My experience in the 2009 ICFP Programming Contest (part 1 of 2)

How hard of a problem could you solve in only three days? Who would you choose to help you do it?

The ICFP Programming Contest is an international programming competition organized in conjunction with the International Conference on Functional Programming, which is an annual academic conference about programming languages. Each year, teams from around the world compete in the ICFP contest to demonstrate the supremacy of their favorite programming language by solving a challenging problem over a 72-hour period.

The contest is organized by a different institution every time, typically a university, and the organizers work well in advance and sometimes take years to prepare the contest problem, which is kept secret until it’s time for the contest to begin. On the appointed day, which is usually a Friday in June or July, the organizers unveil an elaborate problem description on the Internet. When the problem is released — at a time that may be convenient or wildly inconvenient, depending on the difference between the organizers’ time zone and the time zone one’s team happens to be in — the teams go to work, using whatever tools they like to solve the task at hand. Past contests have challenged competitors to control a Mars rover that has to get to a home base while avoiding hostile aliens, design an ant colony capable of defending itself from invaders, and decode a string of letters resembling DNA (not coincidentally, the letters chosen for the bases were “I”, “C”, “F”, and “P”) and “resequence” it to draw a picture. The problems often include strange and hilarious twists, and the problem descriptions may be filled with in-jokes and cute asides.

Ahoy There! An Excellent Swashbuckling RPG!

A fanciful new RPG from the people who brought us Spirit of the Century

Opening Salvo

“Air pirates? AIR PIRATES!” I shouted with glee as I seized the Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies from the “Indie Press Role-Playing Games” section of my local comics/gaming store. Completely un-phased by the $30 I was about ready to fork over for a softcover, I ran to the cashier and exclaimed with elation: “You know you’ve finally got a tabletop RPG about air pirates?” He shot me a look back.
“Well, there was always Skyrealms of Jorune, Castle Falkenstein,” he said, tallying them on his fingers. “And we just got a new steampunk book in: Victoriana.” The wind still billowing my sails, I laid it down on the counter and said in my most gallant voice: “Avast! my good sir, for this one appears to be good.” And he took my money.

Preface

A few words of explanation are warranted before I dive into a thorough review of said book purchase.  First of all, why the heck was I looking for a book in the “Indie Press Role-Playing Games” section of the store anyway?  Well, it just so happens that I A) live in western Massachusetts, a kind of mini-Mecca for the budding independent role-playing game designer (give the proximity of New York and Boston and number of nerdly college grads in the area), and B) regularly run these people’s RPGs at local and national gaming conventions.  Having been a convention gamemaster (GM) for 16 years and counting, I’ve discovered that this is where all the action is happening these days. These games (by which I mean my Top 11: Primetime Adventures, InSpectres, Mist-Robed Gate, 1,001 Nights, Dread, Dogs in the Vineyard, Shock, Annalise, Misspent Youth, Tales of the Fisherman’s Wife, Shooting the Moon) are the best in system design, the most conscious of social exigencies involved in the role-playing hobby, and the most academically cross-referenced and critiqued.  Many are designed by women, and most by graduates of small liberal arts colleges.  All I have to say is: check them out.  They are the future.

Furthermore, I’d like to say for the record that I’m not really a pirates fan per se (otherwise I’d be reviewing 7th Sea here), but for some reason I really dig the idea of air pirates.  I attribute it to an unhealthy amount of Skies of Arcadia played and Last Exile viewed while I was in college, as well as a desperate urge to see a kind of Star Wars-style epic played out in skyships – as opposed to space in a galaxy far, far away controlled by an indifferent, bearded Lucas-man.

A Brief Summary

Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies (S7S), written by Chad Underkoffler (whom I think I met at Dreamation 2008, and who wrote some great Unknown Armies supplements), is a game of fast-paced, swashbuckling action set in a world where islands float in a vast sky over a mysterious substance called the Blue.  Players create characters intended to accomplish great feats of derring-do and, without much ado, dive headlong into dangerous situations for a chance at eternal glory.  The system is designed on the Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ) model, which is synonymous with quick task resolution and immediate character empowerment (as opposed to waiting sessions and sessions to become effective against the big, bad mega-villain, characters in S7S tend to be ready to take him on right out the gate).

It’s a Big Sky Out There

A full four chapters of this book are devoted to the dense setting of the 7 Skies, which ironically serves the primary purpose of catapulting characters into the action without bogging them down with too much back-story.  A kind of fantastical pseudo-18th Century world order is established among 6 primary sky islands and a plethora of secondary islands.  There are the intrigue-obsessed Barathi (more like 16th Century Italy under the Borges — noble houses and poison, etc.), the resolute Viridese (Nordic/Scandinavian-type folks), the passionate Colronan Royalty (France), their neighbors the aloof Colronan Zultanistas (Ottoman Turks), the cosmopolitan Crailese (think 19th Century New York with some religious nutjobs outside the city limits), the ascetic Sha Ka Ruq (a cross between the Congo and Japan — Orientalism meets Token Fetishism, but I digress), the rebellious Ilwuzi (a pirate isle in the Caribbean) and the lost island of Kroy (Atlantis… or Laputa).  Each nationality is basically an excuse to have a different flavor of sword-wielding badass, from a weapon-snapping, fur-wearing Viridese to a tough-talking, cutlass-bearing Ilwuzi and so forth.  Magic and skyships are smoothly integrated into a world system that is believable as a fantasy setting – Underkoffler did a great job of creating a world that’s basically one giant opportunity for adventure where one nevertheless knows what to expect in each port, so to speak.  Read enough of his Bibliography – with entries from Wu Ch’eng-en to Alexandre Dumas, from Neil Gaiman (Stardust, of course!) to Rafael Sabatini – and you will understand that the world exists to put crazily passionate people with swords at odds with each other in dangerous, exotic, and breathtakingly beautiful locales.

System, Shmystem

The PDQ system is also particularly well-executed in this book.  I played Spirit of the Century – another Evil Hat production and an RPG-geneaological predecessor to S7S that has you generate pulp characters who are starring in a number of cross-overs – and found it to be surprisingly difficult to master at first.  S7S, however, seems to have struck an enviably perfect balance between – using the terms of Ron Edwards’ Big Model theory – Setting Simulationism, Style Simulationism, and Narrativism.  “Whoa!” you say, reaching for your musket.  “Where’d all these landlubber ‘-isms’ blow into port from?”  In simpler terms, the game does a good job of A) giving players a deep and enriching established world to explore, B) allowing stylistic tropes from swashbuckling books/movies to become game mechanics (i.e., you can have your cape flapping in the wind give you game benefits), and C) encouraging creativity in the storytelling realm, as opposed to that of maximizing personal player power.  In S7S, if you succeed with your dice roll, you may narrate how you succeed.  If you fail, you get points toward giving your character an extra oomph in the future and can choose to narrate how they botched this job.  It allows for and encourages Princess Bride-style antics in the way that games like 7th Sea only vaguely dreamed about.

One of the nicer bits of the system is a comprehensive ship combat system that revolves around teamwork – a captain giving orders to a crew in the heat of battle – while preserving a dueling system that emphasizes the primacy of individual coolness.  Another is the Style Dice mechanic:  players get handed dice to use in their favor if the GM decides to screw them over rather nastily.  There is an economy established that notably resembles the narrative economy one witnesses in swashbuckling fiction.  All suffering becomes more pleasurable when the hero can take the sweeter reward in the end.

Why You Should Get This Game in Great Haste

Actually, you should be checking out all the RPGs I mentioned in my Preface:  they’re the games so many of us were waiting for as we hunkered down in our mediocre games of D&D and Shadowrun, waiting for some narrative control to be handed back to us.  Why you should go pick up a copy of S7S is simple:  few games are as accessible, intuitive and richly devoted to players’ creative well-being as this one.  Now I’m off to liberate a Crailese freighter of its most burdensome cargo!

The Top Eleven Old Skool Video Games in No Particular Order

In this Gilded Age of the motion-controlled Wii, the Internet-friendly X-Box 360, the mega-military hardware of the Playstation 3, the guitar and drum controllers, the upcoming Project Natal motion-capture controllers and all the rest, I find it somehow refreshing to delve into the “classics” on emulation (without needing to pay a cent by the way!)  See anything you haven’t played?  Now’s the time to become more gamer-literate!

1. Rampage (1986)

Play George (a.k.a. King-Kong), Lizzie (a.k.a. Godzilla), or Ralph (um… Fenris or Amarok?) as they destroy major metropolitan areas and eat human beings while being shot at by military forces.  I distinctly recall first learning of the existence of cities such as Duluth and Toledo through this game, as well as the lesson that most U.S. cities look pretty much the same when they’re being kicked to the ground by giant monsters.  Requiring almost no brainpower, yet fulfilling a deep-seated wish to be in control over the destruction of one’s own civilization, Rampage will remain a pick-up game for all ages for years to come.

2. X-Men – The Arcade Game (1992)

Back when I was growing up, the malls still had thriving video-game arcades with an assortment of quarter-eaters to waste my disposable income.  The best of these was a 6-player, 2-screen beat-em-up extravaganza starring none other than Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus, Storm, Nightcrawler and Dazzler.  Few people might understand the joy of being one of 6 pre-pubescent boys crowding around a set of sweaty joysticks and beating the living tar out of a giant pile of mooks that come at you on-screen.  I’ll be this one would still make money in any surviving arcades today.  Not too many 6-player games came after this one, after all…

3. Full Throttle (1995)

“You know what would look good on your nose?”

“What?”  *nose ring grabbed and slammed down on the bar*

“The bar. Now don’t mess around with me.”

Probably one of the best animated adventure games released for the PC, Full Throttle showcases the best of LucasArts’ SCUMM engine while offering a meaty array of bad jokes and crazy biker action (including a climax involving a chase between a bike, a semi and a wing-less cargo plane).  I find I can just sit someone down at the computer and play through it in about 2.5 hours… the length of a solid, well-made animated movie.

4. Maelstrom (1993)

Ambrosia Software certainly didn’t invent Asteroids – the 1979 Golden Age game that served as part of Atari’s main stable of games – but they certainly brought it into the 90s for the Macintosh user.  Chock full of Simpsons, Beatles and other pop cultural references in its soundtrack and brightly colored, 3-D-looking sprites, this game plays like a hyperactive stepchild who found the meth supply… in space.  Now if only they were to option this for a movie!

5. Maniac Mansion (1987)

Not to spend this whole blog singing LucasArts’ praises, but they did produce some damn fine adventure games.  A group of hapless teenagers are off to save their cheeleader friend Sandy from a sentient evil meteor and the weird family it has corrupted in a mansion filled with surprises.  Maniac Mansion adopts much of the crazy object-based logic puzzles inherent to the genre (“So I need to grab the faucet handle in the garage to turn on the shower to move the corpse to find the number I can call Nurse Edna with so I can get her out of the room so another kid can get up to the telescope and steal her money while they’re at it.”) but it self-referentially mocks its own silly set of errands often enough.  You can stick the hamster in the microwave in some versions!

6. Super Bomberman (1993)

Many nights I slept not a wink because of this Super Nintendo game’s excellence.  In Battle Mode, 4 players have two minutes to be the last one alive in a grid filled with bombs laid by you and your fellow players going off every which way.  A 30-second looping soundtrack amplifies the tension in ways you wouldn’t believe.  Most of its sequels are actually not as good as this original, a fact for which I cannot account.

7. Cyborg Justice (1993)

1993 must’ve been a good year for video games in my mind… This Sega Genesis beat-em-up features a combination of excellent sprite graphics and over-the-top ultra-violence (i.e., you can rip off an opponent’s arm and use it as your own).  You’re a cyborg and you’re seeking, well, justice!  It’s too bad that Sega was never able to keep up with the other franchises – their game design was always above-par.

8. Return to Zork (1993)

‘93 also saw Activision’s great adventure game release Return to Zork, which pre-dated Myst by several months and involved a much more interactive environment than said game.  In any given room, you can do like 50 things involving various objects you’ve picked up, etc.  What I really enjoy about this is the Neil Gaiman-esque dark fairy tale plot and the video-captured actors whom you can all kill if you get frustrated (and then you’re told by a guy in a funny coat that you can’t complete the game!)

9. XCom (1993)

Speaking of 1993, there was a turn-based strategy game for the PC produced by MicroProse that knocked our socks off.  In XCom, aliens have invaded Earth and you’re part of a worldwide task force sent to kick their ass.  The game features a sophisticated tactical engine copied by games like Fallout and later games like Freedom Force.  I watched fellow college students piss away whole semesters on this thing…

10. Marathon (1994)

So you’ve played Halo, right?  Let’s call it “Marathon 4″ and be done with it.  Marathon brought all kinds of innovation to the first-person shooter table:  network multi-player, a flexible map and sprite editor, and an intricate plotline of an almost literary quality.  You play a marine dispatched to a multi-generational colony ship that is under alien attack and has multiple AIs also vying for control of your activities.  We used to haul computers over to each other’s houses just for the opportunity to kill each other on maps we had created.

11. Hunt the Wumpus (1973)

The scariest game ever. You’re hunting a goddamn wumpus with these crooked arrows, and if you miss, it’ll come and eat you.  It fills your screen with its awful face.  I played this on my Commodore back when I was like 6, only to discover that the labyrinth is a cruel place.  The psychological environment of this deceptively simple game still gets me every time.

In summary, 1993 may have been a pivotal year in game development history – self-conscious, impressively addictive games made their appearance around that time.  But at least in 2009, we can still revisit all of these classics! After all, all our culture is nostalgia.

The problems of the Kindle

Ah Kindle, how the literati hate you, or sing your praises. Two years ago, when the first version was released, Dana posted about them and I made my feelings clear in the comments section. Well, it’s been a few year and we now have Kindle 2.0. My feelings haven softened, but not really changed.

I do not really want a Kindle at the moment for a few reason:

1. They are expensive. Do you know how many books I can buy with that money?

2. There’s not (yet) a mechanism yet for sharing Kindle books. If I buy a Kindle book, I can’t loan it to my friends and I can’t check out a Kindle book from the library. (I can check out other e-books from the library–can I read these on my Kindle? I don’t know. Do you?)

3. I fear reading a Kindle in the bathtub, which is the best place to read books ever.

4. Books smell good. And they’re pretty as objects.

5. Do they have an optional back light yet? While I do like that there isn’t one there by default, it would nice to have one so you can read in the dark.

6. Seriously dude, expensive.

I think some of these objections will fall away with later versions– price will fall, I’m sure we’ll figure lending out…

BUT! Over at Marginal Revolution today, another problem presents itself that I never thought of–

We can’t see what you’re reading, and you can’t signal things with what you’re reading.

The apparent difficulty of genre classification

Or: The utility of occasionally judging books by their covers

My nearest local library recently closed for an 18-month renovation project, leaving me with a sudden distressing lack of access to fiction I hadn’t already read. (Not that I’m averse to rereading books, since my policy is not to buy it if I don’t want to read it more than once, but sometimes I do want something new.) The solution was obvious: place an Amazon order.

I was quite pleased with my Amazon order. I ended up with books from 3 new fantasy/sci-fi/speculative fiction series, all of which turned out to be good. Two of them had similar themes: a female main character mediating between members of different supernatural races. This would seem to put them definitively in the fantasy category, urban fantasy if you want to be even more specific. One series, the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, has three books so far that all follow a murder mystery storyline, which the main character ends up needing to solve for the werewolf, vampire, and fae communities respectively. The other series, the Negotiator Trilogy by CE Murphy, is more like Law & Order meets the supernatural realm, because the main character is a lawyer with a strong tie to the police detective who inevitably ends up investigating all the crimes involving the gargoyles, vampires, and so forth that the lawyer is trying to negotiate with.

But this post is not actually meant to be a book review. This post is meant to be a rant. Because what did purchasing these books from Amazon cause to happen? It caused me to get an Amazon ad in my email telling me that based on my purchasing habits, they think it is clear that I would enjoy the following titles on the vampire romance theme. Their algorithm tells them that I am now a woman who reads vampire romances. And I object.

Beyond Reading

Last Summer, I did a light post about how much people are reading.

I’ve been reading a lot of reading reports lately, and a lot of press about the reports. The press is depressing, the actual reports don’t paint nearly as dire a picture and I’m working on a post about that later.

A few key things caught my eye today. According to a new report put out by Scholastic Publishing, kids who are high-frequency internet users are more likely to also be high-frequency readers (going online once a day but also reading for fun once a day). Also, 64% of online users ages 9-17 say they participate in activities that extend the reading experience when online.

AND HOW.

Cell Phone Dependency

An interesting and frightening thing happened this weekend. My brother lost his cell phone. Or rather, my brother lost his cell phone, failed to show up at two or three places he said he was going to be, and no one heard from him for nearly three days.

As it turns out, it had fallen out of his pocket in someone else’s car and then had the battery die, so the other person was driving it around for a couple of days all unsuspecting. And he didn’t show up at his previously scheduled events because the Clinton campaign* called the restaurant where he works at the last minute to schedule a huge dinner, which he then got roped into working even though he was supposed to be off that day, and he couldn’t tell anyone because he didn’t have his phone.

But the whole thing was kind of scary, because it made me realize I have no other way to reach him. I sort of kind of have an email address for him, but I’m never sure if it’s the address he’s still using any more, because he’s not much of an emailer. (At least, not to his geeky sister.) Since he works at a restaurant, he doesn’t really have a “work phone,” (though my parents did go to the restaurant and leave him a physical note-style message when they got a call from the person who did have the phone.) I don’t know the phone numbers of any of his friends. Conversely, I suspect he doesn’t know my phone number without looking it up in his own phone. Hence, the loss of his cell phone pretty much meant that my brother fell off the face of the earth.

Assassin’s Creed – A gamer’s perspective

Some of you might be surprised to see me posting about my thoughts of this particular game today. Truth be told, I bought the game months ago when it first came out. I was looking forward to the game so much I actually pre-ordered it. I began playing the game the day it was released. In large part, the delay is due to my struggle to experience the game in its entirety and then to decide what exactly I had to say about it.

It’s not that I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoyed the game or not. To the contrary, I was immediately certain that I loved it, and no part of my continued play could convince me otherwise. The game was hugely enjoyable. Every time I set my X-Box controller down I found myself looking forward to the next time I would be able to play the game.

I think, overall, that my trouble was that the game was considerably different from any other game I’d ever played. Many video games are simply variations on the theme of other games I’ve played in the past. Those games can be very good even if they’re not entirely innovative. While Assassin’s Creed certainly was reminiscent of certain other games I’ve played, it confounded my expectations, and required me to do a lot more thinking before I could clearly articulate my experience with it.

Geek Buffet Not One of World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs

Sadly, we didn’t make the cut. Nor did any of the blogs our array of authors contribute to or edit. We didn’t get a Bloggie either — heck, we weren’t even nominated! Are we doing something wrong, internet? Apparently our “master plan” to build one of the world’s most powerful blogs is going nowhere, fast.

Actually, we don’t have a “master plan.” (Breathe your sigh of relief here.) Not having said plan makes it that much easier to accept the rejection — or charitably, ignorance — of the real movers and shakers, I suppose. Schadenfreude at the collective weakness of the majority of blogs I read doesn’t hurt either.

I was put in the position last week of having to explain what separated a blog from a website, and further, why a freshly minted travel community should consider having its own regular blog entries rather than relying solely on user-produced content. I gave the example of a blog I frequent — a company which makes money by facilitating budget-friendly hotel bookings for places they’ve culled and authentically recommend. While I’m generally not in the market for their services, I continue to read their daily updates. The benefit to them: regular traffic to their site, their address at the forefront of my brain should I need a cheap hotel, potential commission; the benefit to me: interesting, fresh content, a useful service (booking ease, reliability of product) when I’m in the market. Were there no blog, I would have visited their page once and forgotten the address long ago. Besides providing me with interesting news, insights and ideas, the blog produces a positive returns for the business straightforwardly and inexpensively. Seems like a no-brainer.

They followed up with a more difficult question I’m still deconstructing: would you still be reading that blog if you didn’t blog on that topic?

Project Sylpheed – A gamer’s perspective

Usually when I buy a video game, I pick up something that I’ve carefully explored in advance. I read reviews, watch videos of the game being played, and perhaps even download a demo of the game to play on my computer or a game console. In this sense, Project Sylpheed was different. I was in my local Best Buy to pick up something else, and happened to see it while walking past the video games. I had recently finished the a game, and didn’t have anything new to play at the time, so I bought it on a whim.

The game describes itself as a “space saga.” I would describe it as a combat flight simulator. You fly a small space fighter, engaging in dogfights against other space fighters and larger capital ships. There is a very simple economic system built into the game by which you earn points based on how well you do on each mission which you can then spend to get access to better weapons and equipment for your fighter. The game also allows you to start over from the beginning after you beat it, but to keep all of the equipment you earned the first time through, and to continue to earn points in order to further expand your gear.

As a combat flight simulator, the game is exactly the sort of highly engaging, mindless entertainment you might expect from the cover art. The game doesn’t require a lot of thinking. You can more or less point your craft at the enemy of your choice and hold down the button until your weapons lock on, then let go of the button to fire a swarm of dozens of guided weapons at them while you turn your attention to something else. The game also does its best to provide an engaging storyline, but this is an area in which it tends to fall short.