Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 920 – Scott Alan Miller

July 9, 2007: Turd Painting

Around eight o’clock this evening Dominica’s mother called to tell us that Dominica’s cousin, Andrew – 38 years old and a father of two – had passed away after a short battle with cancer.

Scott Adams has a good post today about Honda spokesperson completely messing up what would be a very straightforward defense. I felt that, as I read the article and before reading what Scott wrote, Honda was in the right but had completely misstated their case and stated the issue in such a way as to make themselves into the bad guys! Nothing criminal, just utter foolishness. Honda is totally bound to state the EPA figures regardless of their accuracy. The US Government is stating what the legal fuel economy is of the vehicle. If the Honda hybrid actually got better mileage than what was stated we would never let them say it but somehow we think that they should point out that the numbers are completely wrong to their disadvantage? Of course not. No one else in the industry does this nor are they required to. They are legally stating what the EPA has told them their rating is. That is all. If you don’t like it then complain to the EPA and make them come up with useful numbers or a better comparison system or ask them to force Americans to all take “efficient driving” courses since the real issue is the idiotic way that people drive.

Today was relatively slow at work – perhaps because this is the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures soaring into the nineties and a heat index at one hundred degrees! Surprisingly when I was outside I didn’t really notice that it was all that hot and actually thought to myself when I went out at three thirty this afternoon that it was rather nice out. I guess that is a pretty serious sign that I am aging!

I ran to Taco Bell for a quick lunch and stopped at Jiffy Lube and got the Mazda’s oil changed. It has been needing to have been done for some time now and we are driving the Mazda up to Pavilion this weekend so it really had to be done before we left. So I figured that today would be the best time to get it done. My car thanks me. This is the last oil change before we flip one hundred thousand miles. Hard to believe that we have owned that car for that long but we did buy it a full two years before Dominica and I got married so we have had it since late 2001 – almost six years. So really the mileage is as it would be expected to be.

I worked just a little bit late today and came home to find Dominica already playing Tales of Legendia. Apparently she likes it. The idea was that we were going to play the game together but she is rather impatient.

Oreo has been under the weather for the past week or so. He didn’t do anything all weekend and just slept. He barely ate or anything. But he appears to be back to his normal, perky self again today. Maybe it was sympathy sickness because Min and I had bronchitis. I still have it a little but for the most part I feel quite a bit better.

The second season of <em>Veronica Mars</em> came in the mail today so Dominica is going to be dead to the world for the rest of the week. She has no self control when it comes to television series like this. I am bad but she is totally addicted. Luckily I don’t really like this particular series very much so I don’t feel the need to watch them all with her. Recently it seems that there is very little that I really want to just passively watch. Almost no movie appears to be worth my time. I really need a special occasion to bother watching a whole movie and television shows that keep me interested are getting fewer and fewer.

Dad emailed me to let me know that Dark Cloud 2 and Rogue Galaxy, both for the PS2, arrived at his place today. I had managed to get both of these titles off of eBay recently and hope to get to start playing them soon. I am very excited to see what Level 5 has done with some other titles beyond Dragon Quest VIII.

Video Games as Literature

At the turn of the century (that is, in 1899 – the LAST century) I think that few people would have guessed that photography would become a significant form of art or that recorded music would mostly displace performance music as the core of the musical arts nor would many believe that future forms of media such as television and cinema would become part of the core literary and dramatic traditions rivaling books and performance theatre for their importance to the collective consciousness of society. Children today can no more survive without being able to reference Star Wars IV: A New Hope, The Sound of Music or Schindler’s List than “1984”, “Watership Down” or “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Movies and television have entered the literary mainstream and are here to stay.

After a century of passive media and entertainment effecting our views and opinions of what constitutes literature today we are beginning to see the emergence of another literary form – the video game. Unlike books, movies, theatre or television video games are not passive but are active literature – literature in which the reader affects the story whether simply by moving it along or by changing the potential outcome of the story. I am not suggesting that society is ready to accept video games as significant media but this change will come and it will come quickly.

Different genres of video games will, of course, be viewed differently. Adventure and Console-style Role Playing Games already often cross the line from a pure “game” into the solid realm of interactive literature. Storylines have been growing and becoming more and more involved since the late 1970s beginning seriously with text adventure and later with graphical adventure games such as Infocom’s Zork and Sierra’s King’s Quest. Games began to tell stories and included engaging characters and situations. Video games rapidly began to take on the role of fiction with the addition of “reader” interaction. No longer is the reader simply an observer but a participant in the telling of the story.

Adventure games, whether text, graphical or illustrated with games such as Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, clearly lead the way in creating a position of literature within the video game arena while the bulk of video gaming leaned towards the trivial action oriented games popular on consoles such as the Atari 2600 or the Nintendo Entertainment System. Much of this would change, however, with the release of Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in the United States) and the launching of the “Console RPG” or “Japanese RPG” genre.

Unlike traditional Role Playing Games, or RPGs, which have translated poorly to the video game format a console RPG is a more linear style of game that is closer to an Adventure game but incorporating some traditional RPG elements. Console RPGs lend themselves very well to deep storytelling and complex character development within the video game framework. Console RPGs may, in fact, surpass earlier Adventure style games in their ability to develop characters and provide deep story telling.

Recently the more traditional RPG genre (that is, non-linear RPG style play rather than linear or near-linear Console RPG style) has begun to benefit from the ever increasing computational powers of the computer or game console as well as the ever expanding budgets of the gaming industry to begin to move into the “video game as literature” category. The principle example of this within the RPG genre at this time would be Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Console RPGs began in earnest in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s began to explore complex stories and persistent worlds that stretched from game to game. Today video games in this genre will often stretch towards and even exceeding one hundred hours of game play providing an opportunity for a depth of story competing with that found in traditional literature while not treating the reader as a passive entity. This complex and deep story telling combined with active reader involvement is giving us today and is promising to provide in the future for a new literary tradition that is dramatically more significant to its readers.

Electronic Gaming Monthly, a major US video game industry publication, said this about Final Fantasy VII – the quintessential highly linear console role playing game – “Square’s game was … the first RPG to surpass, instead of copy, movie like storytelling”, and that, without it, “Aeris wouldn’t have died, and gamers wouldn’t have learned how to cry.” Final Fantasy VII was one of the first Console RPGs released on the Sony Playstation coming out in 1997 and defined the state of the art in video game storytelling during the era. More recently, and also from Square Enix the successor to Squaresoft who made Final Fantasy VII, on the Playstation 2 is Dragon Quest VIII which does a magnificent job of pulling the player into the game world and telling a very traditional fantasy adventure tale while doing so in an entirely new way that makes books seem almost obsolete.

Will video games of the future, perhaps in the next fifteen to twenty years, rival modern fiction literature in its ability to educate, to stir to action, to bring to tears, to move, to motivate, to thrill, to drive? Yes, I believe that it will. And I believe that video games will become an increasingly important part of our collection cultural experience and, as such, will be an important part of educational curriculum just as traditional literature is today. I do not expect and certainly hope that video games will not displace traditional media but see them taking their place within the pantheon of literary forms.

July 8, 2007: Wrapping Up a Video Game Weekend.

Dominica and my weekend of total relaxation continues today. We slept in a little this morning and then I decided to start playing Suikoden III on the PS2 which I just got a week or so ago. I originally played Suikoden on the Playstation back in the late 1990s and it was very good – one of my favourite traditional 2D jRPGs so I have high hopes for Suikoden III.

Here is a really cool idea: wind turbines that float in the ocean!

I put in about three hours or so on Suikoden III. I got to a point where I attempted to save and instead of saving the game at the save point it instead put me directly into a battle and killed me. It was the save point itself that triggered the battle! I call that “bad interface design.” That wasn’t fun and I lost a bit of time that I had put into the game. So I packed it up and called it a day.

Dominica had a similar video game adventure today although hers was much worse. She was playing King’s Quest 7 all morning and when she got part way through the fifth chapter (out of six) the game no longer works. Your character picks up a lit firecracker, then the game automatically saves and then you blow up. Any attempt to return to the game simply causes you to blow up immediately again! We did some research and it turns out that this is a known bug in the game that Vivendi just decided to ignore in the hopes that no one would ever actually play the game that far! The bug has been known about for years – years before they even released this particular package of the game. So there is no excuse for not fixing it at all.

We did some searching online and, of course, found tons of people having the same issues with the game. There were some online fixes but they ended up killing the entire installation of King’s Quest rather than fixing anything. So Dominica gave up on that game when she had almost managed to complete it! What a pain. Vivendi, a large French media conglomerate, is the worst video game company ever. Everything that they make is really cheap and shoddy. Vivendi is also the parent organization of Blizzard who is known for using their financial muscle to threaten their largest fan base. They have their lawyers threaten lawsuits that are clearly made up simply because the defendants don’t have the financial resources to fight the cases in court. I have been involved in the Blizzard boycott for a very long time and because of this have never even seen the game “World of Warcraft” being played let alone played it myself even though it has become something of a cultural phenomenon. Apparently I need to start making sure that Vivendi is not involved in any way in the products that I buy as they don’t stand by their products at all.

(Vivendi didn’t even bother to make an installation guide for Space Quest – instead they packaged a single piece of paper with the Space Quest CD that said how to install…. the King’s Quest Collection that had released several months before! The directions were even wrong as they were for a multi-disc installation and not a single disc installation like Space Quest! Talk about cheap. It was a single piece of paper printed on an office laserjet!)

So we decided to give up on our existing video game collection for the time being. We couldn’t decide what we wanted to do for the day so we decided to run out to Walmart and do some shopping. We are running low on bottled water as Oreo has to be on bottled water now too as the water in 1180 has kept having sediment in it from time to time and we just don’t trust it (we ran the laundry empty several times today to get the brown water out of it!)

At Walmart we picked up six gallons of water and a copy of Tales of Legendia for the PS2. Dominica wanted a jRPG of her own to play after having watched me play DQ8 all week. There wasn’t much of a selection at Walmart but I thought that I had heard that Tales of Legendia was pretty good and I have been interested in checking out the Tales series which is one of the five biggest Console RPG series in Japan.

We came home and decided to just order in some Chinese (cheese wontons and General Tso’s Bean Curd) and watch a little <em>Good Eats</em> with Alton Brown. After a few episodes involving a lot of cheese 🙂 we decided to really take it easy. So we loaded up Tales of Legendia and settled onto the loveseat. Dominica played the game while I just relaxed and followed along like a movie. Occasionally she would have me fill in in the “driver’s seat” while she made some sugar-free pudding or something. Oreo came over and joined us making the loveseat very, very full. We played for almost three hours before going to bed.

The End of Powered Telephones

I have long argued that the legacy telephone network was on its last leg. It no longer serves any real purpose. It is expensive both for end users and for the telephone companies. The quality of phone calls, in my personal experience, has been inconsistent and only on par with VoIP. I have heard many people make the argument that they are willing to pay the much higher fees for legacy, powered, copper based telephones because they provide the extra reliability of having their own power so that they continue to work even when the power goes out. A valid argument, I guess. This assumes that the power continues to be available for the phone which is often, but not always, the case when there is a power outage. And it also assumes that you are willing to pay those high fees instead of getting a nice Uninterruptible Power Supply for your VoIP which is just a one time cost of less than $100. A nice UPS could last through several days of having no power – long enough that you would want to have a generator anyway.

In this day and age when a huge percentage of the population uses only cell phones or VoIP phones or some combination thereof for their normal phone usage there is little argument for needing expensive legacy phones anymore. However, the option will soon be gone as Verizon (and presumably other last mile common carriers shortly) has begun to dismantle its last mile copper network as it rolls out it fibre based FIOS service. This is an obvious move as fibre has far less restrictions on it, delivers more services to the end users and saves money both in maintenance and in power consumption. Fibre is far better for the overall economy and the environment as it consumes vastly less electricity to support – as long as shared infrastructure regulations keep common carriers with access to the fibre infrastructure from monopolizing the market.

The Internet is taking over. The Public Shared Telephone Network (PSTN) is over. For many of us, it is a distant milepost in the rearview mirror. For some it is just an inevitable shift as the old copper system becomes too expensive to support. But one way or another, legacy telephones are done. The faster we move on the sooner we can deal with other challenges.

July 7, 2007: Really Completing Dragon Quest VIII

After completing Dragon Quest VIII last night and seeing the first ending I was determined that I was going to get to the end of this game today and find the true ending. The storyline was way too engaging to let it go without knowing the “truth” of the characters’ backgrounds and how they are supposed to wind up in the end.

I started playing early this morning. Dominica is very anxious too to see the end of the game as well. It was evident quite early on that this little “extra” bit of gameplay after the first ending is not simply a little “tack on” that they did to add a little something to the game. This is a serious extension to the main game with a LOT of setup going into it throughout the game.

During most of the day that I was playing DQ8 Dominica worked on King’s Quest VII which we recently got in the new King’s Quest Collection for Windows XP from Sierra (Vivendi.) She had wanted to play Space Quest but that collection (also from Sierra / Vivendi) is not installable – it simply throws an error and exits without giving you any way to do anything. Pretty unimpressive for an installer that just needs to unpack some cabs and put them in the right place. Nothing complicated at all. So she played King’s Quest VII all day because we were able to get that installed (this turns out to be an illusion as the game does not actually work and is unplayable – a known bug that Vivendi just left in assuming no one would actually play the game apparently – but we wouldn’t discover this until tomorrow.)

It took almost fifteen additional hours of gameplay to get to the real end of Dragon Quest VIII! I was just shy of one hundred and twenty hours on the game clock when all was said and done and there were sections of the game that I decided to just skip as they would not alter the ending! This is a seriously huge game.

It was almost bedtime when I finally reached the actual end of the game. Dominica came into the living room and joined me on the loveseat, along with Oreo who slept on my chest, while I, once again, defeated the final boss and then we watched the REAL hour long end of the game movie. This movie was much better and we were much happier with this ending. Much of the “loose ends” were tied up during the fifteen hours of extra game play so the movie only had to do so much differently that the first time through.

After one hundred and twenty hours I have to say that Dragon Quest VIII is possibly the best video game that I have ever played!