the service portion is actually the most useful: without a network connection or programs piped through, a cellphone or cable box is useless. But with alarms, it’s the initial 60 seconds of 90-decible wailing that provides 99 percent of the value.
As if that’s not enough of a scam, we have to suspect that unscrupulous salesmen are arranging break-ins to spur demand.
Just over two months ago, I wrote that I was taking a job with Microsoft’s Xbox division. The ensuing 5 weeks ended up being one of the busiest periods of my life. In fact, I think we must have set some sort of record for doing a complete interstate move.
My last day with Reuters was June 20. By June 26, me, my wife and 6-year-old son had packed up and hit the road on the 900-mile drive to Seattle.
I received my Microsoft badge on June 30, just two weeks before the E3 expo in Los Angeles that is the video game industry’s most important show of the year (and which, incidentally, we won hands-down).
We closed on a new house on July 31 and were fully moved in by the evening of August 2.
It really was one of those moves in which everything comes together, A-Team-like. It was about time, since we’d had enough practice. Here is a brief history of our wanderings since the mid-90s:
That’s five major moves in less than 10 years. I guess all that practice paid off since pretty much everything went off without a hitch this time.
In a corporate move like this, there are so many moving parts: moving company (and a separate company to move one of our cars), corporate HR for both Reuters and Microsoft, the temp housing company, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, the home seller, etc. In every case, each party totally went to bat for us to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. It was amazing.
I don’t have much to report right now. Scratch that, I have tons to report, but I’m not going to do it right at this moment. This is sort of the re-launching of Command-K, and I just needed to log in and get the ball rolling again.
In the coming weeks I’ll be writing about the new job, my evolving perspective on the games industry from the inside and other random thoughts.
Today was the first day back at work after a long, sunny week of Spring Break. In other words, it was not a happy day.
It does mean that regular blogging should resume over the next couple days as I get back in the routine. Funny how when my day is filled with work, I somehow find time to blog, but when I have all this time off, writing never seems to get done.
It was a good vacation. Forests were hiked, beaches were walked, new bands were discovered, and beach parties were had.
Not five minutes ago, I finished Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and all I can say is, wow. It’s the first PS3 game I’ve played all the way through, and it was amazing. Think Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider meets Far Cry. Uncharted is simply an eloquent refutation of the idea that video games can’t compete with movies for story-telling, or that game writing isn’t important.
I’ll probably write more later about Uncharted as it was, for me anyway, a pretty ground-breaking experience. Most importantly, it was just a hell of a lot of fun and captivated me for about four nights running (much to the chagrin of Tala and the delight of Harlan).
I’ve been taking my first vacation of the year and my folks are in town, so posting has been light lately.
Yesterday we did a 4-mile hike through Muir Woods and then followed it up with some refreshing surf and sun at Muir Beach. Today we went to Haight-Ashbury. Did the dirty hippie thing. Went to Amoeba Music, which is so edgy, even the clerk who took my money was complaining about the weird stuff piped over their music system. Bought a CD.
Having my parents in town means, of course, that we get free babysitting for the duration. We’ve finally saw a couple movies we’ve been dying to see: There Will Be Blood and Juno. Both were excellent. Blood was a lot more subtle than I’d expected. I was figuring on an in-your-face, over-the-top, Bill the Butcher-style role, but there were a lot of interesting and even admirable aspects to Daniel Plainview’s character. I may write more about it later.
Wisdom from a 6-year-old:
“Dad, if you want to know goo, you’ve got to taste goo.”
Keep that headline in mind. I have a tale of DMV woe to relate first, but it will circle back around to make a gaming related point.
I finally resolved to get Tala her learner’s permit. The first step in that process is to take the written test. I had today off (Good Friday as a work holiday is about the best thing $1,000 in annual union dues buys me) and told her I would take her to the DMV and set her up with the test. Should be easy, right?
We got to the DMV around 10:30 and the wait wasn’t that bad. We were called to the counter in about 20 minutes. In the meantime we had filled out the application. The only thing that had me a little worried was that they needed her Social Security number, which I didn’t have. Oh well, I figured that if they needed that, at worst Tala could start taking the test and I would drive back home and get it. Silly me.
They need the number right then and there to even register you for the test. Okay, it’s still not really a big deal as we live less than 10 minutes away. I drive home and pull the number off our tax returns. I don’t think she ever had an actual Social Security card, or if she did, we lost it right away.
I was back within 20 minutes and it was another 20 minute wait or so to get back to the counter. Same clerk. Give him the number, and he goes off to validate it. Five minutes later he comes back and says the number doesn’t match her name. Turns out her SocSec number is under her maiden name while her green card, the ID we used to fill out the form, is under her married name. Never mind that we are waving both her green card and her Chinese passport, which has her maiden name, under the nose of the clerk. The rules say the names have to match, and the only way to do that is to go to the SocSec office and change the name.
At least they have directions to the nearest SocSec office, which is about 6 miles away. So we tool on up there.
“Well,” Tala said, “at least this should be easy. We’ll show my ID and get it changed, and go back to the DMV.”
To which I replied: “Don’t underestimate the government’s ability to complicate even the simplest tasks.”
After another 20-minute wait, we get up to the counter. I tell the pleasant young woman on the other side that my wife’s Social number is registered under her maiden name and she wants to change it to her married name. I give her the number, the green card and her passport. She scans everything for a moment, then looks up and says:
“And where’s your marriage certificate?”
Marriage certificate?
“Yes, we need the marriage certificate to confirm you are married.”
Well, the green card proves we are married because in order to get the green card — issued under her married name — we had to prove to Immigration and Naturalization Service that we did indeed get married. That proof entailed showing them our marriage certificate.
But of course the INS database doesn’t talk to the SSA database, or at least what you do in one realm doesn’t matter to the other. So, our next task is to come up with the marriage certificate. I am reasonably sure I have a copy in our home files, but if not, we’ll have to contact the records office of King County, Washington, 900 miles away, and get a copy sent to us.
And anyway, I don’t have any time off from work to go through this rigamarole for another two weeks, when I take some vacation during Harlan’s Spring Break. Apart from the massive inconvenience, there’s something that just chafes at the revolutionary American character to have to provide a federal identification number in order to just take the first step of obtaining a state driver’s license. Sigh.
Back to the title of this post. Chances are, if you’re a fan of role-playing games you already know where this is going. The comparison is high in my mind because I’ve finally been working through Mass Effect, the sci-fi RPG for the Xbox 360 that came out late last year to much critical acclaim.
A main feature of RPGs is the quest system. The player has a goal, but to achieve that goal and push the story forward, there are a number of hoops the game makes the player jump through.
For instance, in Mass Effect, my character recently arrived at a spaceport on a remote planet that services a system of privately run research labs. I was on the trail of a person who has crucial information needed to make sense of the larger mystery I’m ensnared in. But my status as an elite intelligence agent gives me little authority in this private facility and I have to seek a way to leave the spaceport and gain access to the lab where my quarry is holed up.
I learn from an official who greets me off my starship that I need a permit to leave. She suggests I seek out an administrator. I track him down and he gives me the brush-off. Fortunately, on my way out his assistant drops hints about a couple alternative avenues.
I opt to talk to a merchant who asks me to smuggle something. It requires a trip back to my ship to retrieve the item, which I then carry back to the station administrator. He thanks me by granting me a pass to leave the spaceport.
So here are two thoughts. It actually helped me a little to think of this DMV goose-chase as just another quest in a real-life role-playing game. I was just going through the 2008 California-resident version of trying to leave the spaceport.
That thought was immediately followed by one wondering if Mass Effectis at its core just a series of mundane, frustruating tasks when stripped of its 720p graphics, biotic implants, vast universe of worlds and detailed character development. When I plant my butt on the couch for an hour trying to figure out how to leave the spaceport, am I not really just trying to take the driver’s test?
What accounts for the difference between the two? Is it just in the graphics, story and rich background of Mass Effect? That’s exciting to me, but for my character who is living in that future, wouldn’t this just be the kind of craptastic bureaucracy that frustruates us today? Are Mass Effectand other RPGs just bureaucracy simulators? Or does this sort of thing become more interesting when you know it’s part of saving the galaxy and not just trying to satisfy a very basic part of living in modern society?
So Tala took Harlan to the Asian shopping center down the street after school today.
They were moseying along when Harlan suddenly went: “Mom, I have to go to the bathroom really bad.”
That was quickly followed by, “We’d better go now, otherwise I’m doing to redecorate my pants.”
I think he got it off TV somewhere, but he insisted it was his own joke.
You know something? Kites rock. The past few weekends, Tala and I have taken Harlan to kite heaven, otherwise known as Cesar Chavez Park at the Berkeley marina.
The park is perfectly sited for flying kites. Check it out on Google Maps. Not only does it jut out into the bay for maximum wind exposure, but if you zoom out on the map, you’ll see that there’s only about a 2-mile finger of terra firma that lays between it and the entire Pacific Ocean. The wind today was rather mild but even so it had flags and banners snapping. Moreover, the park has several gentle hills and valleys, all carpeted in lush, shin-high green grass.
It really is a delight to walk, and we’ve gone over on several weekends to admire the squadrons of kites that always seem to be patrolling the park’s airspace. The place has such ideal conditions that it’s the site of the annual Berkeley Kite Festival, which features some amazing kites. So last weekend, Costco had a deal on big kites spanning 6′. We picked up one that looks like a dragon and today was our first chance to try it out. There’s Harlan, above, performing some corrective action.
At one point, Tala and Harlan had wandered off, leaving me in sole custody of the dragon. As I stood there, back to the setting sun, letting string out or taking it in, and occasionally jerking my hands from side to side, it struck me what a similar sensation it was to playing a video game. Gripped in my two hands, the kite reel felt not unlike a game controller of some sort (Wii kite peripheral, anyone?), and my mental state seemed similar to what I feel sometimes while playing — a sort of detached focus on the objective at hand, with hands and eyes working together sort of quasi-automatically while a portion of my brain thinks about other stuff.
In a way it’s not really surprising because both activities are a form of play. I’m sure there are many other pastimes have similar effects on people, but I’ve never before felt such a close association between two pretty different activities. I found kite-flying sort of hypnotically addictive, and Tala mentioned that maybe it’s what draws people to fishing as well. I can definitely see getting into kites, especially with this world-class proving ground just two miles down the highway from us.
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