Category Archives: Computers

Understanding Video Games – Week 11 – Serious Games

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For the last week, they note that there are lots of types of games that are supposedly “serious” i.e. aimed at serious purposes. In the history, the longest running example are wargames, but there are also “tycoon” games that are about business simulations. However, the largest sub-genre are education games, such as the Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego. Over time, the educational starter series have moved into mobile apps, virtual environment, and training simulations.

Stepping back from the genre, I can see how they are dividing things. For example, there are:

– games used in instruction, where the game is an added medium (for processes or procedures); or,

– other games are used as a construction tool, and thus the game empowers the learning style of the individual student (explore and discover).

Games often have to walk a fine line between learning and fun/engagement, but while constructionist tools are often more “fun”, they are also ripe to be subverted by emergent play.

In order to keep players playing, games frequently use:

  • Decay (daily obligations and no way to pause);
  • Sweetening/achievements (the achievements are shared publicly to encourage competition);
  • Object rarity (often with luck and play time); and,
  • Social obligation/activation (gift-giving and reciprocity).

The last video is probably the launching point for future learning that interested me the most from the start — gamification. Namely, the idea of using ideas such as game mechanics in non-game situations. The course concludes with Qs about how to gamify the course — such as course badges, increase use of avatar creator, etc. but I had hoped for a bit more.

And with that, the MOOC finished.


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Understanding Video Games – Week 10 – Race

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The first video for the week notes that “colour” is frequently used as a way of showing race, even when it is two armies — one red, one blue. As you go through the next four videos, it is expanded to show how race is used to indicate “the other” — an opponent, for example. Some examples for the week include:

  • Choices may often reflect external racism i.e. “black dwarves” are more evil than light dwarves, often as proxies for more complex situations;
  • Race serves as the basis for conflict, and conflict can serve as the basis for a narrative arc;
  • What is present is as important as what is absent;
  • Default characteristics can serve as “indicator” of what a “normal” character should be;
  • Character race representations look at cultures and roles within games, including options around protagonist or antagonist roles;
  • Fighting games often include game mechanics framed through a racial lens to control player attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.);

It was an interesting summary, and I can see in many cases the detailed internal mechanics and choices that are presented as a basis for racial conversation. However, the initial premise — red vs. blue, or even white vs. black in chess — is a bit too stretched.


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Understanding Video Games – Week 9 – Sexuality

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Week 9 of the MOOC introduces the theme of sexuality and how it is explored in video games.

In video 1, they focus on the first games that introduced sexuality — adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Or how most of the text adventure games were relatively straightforward, yet Japan started introducing some sexual role-playing content with Night Life while America was still playing Kings Quest by Sierra. But mostly the video is about the development history of text games from basic parsers to added parsing, added exploration, added audio, added graphics, and expanded narrative arcs. It’s an okay start, but mostly it is just to give you the background so they can then talk about:

  1. The history of sex in gaming
  2. Five ways to imagine sex in gaming
  3. Role of women in the industry

The second video talks about the examples of how it is introduced:

  • marketers using sex to “sell” to generally single heterosexual males;
  • designers including sex content (Sierra’s Soft Porn Adventure and eventually Leisure Suit Larry);
  • exploration of gender through cyber-sex roles; and,
  • creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) as reactions to games with sex and/or violence.

Interestingly, while some of the big FPS games like Doom do have strong male markets, other games with bigger audiences — Myst, Sims, Farmvilles — have much bigger female markets. But those markets are often dismissed as not “real video games”.

The third, fourth and fifth videos introduce five ways sex and sexuality can appear in games:

a. Sex as an abstraction — namely as a simplified representation, to reduce explicitness, and to add rationality and linear logic for game play, with similar approaches to how it is done in film, literature and advertising;

b. Sex as a game goal — using lust as a motivation (such as an early strip poker game), and with little diversity in the target market (where the gamer objectifies and identifies with sexualized game characters, namely white men pursuing women);

c. Sex as a mechanic (part of design) — some games make the character’s sex irrelevant while others make it explicit, but not necessarily obviously (such as Super Mario Brothers 2 where the male characters are stronger and faster than Princess Peach who can float), but there are some other still who use sex and gender to create a sense of agency;

d. Sex as an aesthetic (part of gamer experience) — some games are heteronormative (with assumptions of inherent differences matching societal perceptions) in their gamer experience, and while important, there’s also the risk of objectification, such as is argued by Lara Croft’s outfits and proportion in the Tomb Raider series; and,

e. Sex as emergent gameplay — some players have imported outside constructions like online weddings into an MMO game, but this pales in comparison to Second Life (with sold services, toys and club memberships).

For the role of women in the industry, they note that women not only play games, they also critique and make games. And while 45% of gamers are female (although that stat includes a bunch of games that some gamers don’t really consider games at all), only 11% of production crew are women, which goes even lower when you exclude HR, admin, etc. and focus on engineering or designers.

Overall, it was a solid week, just not with much depth. In most places, it just lightly touches on the concepts. Which was disappointing. For example, I expected them to talk about Tomb Raider, and they did; however, they could use TR as an entire study in and of itself, with some pretty complex elements. They don’t even mention the agency aspect that you have a strong female character as the protagonist, smart, attractive, strong…a bad ass who makes Indiana Jones look wimpy. They only cover the superficial controversy, without much attention paid to the counter-argument (although they do mention the puzzle-solving aspects). Grumble, grumble.

I’m also disappointed with the timing of the original recording. But they recorded all their stuff (I think) before #GamerGate started (2014), and so there is no mention of it at all. They mention in passing that there are those who face some harassment online, but it is a throwaway line at most. Obviously if they were doing the same pieces now, GamerGate would likely figure prominently in a discussion of women in the industry.

In the meantime, two more weeks to go…

 


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#50by50 #29 – Make a photobook – Update

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A little over three weeks ago, I blogged about doing a Year-in-Review book on Shutterfly and submitting, then waiting. The book arrived, and as with a previous book by them, there are some parts that underwhelm. There are a few places where I feel like the printer colour ran a bit. Not enough in this case to send it back (I had the previous one reprinted), just enough to mildly notice.

I was also looking to do a Trip Book for the family trip to B.C. back in 2010. These ones are similar in size to the Year in Review ones, I like the 8.5×11 inches size in landscape mode, but they didn’t have to be identical. And after checking out a bunch of sites, I decided at the end of the post to go with one of Shoppers / Loblaws / Uniprix (they have the same interface software).

Except then I didn’t. I tried loading Costco, just to try it, and this time it worked. Perfectly fine. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Shutterfly, far fewer layouts and themes, or stickers, but still pretty solid. It was however a lot easier to see the full suite of what was available all at once than it is in Shutterfly, where the full list can quickly overwhelm you (20000 backgrounds????).

It is a bit harder to compare the books. The travel book is thinner than the Year ones, but overall, it turned out pretty well. I even found some of it simpler. I’m letting my wife figure out if there is a difference in quality before I do more. The timing with Costco is certainly far more controllable — printed in Canada, picked up in Canada, etc. I got it way faster than the Shutterfly book, and no printing glitches either. But I’d be hard pressed to say the quality of the covers is as solid. Nice, but not quite as good. I just don’t think I care about the difference enough to stay with Shutterfly. However, Shutterfly has some sweet deals regularly, and I don’t think Costco does. Not that I’ve seen so far, anyway.

But I’m happy with the Costco book, which is the bottom line.


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Understanding Video Games – Week 8 – Violence and video games

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I’m still plugging away on this MOOC. Week 8 of  “Understanding Video Games” (hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera) starts off talking about violence in early games, and begins with the old platform games (i.e. jumping to or swinging from platforms), ranging from Donkey Kong (static screens) through to Super Mario Brothers (scrolling), and on further into cinematic platform games. Even the cartoonish games attracted concerns of parental groups who wanted to limit ages or locations for arcades.

In the second video, the pair talk about blood and gore, and it’s long artistic roots in art as an aesthetic. They then move on to flagging the different interpretations — gory violence as nothing more than a video game “horror movie” experience; gory violence as a murder simulator; or merely a source of catharsis. Yet it is the same questions that have been posed of art, comic books and television too. In the end, violence can be seen as either gratuitous or as an ingredient to drive a narrative story arc (such as the need to resolve conflict or overcome strategic or tactical challenges).

The third and fourth videos focus on consequences and morality. As a starting point, they assume that there is feedback to all actions in a game, including violent ones, and then look at the cost or reward for committing violence acts, including:

  1. Punishment for attacking “non-player characters” (NPCs) such as Ultima III;
  2. Rewards for attacking NPCs (Crusaders);
  3. Mixed punishments and rewards with competing mechanics (Grand Theft Auto 3);
  4. Mixed mechanics where emergent play (setting your own goals) decides the reward or punishments; or,
  5. Complex mechanics of moral choices (such as avoid, talk their way out, bribe the NPCs, or fight) with differing narrative outcomes, or rewards (the “clean hands” achievement for finding a non-violent solution).

However, some games use “gating” techniques — i.e. you can’t get to the next area until you satisfy the previous area’s requirements in a specific way. In many of these games, there are no “pacifist” solutions. Usually this is the default option for any game that has a boss.

Watching the video, I was reminded of my first time playing Syphon Filter…there are two levels that are “gated”. In one, you have to kill terrorists to rescue hostages. And no matter what you try to do to stop the one bad guy, he would always end up killing the hostage and the level would reset. Unless you did one very specific thing — killed him with a sniper rifle shot to the head. No head shot, no advancement. A short while later in the game, another level required you to go through the whole level without setting off any alarms. But there were so many guards, the only way to get close to your objective was to repeatedly use head shots to eliminate bad guys. No head shots, no advancement.

The fifth video delves into the idea of the degree of photo-realism to the violence. I found it interesting the example of Mortal Kombat 2 — it was initially viewed as gratuitous violence, yet is now viewed as relatively over-the-top cartoonish violence. However, with increasingly realistic physics mechanics (destructible buildings, bullet trajectories, etc.), the immersive experience increases.

Which leads to the final video for the week, dealing with how academia has studied video game violence. It identifies three common threads in the discussion:

  1. Playing video games can cause desensitization to real violence;
  2. Playing causes players to act aggressively;
  3. The more graphic, the more likely they are to be aggressive.

The focus though is on two research questions — does it increase the likelihood of violence and/or decrease empathetic behaviour? The main approach in academia is to rely on social learning theory aka mimicry. The humanities may also look at political, moral, and cultural aspects of violence and video games. However, some academics identify multiple methodological problems with the research, such as:

  1. Ethical design issues;
  2. Choice of undergraduates as the sample guinea pig;
  3. Lax and flexible definitions of what actually constitutes violent and non-violent mechanics, and how to separate / isolate the violent parameter;
  4. Impossibility to test for real-life violent behaviour in an experiment; and,
  5. Journals have systemic biases towards publishing negative results.

Overall for the week’s videos, I expected more direct reference to situations like Columbine in the U.S. as one of the “hot button” examples that media pundits like to reference. I was also disappointed that they didn’t explore a bit more of the argument by some psychologists that video game play was not causal of aggression but more likely symptomatic of aggressive tendencies. In other words, aggressive people were likely to play violent games and commit violent acts, not as cause and effect but as a series of symptoms of their aggression.


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Articles I like: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats

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The WordPress security plugin, Wordfence, published a blog entry describing how one of its techs working on cracking malware goes about doing the various steps in a recent day, analysing and developing responses to specific threats.

While the post seems at first to be highly technical, it’s quite readable by the informed layperson, and quite interesting to see. It also dispels the cryptocurrency baitclick headline to note it could have been running anything off the site, it just happened to be doing CCs.

Even the opening approach is quite illuminating, seeing the real work of defenders, not the Hollywood version.

One of our sources of threat data at Defiant is cleaning hacked websites. In this case, Ivan, a member of our SST team had cleaned a hacked site and handed me the forensic data for analysis. The site had been hacked for months before the owner discovered that it had been compromised.

My normal routine is to start by verifying the files we already detect to check if there is any new information inside any of them. Usually there is not, and this infection did not yield any surprises in the files that Wordfence already detected.

What did surprise me is that the server had a large number of malicious files we have not seen before. The server had been infected for a long time, which may have left the attacker feeling confident enough to upload more valuable code. For us, a server with code we have not seen before is a treasure trove, because it immediately allows us to add new detection capability to the Wordfence malware scanner. If an attacker is caught in this situation, they generally have a bad day, because many of their files that may have previously been undetected by malware scanners will now be detected by our scan.

The first thing that made this attacker different from others is that, instead of using a standard javascript code obfuscator that just scrambles the code, they were using a finite wordlist to replace variable and function names in the code. When you look at the code, the variable and function names just seem like gibberish.

I immediately searched for other similar files out of the remaining samples and found several, then proceeded to write new signatures to detect those files. That accomplished, I moved on to the next file in the list. That was a basic PHP file that selectively redirects regular users, not search engines, to a malicious website. This is a standard thing we see, so I wrote a signature to detect this updated malware variant and moved on.

Source: WordPress: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats


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Oh, well, I was doing well on online guides until this one.

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I’ve had some decent success in recent days with reading online ebook guides from websites, and Vanilla Forums has one called Gamification for Online Communities. I’m not even going to bother linking to it as it doesn’t deserve the promotion.

I confess I have a small hidden agenda in reading it — I’m curious if they know what gaming is to start with or if they just decide it’s too obvious to define. The MOOC course studying games showed that isn’t an irrelevant question (Understanding Video Games – Week 7 – The culture of video games).

It starts off strong — a definition rooted in the academic study and scientific classification, namely that gamification is the “use of game thinking and game design elements in non-game contexts. These game mechanics are designed to shape a game’s dynamics (e.g., competitive behaviour) and emotions (e.g., anticipation) in order to engage players (e.g. users, customers, employees, voters).” It focuses on the application aspects to other areas and even goes further with a larger formal definition that recognizes point-scoring and rules as key elements. For the onboarding process, it uses examples about tracking completion progress and achievements, but doesn’t initially mention the need for “rewards” for those behaviours — without the reward, it’s just a to-do list.

After that, it moves into the aspects but I found the motivation elements less revealing. They talk about player types, and only identify 3, and then moves on to benefits of gamification. Except it doesn’t identify any. It says “let’s talk about what it can’t do”, and then doesn’t. It is completely empty fluff statements. It shifts gears into “how to implement gamification”, but really only jumps to some key performance indicators (KPIs) to know if people are using the site before and after you implement it.

At this point, I would be willing to toss the entire thing, but it’s only 33 pages so I kept going. The section on onboarding isn’t bad, pretty simplistic view, but okay. Another section talks about engagement, hopefully leading to entrenchment, before moving on to potential pitfalls.

Overall, I’d probably rate it about a 3/10 for content. But if you take into account typos, grammatical mistakes, and just plain spelling errors, I’ll downgrade to a 1/10.

Too bad, it started so strongly on the definition.


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An ebook guide to WordPress plugins worth reading

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I recently loved WP-Engine’s guide with Torque called “The Ultimate Pre-Launch Checklist for WordPress Websites“. So when they sent me a link for The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins, I was intrigued enough to click-through, sign up, get the ebook and start reading.

As with the Checklist, it is divided into multiple simple sections:

Marketing — Instagram, SEO, and Sitemap plugins were standard fare, but they also added lead generation, and contest plugins, most of which I would never use but I’ve also never even thought of them as categories that WP had in their repository.

Development and Design — Child themes, sliders, forms, and lightbox plugins are all standard fare, a good collection. I would have expected a bit more “getting started” plugins before those, but good choices. Typography and shortcode plugins though are really good additions, even if they are more “level 2 or 3” for people new to WordPress.

Monetization — I am not very interested in this area, but I liked they added simple things like PayPal integration, crowdfunding, and e-commerce in general, not just ad systems and affiliate links.

Media Plugins — I was really curious to see what they had listed, particularly just after I did my pic and video integration project. They have audio (not interested), graphs and charts (simple choices, but good), and two video plugins. Not awesome.

Customer Experience — Adding a knowledge base to your own site? I didn’t realize you could do that with a separate plugin, but okay. Translation plugins? Those are giant flags for me as automated translation is often a crapshoot. Live chat plugins, okay. Ratings plugins? Well, that’s a bit different to see. I don’t normally see those covered. And tooltips, whatever.

Security — basic security plugins and role managers? Hmm. I guess since the security packages tend to be all-in-one, I guess that makes sense. I was expecting a suite of smaller functional plugins.

Business Improvements — booking and calendar functions, looks decent. Could put that with customer experience though. Same with directory plugins. Invoice plugins…wouldn’t that go with your e-commerce area? Project management plugins…hmm, now there’s a question if that warrants it’s own item from the rest. Although it gets close to “running the business” to me, kind of like monetization too.

Site optimization — Often these look like snake-oil salespersons, but at least the ones mentioned are reputable. Don’t now how much good they do outside of large business sites. There’s also responsive design, mobile compatibility, etc.

And then the ubiquitous “other” category. But what a category. Plugins to embed games; holiday related plugins; map tools; real estate plugins — wait, what? that’s pretty specific; and comment plugins — why isn’t that with forms and ratings?

A pretty good list overall, and worth my time, even if a bit uneven in places and not as good as the previous guide they shared. I’ll double-check my game and wordsite options, good flags for me.


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A website guide worth reading

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If you’re reading this, you know that I have a website (the server waves “hello”, by the way). It’s just a personal site, but I’m closing in on a million words worth of posts, so that alone puts me above a number of personal sites out there where people blog for a while and then stop. Plus I’m a bit of a planner, so I approach my site a bit more formally than the “creative” types. (Also explains why it has such a boring layout but that’s another story!). Which quite often means that if I see guides and things designed for businesses that can be applied to my site too, I click, read them, and go to sleep hunting for acorns of truth in a sea of spam and superlatives.

So imagine my surprise when I click on one and find that I LOVE IT.

An organization called WP-Engine wrote “The Ultimate Pre-Launch Checklist for WordPress Websites“ and I thought it was interesting enough to click-through. Sure, I had to surrender my email and look like a business, which I am a bit, and then I got the e-guide. They have it broken down into several headings and I’m going to talk about each one.

Content — replacing dummy content (words, images, video, audio), and proofreading and formatting, and a contact page are standard, but I like the rest of the suggestions for reviewing — page links, downloadable files, 404 error pages (rarely done, mine is pretty minimal), and redirections (from old sites), which a LOT of people don’t do.

Design — I was surprised at this one, as I thought they were mostly going to talk about layouts and themes, but instead they were more on the technical (HTML and CSS validation, optimizing images, FavICONs, and linking header images) and usability testing (previewing in different browsers and platforms, including mobile). However, I didn’t even know you could set up a Print Stylesheet (I tend to just use PrintFriendly) and this may be something to look into as I would like to be able to quickly convert some of the posts into downloadable / printable sheets or PDF.

Functionality — This one looks more like simple usability testing to me, with web forms, auto responders, speeds, social media, RSS, and third-party tools. However, I really like their inclusion of “accessibility guidelines”. Often missed.

SEO — I really hate stuff written about Search Engine Optimization, normally at least. Almost all of it is “I can put your site at the top of the Google results list!” Actually nobody can do that. Not without bot farms and a bunch of shady methods. Real SEO is not about having the perfect design, it’s about content. Always has been, always will be. If you’re a company selling widgets, unless that widget is unique to you, the only way you’re going to the top of the list is if people like your product and search for it or click on links that link to you. An optimized site with crappy products won’t do anything compared to an okay site with great products. The guide has all the basics of meta data, titles, taglines, keywords, and add a site map. It’s a good list, I just wished it focused on the content more…for me, it is more like “don’t forget simple things you can do to avoid missed opportunities”. But it’s not presented egregiously, just one more thing to do.

Marketing — Ruh roh, my alarm bells started ringing. Web marketing tends to be like the classic line about advertising — 50% doesn’t work, we just don’t know which 50%. Except in web marketing, it is likely closer to 90% doesn’t work. And honestly, most of the materials on the net are “Oh, you want to do web marketing? Here’s my tool at $x per month that will make it EASY to GET THE BEST RESULTS on the PLANET, maybe EVEN THE UNIVERSE”. This guide? Nope, it just mentions newsletters, email providers, social icons, and social profiles. Nice.

Legal — Up until this point, I would say the guide is clearly in the top ten of all the ones I have ever seen. Then they do a section on Legal? Nobody does that. NOBODY. Seriously, I’ve never seen it even remotely mentioned in any guide. And I don’t just mean put a copyright notice. They talk about showing the company details — trustworthiness, efficacy, sure, but also mandatory for some jurisdictions, along with tax registration. Ensuring you have all the required licenses for images, fonts, code, plugins? Nobody tells companies to review that! Privacy policies are de rigueur now, so no surprise to include it. Terms and Conditions are good, although I saw a post this week about the readability of them and running it through a barometer of how dense it is. Even cookie warnings and local requirements are mentioned. Awesome. Way beyond anything one needs to do on a personal site, sure, but awesome.

The rest of the guide is equally awesome. Moving the site to a new server, preparing for launch, backup and security, and then the launch. All with decent steps covering the big-ticket items. It even concludes with a bunch of cleanup organizational items.

But if you’re not convinced by my descriptions above, here’s the kicker…wherever there is a popular related plugin in the WordPress repository, they say, “You could use x or y to do this for you.” If you go off and do that, they don’t get a royalty or anything. There’s no click-through to do that. It is just them mentioning it. And most of their recommendations are relatively obvious ones, but it’s what everyone is using. They’re not saying, “Here, try this little plugin that one of our members developed.”

It’s just a great guide. You may have to surrender your email and get a marketing offer for the company to see if you want to hire a WP expert, but the content is awesome.


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Articles I Like: The five ways we read online

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ThePassiveVoice shared an article about a paper from the Web Conference related to metrics for how people read online posts, news articles, etc.

Interesting developments on how they are developing metrics based not on the clickbait sites that spread an article over several click-through pages so they can load more ads, but just how you go through a single article on the page.

 

 

Grinberg was able to identify five types of reading behaviors: “Scan,” “Read,” “Read (long),” “Idle,” and “Shallow” (plus bounce backs, in the case that someone gets to a page and almost immediately leaves). Not surprisingly, different kinds of news sites see different kinds of reading behavior. On the sports site, for instance, “we see there is a lot of scanning. I think what’s going on there is a lot of people go to sports sites in order to find a result, like the outcome of a game, and don’t read the full thing. Another example that stood out is the how-to site, where we see that there’s more idling — people read an article, idle for a little bit, then continue. From looking at the articles themselves, it looks as if people are following instructions on how to do something in the real world.” On the magazine site, meanwhile, people really seemed to be reading for extended periods of time.

[…]

SIG can be useful for publishers, Grinberg says, because it ends up being highly predictive of how engaged someone will be with an article, and they should consider it along the other metrics tracked by companies like Chartbeat. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” he said. “The magazine site provided a lot of information up front, and people still engaged in long reading. In contrast, for sports and financial sites, it seems like withholding information at the beginning is associated with longer reads. But publishers could start looking at SIG as they make decisions about strategy and experiment with different story structures to see what works for their audience.”

Source: The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones) » Nieman Journalism Lab

Some of the advanced stuff looks highly subjective to me as legitimate calculations (basically trying to estimate how quickly an article gets to a specific point and where it is in the article), and would vary drastically by writer and subject matter, not to mention whether it is truly “news” or mostly filler. But interesting nevertheless…


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