This is going to be  a short post. I’m curious what other people’s thoughts are on the topic of quick-saves in games (on any platform). I remember the days of playing Soldier of Fortune back in 2000. I was a lot younger back then (I guess, technically, we all were… ha) and, whether it was because of my maturity or impatience, I didn’t have a good appreciation for difficult video games. With the exception of one shooter in particular (Quake 3 Arena) I always played on Easy and I used quick-saves like a professional cheater: peak around a corner, decide the next room is hard, quick-save, enter the room, kill a few baddies, check my health and find cover if still high, then quick-save. If you die, you always spawn again in a good safe place with plenty of health. It was a great strategy.

I don’t claim to be a good gamer (with the exception of two game in particular in which I’m very proud of my skill). I am the kind of person that plays most games to be part of a cool story and experience the latest and greatest advances in graphic and audio technology. I also love to see the creativity in weapon, level, and creature design. Let’s face it, Soldier of Fortune’s GHOUL technology making it possible to blow off different parts of an enemy’s body is a prime example of this kind of thing and it makes perfect sense why I was drawn to the game (you know, for the technology). I digress.

This morning when I arrived at the office, as per the usual, I start skimming my RSS feed headlines. Today I find the article Hard Reset developer talks quick-saves, royalty rates, and DRM. The whole article is interesting but, obviously, the only part I’m specifically discussing is about quick-saves. This is what Zych had to say:

The save system has a huge impact on gameplay, it changes the way people play the game. For example, if a game doesn’t have checkpoints—this can be very frustrating when you forget to save often enough,” Zych explained. “Quick saves on the other hand can ruin a game’s difficulty and balance. – From the article linked above.

 

So, I was curious if other people felt the same as Zych. I know that my view of game difficulty has changed quite a bit since the Soldier of Fortune days (even though I do tend to still play shooters on “normal” or something easier at least until I determine if I want to really focus on being “good”). If a game has quick-save functionality, I’m going to use it. My view is that if a game gives you a tool you can use to win, then you can use it. It’s not cheating the system at all. But I’m not against the exclusion of a quick-save system nor do I advocate it. It’s just another thing in the game much like a shotgun, BFG, or health pack.

What are your thoughts?

- John

Ah, yes. Conference calls. If you work in an office building, chances are good that you’ve sat on a conference call at some point or, at the very least, you’ve known someone who has. You can have a conference call about anything really: proper break-room cleaning procedures and frequency, building maintenance, customer-handling policies and procedures, etc. You could even have a conference call to set up another conference call later in the week (yes, this really happens). Those are your normal day-to-day conference calls though. Depending on the type of work you find yourself in, your experiences will vary. In my case, I’m on a team of software developers. We find ourselves in conference calls regarding things like weekly server maintenance, changes to the SSL tunneling configurations, firewalls, SOX and PCI compliance, standards and practices, etc. These calls can get pretty technical, so much so that we have an entire group dedicated to nothing more than communication between teams (the Change Advisory Board). And sometimes, just sometimes, these calls can last for hours on end. Sometimes even days.

Now, with this kind of conference call, it’s very easy to become numb to the constant murmuring on the line. When there are fifteen people trying to coordinate their tasks and work together, there are long stretches of time when you’re doing nothing more than listening to others talk amongst themselves. When this happens – and this is totally inevitable – you’re going to phase out. You’re going to stop hearing what they’re saying and go completely and utterly numb. This is where my rant begins.

You see, everyone knows this. Everyone in our industry expects this to happen on conference calls but so few people actually conduct a conference call with that expectation. What tends to happen is two people will be talking amongst themselves for half an hour, everyone on the call will zone out waiting for something to  catch their ear, and then… blam! A silence falls on  your ears. Everyone immediately goes on edge; “did they just address me? Are they waiting on me to respond?” And then it happens, you hear your name in the form of a question. “Damn it,” you say under your breath, “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

“Does that sound like it would work?” Now you’re panicking a little more. You have no idea what they’re asking you about and now you have two choices: 1) admit to fourteen other people (including your boss and his boss) that you weren’t paying attention or, 2) lie through your teeth and say “sure! That should work just fine. We can get it done in a week.”

But, you’re an ethical person. You’re not going to lie, especially when it would potentially dedicate you to a timeline that you just can’t meet. So you accept your moment of weakness, you embrace it and say “I’m sorry, I must have a missed something.” Now you’re thinking of excuses for not paying attention: you’re busy working with another project in tandem to this one, you’re on two conference calls at once, your neighbor is pestering you… But none of these will work. Why? Because everyone on the call knows exactly how you feel and knows you were paying your attention elsewhere.

This whole thing can be avoided in a very simple and accommodating way: when you need to address someone directly, you say their name and restate the question proactively. Don’t expect them to be paying attention. No, instead you should expect them to not be paying attention. Using this tactic keeps the call moving forward, doesn’t make people feel singled out, and is all-in-all much more efficient for everyone involved. I can honestly say that, if this approach had been taken on all of the train-wreck conference calls I’ve been on in the past, I would be a less-bald programmer standing before you today.

- John

Greetings!

Yes, I’m well aware of how long it’s been since we’ve done an update here (and how long it’s been since I’ve posted personally). This past weekend (which was very good, I might add) a friend of mine asked what happened with this site and why we had stopped posting. I immediately wanted to make excuses but realized that making up something on the fly to explain away our absence wouldn’t get anyone anywhere. So, I told the truth; when things come up that I would blog about, I lack the motivation to make the time to actually sit down and write.

That got me thinking! What would it take to have more motivation? Should I attend a Dave Ramsey seminar? No, that might be overkill. Instead, I decided to take away some of the effort, thus reducing deterrents. You see, blogging, at least in my mind, is something that shouldn’t be done haphazardly; it feels sloppy to throw something together and lob it out in to the wild. It feels sloppy to blog about a topic that I can’t educate you on. But, thanks to my friend’s very simple question, I started thinking a little more about this site, what it stands for, what originally inspired us to put it up, and the architecture of the other blog sites I frequent. Know what I realized? The blogs I read are ones that have immense depth in their material. The next thing I noticed was the frequency of posts. While they do have incredible depth (see Anderson Brown’s Philosophy Blog for example), they don’t post every day. As a matter of fact, most of them don’t post more than once or twice a month. And then it hit me. It was like the blogging gods spun golden tendrils of incredible bloggy goodness and slung it directly in to my brain: depth takes time and preparation!

I know, it sounds ridiculous. I can hear you now: “It’s depth, John. Of course it takes time and preparation!” I think I’ve had a perspective problem. So, to the friend that helped me see the light, thank you. Something tells me I’ll be updating quite a bit more often in the near future.

Good night!

- John

I normally don’t post about frivolous, mushy personal stuff, but tonight is a exception. My three oldest kids had a blast in giant hamster balls at the mall today and I caught video. So I’m posting it. And I don’t care if it falls into expected subject matter. It looks fun and I wish I could do it.

To start things off, I live in the Florida Panhandle. For anyone coming across this page that doesn’t know what that is, to most people, Florida means Miami, Tampa, Orlando, maybe the Keys or even the Everglades. But yet most people also know of Panama City or Pensacola if it is mentioned to them. These last two are in the Northwest part of Florida which is dubbed the Panhandle. Someone in school said they call it this because that is what it looks like, but I think that they must have used some funky looking pans from before I was around. Basically, the Panhandle is Northwest Florida and might as well be Alabama for as close as it is to the big names of Florida. What I am saying is that South Florida and the Panhandle might as well be different states.

So what does this have to do with the Miami job market, you ask.

Well, for my professional life, I would say that I am in the IT field. I have had several jobs as network administrator and even a couple of gigs doing graphic arts and web design. Sometimes my resume is even picked up by national recruiters and I get the chance to hitch onto a project outside of my normal stomping grounds. On the whole, I relish the chance to getting paid to travel and work. I recently spent a couple of months in Mississippi for a project. What is interesting here are the misconceptions of those who are recruiting for companies (or just locations) based in Florida, but the recruiters themselves are based elsewhere (such as Virginia). Most companies look for project participants that are local to them to save on traveling costs (which may suck for me, but it makes sound business sense). Apparently most states in this great republic are fairly regular in general shape. This makes a different part of the state being an unmanageable move a foreign concept to a lot of recruiters. Apparently being within 4 hours of a destination means that moving there is ok for an acceptable percentage of potential workers (which is fine). Unfortunately, most of South Florida is an 8 to 12 hour drive for me. Recruiters just don’t get that.

Now to the actual point of this post.

The attribute of me being technically in the state of Florida means that I get job notifications from out of state recruiters vying to place a worker in jobs in the Miami area. And I have started to notice an increase of these job notifications. In the past I even had to walk a recruiter through looking up Panama City on Google Maps to show how far away I am from their “opportunity”. The real problem here is that they aren’t looking to pay any moving costs. They are looking for local help… 8 hours or more away. I’m glad that there are jobs finally opening up to a point where they are starting to have to cast out more to find the people they need. I just wish that it would trickle down to smaller markets such as where I am. I don’t want to move to Miami for a halfway decent job.

-Mike