Gaslight & Steam

The portfolio and blog of David Bennett

Author: David Bennett (Page 5 of 6)

Populares Et Optimates, A Game Of Rome Part 2

February 6, 2010 /

Watching card manipulation by Dan and Dave Buck including those on their site like the demo video of the Akira flourish got me thinking quite a bit about card shuffling. After seeing some of the false shuffles and other manipulations and having read about games where the shuffling algorithm was only pseudo-random, I wanted to make sure that the card shuffling for my game was at least adequate enough to make the game work. If you’re not familiar with Dave and Dan, check out this video advertisement for their set of DVDs over at Theory 11.

Wikipedia has a good article discussing shuffling cards and computer algorithms for shuffling.

An example shuffle algorithm in Javascript would be this implementation of Durstenfeld’s algorithm, a modern version of Fisher-Yates that looks like this:

function array_shuffle (aArray)
{
    var i, j, mTemp;
    for (i = aArray.length; i;) {
        // mTemp, j initialized here for shorter code.
        j = parseInt (Math.random () * i);
        mTemp = aArray [--i];
        aArray [i] = aArray [j];
        aArray [j] = mTemp;
    }
}

For the random number generation, I prefer this, but I haven’t exercised it in order to see if it makes a difference, though seeing parseInt in the above makes me wonder about its presence.

j = 1 + Math.floor(Math.random() * i);

As for the cards in the game, they are represented in the Javascript as objects and can be either people or actions. People cards are members of one or the other faction or a third group of loosely-aligned Romans who may be swayed to one side or the other. They have attributes including the side they belong to, whether their side may be changed, their name and current rank. Action cards represent the cards that are used during play. Actions include ranks and positions that may be assigned to People and events like riots, assassinations, and plagues. Action cards often have negative or side-effects, sometimes costing the player who uses it as much as his opponent. Other cards require votes from the Senate such as Exile or the appointment of Generals.

There are a variety of collections that I’ll refer to as decks. There are two decks of people, one for each player. Event decks include one hand for each player, the drawing deck and the discard deck. Additionally, there may be individual cards in play that belong to no particular deck.

I considered a number of names for the game including Optimates et Populares, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue. The working title that I came up with is Marius and Sulla after the two men who fought together in the Social War and then became bitter enemies. The game centers around the time where partisans identified themselves less with the espoused philosophies each represented and more with the personalities themselves. The short version of the game covers the six years following the Social War (88 BC – 82 BC).

SPQR Or Pontifex Maximus, A Game Of Rome Part 1

January 29, 2010 /

I’ve decided to create a web-based game set in early Rome. It’s intended to be about the leaders of the time with an emphasis on politics rather than military strategy. I want the latter to happen “off-screen” as it were, but with the option for legions to show up at the gates of Rome when needed to influence political events.

The biggest difficulty was selecting a time period that provided the right amount of variety, particularly political in-fighting and manuevering without too much military action (such as the wars with Carthage). In that regard, the early and late periods of the Republic offered some interesting options, as did the time of the First Triumvirate and the period following the death of Caligula, to name but a few points in the turbulent history of the Romans.

I’m particularly fond of the political manueverings described in Imperium by Robert Harris and in the BBC production of I, Claudius (for which I must confess that I haven’t read the book by Robert Graves). There’s an immediacy to the politics combined with a certain degree of brutality that keeps one from longing overmuch for the good old days. So the more I thought about it, the less Imperial Rome appealed to me and the more I wanted to go back a little further in time. At the same time, Lavinia by Ursula Leguin brings the events of Virgil’s Aeneid to life brilliantly with the interplay between the tribes of the area and the followers of Aeneas.

Out of all the time periods that I think would make for an worthwhile game, the period immediately following the Social War, a crisis point in Roman history, sounded extremely interesting. Sulla’s First Civil War with the struggle between the optimates and populares (and I’m simplifying matters greatly since it wasn’t that black and white) made for some turbulent times with lots of political and military manuevering. Throw in assassinations, exiles, plagues, riots and external threats like Mithridates of Pontus, and you have a good deal of elements to work with.

As they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The politics of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire have much in common with the infighting during the War of the Roses and the gangland warfare of the Roaring Twenties. For that reason, I wanted to capture some of the feel of the Avalon Hill game Kingmaker, minus the board and tediousnous of moving armies around, with the fast-paced play of Family Business, but with a more historical feel and slightly more elaborate mechanics.

Before starting work, I did some research on already existing games that covered both the time period I was interested in with the politics in a card game or simple board game version. I was positive there’d be a plethora of games of all stripes, some very similar to what I had in mind. Surprisingly, the list wasn’t nearly as long as I expected, though I’m sure I missed more than a couple. My short list of games that aren’t strategy games and that otherwise capture some of the elements I was looking for are as follows:

Certainly, some of these games are ones that I’d really like to play, particularly Triumvirate. But before I do that, I’d like to get my game up and running. First up, a paper prototype. Much like website usability testing with paper mockups and wireframes, I plan to make some cards and to try some mechanics so I can see how they play out. I’ll discuss that in my next on this subject.

Idioms and Economy of Language

December 3, 2009 /

I was talking with a co-worker about my limited facility with Japanese and my interest in improving my facility with that language. During the course of our conversation, she mentioned a fascinating aspect of Japanese for expressing certain idioms or proverbs. That’s were I learned about yoji-jukugo (四字熟語), which are idiomatic expressions made up of four kanji characters. These idioms are written only in kanji only and have no kana between them.

One such example would be the Japanese equivalent of the idiom, “two birds with one stone.” This is rendered as isseki nichou (一石二鳥) (literally, “one stone, two birds”). There are many more yoji-jukugo, many of which have similar versions in English (and many other languages besides).

The Chinese equivalent from which yoji-jukugo originate are called chengyu (成语). The same idiom above has a similar chengyu that translates as, “two birds, one arrow” (yÄ« jiàn shuāng diāo, written 一箭双雕). Another one I like is sān rén chéng hÇ” (三人成虎) (literally, “three men make a tiger“), which refers to how a repeated rumor may be erroneously accepted as truth.

There are lots of examples of these idioms including a chengyu of the day. You learn something new every day.

Language Impressions

December 2, 2009 /

Today I read an interesting perspective on Dutch language, particularly the rather unique ‘ij’ sound in that language. But more than that, it’s a poetic take on the way language seems to feel. (via Snarkmarket)

“There’s something slightly disturbing about the visual scan of the language (I don’t even know what the term is for that: you know when you see a page, or a sign, written in a language and you have an immediate impression of the content of the text? This works also in your native language: look at a page from, like, Dickens, and you can sort of get the Shudder of the Text, or whatever, anyway, what I mean is that some languages, like French, always seem to bear a melismatic philosophy behind the page; German, an authority, Amharic, a crooked delight…) … with Dutch what I get is a sort of childlike pornography: hoog, sneeuwt, poesje, standplaats. But I’m obsessed with it: there’s nothing better than having an old school diagraph still kicking around like an appendix.”

I like the word melismatic in this context, as though the words on the page were the notes and the meaning of the page was the word or melisma. It’s a new one on me even though I subscribe to A.Word.A.Day and occasionally test my vocabulary at FreeRice.

What’s the Definition of a Game?

September 22, 2009 /

A month ago, I updated my LinkedIn profile to say I was, “…playing and making some games.” I’ve had a few game ideas kicking around and the games I’ve been playing lately have gotten me a bit more motivated to work on my own ideas. My thought was that this small declaration would keep me moving forward and I would actually make some headway on at least one project. As others have noted, ideas are cheap, but seeing a project through to completion is considerably more difficult.

What I hadn’t anticipated was a co-worker asking me what kind of games I was working on. Since my day job is in web development for an HMO, my co-worker was unaware of my background in game design and my continuing interest in doing that kind of work. However, the reason I’m not employed full-time doing game design has more to do with the nature of industry, particularly the crazy hours and my daughter being of an age where she started to think daddy lived in the phone. At the time, people were beginning to take a hard look at some of practices and work environment that went with game development, the most visible being the story of EA Spouse. Just as a case in point, the agency I contracted through gave me vacation time that accrued at a rate of 2 weeks per year based on hours worked. In my first contract, between overtime and the occasional all-nighter, I accrued four weeks of vacation.

So, though I’m not working in the game industry as my day job, I’m still very much interested in games. But my co-worker’s question raised an interesting point: What is the definition of game? Her assumption was that, as a computer guy, I would be turning my energies toward some form of computer game. But even that’s a pretty broad range, given the proliferation of casual games, many of them web-based, alternative reality games, that incorporate many forms of technology including web pages and other technology, and console games, developed on computers despite the hardware being rather specialized.

However, I also play pen-and-paper roleplaying games (Dungeons and Dragons and Ars Magica, among myriad others), I am guilty of having played live-action roleplaying, and I play boardgames, given the opportunity. In fact, about the only thing I don’t play is fantasy football and its real-world team sports analogues.

So, while I’m not planning on creating something like BASEketball any time soon, I’m casting my net considerably wider than trying to develop the next version of Duke Nukem Forever (figuring whatever game I work on still probably has a better chance of seeing the light of day).

Mapping Early Manhattan

August 24, 2009 /

The September 2009 issue of National Geographic Magazine had a fascinating article about Manhattan before it was settled. The article is based on the work of the Manahatta Project, an endeavor to match the current city to the terrain as it existed prior to settlement by Europeans and to then add the ecosystem that went with the land. The science of landscape ecology and the visualization of biosystem relations that the project has dubbed “Muir Webs” both appear to me to be narratives that go beyond single dimensions and instead look at the patterns formed.

For much the same reason, there is a similar narrative about the early settlers of New Amsterdam, among them is the story of my ancestor Jan Jansen van Flensburg. As a baker who came to the New Netherlands and raised his children in New Amsterdam, the records are far more extensive than for many other immigrants of that time and the maps well detailed (such as this 1656 map of the New Netherlands).

Seeing new ways of combining various data the way the Manahatta Project has done inspires me to look at new ways to bring together historical data and maps such that they tell a story that’s richer than the sum of their parts. A good start in this way of looking at information is the software from TimeGlider, which is useful in putting together historical events in sequence such as this history of World War I. [Update 01-12-2021:  Timeline is now defunct, but I think offerings like Preceden and Twile include similar options).

nieuwamsterdam

The Demise of Books

July 14, 2009 /

Yesterday morning, I read a good Snarkmarket article about James Wolcott’s Vanity Fair article on the demise of books. Wolcott says, ‘How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?’ and then goes on to talk about, even if he’s being tongue-in-cheek, why he’s completely wrong. As Rex Sorgatz at Fimocolous says, ‘James Walcott [sic] cries that no one will see him reading Anna Karenina on the subway, or something like that.’

Then again, Wolcott also says, ‘An overgrown man-child and his precious collection can become a closed-loop co-dependency that functions as a moat.’ Sounds kind of like acquaintances of mine who are terrible hoarders. And if the essay suggests he’s bemoaning the disappearance of books and CDs, his conclusion suggests otherwise:
‘As all this space opens up—as the tokens of our cultural snobbery or keen connoisseurship (take your pick, depending on the degree of pretentious wankery you attribute to others) recede into the hideaway shelves and flash drives—what will refill it? “After two decades of defining ourselves in terms of our possessions,” Holly Brubach wrote recently in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, “we now need to figure out who we would be without them.” I suspect that once this downturn plateaus and shrinks in the rearview mirror, we’ll just stock up on other possessions, which will be arrayed and arranged to show off not our personal aesthetics or expensive whims but our ethics—our progressive virtues.’ In any event, Wolcott’s a good writer and it’s definitely worth reading.

On a related note, book lists by scholars including Social Media, Bollywood and the Science of Sex from the New York Review of Ideas.

K’Naan and Waving Flag

July 7, 2009 /

Thought I’d pass along a recommendation for a song I heard yesterday called “Waving Flag” by Somali-born singer K’Naan off his new album Troubador. It’s got sort of a Michael Franti/Spearhead vibe and it definitely appeals if you like that sort of thing or some of the other Hip-Hop that fuses different styles (there’s a little bit of reggae in her with some guitar work and samples from 70’s Somali pop). Very listenable and deeply personal (the sincerity just sort of comes through in the music when hear it).

He performed songs from his latest album as the SXSW Music Festival in March of this year and you can hear the performance streamed on NPR or you can download it for listening later. In case you’re actually curious and want to hear his stuff.

I’ve finally had a chance to listen to hear the whole album and I like about half the tracks. Which is to say, there’s probably something on the album for everyone, ranging from old-school rap, a track with Kirk Hammett that I like because it reminds me of Rage Against the Machine, and the reggae-influenced “Wavin’ Flag”. In that regard, it’s got the same diversity as The Way I See It Raphael Saadiq.

Movies with Ninjas

June 7, 2009 /

The latest from The Onion News Network about a ninja parade in Modesto is pretty funny, though not as funny as the Onion article about the office massacre by a disgruntled ninja co-worker wherein, among other things, one of them was, “…impaled upon cunningly folded quarterly report folders.”

More seriously, though I’m sure it’ll be a cheese-fest, Ninja with Scott Adkins looks like it has some beautiful fight scenes. Another ninja movie, Kamui, looks to be more in the classic line of Japanese ninja and samurai epics to judge by these teaser clips. It has much the same feel as the movie version of Lone Wolf and Cub series (also referred to as Shogun Assassin, another movie based on a manga. One hopes it will live up to the sand dunes fight in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx.

Reader’s Advisories and Books I Read

May 19, 2009 /

A few questions that come up sporadically from friends and co-workers are what books do you like to read, where do you find new books and new authors, and can you recommend a few. Since I know how much tastes differ and having rather strong tastes myself, those are difficult questions. What I like to read varies from month to month, though I have a solid set of favorites that rarely changes. I find new things to read through a combination of my local library, perusing shelves at local bookstores and online through new release listings. I also read authors’ blogs and read their recommendations on the work of other authors.

As far as my list being a reader’s advisory, I’d say it’s highly suspect. I read a number of different books for a number of different reasons. Some are out-and-out junk that I read purely for entertainment and because they don’t tax my brain. Others I read in pursuit of a line of research or just because I’m interested in a given topic. Some are career-related or are part of my professional development. And there are certain authors whose new work I almost always read, no matter when it comes out, interrupting all my other reading. When I get around to tagging and generally categorizing my books, readers might be able to see a few common themes and interests.

I’m leveraging a no-longer-maintained WordPress plugin called Now Reading, though I’ve installed the updated version that works better with WP 2.7+ with a few customizations of my own. I really like it as a jumping off point since it saved me a bunch of grunt work in creating a plugin from scratch, but there are other changes I’d like to make. Amazon search is rather primitive (at first blush, it appears to be a simple screen-scraper) and I’d like to do something more like LinkedIn’s reading list widget leveraging the Amazon Product Advertising API. None of the books are tagged, so that’s next on my list. I’d also like to have small-sized and large-sized images that are stored locally rather than pulling them in from Amazon every time. This is in part because the Amazon links aren’t necessarily to the copies of the book I’d prefer and the out-of-print books I have in my library may not have cover images online. After that, I’d also like to add long reviews to the books in addition to the short descriptions on my main library page, particularly for my favorite books.

There were some plugins for Joomla! including one called JCollection that offered a little more versatility with the flexibility to create individual listings of movies, music, books or whatever else. But customizing the front-end was almost incomprehensible and the back-end was a little more primitive than I wanted with no way, for example, to easily integrate musical genres in the way that I wanted. It was also 1.5 legacy at the time I was considering it, though there’s now a 1.5 native version as an alpha. So I’ll be keeping an eye on it and other plugins that might offer interesting functionality.

So my library is very much a work in progress, but it’s a start.

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