It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Category: year26 (Page 4 of 92)

I posted an entry each day during my 26th year of life.

Day 353: facebook

January 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Facebook may be the most important website of my life right now.

Sure, Google is important (how would I find anything on the wild and untamed Internet without you?) and there are specialized websites, like Wells Fargo, that handle my financial transactions without which life would be much more inconvenient.

But Facebook is a site that I visit every day and it is a self-contained microcosm of everything important that happens in my life. My moment-to-moment Twitter thoughts are cross-posted to Facebook, and I get far more comments on Facebook than replies on Twitter. My daily blog entry is imported into Facebook, where I (once again) get far more comments than on my actual blog’s website.

I learn about high school friends getting married on Facebook, co-workers getting engaged on Facebook, current events and today’s zeitgeist on Facebook. It’s the first place I go if I need a cell phone number or for a picture of someone’s new baby.

I don’t spend hours on the site each day, but I find it somewhat exciting that one website can add a layer of social interaction and connection that elevates my daily actions and thoughts from personal to communal. This is especially exciting because only a scant decade ago, this would have been impossible.

So here’s to you, Facebook! Despite your shady ads that use profile pictures, always evolving and somewhat complicated privacy settings, and annoying games that post items to the news feed once a minute, I like you and hope that our future relationship continues to be agreeable.

Day 352: meaningful choices (in games)

January 29, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I talked briefly about Surviving High School before.  It’s an iPhone game with a few semi-fun minigames.  But the main gameplay and actual enjoyment of the game (for me, at least) boils down to two important aspects: good, funny writing and meaningful choices.

There’s another iPhone game that I downloaded later, which strips away the cartoony visuals and production values of Surviving High School while retaining the core two mechanics called Choice of the Dragon.  You can also play it in your browser by visiting the link.

I love both of these games, despite (or perhaps even due to) their simplicity.  With Choice of the Dragon, it’s as much an original online Choose Your Own Adventure book as a game.  But the choices are more numerous and, like most games, slightly less punishing.

I remember a single wrong choice in a CYOA book often ending in disaster, death, and a sudden end to your journey.  Here, while the choices you make certainly matter (and “bad” choices will have consequences), the reader/player isn’t instantly killed.  There’s time to recover by making better choices and often content that you would never see if you had made the “good” choice initially.

Due to the stuff I’m currently working on and the realization that this is something that really satisfies me as a player, I’ve been thinking a lot about what meaningful choices in games mean.

What’s more, the people who made Choice of the Dragon have released a version of their scripting software (ChoiceScript) that allows anyone to create a similar game by simply writing text (and following certain formatting rules).

I’d like to give myself the challenge of seeing whether I can craft a small but enjoyable ChoiceScript game by the end of February.  If I succeed, I’ll certainly post it here so everyone can play it and give feedback.  If I don’t, you’ll probably never hear about it again.  Either way, attempting it should be a learning experience when it comes to how to best present meaningful choices to a player and what types of decisions and consequences feel most satisfying.

Day 351: gettin’ pumped

January 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

With only five days to go until the start of Lost’s final season, it’s time to start getting excited.

To that end, I’ve rented season 5 and we started watching it tonight. We’ve got 16 episodes of sublime television pleasure that’ll help us prepare for what I anticipate will be the greatest and saddest season of television event I’ll experience in a long while.

It’ll be the beginning of the end, an episode that’ll cement in my mind that my favorite show is going to be over in a few months. Of course, that’ll also mean that I can finally purchase that super complete series box set with super bonus features and hold one of the most legendary parties ever, where we watch the entire series from beginning to end.

But right now, I’m filled with nothing but excitement for the premiere. We watched the first three episodes from season 5 tonight. And, man, do I love this show.

Day 350: state of today

January 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

There were two big events today.  At 10 AM, Steve Jobs delivered a presentation that detailed Apple’s newest thing, a touch-screen tablet called the iPad.

And then, at 6 PM, Barack Obama delivered a speech detailing the state of the United States and the progress and difficulties we’ve gone through in the past year.

Were they that different, these two events?  Both were highly anticipated.  There were potentially high hopes that both might give us insight into a way to make our lives better in the near-future.

And reaction to both events afterwards was quite mixed.  The iPad was not revolutionary, in the way that some thought it might be, but there are still many that yearn to get their hands on it.  Likewise, Obama’s speech was not – could not in this fiercely politically divided time of ours – able to bring forth anything other than a mixed response.

It’s because, in the end, Steve and Barack were trying to do the same thing.  They’re trying to get us to empathize with them, to see the world that they do and to dream the same dream.  They want us to see the potential that they know the iPad has while overlooking its shortcomings.  They want us to see the benefit that health care reform will give the country while overlooking the political hoops we may have to jump through to get it.  They want us to try to understand that it’s hard.

It’s hard to create products that invent new markets and revolutionize the way humans interact with technology.  It’s hard to run our country.  “But,” say Steve and Barack, “here’s what we came up with.  And we think it might be what you’re looking for.”

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