24 posts tagged “kvetching”
Or, as The Doctor calls it, "Chinese Whispers". (God bless the British for being able to unselfconsciously use "Chinese" to mean "ass backwards". God bless 'em.)
Anyway, I just wanted to point out a couple of bees in my bonnet: silly internet memes that were once clever but have now succumbed to the sort of mediocrity you'd come to expect when the crowd gets involved. The first is song charts which graph only a single data point. You remember making outlines in 7th grade, right? Having only one subsection bespeaks poor organization of your thoughts. Thus:
In honor of Emily Sears' struggle with her local recycling authorities:
On the bright side, it's a pay week for Boots.
In spite of a decent amount of sleep last night, I still feel groggy and sluggish. Maybe I need some B vitamins or something.
Alright, really, let's face it. There's nothing really life or death on my plate right now, and the only thing that's going to get the gears in my brain to spin up is to start writing about something that's been bouncing around in there for weeks. Since I don't have a "trusted system" in the GTD sense of the word, it's just been eating up processor time.
You might have noticed that I've been pretty vocal about how much I'd been digging PMOG in the last few weeks. You might have also noticed a sudden, sharp drop in my nattering. This is mostly because I felt like I hit a wall with PMOG where the signal to noise ratio tipped too far in the wrong direction. Or maybe not the signal to noise ratio. Maybe the possibility for interaction.
The geeks and early adopters that pick up on sites like PMOG have plenty of suggestions about what they want to see on PMOG, and they have a forum that's chock full of posts about. Maybe it's just me, but I have a serious aversion to bulletin boards as a way of producing meaningful discourse. I mean, talk about terrified sequential monologues, especially when no one wants to bother reading a thread that's gone out of control before they add their two cents. But I digress. The fact that you can't get any sort of notification if someone posts to a topic you've created, or a topic you've chosen to monitor is exemplar of the sort of basic interaction nuts and bolts that PMOG is currently missing.
PMOG is mainly a bank of "Missions" which are analogous to PowerPoint presentations that span multiple web pages. A nicer way of saying it is that they're like picture books. And like a good Richard Scarry book, the folks who read them should want to come back to the sites you've marked along the way to look for the informational equivalent of Gold Bug (a precursor to Waldo) on every page. The people who take your missions get points for every site they visit, and you get points for every person who completes a mission that you've constructed. Players can rate missions, and leave comments. If someone rates a mission you've made or leaves a comment about it, you also receive no notification, so you're left to go back through your missions to check for new comments. Tedious at best.
They also didn't really bother with any kind of comment threading on PMOG (something I still dislike about VOX, even if their "Reply To" option almost does the trick), so if someone asks a question or makes an interesting remark about something you've built, you can't respond to it except through a private message. It seems to me that discussing a thought-provoking or otherwise interesting mission would be the best way to get players to interact. They are, after all, the crux of game play.
I've also gotten frustrated by the fact that once a mission has been created, a few folks will take it and then it will basically fade into obscurity. Missions are always being made about a few of the same topics, webcomics being one of the most glaring examples. One of two things would be nice: I would like to be able to tweak and refine my missions and keep them in the public eye; I also think it would be an awesome game element if players could argue over and make adjustments to missions that didn't belong to them. That case always reminds me of memory palaces, and I love the thought of spinning off an entirely different system (an entirely different game?) that builds a glittering city of memory palaces which players fight over, mark up, knock down, and rebuild. I'd like to build that game, actually.
There's an entire subgenre of PMOG hackers who try to build missions with branching paths, but I've heard scuttlebutt that there's something in the works for that, so I won't go into it much here.
You can build a list of acquaintances, allies, and rivals and see what they're up to. Unfortunately, although it seems to show you if they've stashed a crate or foiled a mine (actions which are just about as meaningless as they sound), you don't see if they've built a new mission. At least I don't think you do.
While we're on the topic, though, there isn't really a lot of point to making someone an ally or a rival. More to the point, the main mode of conflict in the game focuses around devices that take away the number of points you have. Points are currency, points can buy you stuff to build missions, take away other people's points, or protect yourself or others from people who want to steal your points. Sure, sure, whuffie is the currency of the internet (although losing these points doesn't mean that someone else gains your reputation points or that you lose yours), but at this point, we're still just watching numbers go up and down.
There are "levels" which are (so far) meaningless. We've heard several times that there's some meaning coming at some point, and thus far, whenever the PMOG staff makes updates, they are usually pretty awesome (unlike certain other sites I could mention... *cough* *cough* VOX *cough*), but I really think that if you want to encourage even a playful sense of warfare between your users, you've got to come up with something better than making points go up and down. Nerds are a prankish lot, and I think there ought to be some sort of hypertextual equivalent of a "kick me" sign that would really get your gall up and make you plot some serious revenge. Literally being able to draw bunny ears onto a user's MySpace profile (visible only to other PMOGers, of course) or possibly turning them into a YTMND would probably be good options. The second one, though, relies on being able to get the word out that so-and-so has been YTMND'd in order to maximize the need for revenge.
Anyway, that stuff is a lot more like taking the game in an entirely different direction, but it does focus on my core point. I have a really hard time interacting with other PMOGers, which, I think, is the point of a game, right?
As much as I like passive aggressive notes, I just wanted to throw in my $.02 here in favor of direct action. Well, nearly direct action. As you may have noticed, the people responsible for the aesthetic and interface decisions which led up to the new interface have blogs here on VOX. I suspect that with a little detecting, you can figure out who they are and leave comments and/or send them private messages if you feel that your grievances are not being suitably redressed by the feedback system. They are actually people and can either be reasoned with or hazed into regretting their decisions-- depending on your temperament.
In other news, about five things all need my attention today, so writing anything here at all is probably not the best use of my time.
In spite of that, could someone restart the Calliope? I broked it.
Actual SA employees who may read this blog may want to skip this post. Some of it is caustic or outrightly inflammatory, and is more of an attempt to enumerate my feelings that to seek dialog or redress.
Strangely, I had recently been thinking about how the old homestead was actually a whole lot more of an appealing playground for the early adopter types like myself, and before my semi-self-imposed exile from home computer use, was considering trying to make more use of it. So, naturally, they had to go and sell it off to the Russians.
Lord knows I'm an old cranky kibbitzer and that I like nothing better than to be a killjoy and a doomsayer, but the whole thing gave me a sort of sick feeling in my pants. To tell the truth, I doubt that it really is going to affect the service, features, or community that's been built up over there-- certainly not for a while, anyway.
So what's bugging me?
First off, SUP, is a "media conglomerate" which may just be evidence that the people they have doing their English copy writing are woefully second tier, because "media conglomerate" in English roughly means "great Satan". Faceless, monolithic-- everything we really don't like to think about which is really going on behind the scenes in any organization over fifty people or so. Certainly not the sort of organization which generates the same kind of fondness that you have for a guy named Brad who decides that all the file extensions on his blogging site will be .bml (presumably "Brad's Markup Language?").
Second, this paints Six Apart in an ugly, Carpathian light. The chupacabra, having descended on LiveJournal and sucked out some of its marrow (privacy settings, etc.), is leaving the old goat on the side of the road for the vultures. Yes, I am prone to histrionics, even when, as mentioned above, I don't think there are going to be practical ramifications. Only symbolic ones. But fuck it, I've got a degree in reading too much into things.
Third, it really makes LiveJournal seem like The Simpsons. Once in the prime of its life and creativity, now nineteen seasons in, all but the most hardcore fans are praying for it to just be fucking over. LiveJournal didn't want LiveJournal, SixApart doesn't want LiveJournal. Why the hell should I want LiveJournal? There's no dignified death in business, though. As if the chintzy interface and hand-me-down themes didn't already make the place seem a little like an outdated, depressing mall, handing the company off to "media conglomeration" just feels like adding a touch of insult to injury.
It's always odd when I find myself put out by these sort of things. I actually wasn't upset when SA took over LJ. I'd used MT before, respected them as another worthwhile player in the field, and accepted their stewardship. I'm sure Brad and his cohorts would prefer this to being gobbled up by Rupert Murdoch, and I've come to accept that this is sort of the way things go in life and in business.
Oh forget it. I was trying to wind my way into some kind of concluding paragraph, and it's just turning into more maudlin bitching. Chalk it up to being sick.
Anyway, I didn't make coffee last night. I didn't get Dunkees on the way to work. I was going to abstain until I got a bit better, but around noon the blinding headache set in, and I had to admit that the monkey had beaten me.
This is strictly a medicinal mocha. I promise that I'm not enjoying it at all.
- Four days is enough to completely demolish my proper work-related sleeping habits.
- I got kicked out of bed for excessive snoring.
- The cats had shat on the futon, so I had to sleep on the couch.
