Drossy

The Reluctant Gardener

I’ve never been the most green-fingered individual – I once managed to overwater some cress I grew in a margerine tub in playgroup, but having become the owner of a two bed terraced house I now find myself with just shy of eighty square metres of garden.

So now I have to decide what to do with it.

Firstly, the grass, or more accurately the “grass” as it really seems more moss and weeds than grass right now.

However I’ve just dumped a box of moss and weed killer on to it so we’ll see where we are in the next few weeks.

What else? Well the apple tree in front of the shed looks a bit forlorn and I suspect is never going to get enough sun to actually grow straight – so its going to go. Also, the large bush on the left of the first photo does an impressive job of both blocking late afternoon sun and hiding a much brighter, more interesting shrub – at least at the moment, from the view from the house, so its a candidate for removal too.

There’s some other smallish bits of work too – the borders are not really well defined, so they need dug and forked over. Mostly though, I think I’m going to leave things as they are and see how things get on – I’m not really looking for a high maintenance garden, so let’s do get some survival of the fittest going on here.

I would like to add a new bush or possibly a trellis on the left, back towards the shed to block out the bare concrete next to the shed – this will likely mean that the raised bed is also going to have to go too, plus I’m thinking of reusing some of the spare patio slabs by the shed to make a path from the edge of the lawn to the shed door.

But of course, all this takes time…

GLQuake

My first PC was a Pentium 166MMX, bought with the proceeds gained from a savings account in a building society turned bank between my first and second years of university, circa 1997.

This was right around the time of Quake, and while I definitely liked it, I can’t say that it had made a particularly huge impression on me.

That is, until I saw GLQuake.

My PC had a STB Nitro 3D video card which could render GLQuake, though attempting to move was painfully slow, but oh did it look good – the resolution was doubled in both dimensions leading to much smoother images.

I had pure, unadulterated technolust and I had it bad. One hike to the dodgy computer hardware shop out in the west end of Edinburgh and I had my sweaty paws on a 3dfx Voodoo 1. GLQuake was mine and it was good.

When various friends saw how good it looked and ran, they went out and bought their own 3D cards and so in my own small way, I contributed to the headlong rush towards 3d acceleration.

What goes around comes around though, so now part of my day job is managing a compute cluster comprising hundreds of GPGPU cards which have a lineage back to those original Voodoo 1 cards, because a very bright spark realised that those 3d cards for gaming were really good at performing matrix maths which underpins a host of scientific computing algorithms.

Beyond the constrained system

Ian Bogost gave a thought provoking presentation on “Fun” at UXWeek 2013, where he defined it as “the feeling of deliberately operating a constrained system”. And while this certainly struck a chord with me, with its sense of exploring and discovering the boundaries and reactions of the system to my actions that is inherent to a lot of games, I felt it perhaps excluded or overly simplified a number of activites in gaming, where there is a step beyond this definition.

The first is obviously that some people don’t merely operate the constrained system, they in master every subtle nuance – the best examples are the e-sports communities, where RTS players’ actions per second are vaunted and where pulling off moves in fighting games rely on split second timing to ensure that the move occurs at exactly the single animation frame it needs to to take effect.

Closely related to this is pushing the boundaries of the system, exploiting the underlying mechanics – holding a particular weapon in an FPS to move faster, the entire subgenre of speedruns and less positively; griefing.

Finally there is extending the system through mods – a browse through any forum for a game with a strong modding community, will inevitably encounter multiple definitive lists of mods which, the authors maintain, the game cannnot be played without. They have reached a stage where operating the original system has lost its lustre, so to recapture the fun, have moved to a related but different system and cannot contemplate moving back.

I’ve felt this myself most recently playing Kerbal Space Program. KSP is a game where you build rockets to launch little green men into space to explore their galaxy. Its a really excellent game and even educational about orbital mechanics and rocketry (a mission pack in collaboration with NASA has been announced) and I thoroughly reccomend it.

KSP started off with only its sandbox mode where players were free to build their own elaborate rockets without any limitations, in recent updates it has introduced a tech tree, limiting access to certain components until suffcient research is done. I had been an avid player of the sandbox mode and had installed a number of mods but when attempting to play using the tech-tree, bounced off it. I felt too limited by the restricted selection of components available at the outset and soon went back to the original sandbox mode. Had I been new to it, I think the tech-tree could have worked as an good introduction and tutorial, drip-feeding new components to keep things fresh, but as I was already familiar with them, this was less appealing to me.

Perhaps when I’ve fully explored all the planets and moons and am seeking a new challenge, I’ll revisit the tech-tree mode, but it will have to wait as my first manned flight to another planet is on final approach…

Lamenting the loss of wonder in buying games

When I were a lad and this was nowt but fields, a visit to the nearest shop that sold computer games was a rare and treasured occurrence. Partly this was because my parents had an unerring ability to live in some of the dullest places imaginable, but also because in those pre-internet days, there was always this sense of the unknown when venturing into the hallowed halls of former high street stalwarts such as Virgin Megastore or John Menzies (Scottish equivalent to WHSmiths).

The continual deluge of content we can immerse ourselves in nowadays from official forums to fan blogs couldn’t even be conceived of in those days, where most info about new games came from a monthly magazine and where going all out on your marketing was taking out a two page spread for your advertisement. This meant that there was always an element of surprise and wonder when going games shopping – you’d never quite know what was going to be there, whether you’d encounter a sequel to a cherished favourite you’d never realised existed, or find a new gem to while away the hours.

Fast forward to today : the release schedule is known months in advance, carefully selected tidbits to whet the appetite are doled out according to a carefully plotted marketing strategy to ensure excitement is maximised just before launch and we’ve been saturated in enough trailers and frame by frame analysis to glean the smallest insight. But all of this means that before I wander into the nearest game store or even supermarket, I have a pretty good idea of what will be there and whether I want to buy it – the element of surprise has gone.

Some of this is undoubtedly nostalgia, and my growing cynicism as I get older, but I think we’ve lost something somehow, that joy and wonder and excitement of a new game, any new game. We’re so saturated with content that the pleasure of discovery has been taken from us. Perhaps its inevitable with the increasing budgets for the top titles – to stand any chance of recouping their costs they have to get the message out far and wide, but this has led to an increasing cynicism amongst gamers and we’ve lost our innocence somewhere. Maybe the change is so stark to me because it has happened in my lifetime – gaming is an industry that has grown up with its adherents.

I don’t have a fix for this, but when I think back to the simple joy I felt when I bought a new game, the sheer excitement of taking it home, carefully opening it and the first play and compare it to the guilt I feel when looking at the list of games sitting unplayed in my Steam library – something has been lost and not for the better.