Word Warp

Over the holiday break my husband and I became total addicts of a simple anagram game for the iPhone called Word Warp. Believe me, we had plenty of high tech gaming options, but we spent long, happy hours huddled around the iPhone, dreading the moment when we would fail to find the six-letter word that separated us from moving on to the next level, or Game Over. Although the game had options to extend our time limit, we kept to a strict two-minute timer. Our best game ever spanned two days (even addicts have to pause to eat and sleep), and we scored a whopping 51,680 points!

Word Warp is generally pretty good about making sure the all-important, six-letter word is vocabulary the average person would know. But we did discover a set of little three-letter words that we had never heard of before- and they came up over and over again.. We memorized these three-letter oddities, and it wasn't long before we had to know what they meant. Often these rare words were the names of birds or fish- not super interesting. But here were some of our favorite obscurities, a few of which have begun to come up in our everyday conversations:

ted- to spread out to dry (as in damp straw to dry for animal bedding)
ret- to soak to loosen the fibers of fibrous materials
ort- a morsel or scrap of leftover food
lea- meadow, pasture

A lot of these older, out-of-use words are related to farm life. But who among us never has some orts to scrape off the plate before loading it in the dishwasher? It's fun to get some use out of these old, three-letter gems.

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime

Where we're working in a mine
For our robot overlords
Did I say "overlords"? I meant "protectors"

-Jonathan Coulton

You may already know Jonathan Coulton from his famous song "Still Alive" at the end of the Orange Box video game. Or you may know "Code Monkey," theme song for the animated TV show of the same name. If you don't know Coulton, let me introduce you. He's a real treat for spec fiction fans and music fans, alike.

Coulton writes decent melodies and has a decent voice. But I wouldn't be blogging about him if it weren't for his lyrics, because the lyrics are where he really shines. I can listen to his songs over and over, because the disarming tunes do such a fantastic job of highlighting the lyrics- most of which never fail to make me laugh. Coulton writes songs about being a programmer, being a husband, and the drudgery of office life. But sometimes he puts a fun spec fictional twist to the tune, as in "Chiron Beta Prime" and, my personal favorite Coulton song, "Re: Your Brains," in which a zombie supervisor attempts to negotiate with the surviving human workers barricaded inside their office building.

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime!

Find the lost ring

The ARG, or alternate reality game, is a new interactive way of telling stories that became popular with the I Love Bees ARG promoting the release of Halo2. Now the producer of I Love Bees has set another ARG in motion, this one called The Lost Ring.

A look around The Lost Ring website reminds me of a series of mystery puzzle game books I enjoyed years ago. Those books were filled with photographs of newspaper clippings, theater tickets, bloody handkerchiefs, and other random clues which, with the help of disjoint textual description, the reader had to organize and use to solve the mystery. The Lost Ring site is the HTML version of those old puzzle books- which means that you can zoom in on the photos and scraps of paper, and nearly all the clues are linked to other clues, or to web pages that contain further information. Many of these links take you to "real world" websites, so that an ARG character tells some of his or her story on his blog, Flikr page, or has uploaded You Tube videos related to the game.

But The Lost Ring is more than an evolved You-Solve-It mystery book. The game is well-endowed with ARG hallmarks- a spec fictional story element, timeliness that makes the story feel live and relevant, tied to the time in which it is played, and interactivity that connects players of the game.

A sense of the spec fictional is conveyed through a combination of the mystical-historical with the scientific, an aesthetic you can grasp by the images on the clues (owls, old statues, brain scans). The sense of timeliness was created by linking the story to the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China. This sense of timeliness makes the story experience unique- something that only makes sense to participate in during the spring and summer of 2008.

The element of The Lost Ring that first caught my attention was its use of Esperanto. In the opening video trailer for the game, I noticed a mysterious tattoo that read "Trovu la ringon perditan" (Find the lost ring). Many of the clues are written in Esperanto. In addition, the six main characters in the story speak six different languages! This adds an interesting layer to the interactive element of the game. Since it is unlikely the average participant can speak Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, German, French, Portuguese, and English, cooperation between players of different national and linguistic backgrounds is essential to unlocking the mystery.

ARGs already have a history of interactivity- people meeting at phone booths to receive an important clue, participants blogging, creating wikis, and working together to solve the puzzles. The Lost Ring has taken that interactivity one step farther. By encouraging interaction between people of different cultures, The Lost Ring becomes more than a game, more than a story. It's becoming a global event.

The King of Kong and the Art of Conflict

I was less than thrilled when my husband announced that our movie night featured a documentary about video games. The documentary would cover two gamers fighting for the record high score in the original arcade classic, Donkey Kong.

The King of Kong turned out to be an engaging and memorable story, one that generated a lot of conversation and speculation after the film, and that days later is still on my mind. Given that I am not a classic video game fanatic, why did I get so excited about this documentary?

The King of Kong used conflict as the combustion engine of its story telling machine. But this conflict was made even more interesting by using three techniques:

1) The makers of the documentary clearly picked a "hero" and a "villain." As a viewer, I was rooting for the newcomer on the arcade gaming scene, Steve Wiebe, to overtake Billy Mitchell's long-standing high score record. Mitchell's machinations to preserve his record and shun Wiebe's acceptance to the arcade gaming community, made me feel that Steve Wiebe was a hard-working, genuinely nice guy, and that Billy Mitchell was a jerk.

2) Although they had clearly sided with Wiebe, the makers of the documentary left one niggling doubt about Wiebe's integrity. They also kept the conflict balanced by demonstrating that Mitchell was an extremely skilled gamer, and by including a sub-plot (coaching an elderly Q*Bert champ), in which Mitchell could show his human side.

3) Walter Day, the arbiter of the conflict (who was shown throughout most of the documentary in a black and white referee costume), faced trying to balance fairness to Wiebe and loyalty to Mitchell. Day's difficult emotional journey showed that successful resolution of the conflict was vital to more than just the contestants.

These techniques kept me engaged in the conflict and rooting for the hero. At the same time, I was intrigued by the possibility that Mitchell might have some honest (or at least not so blatantly self-serving) motivation for shunning Wiebe. I was also intrigued to watch Day's journey, as he made mistakes, agonized, then tried to live up to his pledge of integrity.

Anda's Game

Anda's got a bit too much podge, she hates PE, and she loves sweeties and her online RPG. There's nothing particularly futuristic about this British teen, the protagonist of the third tale in Cory Doctorow's Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, until her passion for her favorite game gets her into more than one kind of trouble.

"Anda's Game" was a lot of fun to read. Doctorow is to be praised for the use of such phrases as "sensible boobs" and characters like "Liza the Organiza." Anda's voice is realistic- sweet, but sometimes greedy, depressed, bored. Anda's round character showcases Doctorow's ability to actually get inside a twelve-year-old girl's head. The plot is engaging, and leads logically down a path that brings Anda and the reader to a genuine dilemma.

In his forward to the story, Doctorow goes into great detail about what inspired him to write "Anda's Game." Thumbing his nose at the misnomer that titles can be copyrighted inspired the title. The practice of gold farming gave him the idea for the plot. What Doctorow fails to mention is where he got the idea that female role-playing gamers were better than males. This assumption is the only element of the story that I didn't find plausible.

Doctorow cites some believable reasons why girls aren't as avid gamers as their male counterparts, including avatars that make them "perv-magnets," taking crap from boys, and gamespace that "smells like a boy's armpit." Where he loses is me is the premise that female gamers are better than male gamers. Just as good, could be. But better?

Doctorow's feminist RPG queen, Liza the Organiza, claims that girls are "faster, stronger, and better than boys." Let's just say this is Liza's opinion, not Doctorow's. But later, when Liza says that girls' cooperative spirit makes them better fighters than boys, I really got the feeling Doctorow shared her opinion. Indeed, important events of the story were tied to the way the girls in game cooperated.

I've observed a lot male gamers playing online MUDs, RPGs and XBOX Live Arcade games. Say what you will about these fella's armpits- the spirit of cooperation is strong with them. Listen in to the audio chat channels during play. You'll hear guys of all ages from all over the USA (and in some cases the world), guys who have never even met each other, spontaneously working together to achieve a team goal. You'll hear them sharing the spoils of war, covering each other's backs, and teaching inexperienced players the ropes. It's beautiful, in a kind of smelly guy way.

I don't think girls are going to edge out male gamers based on spirit of cooperation.