Atlas · Gaming and Media · 10 entries
Gaming and Media
Being a gamer made me who I am today. My game, Wyvern, which I started in 1995, is what got me into programming language design, which led to blogging. Wyvern is also what got me hired at Amazon. They were amazed by it. And it's what got me hired at Google, too. They considered Wyvern to be overwhelming evidence to support hiring me in spite of some shaky interview performances (and some great ones!)
It's hard to write essays for 20 years without some digressions and diversions. These are the articles, posts, and essays that strayed into the games I was playing and media I was consuming at the time.
I know not everyone's a gamer. But spending time building games will absolutely turn you into a better programmer, no matter who you are. Game programming challenges you to extract the utmost from your hardware and software. Creating games exercises virtually every corner of computer science and software engineering. So I feel it's a good adjacency to my normal blogging fare.
- ★ Essentials
- 👍 Good read
- 💩 Not worth it
- 🤓 Language nerd
- 😄 Humor
- 📚 Story / fiction
- 🕹️ Gaming
- 🔮 Called it
- 🤡 Whiffed it
Gaming
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2016
The Monkey and the Apple
The post that broke a two-year blog silence. Opens with a deadpan husband-and-wife conversation about a rogue Wyvern pet monkey, then expands into a tour of mobile development circa 2016 — iOS vs. Android, Apple's App Store review process, Google Cloud Platform's early roughness, and a quiet endorsement of Kotlin as the future of the JVM.
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2012
The Borderlands 2 Gun Discarders Club
Borderlands 2 produces 87 bazillion guns and then gives you room to keep about twelve — so the collecting economy that made the first game work collapses. Steve's diagnosis: Gearbox built a gun-collector's game without building a way to collect guns. The fix a programmer reaches for instinctively is a database. A sequel that proves the first essay's design argument by watching a studio get it wrong.
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2012
The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club
Borderlands kept people grinding for years after release, and Steve uses it to lay out the Magic Recipe for addiction. Fun is not enough. What keeps people playing is a token economy — scored, rankable, rare, collectible tokens, with display cases to show them off and stack-ranking to make them sting. A design essay smuggled inside two thousand lines of enthusiast review, and early on gamification.
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2008
Fable II: Arguably Better than Getting Your Head Crapped On
Steve structures his takedown of Fable II as numbered Lowlights and Highlights — and runs out of good things to say at Highlight #8, which he lists anyway as another Lowlight. His point: a game can be flawless in engineering, art, and sound and still be ruined by juvenile, tasteless creative direction. Craft cannot save bad taste. The one thing he genuinely loved was the loyal in-game dog.
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2008
A Programmer's View of the Universe, Part 2: Mario Kart
Mario Kart's invisible track boundary as the cleanest example of what Steve calls the One-Way Wall — the kind of boundary that lets you see across it, but not reason past it. The essay's claim is that this is the most important concept in embedded-systems thinking and we have no name for it.
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2008
The Bellic School of Management Training
A violent crime game described in the bland, approving register of a corporate-training press release. The final mission — execute a begging man, or let him walk — is "obviously a metaphor" for putting an employee on a performance plan. Steve files it all as professional development and declares himself a Certified Expert Dev Manager. Then the piece drifts, sincerely, into a lament that nobody remakes the great old games.
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2008
Four console games you might like…
Capsule reviews of four games Steve had played since his Oblivion review a year earlier. He plays maybe a handful of games a year, so when he writes a games post it is because the games actually moved him.
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2006
Oblivion
The game is gorgeous, the crashes are frequent ("Autosave successful."), the NPCs are uglier and more inbred-looking than the countryside deserves, the voice acting is amazing but performed by maybe four people total, and the monster AI is genuinely great — well enough to chase Steve out of dungeons and into town, where Imperial Guards then have to fight them off. The piece is also an early case for what good games are about — not graphics, not plot, but a world that keeps doing things even when you stop looking at it.
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2004
A Software Fable
Steve treats Fable as the excuse to inventory all the roles that exist in games and don't exist at Amazon — producers, directors, voice actors, motion-capture actors, the army of trained-but-unemployed 3D artists — and to tell stories (second-hand, via a friend at EA) about the producer-driven always-in-demo-mode game-engine treadmill. The second half is the part that earns it a place in the Drunken canon: the argument that no one in software engineering has ever agreed on a calibration system because they have all overlooked the only one everyone already understands, which is the D&D level.
Media
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2006
Anime for the Nonplussed
Steve and his wife Linh watched Spirited Away, then everything Miyazaki, then asked a 19-year-old at Suncoast for a recommendation, and twelve months and roughly 150 DVDs later Steve is delivering a Top 10 list: Haibane Renmei, Last Exile, Fullmetal Alchemist, Twelve Kingdoms, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Scrapped Princess, Witch Hunter Robin, Wolf's Rain, Gunslinger Girl, Gankutsuou. No thesis, no industry argument, no programming. Just the obsessive consumer's report, with a Jeff Bezos digression in the middle on why Amazon stopped trying to be the world's biggest book/music/video retailer.
