On Subsystems and Selves

Simple diagram of The Application of Object-Oriented Design Techniques to the Evolution of the Architecture of a Large Legacy Software SystemIn a later post I'll tell you about the subsystems in the game Puzzle Strike, but first I thought we could discuss subsystems in general. Disclaimer: this post is intentionally labyrinthine because that's how thinking about things works.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander wrote the book on subsystems back in 1964 and it's still very much worth reading. He explained that sometimes a system is made up of a web of deeply interconnected relationships, or in other words: a mess. If changing any part of a system means you disrupt everything else, it's very hard to tinker with and improve without ruining something. On the other hand, it's easier to deal with a system when its made up of subsystems that (though they might themselves have interwoven webs of connections) do not have many connections among each other. This way, if you tinker with subsystem A, you probably won't ruin subsystem B by doing so.

Computer programmers are well aware of this concept. The Model-View-Controller architecture is one example in that it separates 1) the stuff the user interacts with, 2) the stuff the going on behind the scenes, and 3) the stuff the user sees. If you need to rewrite the stuff the user sees, this hopefully has little effect on the other two subsystems.

Another point Alexander brings up is that when we encounter some system, we naturally try to view it as a collection of subsytems, but the way we choose to carve things up can be based on our personal biases. In fact, it can even be determined by the language we speak. The set of all possible subsets of a system is usually so large that it far exceeds the number of words in our language. If our language happens to have a word that describes something, we're more likely to carve things up THAT way, just because we have a way of talking about it. Some languages have more words than ours does for snow, or more words for happiness, or more words for types of small rivers, etc.

As an example, imagine we were going to build a building. That's a very complicated system. What are the subsystems? Maybe plumbing, electrical, and load-bearing materials are three of the subsystems. After all, each of those things has a lot going on within the subsystem but relatively few connections between subsystems. But we could slice things up differently. Maybe some of the plumbing is made of copper pipes. Maybe some of the electrical has copper, and perhaps some other part of the building uses copper, too. Maybe copper parts are subsystem, all related in that they are susceptible to rust and water damage over time. Or what about simply "the bathroom" as a subsystem? Everything in a bathroom must work together, fit, be functional, not cost too much, be aesthetically pleasing, etc, even though it contains plumbing, electrical, and load-bearing materials.

Alexander's point with all that is actually that the best way to carve up a system tends to be the way that gives you the most disparate (as in not tightly woven) subsystems.

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to talk with Will Wright, and I read Notes on the Synthesis of Form on his recommendation. I saw on his whiteboard a diagram of the subsystems of The Sims Online. I couldn't help mentioning the idea that perhaps there was some other set of subsystems, and perhaps the ones written there were simply easier to SAY, as opposed to being the best ones. He said yes, good point, and looked at the diagram. Then he said, "actually, the instant messenger isn't really listed here, it's part of several of these subsystems but maybe it would be better to think of that as its own node."

Susan Blackmore

The ultimate in systems is the

Click to read more ...

Meanings, Pictures, and Words

I got around to reading the Watchmen graphic novel, and I was thinking about how well-crafted it is. I also thought about how much it uses double meanings. On one level, super heroes themselves have dual personalities: their normal self and their super-hero self. (Though Alan Moore posits that Rorschach's dual roles switched along the way and the masked version is now the "real" him. Nite Owl has a dream that hints the same thing about himself.)

But actually the double meaning I was really referring to has to do with juxtaposing two scenes such that the dialog from one seems to comment on the situation in the other. In the first few pages, some cops investigating a murder are talking, but every other panel shows what really happened (in the past), so the cops' words have one meaning in the context of talking to each other, but a different meaning in the context of those words juxtaposed with the true events of the murder. Watchmen does this same kind of thing throughout the book. Some might call it cutesy or trying-to-hard, but I think it adds cleverness and a feeling that we, the readers, are in on something.

The TV show Dexter relies heavily on this same concept. Like a super hero, Dexter leads a dual life: one as a crime scene analyst and one as a serial killer. Often, things Dexter says to other characters have two meanings: one that applies to the situation at hand, and another meaning that only we the viewers understand, because it applies to his secret life as a killer. Dexter narrates the show, and this gives him even more opportunity for these double meanings because it allows him to say clever things that simultaneously apply to both of his lives, even when he couldn't believably say them out loud.

One quick example from the animated series Dexter: Early Cuts. Dexter watches a murderous magician's assistant on stage, about to be the subject of the saw-a-woman-in-half trick. Dexter narrates: "The magician may be the one who gets the glory, but if you ask me...Cindy's the one doing the tricks. She's still in one piece...but not for long."

Oh yeah, and if you somehow forgot to watch Season 4 of Dexter, you really, really should see it. I won't even say anything about it, but god damn. (Link to DVD and Blu-ray.)

Anyway, back to Watchmen. Consider this other kind of multiple meaning. It's a story about "what if super heroes really existed, and it was more like real life than super hero stuff?" and yet, the story itself *is* a super hero story. It's the very thing its commenting on. Even more notably, the character Dr. Manhattan's super power (well, among others) is basically the ability to see the rest of the comic book. It's a linear medium, and we experience it much like we experience life: a moment at a time. We can remember the past, but not actually experience it, and we can't see the future. But Dr. Manhattan can see and experience all of it at any time; he can basically read the whole book at once. (This insight has surely been pointed out before, but I stole it from famous game designer Clint Hocking while he was half drunk).

Here's Alan Moore himself talking about Watchmen. A spoiler in there though, so careful:

So I was thinking about all that and looking at how the panels of Watchmen are actually laid out. How different configurations convey that we are looking at quick events in slow motion, or that we are looking at a slow event over a long period of time, or that a very large panel conveys importance and grandeur, and so on. Hard to think about any of that without thinking of Scott McCloud. I hope you've read Understanding Comics by now, which incidentally, is hardly about comics. Also, here is Scott talking about that book, among other things, and he even mentions that he thought it was for other comic artists but really lots of people from other fields like it, like game designers. Ha. I think he and I would get along really well actually (if he had any clue who I was). I'm down with everything he says in this video:

Another fun fact is that I used to have a copy of Understanding Comics signed by McCloud himself. It was also signed by Will Wright. They were both on stage together doing a presentation at GDC, so I got them to sign it. Will Wright said, "Wait, you want me to sign a book that I didn't write?" I said, "Yeah because you're here, and you're Will Wright." This seemed plausible enough for him to go along with it. Unfortunately an ex-girlfriend (not ex at that time) borrowed it, and I never saw it again.

Back to McCloud, you might as well read his comic book that launched Google Chrome, if you haven't. Tufte would be proud. If you don't know who Tufte is, it sounds like you have quite a lot of reading to do. (He is a professor of information design, focusing on the visual display of information.) Also, here's a video of Tufte talking about the interface design of the iphone. It will give you a surface-level understanding of what he's all about:

Because Scott McCloud is so great and I was thinking about the visual design of comics and graphic novels, I also started reading another of his books, Making Comics. Even though it's much more closely targeted at comics than is Understanding Comics, I still see the same sweeping concepts of design there too. For example, early on he talks about the balance between making something CLEAR and making it EXCITING. I have faced the same kind of thing in character art for my card games, in package design, card layout, data presentation, and so on. No matter how much Scott talks about comics, he can't help but talk about universal design concepts. ;)

I checked out McCloud's blog to read more about him thinking about pictures and words and I found these two videos. I can't speak to the validity or invalidity of any of the content in these videos. I mean, they seem pretty interesting and thought-provoking to me at first glance. What I mean to highlight here is the use of pictures to enhance the words. The videos are extremely opposite, one for humanities majors and the other for students of hard science. (Or should I say one for Harvard students and one for MIT students?)

Let's all have empathy:

And now for something more confusing that will hurt your brain:

I think you probably need a rest now if you really read and watched all that stuff, so I'll let you go.

A Very Long Story About Board Games and Business

I came across this amazing story. Michael Barnes weaves an epic tale of his trecherous journey as a hobby game store owner. I laughed, I cried, and so on. It's damn long.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Epilogue

I was rooting for our protagonist here. Business is a tough world--the board game business, doubly so. Mr. Barnes may use a lot of linguistic flourishes in this story, be uses them well, and he certainly has something to say.

Dexter's Mechanics and Flavor

A year or so ago I read up on various critics' top 10 lists of TV shows. One show that came up often was Dexter. I have to say that it's incredible and it fully deserves all the praise it gets. I've been thinking about the show from the point of view of a game designer.

Mechanics Matching Flavor

Game designers are often faced with the challenge of matching mechanics with flavor. What I mean by that is on the one hand, we have to create a system of rules that actually works, but on the other hand, the experience these rules create has to be aesthetically pleasing somehow.

As a simple example, let's take Rook in the card game Yomi. We have to balance Rook so that he's fair against other characters. Rook has lots of slow moves so making them faster would be a way to increase his power if we found him to be too weak. This solution isn't aesthetically pleasing though, because it violates his flavor. He's supposed to be a big stone golem so he probably shouldn't have fast moves. Instead, we need some sort of solution to make him fair (the mechanics), but that fits the experience you're supposed to have while playing Rook (the flavor).

As you can see, the solution I chose is Rock Armor, also know as "super armor" in many fighting games. He has slow attacks, but unlike other characters, he has a way to continue his attack even he gets hit by a faster attack from the enemy. The mechanics and flavor work together here, and there's even another level to it. Rook's card game incarnation has a mechanic (super armor) that's familiar to fighting game players. He'll probably have that same mechanic when he appears in an actual fighting game someday. So not only does Rock Armor make sense inside the card game, but it also helps the entire card game's flavor match the experience of playing a fighting game.

Plot vs Character

Fiction writers face a similar type of challenge. They have to deal with "mechanics" too, though they usually

Click to read more ...

Avatar: The Movie: A Game?

There's some debate on my forums about various movie reviews like this one that call Avatar "like a video game."

The problem some of my forum members have is when movie reviewers call something "like a video game" and have no idea what they are talking about. Take this quote:

You’ll feel like you just mastered the greatest video game ever conceived in an amazing three-hour setting. You’ll change your life, get the girl and save the world, yet all you had to do was sit back and enjoy the fly.

You actually won't feel like you've mastered anything because a movie is a form of passive entertainment and mastering something, especially something fundamentally interactive, is an active process. So what the heck is that even supposed to mean?

The thing is, Avatar really is like a game, it's just only certain people can really credibly say that. It's kind of like how I can't really say the N-word. If I say it (or even if I write this paragraph?), it would be really offensive. If a black person says it though, they say it with a kind of knowledge and experience that I can't have. Incidentally, I saw a news report yesterday where a woman described a Nigerian terrorist's appearance as "African American." Wow. Political correctness gone so awry that it ends up describing a terrorist who hates America as "American" just because we have no acceptable way to say "black" anymore.

Back to our story. At the very least, I will claim that somewhere in the world, you can call something "like a video game." I mean a thing that isn't a video game...isn't a video game. We know that. But a thing can really be "like" a video game. It can share some essential quality or remind us of a video game. In what way is the movie Avatar "like a video game" then?

It takes place in a fantasy world. The world uses hyper-saturated, vibrant colors. More importantly, it's a world with *jumping*. Lots of it. Running, jumping, climbing, and swinging through trees. It's a world where the ground lights up under your feet as you take a step. A world where touching a plant lights it up or makes it change its size. A world where you can ride an array of fantastic beasts--both ground and flying versions. In short, it's a world of INTERACTION.

Now, you could be a jerk and claim that everything has interaction. The world of, say, Law & Order (a cop / lawyer show) has "interaction." The cops fire bullets, the lawyers open doors, etc. But seriously, don't be a jerk about it. The world of Avatar has an extreme level of interaction (between the world itself and the inhabitants of the world) that's just uncommon. I fully understand that there is no more interaction between the screen and the audience than any other movie. I'm not saying *that* type of interaction is going on. What I am saying is that if you held a mirror up to "interaction" you'd see something like Avatar in the reflection. What you wouldn't experience is "feeling you've mastered the greatest video game ever made." That's kind of ridiculous. Nonetheless, I think it's still fair to call Avatar "like a video game."

But here's the boring part: so what? I don't mean the comparison as a compliment. I don't mean it as an insult. I simply mean it as description. (Incidentally, many movie reviewers seem to assume a game is automatically some terrible thing and they use the comparison as an insult.) Anyway, we've now described a facet of the movie. We've described that it depicts a world that's highly interactive. Pretty boring (yet true) statement, if you ask me.

It would be more interesting to discuss the story, that it casts humans as the bad guys, just like in the movie District 9. In both cases, the ignorant humans have no regard for the "others" and are happy to destroy what's sacred to the others without a thought, to slaughter them without a thought, and so on. A member of my forums named WaterD famously said, "The humanity is sad," and I applaud movies like these that try to drive that point home so that maybe "the humanity" can be a bit less sad going forward. Maybe occupying foreign countries is bad. Maybe huge military budgets aren't the greatest idea, in light of the healthcare shortcomings our main character faces. In his world, they can afford outrageous expeditions to conquer foreign lands, but they can't afford to fix his legs, even though they have the technology. The humanity is sad.

Anyway, it's "like a game." And that's not the point.