In Defense of The Offense of The Defense of Steely Dan

Posted by agentcox under mp3, music

It was years ago, I’m sure, that I got the Two Against Nature music-video DVD, and I figure that with a few glasses of white wine on board, I’m willing to tackle it.

I get it – in word, deed, and eyegravity (that thing people do when they just sort of look at you until you’re embarassed enough to recant) that Steely Dan is no longer anyone’s favorite band. I have my doubts that they ever were. I’m serious. You’d like ‘em, sure, but you’d say Brubeck, Bechet, or – hell, even Bacharach before you gave Dan the top slot.

C: Tell me your favorite band.
X: Oh, Steely Dan, definitely.
C: (eyegravity)
X: Well, I mean – okay, so I always liked what Traffic did with “Low Spark” better.

Dan fans – of which I’d count myself among, at least in the pedestrian cadre – have to put up with the reality that along with everyone else, they too have to tolerate a strategic volley of musical squickery that leaves The Grand House Steely as that uncle with enough tribal casino debt and the resultant ankle monitor that gets everyone at the Christmas party changing the subject and finding the far punch bowl instead of the near one.

Not that there’s anything wrong, right? My God, talk about your bend sinister; they’ve got the cleanest sound of any concert I’ve attended – what you hear on the DVD is literally what you get when you sit on the grass in front of them live. And they never show disrespect to the instruments – they’re muting their trumpets, wiring their saxophones just perfect, and yet – why don’t I want to take another bite of the salmon mousse?

Is it Donald Fagen’s Doolin-Cave-sized stalactite canines?
Walter Becker’s neckbeard?

Realizing it now – they helped a bit, Donald Fagen describing himself as halfway between a nerd and a schmendrick – I think these two are shop teachers. Not kidding. If it wasn’t for the fact that the sleaze of New Jersey tasted good with a seventeen-piece band they might be drooling over another slat of McLendon pine.

Victoria – a backup singer, about Donald Fagen: “He reminds me of my dad.”

I can’t make this kind of stuff up. You can’t ignore the dudes are sixty years old – that’s ten years of “over the hill” joke cards and another ten of depressing silence. I’ve been facing up to the possibility that these guys are flat-out irrelevant.

Cornelius is the saxophonist on this gig. He’s bearded, black, and the source – the guys say – of a tension, no, not a tension: a faux-tension with some of the other band members.

He rolls his eyes.

“Modern psychoanalysis says,” Becker begins to lecture, “Most of your sources of – ah, tension – come from events in your past.”
“And the unconscious always wants to say ‘yes’,” Fagen warns.
Cornelius looks once at each of them, utterly done-with-this. “Can I go now?”

It’s these stunts that makes loving Steely Dan harder than it has to be, and always under the withering tracer fire of perfectly reasonable modern culture; they’re making us all uncomfortable, and not in that Bauhaus way – these guys aren’t finding new ways of fitting glass together at right angles, here. Maybe it’s hubris; I clearly have no idea. You’ve figured that out by now, right?

All I can say is that I’ve got ten Steely Dan albums in my collection and a DVD, and am, over twenty years of listening, from my first youthful encounter with Aja, no closer to understanding whether these transplant blue-eyed soulsters are playing it straight, crooked, or backward.

Guess I’ll keep listening.

BVI 2009: Days 6 and 7 – Soper’s Hole and The End

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

The close of the tour.

Charles:

We’ve got only a few cycles left before we catch the taxi back to the airport, our boat safely in harbor, stalwart against the building dark of the next cold front. To the BVI, a cold front means a drop in winds, rain showers that would be described by most as “a pleasant distraction”, and a decrease in temperature of about a degree. That’s a fahrenheit degree.

In fact, it’s been stuffier today than any other day since we started our trip – the recycled chill of a 757 cabin in flight actually sounds agreeable. I’ve gone crazy, I know.

We spent the last two days making our way back to base – sort of. No trip is complete without a stopover at Soper’s Hole and the gift shops that dot the eastern quay. We got a few odds and ends for Christmas, then fired up the grill to cook the last meal on the boat. The next day, the swell was building again, and our final run back to Road Town was reminiscent of the first day, when our legs still had learning to do about the pitch and roll of the sea.

Sleeping on a boat for this long means we’ll have wave-brain for a while; closing one’s eyes in the shower is a good way to bring it on: your mind imagines you’re still pitching and moving about. I predict the next week of land-based sleep is going to bring interesting, kinetic dreams.

In all, this trip has been a great opportunity to do as little as possible, as laid-back as possible, with the best food and drink possible, with the kindest weather the planet has to offer around Christmastime. The islanders here call it limin’. I could get used to it.

That’s a dangerous thought. Back to Type A mode. Do things. Sound important. Schedules, milestones, grunt grunt grunt. I’ve got a plane to catch. Profit.

W2SBUCUC9Q6X

*transmission ends*

Alicia:

*transmission resumes*

When we set out on this trip, Charles scoffed at me for bringing a dozen books (yes, that’s the actual number, not an exaggeration) on a week-long excursion. He himself brought a single pair. Now, at week’s end, who is loaning him an advance copy of the Jasper Fforde’s newest novel? That’s right. Meanwhile, I’ve cruised through all but three of the books I brought, and those three are some solid nonfiction volumes that should be plenty to occupy me on the long series of plane rides home.

There have been times in the course of our voyage where I have felt guilty for the strong urge to moor the boat, mix a cocktail or two, relax on deck (or belowdecks, on the days when the AC was operational), and read until my eyes were drooping and it was time for sleep. I can’t remember the last time I had an opportunity to go through so many books of my own choosing in so short a period of time. And the bonus facts that I get to do so between bouts of sailing and snorkeling and some truly amazing food? Heaven.

That said, the pull now is homeward. I miss sweaters, and blankets, and not being so itchy and hot. Charles misses the video games, and we both miss karaoke and familiar faces. The best vacations make you as happy to return home as you originally were to escape it, and by such a standard this trip was nearly perfect.

Over and out.

BVI 2009: Days 4 and 5 – Eustacia Reef and Back to the Baths

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

Charles:

We’re tied up at Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbor now, with two full days left to enjoy the rapidly-calming weather. Though it costs a little more, a slip at a marina affords the luxuries of power outlets, air conditioning, WiFi, showers, and a significant reduction in that terrible feeling that your boat is going to swing right off its buoy in the middle of the night and bury nose-first in a nearby reef.

The downside is that – at least here in the BVI – these slips are a royal bitch to get into. I’ve already scratched the paint, bonked her nose, and knocked a navigation light cover loose trying to back this boat into a twelve-foot slip in crosswinds. In Tacoma, it’s no trouble. Here – well, it’s humbling; Alicia has kept my spirits up and has always been there to throw lines and re-rig as necessary to get us to safety. She’s a natural at this.

We’ve still been motoring – at this point, sailing her just feels like too damned much work. This is supposed to be a vacation. We’ve done nearly everything else, including cooking our first dinner aboard tonight – baked some-kinda-white-fish with garlic bread and rum carrots. It’s the cap on a heck of a day – they went from red-flag to yellow-flag at The Baths today, which means we were allowed to come ashore, swimming nearly a mile today to-and-from the boat and ashore.

That’s on top of yesterday’s snorkeling excursion to a reef just off Eustacia Island, diving beneath the waves to escape the pouring rain, finding huge formations of colorful fish just below the surface. On board, we met a couple from Minnesota, and spent the evening over dinner and drinks, swapping stories of frozen winters back home and Caribbean trips gone by.

All of this reminds me daily how important a good crew is in life, in every endeavor, from sailing to singing to everyday work. I’ve had the very best people giving me all of their support every step of the way; that goes double for Alicia, the best partner anyone could ask for, and a damned fine deckhand.

Alicia:

If I am, as Charles says, a damned fine deckhand, it’s because I have a damned fine captain on board with me. Someone this charismatic and capable does not come along every day. They especially do not come along every day and sneak booze into Bond films with you.

The night before last the Bitter End Yacht Club was showing Goldeneye in their open-air theater for free in the evening. “We should watch that,” I said to Charles. “Haven’t seen it in years.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Movies, in the Virgin Islands?”

“It’d be relaxing.”

“Yeah, but I’m already pretty tired.”

“We have whiskey,” I reminded him.

“Maybe we’ll just watch the first part,” he conceded.

And that is how we wound up loading a fifth of whiskey and two plastic cups into Charles’ laptop bag for camouflage and watching a Bond flick with the theater all to ourselves.

The couple from Minnesota mentioned the weather report was supposed to improve, so today Charles and I retraced our watery steps and headed back to the Baths. Mooring buoys are second nature by now, but the only one left was the farthest one north, one bay up from the Baths proper, and the current runs north-to-south along the coastline. “Are we swimming in?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” said Charles.

And we did. It was about a half-mile jaunt, which may in fact be the longest single swim I’ve ever done. When we finally reached shore, we slipped off our fins and turned back to eye our boat.

“She’s way out there,” said Charles.

“And we’ve got to swim back,” I said. “Want to hike the trail to Devil’s Bay?”

And so we did that. And then we swam back. It was grueling — we were fighting the current this time, and the swells were impressive and swamped my snorkel more than once — but we did it. For the second half of the trip we even had an escort: a school of about fifty blue tang, who were gliding happily along the sandy bottom from boat to boat. The catamaran moored just short of our boat had a few swimmers playing around off the back: the tang swam under them with an air of unconcern, and the swimmers never once looked down to see they were temporarily surrounded by tropical fish. As we approached Mystique, the tang swarmed happily up and circled the bulb of our keel, feeding on something there and bubbling with excitement. I had to laugh into my snorkel, and then gratefully pull myself up the swim ladder.

BVI 2009: Days 2 and 3 – Cooper to Bitter End

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

In Which our Heroes Tackle Cooper Island and North Gorda Sound.

From Charles:

The wind continues to howl, making it unseasonable weather for the kind of upwind sailing we’d need to do on this leg. I’ve clocked winds in our most recent squall en route to Cooper Island to be in excess of 32 knots, so the canvas, sadly, remains down.

But our engine, faithful companion, has kept us chugging happily along, first to Cooper Island and then to the Bitter End Yacht Club in North Gorda Sound, where we have received a much-needed injection of civilized treats, the first in three days: garbage pickup, air conditioning, and a shower.

Life on a mooring ball is an odd one: first in The Bight and then on Cooper Island, we swung on moorings each night, shuffling open and closed hatches along with the alternating heat waves and rain showers, listening to the wind lash at the boat’s bones, and rolling in the swell. They weren’t bad nights, but you have to get used to them.

On a ball, contact with others comes infrequently, either with trips to shore with the dinghy for meals or shopping, or with the occasional boat-bound vendor that pulls up alongside to hock ice cream, booze, and trash pickup. Other than that, it’s you, your boat, and the weather. About a quarter of the waking day is spent listening to the engine thrum as it recharges the onboard batteries. We’ve spent the remainder of the time reading, tending to the boat, eating, and hunting out good swimming and snorkeling spots.

The conditions are making for difficult snorkeling as most spots at the least suffer from cloudy, churned-up water, and at worst are off-limits altogether, as the bright red flag flown above the Baths at Virgin Gorda indicated today. To remedy this, we’ve signed on with a snorkeling tour here at the Bitter End tomorrow afternoon, which promises three good spots.

We have to stay another night on the docks here in North Gorda Sound to accomplish this. We’re surrounded by date palms, white sands, kiteboarders, and sailboats stretching out on miles of moorings. We’ll manage.

Alicia:
Our boat groans and howls like all of Dickens’ ghosts put together. She is also full to the gills with secret compartments and hatches, more cubbyholes and stowaway spots even than you’d normally expect on a boat. It’s very Victorian, somehow, the wailing and the secrets.

We have decided we must miss the Baths on this trip, as the weather thwarts a safe approach and grounding the boat doesn’t sound like much fun. On the upside, we get an extra night here in the Bitter End Yacht Club, which is so — it’s just — listen, the best way I can describe it is with a question: Have you ever seen “Swiss Family Robinson”?

Now imagine that treehouse as built by Donald Trump.

The heart of the Bitter End  is a long path that extends along the beach, gently paved and lined with coconut and date palms, mangroves, and flowers the likes of which I’ve never seen before in my life. East of our dock, the resort’s small rooms are piled high on the hill and reached by labyrinths of wooden stairways that climb upward from the path’s lush greenery. West of our dock are the cottage rentals, whose pyramidal roofs weirdly evoke the Egypt of pharaohs and long slave galleys on the bulging Nile. Everywhere are cushioned deck chairs, hammocks, shaded benches, and always the curve and sweep of the ocean.

Oh yes, and this central area where we are moored is full of restaurants, gift shops, sailboat/kiteboard/kayak rental places, bars, and even an English pub (!), all with balconies open to the tropical breeze and the sunset views. It’s idyllic, is what it is. It makes me glad the wind kept pushing our boat away from where we intended to put her, at nearby Saba Rock. Clearly, we were meant to end up here.

After two days, even without putting up the sails, Charles and I have evolved a chain of command that suits us both. He mans the helm and keeps us on course; I take charge of deck lines, the dinghy painter, fenders, and anything else that needs fixing or grabbing or tying. It means he gets to steer (which I don’t envy), and I get to clamber around the heaving, bobbing deck, or venture below to retrieve something from the navigation table. It’s a challenge we both enjoy. We’ll see how this plays out when we start our sail westward to Trellis Bay and Sandy Spit on Wednesday.

BVI 2009: Day 1 – Off and Running

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

From Charles:

With only the most minor of inconveniences…okay, there were a few – late planes, frantic gate changes, lack of showers, closed restaurants, and six-foot seas, we’re finally safely moored at Norman Island’s famous Bight.

The place is beginning to feel like home; homemade Pina Coladas and our first snorkeling adventure in the new gear got the bad taste of air travel adrenaline out of our mouths.

The boat is good: lean, adventure-ready, and elegant. A DVD player/TV combo  mounted on the bulkhead gives me the feeling that more than a few people sort of miss the point of a Caribbean vacation.

I admit the shameful truth – we motored over today. Didn’t even raise the sails once.  This wind and the waves, definitely a jump up from the summer months, and about 30% on top of that. Too much. Other people were sailing. Those people are crazy.

We’ll be staying the night here and leaving late-ish tomorrow, long enough for us to get in one more snorkeling trip, and hopefully, get our new underwater camera out there so you can all see what we see!

We’ve got reservations at Pirates Bight restaurant tonight; the barbecued ribs sound mighty tasty.

Alicia:

I lost my beer hat today. It was a 1557 New Belgium baseball cap I’d won by stepping up to the mike one karaoke night and pretending I knew more than the chorus of “You Sexy Thing.” The wind whipped it right off my head as we were turning the boat to point into the Bight. “Oh no!” I cried.

“It’s gone,” said Charles.

“Yeah,” I agreed. This was not like the time my Finland hat went overboard — then, I’d made the person responsible swim out and retrieve it. The Finland hat is special. This hat was merely gone.

Later, we discover a gift shop on shore that sells t-shirts, and therefore very probably hats. We are planning on going to check when we dinghy to shore for dinner (and wifi). So now the loss of the hat just at that moment seems providential. “You have done well with this beer hat,” the universe is saying, “but it is time for something new.”

Charles, by the way, is not joking about the ferocity of the waves today. Apparently the phrase swells of six feet or so is a code phrase for Alicia you better hang on to that boat because it is actively trying to throw you into the ocean. At first this was startling, because growing up with ski boats means I consider a forty-five-degree deck angle equivalent to capsizing. In a sailboat, this merely leads the captain to make sure all the rum is secured below in the cabin. (It was. We had great consideration for the rum.)

Then, on a trip into the boat’s bucking interior to retrieve the cruising guide that would tell us how not to hit rocks, I starting thinking of my movements the way I thought about them when we go rock climbing. This worked like a charm, and I felt much more secure. So remember, rough seas = climbing a vertical wall. End of seminar.

BVI 2009 – Day 0: Pulling An All-Nighter

Posted by agentcox under British Virgin Islands, Sailing, Travel, charles cox

The beginnings are always the hardest. Harder than going home. For our trip this year to the British Virgin Islands, it’s felt like a race against time to get ready.

Starting From The Front Row

Fate has given us hardly a nickel’s worth of consideration in these final days before we depart: work crunches, a mouse infestation in the home, and a sub-freezing arctic front icing down the city is just par for the week before vacation.

You set the traps, you wear a coat, you press on.

Alicia and I took some time last week to drop by Silent World and get some gear; last year’s adventure convinced us both that a good set of personal snorkeling apparatus would both increase visibility and decrease discomfort (and the “somebody spit in this snorkel” ick factor).

We have our fins, new partial-dry snorkels, and a set of superhero-like rayblocker masks from Seadive. In addition, you’ll be able to come along with us on this trip as we explore the BVI’s best (okay, closest-to-the-boat) snorkeling destinations with a Flip Ultra HD cam fitted with an underwater case.

Headed Where?

At some point in 2007, The Moorings completed massive renovations on their Road Town base in the British Virgin Islands. In June of last year, we had a chance to experience it, and it’s a hell of a job. Green marble showers, a pool, restaurant and bar, and shops for everything you need, and that’s before you step aboard your boat and forget all about life on land.

The plan is to be aboard the boat about 17 hours from now, with food freshly stocked and linens primed for sleeping; the next morning sees us at the briefing and on the way to Norman Island where I can go to that place I like that’s got the sand and water and fish.

We’ve been lucky to have been upgraded to a 37-footer; a Beneteau Oceanis line monohull sailing vessel with a bunch of state-of-the-art-blah, blah, and blah. You’ve heard this part before. I’m just trying to write something in order to stay up until 3:30 in the morning.

That’s when we leave for the airport.

Oh, the inconvenient things we do for convenience. Hurry up, 3:30.

My Letter to Senator Val Stevens About the Latest No on R-71 Ad

Posted by agentcox under crime, jobs, politics, writing

Dear Senator Stevens:

I have not been shy about assertive political debate in Washington. I realize that today, for the many millions that live here, the stakes could not be higher. Jobs are at hazard. Security is uncertain. Even public health is at risk.

In times like these, the animus of our collective parties can take battlefield forms, and it’s only aggressive language, challenges, and promises that rise above the noise of common process to stir the populace to action, even if that action is simply casting a ballot.

But it should never escape the conscience of any public official that behind the metaphor are lives: men, women, and children, and that a carelessly-worded statement from a position of authority can put thousands, even millions of these lives in immediate and dire peril.

Today, I read such a statement, and it came from your office – possibly from your very pen.

Senator Stevens, your most recent call to action on Referendum 71, for the members of the Protect Marriage Washington Political Action Committee, starting “Could this be the final battle…” is a deeply frightening and unnecessarily warlike tirade against a group of people who count among their ranks millions of innocent men and women – including children – that deserve no less than the full faith and credit of every one of the public institutions in this great state, down to the last helping hand.

I am aware of your causes’ immediate need for support in order to be successful. I realize the protection of marriage as traditionally defined is a critical component of the faith that so much of our country shares. But I would expect that you, as a senior member of a government in charge of so many millions of lives, would realize that a higher ethic must span your conscience and act as a damper on the rasher actions you might stress in times of crisis.

This wise influence, however, I do not see in your latest statement. In its place, I see a fall – a slide into patterns I had hoped we as merciful and tolerant citizens were rejecting: bigotry, prejudice, even hatred against a group of fellow Americans.

Your own words:

“After 27 years of relentless pursuit, homosexuals finally received protected class status from the Washington State Legislature in 2006, making it illegal for you to refuse to rent them a house, or hire them on account of their homosexuality.”

In casting refusal to hire or provide a home to members of the homosexual population as a desirable outcome blocked only by meddling legislation, you have ignored – or attempted wittingly to undo – generations of progress supported not only by the state of Washington, but by citizens all over this nation. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 and 1964, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 among others are the proud legacies you plow under with these words.

While it may be abhorrent to me personally for you to encourage the voting down of R-71, to withhold pension benefits, medical visiting, even child custody from same-sex couples, the stance is not in itself an unethical use of your power.

Encouraging the citizens of this state to withhold jobs or homes from others based solely on their sexual orientation in clear violation of Washington State law, however, is, and puts real lives at hazard.

If you truly consider this a battle as you say, Senator, you’ll know there are only two choices available to you when it comes to the thousands of families you’ve encouraged to be put out of work and home through your own words. You can either realize your actions have created casualties and take steps to heal the damage, or you can decide that these are simply bodies to trample underfoot on the road to your victory, and let that be the legacy that you leave.

Either way, the voters of Washington are watching.

Respectfully,
Charles N. Cox

The ad: http://protectmarriagewa.com/index.php/component/content/article/2-press-releases/195-important-message-from-sen-val-stevens-on-r-71

Want to write her, too?: https://dlr.leg.wa.gov/MemberEmail/MailForm.aspx?Chamber=S&District=39

A Year Ago – Lesson #1

Posted by agentcox under career, charles cox, microsoft, psychology

A year ago, on a crackling autumn day like this one, I turned in my badge, performed my exit interview, and tried my best to start a new life, a life without Microsoft. With a year behind me now, it’s hard to resist examining the choice and the lessons I’ve learned from life outside.

I’ve heard others describe Microsoft as a kind of graduate school; a place of practicum-meets-theory among unconnected vats of boiling hard drives and college graduates. I always imagined towering vertical pressure cookers. Turns out that’s mostly what I got.

I hear that the fall of 2003 – when I joined Microsoft full-time as a junior technical writer – was a strange season for the company ranks; a type of reorganizing that coincided with new language around collaboration, and less about cutthroat internal competition: in short, the Type A’s were no longer driving the bus.

Lesson #1: I’m a Rotten Type A

Maybe I had a spell of bad luck over 1/10th of my working life, but Type A’s were the only people driving from the moment I swiped my badge. Even if there were relaxed, collaborative people taking care of me, they were always at the mercy of the screamers, the yellers, the keyboard-throwers, because they used their few weapons – the axe of layoffs and the scythe of program cuts – faster and with less concern for collateral damage, and every thoughtful lead and manager knew it well enough to keep out of the way.

But I admit, it gets things done – just maybe not the right things. Still, it looked like success to me, and I fell for it. My arsenal of shirts and pants from Express hail from the days that I mistook histrionics for proxemics. I dressed up. I took Dale Carnegie leadership courses (when you could still get the Company to pay for them). I signed up for the University of Phoenix to finish that 4-year degree and move on to a – well, go on, guess.

That’s right. An MBA.

I don’t know what I would have become, but I wouldn’t have liked me much.

It’s not that aggressors are the only inhabitants of Microsoft. And it’s not that aggressors always go for the MBA. It’s this.

Me + Microsoft = Angry, Competitive, Feudalistic Me.

I believe more and more these days that it’s not the corporation, and it’s not the man, it’s the corporation plus the man that encourages one type of behavior or another. You are the company you keep, and I realized quickly that the competitive bile had nowhere near been drained from the Company by the time I arrived, and for all the talk about the New Microsoft, it wasn’t going to.

It was part of their lifeblood, part of what made them – and continues to make them – unique, innovative, and successful. To cut it off would be suicide.

But as the Psychedelic Furs say, there’s a world outside.

You might accuse me of threading the needle of Bolshevism by my own words, but I’ve seen collaboration work magic in the past year, and I believe there is a case for the listeners, the consensus-builders, and the just-plain-hard-workers to make a goddamned good product.

This past year has been my conversion to a steadier platform of innovation, and my own personal evolution to a calmer way of being.

Maybe it was the pain of losing family members, maybe it was the sickness, but I realized there are things you can’t plow through.

For five years, I didn’t think there was any other way.

Turns out there’s a world outside.

My Life in Video Games: The Klik & Play Days

Posted by agentcox under charles cox, childhood, digital life, directx, microsoft, video games

Let me start this episode by saying the history of Klik & Play is a confusing one, and nearly all of my work created using this legendary program are long lost to the sands of time. You’ll just have to trust me.

In desperation, the image to the left was unceremoniously stolen from SixSecondFiesta, and I think it accurately describes much of the style you’d get from Klik & Play: heavily-aliased Win32 fonts, remora-like attachment to 16-bit lopsided gradients, and mountains of uncoordinated, disturbing clip-art.

With that said, I’m going to chat a little bit about how my early years intertwined with this program to create some of the worst games ever. Strap in.

The Klik & Play years began during the eventual sunset of my beloved Level B4 BBS, sometime around 1993. MS-DOS 6.0 and the DOSSHELL environment inevitably lost ground to Windows 3.1, but in the transition away from EGA/VGA or text-based console interaction, gaming suffered greatly. Most of us in search of gaming satisfaction in this new age, were expecting all of the fruits afforded by the confluence of the CD-ROM, the Windows GUI, and rapid advances in hard drive space and RAM. Instead, we got Jewel Thief.

(To be fair, we did get Inner Space and Proliferation, eventually).

If playing games in the hybrid space between console mode and genuine graphical UI was difficult, making them was damned near impossible. You’d have to ask Charles Petzold what was so difficult about getting access to the video layer in the Windows 3.1 days (between 1992 and 1994), but it’s telling to realize that Microsoft themselves (including Alex St. John, who had the honor of speaking in the illustrious basement meeting room of the Sea-Tac Marriott at my college commencement) didn’t decide something needed to be done to open up Windows to game programmers until Windows 95, three years later.

I feel obliged at this point to include a shot of Jewel Thief.

Notice our main character – controlled entirely and unmolestedly by the direct mouse movements of the player (he is essentially a cursor), trying to grab gems on the surface of Mars while avoiding what are either flying elephants with swords or miniature cartographic drawings of Angola.

To be sure, we, the game players now itching to be game creators, took a serious blow to the heart (and head and neck) by what looked all the world like a regression.

We had MS-DOS still at the heart of it all, of course, and most games of the time were still made to be run in command mode at the prompt; indeed, the games themselves would unceremoniously puke if any attempt was made to run them in Windows 3.1. But if you weren’t a big-budget title good enough to make people want to back out of Windows into DOS mode to run you, (I’m not kidding, this was a serious consideration) and you knew Windows 3.1 turned your entire idea of a game into shuffling around random dialog boxes, what was left for the little guy?

In 1994, the answer came, published by Maxis and appearing in the mysterious CD-ROM format that the kids were whispering about in hushed tones along the hallway: Klik & Play.

While the title was developed by a European consortium, you’ll notice that Maxis, as the American publisher, put all the necessary stuff on the box to make an implicit promise of fulfillment to every single demographic they could think of:

• D&D Nuts (Dragon)
• Simulation Junkies (Stealth Fighter + Tank)
• Fans of the Atari 2600 “ET” (Jetpack and UFO)
• Your Mom, Who Thinks Games are the Devil (Clown)
• Your Dad, Who Just Discovered Solitare on Win 3.1 (Playing Cards)

It’s hard to fault them (I’m talking legally here) for overpromising the wages of their product, as by rights you *could* make any of those games, though they weren’t necessarily already in the box – the ingredients to do so were there or easy enough to make with the included tools.

But of course, that’s not quite true either.

Klik & Play was revolutionary, but that in no way should that superlative ever apply to actually using the thing. Computer usability in 1994 was hardly an established science, but American users of the product suffered two strikes against them: the standard horrible usability, plus European iconography.

Let me put it to you, the reader – could you use this?

WTF IS TIHS A MONSTAR

Among the icons that stand out at first glance you’ll notice TWO identical clapboard icons, the door to 10 Downing Street in Westminster (the UK Prime Minister’s house), an amateur sketch of the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic half-smile as described by Max Fleischer, an English court judge, and something I can only describe as a nightmarish scenario involving an annelid worm and a waiting Yellow Cab/Angler fish transformer.

Despite your first impulse, these are not images that psychiatrists show to children to diagnose hidden problems at home.

They are buttons, and by clicking them, you’re supposed to make a game. I’m not kidding.

Were there other limitations? Of course.

• Images needed to be made up of uncompressed single-frames with manually drawn-in transparent regions. Too big and the program would flop over dead or drop frames until it was on par with a PowerPoint slideshow – this of course included small images scaled up to large ones on the fly, as there really wasn’t such a thing as hardware scaling at the time.
• Logic was defined using a complicated if-then matrix of icons that would put the ones above in the category of high art.
• Sounds were a combination of 16 kHz uncompressed waves and MIDI music tracks that started about 3 seconds after you called them.
• There’s a button for a gradient there – I know you see it, and you’re tempted. Don’t. We’re working in 16-bit color and that means all gradients not only band into ugly stairstep-looking things like this, but on some video cards, they end up with a snot-green tint as well, since three colors don’t share 16 bits equally and the extra bit usually went to green.

Finally, if you really did get through all of that, you’d get a game that ended up looking something like this (and thanks to Glorious Trainwrecks for this one):

Pragmatists have finally already blown their stack and asked, “So, with all of these obvious handicaps and failures, why did you use it?”

Well, because it was there, and it made games that other people liked to play.

We knew that the future would be brighter.

We knew that one day we’d have the tools to do great things.

Until then, we used what we had.

Just like now.

The Word is Up: Interactive Fiction as a Social Dialetic, Dogg

Posted by agentcox under game development, phraseology, psychology, video games

It had really ought to come in a packet you can open when you’re old enough to read: “Welcome to life. You will experience this as a set of endless disagreements about perceptions orbiting an unobservable yet objective core set of thermodynamic rules.”

I’ve already had my fill of (and subsequent detox sessions from) radical relativism, far enough removed to be able to convince myself that there is a definitive is separate from our own perceptions (see Berkeley’s rock test), but I run almost immediately into an intractable problem when I get to work, and that is this: I don’t work in objectivity.

I’m paid, as a technical game designer, to create frameworks to support perceptions around an obfuscated set of assumptions. A game is more about trickery and flash than just about any other medium of creative expression; in fact, in handling the very real constraints of the hardware we test against, we gain a great deal of performance by removing unperceived elements (see Propaganda Village for a close physical metaphor).

Refuters will immediately seize on the fact that I work against very real hardware limitations, and this should be enough to form the Berkeley’s Rock against which I can gleefully dash my foot. Sure, if I were working in a vacuum, concerned only with technical input and output against a quantitative metric.

But I play the same games I create, and each time it grows more and more subjective as costs to performance are weighed against visual, audio, and kinetic aesthetic. Hedonics precedent usually winches one or two of these arguments mercifully out of the mud, but all too often in games the dialectic argument rings hollow against the bulletproof plate armor of gamer perception. If not historical precedent, then modern trends. If not trends, then usability and focus testing. If not those, then vaporous demographics.

Often it just feels like a Goldilocks problem – when I entrench in code, I lose sight of the game. Too low. When I fire up the Peter Copter and look down at the game from a conceptual standpoint, I lose the beacons of objectivity that give me the kind of confidence I want to make an informed decision.

Is there a way that I can quickly craft game interactions that give me both the low-level geekiness I want and the high-level conceptual exercise I need? For a while, I thought XNA Game Studio might be it, but no language there ever emerged that operated on a higher level than C#, and so I was stuck endlessly bit-twiddling.

Imagine my surprise when the answer made itself both new and old in one breath: Interactive Fiction. What it took was a new way to create an interactive fiction project; through a tool called INFORM 7.

You’ve probably already seen it, but I was absolutely blown away when I first saw the concept: create interactive fiction by using natural language sentences – definitive statements.

• Martha is a woman in the vineyard.
• The wind is a direction that varies.
• If Jerry doesn’t pay his rent, beat him.

I confess, I made that last one up. But it’s interesting to see how complex things can get.

In fact, by constructing a simple fiction out of english-language rules, you can actually begin to notice how dialectic patterns emerge and grow rapidly into subjective patterns, even in the code itself, not just in the interpretation of interactive fiction’s typical flowery language.

Take a look at this example screenshot below – the code is on the left, the game it produces is on the right.

And as an added bonus, you can play it (all eight heartstopping seconds of it), special thanks to GrimJim’s BLORBFork of Russoto’s zplet:

Play “The Box” now! (Java Required)

Word is a direction that varies. Word is up.

It is indeed.