Recently, we threw a big party with some friends at our house. The theme was “Back To School” and we encouraged people to dress up along a school theme. I got inspired.

After letting it languish on my hard drive for several months, I finally uninstalled Arx Fatalis today. I’d made it (I think) about half-way through the game before losing interest and never getting back to it, which was disappointing. One of my all-time favorite computer games is Ultima Underworld, which the Arx designers said in interviews they were trying to emulate. Unfortunately, while they borrowed much of the interface logic and much of the basic plot of Underworld, somewhere along the line it lost whatever it was that made Underworld such an awesome game.

I think one of the biggest problems with these kinds of games today is that they end up focusing on trying to give the player a detailed world rather than an enjoyable story. Comparing Arx and Underworld, the former has a much more detailed world, both in terms of backstory and in terms of physical reality. Whereas the Stygian Abyss in Underworld was nothing more than a crude approximation of a real space – I think the dwarf “city” was just one big room with a couple of dwarves in it – the city of Arx has architecture, a castle, denizens who have jobs, etc. But the designers get so caught up in creating someplace “real” that they start to forget about what makes a game actually fun. (There are also some really practical problems with creating spaces that approximate the real world, namely that you end up spending a lot of really uninteresting time backtracking through areas that you’ve already visited to get to somewhere else. If I want to do that, I can go take a hike in the real world.)

This same problem also really ruined another game I should have loved, Deus Ex. After all, it was created by the same guy who oversaw my hands-down favorite game ever, System Shock. As a side plug, if you’ve never played System Shock, I highly recommend tracking down a CD of it in a remainder bin somewhere and doing whatever you have to do to your computer to get it run. It was the most amazing game I’ve ever played, not the least of which because I really felt like I was there on Citadel Station. Even now, I can recall a tactile sense of the layout of the station and some of the more important locations. And all this with a graphics engine that would be laughable today.

When I first heard about Deux Ex, I was very excited although I was worried by the interviews in which the team went on and on about how they adapted real-world locations in loving detail for the game. Sure enough, the game does render futuristic versions of real locations in great detail. The game starts in New York City on Liberty Island, and when I was in New York recently I found myself on a boat sailing past Liberty Island. I was idly staring at a dock on the far side of island when I suddenly had a shock of recognition – I’d been there! Well, not really, I’d just been there in the game, but the game had been accurate enough that I actually could recognize the layout of the island. But even though the game was so “real” in this sense, from a game perspective, the world was… well… empty. As accurate as they were, all the real world locations in Deus Ex felt like disconnected set pieces. This was compounded by the fact that I ended up not giving a damn about the character I was playing. I mean, the guy’s brother is being offed by an evil group bent on world domination, and all I’m thinking is “Damn, couldn’t they get a better voice actor for this gig?” Contrast that with, say, Max Payne, which had exactly the same kind of New York set pieces and the same over-the-top mythical pretensions (while Deus Ex steals from Christianity, Max Payne steals heavily from Norse mythology). Even though the places in Max Payne were less realistic than those in Deux Ex, it kept my attention throughout the entire game. And whereas I uninstalled Deus Ex halfway through, I had a great time with Max Payne through the very last gun battle.

Ultimately, I think how “real” a game is has nothing to do with whether the game is any good. The good games out there make me identify with the protagonist or the story, just like a good movie, book or TV show. They feel more real in an emotional sense… more human. Clichéd as he was, Max Payne was much closer to a real person than the robotic J.C. Denton. And the “how the hell do I get out of here?” plot of Underworld was much more accessible than the “I’m a messenger from the gods from another plane sent to stop another god from blah, blah, blah, blah” plot of Arx.

Now if someone would just rebuild System Shock and Underworld on top of the latest Unreal engine, I’d be as happy as a clam…

…so I was going to sleep in, but some jerk decided to call a couple of times at 6am and wake me up. Figuring that nothing could be that urgent at 6am, I ignored it and went back to sleep for an hour before waking up for good at 7am. It was a beautifully sunny day, as I remember, and I went in to the study to find out who the rude caller was. As I stood looking at the sun coming up over the Cascade mountains, I listened to the message. It was from my dad, calling to say that he was in Washington and that he was OK in regards to the terrorist attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon. However, he couldn’t get through to my mom in North Carolina because the lines were all jammed – could I call her and let her know he was OK?

I remember thinking, “What? What is he talking about?” I went downstairs, turned on the TV and flipped to CNN. I think I spent the next few minutes just sitting there saying “Oh my God…” over and over again. I woke up my wife Andrea and let her know what happened. We spent a while making sure her mother, who was also in Washington that day working for the State Department, was OK. Then we just went ahead with what she was planning to do that day – we went down to the Pike Place Market to buy food. It was a nice day, sunny and warm, and there was a surreal calmness everywhere. Andrea spent the rest of the day cooking food for the rest of the month and we both just watched TV, trying to take it all in.

OK, so normally I classify the Myers-Briggs test in the same category as I do psychics. Like a good “psychic”, the test sorts people into very broad categories that have lots of personality traits that most people exhibit at one point or another in their lives, allowing test takers to feel that the test really “knows” them. (I remember once watching a show on a psychic debunker. He had a set script that contained general phrases like “you often allow people to take advantage of your good nature” or “you are a caring person.” Many/most of the people he talked to were convinced that he really was psychic, some even after being let in on the joke.) Unfortunately, in the business world the test can also be used to stereotype or pigeonhole people, something I think is a very bad idea.

Nonetheless, the test is fun and so I took it, and when I found out that I am supposedly a “Mastermind” (INTJ), well that was just too cool not to comment on. I mean, who doesn’t like being told that they are “rather rare” and a “natural leader?” Even being told that I can be “quite ruthless in implementing effective ideas” sounds kind of cool. Of course, other descriptions are a little more evenhanded.

Now, where did I put that number for Miss Cleo…?

[Ed note: Warning. No technology content ahead. May not be suitable for all readers.]

Well, I’ve finally broken down and installed the RealPlayer so that I can listen to The Writer’s Almanac on my computer every day instead of mostly missing it on our local NPR station. What I find fascinating about it is that it manages to bring poetry back from the obscure backwater that it inhabits in my high school English classes of the past. What’s even more fascinating is that normally I absolutely cannot stand to listen to Garrison Keillor do a reading – his “News from Lake Wobegon” segment from A Prairie Home Companion is like nails on a chalkboard to me. But for some reason I think his poetry readings are just absolutely superb. It’s probably because he lacks that self-conscious “poetry cadence” that most people (including poets themselves) use when reading poetry. I think the poetry choices are also very good and I have found the poems he reads to be very personally affecting, something that I had really forgotten that poetry can do. Many kudos to a fine and worthy effort.

And for those who wonder, the title of this entry comes from one of my favorite poems (do people still have those these days?), “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens. Why it is a favorite, I have no idea. Something about the line “Let be be finale of seem” just does it for me, I guess…

[We now return you to your regularly scheduled technology blog.]

Chris points to an article that I saw talked about in the New York Times or some such place in the somewhat distant past. It reminds me of a story that my wife tells about when she was young and her sister asked her grandfather, “Papa Ali, is it harder to be smart or dumb?” His reply (more or less) was “It’s harder to be smart. You see, dumb people don’t know they’re dumb, so it doesn’t bother them. But the smart people have to deal with the dumb people.”

The implication, though, of this article is that the answer really is “neither,” because if dumb people don’t know they’re dumb and think they’re smart instead, they’re going to get just as annoyed by the supposedly “dumb” people they deal with.

As for me, I take no position as to which category of people I fall into. Safest position to take…

OK, so I’m just following the latest trend at Microsoft – even though my first post is conveniently dated several days before this article. Now I’m just left hoping that I’m not the one that “blow[s] it for everybody else” (as Joshua Allen succintly put it).

This blog is a bit of a mix. It runs on hardware and software that I purchased with my own dime and is physically located in my basement in an old armoire (which my wife insists on calling a “chiffarobe,” like some character from “To Kill a Mockinbird”). On the other hand, I’m naturally going to talk about what I spend a lot of my day doing, and I will occasionally post on company time, like right now. So it’s going to be a delicate balance, and one that I’ve obviously been thinking about for a long time.

Back in my salad days of uber-geekdom (i.e. in my early teen years before I discovered the opposite sex), I was a Doctor Who fanatic. As such, I naturally owned a highly prized Tom Baker-esque wool multicolored scarf, to which I would affix various Doctor Who related buttons. One of the few that wasn’t Doctor Who related (and the whole point of this story) was one that read “Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters.” I think that about sums up my relationship with my employer: I’m basically a semi-sellout who really enjoys working for the Man and everything that comes with it, but who nonetheless likes to pretend that he can also be his own man, with a little “m.” Am I fooling myself? Depends on who you ask, I guess…

[Ed. note: I am extremely frightened to find that a quick search on Google reveals
that an ex-Microsoftie has written a book called “Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters.” Am I really that unoriginal? As it turns out, maybe. The author tracks down where the phrase came from, and… there’s my button!]

Like personal ads and job application cover letters, a weblog introduction entry is bound to be awkward, a bit stilted and vaguely self-aggrandizing. So let’s get it over with as quickly as possible, shall we?

I am the author of this weblog, and my name is Paul Vick. Since this weblog will most likely be more oriented towards the technical than the personal, I’ll start with the professional side of my life: my current job is Technical Lead on the Visual Basic .NET product at Microsoft, although I’ve been around Microsoft long enough now (11 years and counting) to have done a variety of things. I’ve been on the Visual Basic team for 6 years now, most of it closely associated with the core Visual Basic compiler (as opposed to, say, the data access components, debugger or IDE). For a long while, my primary responsibility has been overseeing the development of the compiler (I’m a programmer), but recently I’ve been focusing more on the design aspects of the language and the broader product. Oh, and I’m the author of the Visual Basic .NET Language Specification, which I add because it’s probably the most tangible result of my work of the past several years. (I’m also working on a Visual Basic language reference book, but believe that when you see it…)

On the personal front, I live in Seattle, WA with my wife and two cats. I do have a life outside of work, but I think I’ll let those details come into the weblog naturally rather than making this entry really start sounding like a personal ad…