ASCII by Jason Scott

For reasons that nobody cares about, I was sent two companion threads, one closed and the other basically so, regarding the release of an Atari 2600 cartridge. This is interesting in itself to some people, but in fact I’m more fascinated by the body of it and where things went wrong. And things did go wrong! A discussion announcing the availability of a new rendition of a 20+ year old Atari 2600 program quickly turned into a free-for-all and was closed. Then, a week and change later, a reference to this thread was made in another forum and even more vitrol occurred.

I am an objective observer, and a student of the discussion thread and its myriad implementations. Let’s consider then, what the hell happened.

Here’s thread #1:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=123594

My summary of the subject matter is this: Rob Fulop, an established and historical figure in Atari history, announces that he is looking for input for the price of a limited edition Atari 2600 cartridge he has made of a game he worked on in the 1980s called “Actionauts”. Here’s that message:

I'm about to release a new 2600 cart - Actionauts. I have no idea how much such a
thing is 'worth' in the Atari 2600 collector's marketplace. What I know are the
following two facts.
 
1) I've released a game into this community before. The name of the game was
Cubicolor,  and I released it almost 20 years ago. At the time, I had no idea what
to charge for the game, so I picked $50 pretty much out of the blue sky. The
fifty available copies sold out pretty fast. Today the sale price for one of these
games hovers around $1,000. OK, personally I think this is sort of a high price
for a game unworthy of release at the time it was made, but who am I to know
how these things work. For whatever reason, the 2600 collector community
has decided a Cubicolor is worth $1,000. Regardless, I think it's a fair statement
that I certainly didn't get the better end of THAT particular transaction!
 
Suffice it to say the $50 is probably below the price of what an Actionauts cart is 'worth'.
 
2) I do know what the COST is for Actionauts to exist. The game took about
3.5 months of my time to make in the first place. Then it took about 1.5 month
of time to make it available ... figuring how much time it took to make 300 copies,
design boxes and labels, figure out how to take and fulfill orders, etc. And then
it cost about $5,000 in hard cash to build the 300 carts, print the boxes and labels,
etc. So the "cost" of Actionauts is $5,000 + five months of my time. Such is the
real cost of making the game available to this marketplace.
 
Since nobody knows the real "value" of the game, all I can go by is the cost
of making the game. Which comes down to what is a fair "wage" for me to
earn here? How much is five months of my time worth? I'd like this community
to help answer this question, before I put a price tag on the game.
Once the community has designated what they think a reasonable "wage" is
for somebody like myself .. and I concur ... I will use the following formula to
establish the price for the game. (5 * (monthly wage) + 5000) / 300. In the
interests of this community, I think it would be wrong to attach any sort of
profit to this price. Thus I'm asking people to be fair and reasonable in the
poll questions, and not answer the questions from a purely self interest.
 
Thanks

The Numbers

The thread begins on Monday, March 31, 2008, at 4:22 PM. It is closed on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 1:01 PM, for a total lifespan of roughly 45 hours. It contains 198 posts, or an average of about 5 posts an hour. Of these, 40 of them are by the thread originator and main subject, Rob Fulop. Of the 62 participants, 30 post just one message.

Already, there’s an obvious imbalance or unique aspect here: the conversation is Rob Fulop (that big blue slice) posting an amount equivalent to at least 30+ other participants. Taken another way, he posts messages frequently and in response to others, all the way through to the end of the 45 hour period. Being that this post is about soliciting questions, the warning sign is that Fulop does not in fact merely post a question (and related poll); he immediately and consistently engages the posters in debate and discussion.

The problem with a “what do you think about this”, or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it’s all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it’s the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually “breathe” in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves. With this in consideration, here is a different observation of the posting metric: the number of posts per hour across the 45 hour period:

The “breathing” of the forum discussions becomes more clear with this view. We see the usual flurry of initial response and activity of a healthy thread, which then reverberates in a more quiet fashion for a while before it all flares up again, followed by the same reverberation, and then a small up-ramp at the end that is cut off by the thread closure.

Not surprisingly, that second flare-up is caused by a post by Fulop. So let’s address the content.

The Content

As mentioned above, this thread is ostensibly about the future release of an Atari 2600 cartridge and the suggested price points by the “community”. It is a question posed by the cartridge’s creator, a man of strong pedigree and historical credit named Rob Fulop. Once an Atari engineer, he is a co-founder of Imagic, a third-party maker of Atari 2600 cartridges, which ultimately shut down. He has his name in a good amount of productions throughout the years. He is, in other words, the Real Deal.

In his poll, he asks two questions: Should the author of a new 2600 release be paid for their time spent? and What is a reasonable monthly salary for a 2600 designer to earn? Since the title of the thread is “Actionauts price tag?”, we run into another problem: the poll is not related to the question. The question should have been “how much would you pay for the following item” followed by “what is important to you in buying a package like this”. These are the questions one would reasonably expect.

Within the first fifteen minutes of the thread, a user named Mirage1972 answers the poll (which is anonymous) and then writes this message:

I voted $2000/month, but I wanted to say that that's
not what I really think the programmer's time is
"worth". It's  "worth" a lot more. It just has to be balanced
with what people can and will pay.  Also factor in that anyone
choosing to program and release a 2600 game in the
21st century should be doing it primarily because they
"want" to, or, in other words, for intangible benefits.
 
I don't think it's possible for you to be paid as much
as you (or any other 2600 programmer)
should get, or as much as I would "like" to pay you.
 
Now that I think of it, $2000/month with your calculation
works out to $50/cart (with box/manual).  That should be
the low end of what you charge, probably. I'd say $50-$65
would be fair, and  you'd easily sell out at that price.
Realistically, you'd probably sell out at $100 each, some
people  just wouldn't be able to buy them. But, that's the
breaks I guess.

Mirage’s response is informative, helpful, complimentary, and even does some basic research to accompany his opinion.

Almost immediately, Fulop responds:

You do realize, that you are suggesting that a 2600 programmer,
one with reasonable credentials, should expect this community to
pay them no more for their time then they could earn as an
assistant manager at Jack in the Box, right? Maybe you are
right, and such is how this community truly values people like
myself ... I guess we will see based on the result of the poll!

FOUL! Here we see the roots of the problem: Fulop takes Mirage’s statement and throws it back into his face, implying not only that Mirage has degraded his skills and dismissed his efforts, but that he considers his time equivalent to a fast food restaurant’s “assistant” manager. Note how this is all crafted; the $2k/month figure was one of the original (poorly chosen) poll questions; Mirage simply selected it. It turns out that Rob conisders some of the potential poll questions wrong. This is not how polls work; you poll people to get answers. That people might answer incorrectly with regards to objective knowledge is not the issue; with a poll, you realize there’s a problem (too many US citizens can’t find Australia on a map) and you then use this information to create a counter-campaign. (More geography lessons; make Australian tourism commercials include graphical representation of Australia’s location on a globe, etc.). If the poll-taker immediately turns around in the same public forum, and implies that he is personally insulted by the answer, then the poll is no longer relevant and certainly not objective. Additionally, he takes the answer from a single responder on a single thread on a single site and immediately indicates that “[this] is how this community truly values people like myself”. Now we have a double-edged sword: the “community” has been accused of sub-par character quality, and the poster has indicated he considers himself very important/worthy, a problematic non-humble position not sure to win favor.

Fulop quickly falls in love with the Jack in the Box slur; he uses it multiple times in his subsequent postings:

• What I’m getting out of this conversation is “about the same as our society values an assistant manager at Jack In The Box” .. which puts it into perspective nicely.
• These guys basically are saying I should earn less doing this then i would earn as assistant manager at Jack in the Box .. my view .. these guys aren’t going to be interested at any price .. and even then .. they will weep that the game isn’t as good as Pitfall. So the low votes don’t count especially given the discussion surrounding their justifications.

The insults don’t stop there. Fulop quickly takes his own thread downhill as fast as his fingers can conjure the words.

• To be told by people in this community that the think my time is worth $2k per month .. is sort of weird, actually. I mean, in the same breath, the person who says this can’t seriously tell me how much of a “fan” they are of my work, right?
• I certainly understand that this market is small, and unable to compensate people like myself for the effort involved. Thus there are very few new releases. This makes sense. But it’s really weird to me that you use the term ‘profit greatly’ when talking about somebody asking $4k a month for their time. How much do you charge for yours?

In these cases, landmines are being laid, landmines ensuring someone will come along and trip on them.

The second-flareup is interesting; it concerns what represents a living wage.

Specifically, Fulop takes umbrage with the “$2k/month” atari developer wage, the idea that he should only make $24k a year. In fact, it’s easy to interpret this poll question many ways; what’s a good wage to make doing atari carts in your spare time? What’s a good wage to make with atari cartridges after you’ve done all the work and am collecting new items? But it turns out the secret answer was that Fulop was asking how much poll responders thought any Atari 2600 Developer should make in toto in a given year while working full-time in that sole capacity. When he then indicates that $4k/month would barely be a living wage (this is $52k a year), then cultural issues come into play.

For some locations, $52k is a princely sum, while in others it can’t support an apartment, much less food and transportation. Within Fulop’s position (and he is a man well along in years, having been involved in this industry well beyond a quarter century), it is entirely possible that $52k can’t possibly support a healthy lifestyle and living wage; but this was not asked in the poll and is not the point given in the poll. What starts as a simple question about the price of a cartridge becomes a man’s last stand of sanity against an onslaught of cartridge collecting zombies, firing randomly into the sea of grabbing hands to protect his livelihood.

Much of the thread, then, is meta; people defending Rob Fulop’s talents (which are not in question), people discussing a living wage and what that means, people discussing where everything went so wrong in the thread, and people defending other people’s positions as various sides are taken. A parallel conversation occurs as to the definitions of “gamer” and “collector”; Fulop sees them as distinct and disparate groups, while others see more of a grey area or spectrum. This discussion muddies at the core level from that point on, until Fulop throws up his hands and requests the thread end; he’s gotten what he ‘came for’, although it is not entirely clear how he could have possibly achieved this.

Ten days later, on another web forum, a new thread begins, starting with the pricing of the cartridge and disagreement on the price. This brings the players back into the same fight again, the one that should have never happened in the first place, based on a poll question that was poorly asked and poorly discussed afterwards, and a range of insults and finger-pointing that naturally come from this discordant, foolish melee.

Conclusion

Forum Referee rules that Rob Fulop is a very talented man who is also a dope. Seeking assistance in pricing a product does not give you slack to insult anyone who takes the time to give their answers. Twisting around words and then throwing them back at faces, indicating insult where there is none, and giving your poll answerers a total of 30 minutes before you jump in and start swinging indicates what the kids call a “total n00b”. Unsportsmanlike Conduct!

Stay off the forums and do your good work when time and money permit.

6 Comments

A word of warning. This is about content license issues. These entries are always classic, in the way that the Hindenburg Disaster was “classic”. Go ahead at own risk.

An interesting situation occurred recently in my mail. I had a customer buy my BBS Documentary, and then write a nice fan mail letter, followed by, “If your next documentary is freely licensed, then please put me on the notification list”.

He included a link. This link, in fact. This was, in other words, his definition of “Free”. It’s very convenient we can do this now, just point somewhere and go “this is what I mean”.

After spending a little while at that site, I sadly had to decide not to put his name on the notification list.

GET LAMP is not going to be Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike. It’ll be Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0. The reason’s pretty simple: I have a number of musicians involved who do not wish the music to be easily placeable on commercially sold compilations. I want to use their music. So I am distributing this work under this license.

Personally, I saw no issue with this, and really still don’t. My stuff, my choice. I have people I respect who are being kind enough to provide all the material they are, and they are letting me release it under this license, and we’ll all by a happy little can of Clamato juice. Under the license it’s being released under, you can throw out huge swaths of the movie, add your own commentary and distribute it, dupe copies or even torrent it, and generally have your way about it. You just can’t sell it or profit by it.

I had forgotten, of course, how divided certain aspects of the license community are about these things. Maybe that was a good thing. I have enough trouble trying to explain to people who don’t care about this that yes, they’re allowed to show my movie to their classes without paying, and yes, they can have showings of it and not pay me, and yes, they can take excerpts of it and put it online all remixed up. I appreciate being asked but they don’t really need to. I understand fully what I did when I went Creative Commons, so the repercussions don’t shock me. (I’m not this lucky in all aspects of my life, but with this, I pretty much knew cold what I am saying when I use these licenses).

But man, what fun little internal battles. The website I was linked to contains a very specific article, directly geared to the general thesis, that thesis being: If you license with a NonCommercial Creative Commons License, you are a Fuck.

The whole site is a Wiki, albeit the kind I prefer, with logins required to mess around with them, and a way to link to a specific revision, as I did above. What’s not directly clear unless you look at it is the whole thing’s run by Erik Moller (sic; I can’t use his properly spelled last name because it breaks the livejournal rss feed to my weblog). You probably don’t know who Erik is. All well and good. If you’ve studied Wikipedia’s internal processes, then you know exactly who he is. He’s about as insider to the Wikipedia “cabal” as you can basically get; one of the all-time apologist characters for its failings and abuses. He recently got Konami-Coded into the higher echelons of the non-profit, and I think that’s about all I’ll discuss about Erik. All I’m saying here is he’s one of the proponents of a manner of thinking I don’t necessarily hop into the haystack with, spouting glee. Let’s get back to the writing instead of the man.

The writing is filled with a lot of that spectacular sleight of hand I’ve come to hate from groups whose general stated purposes sound really wonderful and then you flip over the rock and are horrified. It describes all the reasons you didn’t think your Subtle Plan all the way through before going with the NC version of the Creative Commons license, and you should drop the NC. Here’s one that’s particularly awesome:

“One final factor to keep in mind, especially for wide-spread small scale exploitation, is the enforceability of the license. For example, even a generous interpretation of Wikipedia’s GNU Free Documentation License requires that content users link back to Wikipedia and the article history, and point out that the document is freely licensed.1 As is evident from a brief look at Wikipedia’s own list of mirrors and forks by compliance, many content mirrors completely ignore the GFDL. Some even systematically remove all evidence that the content is from Wikipedia. Such behavior, while illegal, is difficult to punish, as mirrors reside in many different countries. Many have been quickly set up, without anyone in charge of operations. Even though Wikipedia is a large community with a reasonably well-funded parent organization, it is clear that it is hard to enforce even very basic licensing requirements on free content. Ask yourself whether you are truly willing and able to enforce violations of an -NC license. Otherwise, the only people you punish with the restriction are those who are careful to respect your wishes — people who are likely to be amenable to friendly cooperation anyway.”

Read it again, or feel free to hear my interpretation of what he says there: There’s no point in putting a non-commercial restriction on your work, because everyone’s going to ignore you anyway. Damn, that’s a pimp-slap for you, isn’t it. The reason you should license your stuff for the most accessible and widespread distribution is because you, content-boy, are going to get gang-banged against the hordes of users out there, and at least this way you get a free dinner. Sign. Me. Up.

The essay is chock full of some of these winner statements. One indicates that doing this only hurts the little guy. The little newspapers, the small websites, the mom-and-pops of the world who just want to get the biggest benefit of your hard work without opening them to legal liability. It’s about as logical as a drug user explaining why the reason he has to sell your toaster for more meth is to gear the two of you towards a better tomorrow, that is, one where he won’t have to harvest your organs.

But instead of filling your screen with a point-by-point breakdown of where I don’t jibe with Erik’s disagreement, I’d like to get to the interesting stronger issue here.

I don’t often compromise. I am an intractable asshole when it comes to certain things, aspects, and so on. Believe me, more than once I have screwed myself in a fireworks-and-brass-band fashion over a point. Other times I stand ground on stuff that likely means little to anyone who is not, generally, me. Some offhand examples: I refuse to watch Hogan’s Heroes. There’s a pizza place a couple blocks from my house that I won’t go to because I was once left waiting for 25 minutes for someone to take my order. I won’t buy Sony products at all, with the exception of my video editing software. This goes on for page after embarassing page. Been there. Haggled over that. Screamed and moved on.

But somehow it still burns my bacon when I see people informing me, or others like me, how we are doing the wrong thing, a disservice, by not making the stuff we generate distributable in some way. It trip-traps over the troll bridge into somewhere I don’t find very pleasant, or enjoyable. It says, basically, way down there. “Thanks. Gimmie.” It makes me feel like someone’s tugging my pant leg. I don’t like it at all.

And on top of it, we have my little fan, so happy with my first film, laying down his gauntlet of what he thinks a film must be and basically shutting himself out of my next one because it has a license restriction on it. A license restriction that, I’m sorry, I can’t see being a huge deal. Yes, unlike the last time, the schools in question would have to call me if they decide to charge admission to see my film, permission I will give. And if someone wants to have a bake sale and sell dupes of my disc, huzzah. Pick up the goddamn phone and chat with me. Is that so hard?

It comes down to this: while in many cases, I have happily allowed stuff I’ve created or assembled to join the Big Happy Shitball, this does not mean I have, by default, considered this to be the be-all end-all final answer for all future creations. Just because people “can” copy it and will ignore whatever license I put on it, Erik, does not mean that I have to automatically make it easy for them to do so in contradiction of my collaborators’ wishes. We do that, when we work together, you see; focus on the good we’re doing, instead of sneering into our soup when we don’t get it all handed to us on a silver platter with the words “E Pluribus Unum” etched on it.

Oh, well. Maybe next time, big fan.

5 Comments

Sometimes I find someone weblogging who in fact is holding some very unique knowledge. One of the recent such discoveries made aware to me by a gabillion links is that of Dad Hacker, the weblog of Landon Dyer. Landon worked for Atari and later Apple and a bunch of other concerns, but for the moment it’s his very occasional entries about working at Atari and on Atari projects that’s holding my interest. His weblog goes back six years and is of a wide variety of subjects, so it’s not like he just started down this road.

Like my own little site, one specific post has gotten a lot of attention, and fans have now clung on awaiting further similar pearls to arrive. In his case, it’s Donkey Kong and Me, which is worth the price of admission and much much more. It brings to mind some of the stories of Sinistar, but this narrative of Dyer’s is very personal and very technically specific as he works through his project.

Before you particularly strong-memoried folks jump down his throat, this is about the Atari 8-bit version, not the Atari 2600 version. Just so we’re all clear here.

If you browse through his back archives, very little is about his days of Atari, but the few that are more than make up for it. I hope he continues to dig deeper. Until then, enjoy the handful of worthwhile essays of someone on the ground in the hand-hacking of a classic work.

2 Comments

By now a lot of what we consider the world-wide-web’s most popular destinations combine into one big social club, with a good number of trendmakers and pundits whose opinions represent the general consensus. Occasionally we disagree with them or vehemently agree, but woe to us who go against the grain.

That said, I find myself agreeing with two positions that the opinion captains are steering around.

The first is the idea that the April Fool’s Day Web Prank is perhaps rife for “you’re doing it wrong” type mishap. People do tend to see what others are doing and implement, clumsily, the same general ideas, so we have an awful lot of upside-down logos, “special announcements” that something completely crazy has happened, or statements of changes or terrifying outcomes that are not, ultimately, true. Even more important than the natural distaste for shallow copycatting of the “I am being hilarious” prank is that the natural of information duplication now means that insane statements done in the name of April Fool Comedy are joining streams of information far away from the original sources, leading to problematic and needless confusion, and not of the “oh you sure got me” variety. If the hilarity to mishap/blandness ratio is high, then I’m all for it, but I can’t help but feel we’re getting heavily toward 1:1 as the years go on and we celebrate our little web holidays.

The second position is a proposal: instead of utilizing April 1st as a day for hilarious non-hilarity, instead use it to announce site-changing or vision-changing creations. Whereas you would normally provide people with a claim that you were moving to China to work in a gold farming boiler room, instead announce that you’re engaged. Instead of claiming to be able to send your pets into space, announce a program you’ve been tinkering with for months that nobody would believe could actually be that cool and exist.

In other words, turn April Fool’s Day into Surprise Announcement Day.

April’s a nice month, far away from the end of year holidays, not quite to the summer’s dullness and warmth, rife with opportunity to brighten the growing days with something really amazing that you did. You tinker and slave away in darkness, and then spring onto the world your showpiece, something that makes all work stop and days of playtime commence as your newest fans explore the gift you’ve given them.

There are examples of this already. I hope there will be more.

I am a tiny, wavering light in the wilderness of opinion, and my idea is not original, but I can certainly hope it might catch on for 2009.

8 Comments

April 1st is essentially ruined for any serious discussions or essays; everyone thinks you’re playing a joke, or you’re not getting into the spirit of it all. So here’s a photo of me directing MC Frontalot. I’ll swing back by tomorrow.

4 Comments

One of my speakers (which I will not name), essentially agreed to Blockparty but didn’t, you know, totally go crazy studying what the heck it is. I was offering a flight and hotel and a chance to visit some old friends in the area, so they were all for coming. But after browsing the schedule and events at this combined conference/demoparty, this week I got what was essentially a “Hell yeah, this thing is gonna be good.”

There’s no easy way to solve this problem; a lot of people who would really enjoy this event I’m helping to put on will never hear of it. A demoparty is one of those things which a person doesn’t just sit down one day and look for, i.e. “I wonder if there’s any demo parties in the area” or “Hmm, I have this demo sitting around and nowhere to submit it; I’ll check the usual places.”. Some folks don’t even know what this event is at all and would have to be severely assaulted to get them to look at all the great things happening with it. This is how the world works, and there’s little to do about it without becoming a loud-mouthed, inappropriately-shouting-things advertising dumbass. So nope, the tragedy will continue.

I leave for Cleveland tomorrow (April 2nd) and between now and then there’s a lot of gathering, collecting, planning and last-minute calls to be made. It’s going to be quite the event and I’ll be spending a lot of time and money between now and then on it. It’ll all be worth it, too.

To the people who, in late April or May, will hear this went on… sorry, man. Maybe next year.

To the people who just heard of it before it happened… drop everything. You have new plans.

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After spending many hours scanning at Steve Meretzky’s, house, I got a small amount of sleep and hopped a flight down to Washington, DC to drive over to Peter Hirschberg’s Luna City Arcade. I’ve gushed about this place quite a bit, and the family that is willing to open their home to complete strangers on a regular basis to enjoy a mortgage-swelling personal project that has inspired many.

The impetus for this particular event was a visit from an NPR reporter, and sadly, I didn’t get the chance to be there before the reporter left. I had many things in mind to tell that NPR reporter, things which I had hoped to get into the final story. I know how these things go, so the chances of this were not so great. So I guess I’ll just have to tell you in here.

What I wanted to stress was the style inherent in how Peter’ s gone about his creations; how his Vector Dreams emulator was an attempt to not just emulate the gameplay and program, but the actual behavior of a vector machine, the sounds that came with it beyond just the stuff on the circuit board, and the variations in the machine that would mean the difference between an echo for someone looking back and an intense memory. I wanted to tell the reporter how much this guy sank into this project, and to then turn around and not charge one thin dime for its use for people, how wonderful that is. A lot of people have private arcades or game rooms; Peter built a living shrine, a temple of video arcades, and invites the world to come by and pay respects. That’s special.

I played a number of games (Q*Bert and I like each other) and twirled some knobs, but I mostly like walking around soaking up the ambiance of the place while dozens of people are milling around. It feels so right, in there. (The windows are all blacked over, giving the impression of a late summer night and trying to get those last few games in before you have to go back home.) A choice phrase I overheard, multiple times, was “Wow, this is so much better than the emulator.” The emulator brings the core functionality of the arcade game into a realm of ease and accessibility that is hard to overcome, but it has to do so at a great sacrifice of environment. Even a custom cabinet running an emulator has a lot of potential to miss both the intensity of a dedicated game (especially with custom controls), and the better-than-the-sum feeling from standing near a row of such games. Obviously it’s not realistic for every person who desires the feel for the old arcades to have one in their homes, which makes a place like this that much more special.

After taking a few shots of the place, I went upstairs where he had snacks and chairs, and hung around talking with folks. Peter and I made the acquaintance of a set of people stopping by to congratulate the Hirschbergs on having such an incredible place. This is the payment they choose to get over turning this into a profit-garnering concern; you play all the games for free, games that in some cases predate the people playing them, and then you stop by the thank them for the opportunity. A lot of people did just that.

It was an excellent trip.

5 Comments

Saturday put me in Steve Meretzky’s basement. There are worse places to be than Steve Meretzky’s basement.

As part of the GET LAMP project, I’ve been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in the early 1980s. And Steve was one of the big designers at Infocom, creating or co-creating some of the most lasting games in the genre: Planetfall, Sorcerer, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall… and then went on after Infocom to make many other classics as well. He is a towering figure in the games industry, recognized as one of the greats, among other designers who have produced one-tenth his output.

But beyond his place in the history of text adventures, he’s also acutely aware of the history of text adventures, and the process, and the trends of a gaming industry. Unlike a lot (and I do mean the vast majority) of commercial text adventure authors, he’s still in the game-making business; a lot moved into other programming jobs, or contract work, or basically stepping upwards into management of other programmers. (A few walked away from computers as a livelihood, too.)

But even beyond that, beyond the fact that he was this great designer and also associated with this great company and has been a willing participant in recounting the history of this genre, is the fact that he’s been a tireless archivist of all the history he’s walked through or been a part of.

This can’t be trumpeted enough: Steve saved everything.

He’s let me go through a lot of what he saved, to scan parts of it for use in my movie. And there was a lot to go through.

He followed one of the core tenets of archiving: save everything you can, because you never know what will end up being the most important items in the regard of history. He saved memos, handwritten notes, ad copy, correspondence with printers and PR folk. He saved invitations to parties, softball game announcements, photos and sketches.

This is also critical: it’s sorted. He didn’t sort it to the level of fanaticism that would require someone to only keep a subset of stuff, but he has it in arrangements that made my life a lot easier: memos by years, folders for sales, folders for drawings, and game design binders. Did I mention the game design binders? Every scrap of paper related to the design of his games, thousands of pages of revision, discussion, improvements, dead ends and so on.

He also had a really nice copy of Cornerstone, the ultimately-failed Infocom business product:

I can’t imagine there are that many pristine copies of this product left; that one of them would be in the collection of someone whose company partially failed because of this product shows his stellar attitude to saving the artifacts.

I wish more people who worked in firms of great fame or whose company has or had great influence in the minds of the world would be like this. While for many it might not be informative to browse over the castoffs of a commercial enterprise, for others it’s a perfect insight into what came before. Infocom had to pioneer many now-common ideas in marketing, production and programming approach; the academics that started the company threw a lot of very interesting incubated ideas into the mix and I personally believe that’s what led to its initial success. Beyond that, though, you can’t discount the work of their creative teams to turn very good game ideas into must-have classics.

I must state clearly that not every step of Infocom was a sure-footed midas touch, and not every choice made came back a hundred-fold in riches. Contained in these documents are silly demands, poorly-considered options, badly-handled maneuvers, and the failings of people all too human.

These are not items saved to trot out at every gathering of folks to self-aggrandize. They aren’t trumpeted in every piece of post-1990 correspondence to win arguments by fiat. This is a collection of influential writings and behind the scenes artifacts that a serious student of games and self-proposed archive of gaming materials would have to acknowledge as a world-class library. We are all very lucky that Steve had the forward-thinking approach to his work to keep such a tight record of the last few decades of his productive life. We will all be better for it.

How lucky I was to have contact with Steve Meretzky. How lucky we all are!

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It almost sounds like a joke, doesn’t it. DVDs for the blind. What are the blind watching DVDs for. There’s nothing to watch, really. Go listen to an audiobook or something, blind people.

Well, you might be surprised to hear that the blind do buy DVDs, and play them, and enjoy the movies. Not all of them, but not everybody watches DVDs at all, so this isn’t surprising. In another useful bit of evidence on the side of the anti Digital Rights Management crowd, the blind often end up having to rip the DVDs and extract the various titles/parts out of the DVD so they can play stuff without being hung up on menus and special features and easter eggs and the rest. They turn a DVD into a series of audio tracks in a playlist and go through those, basically.

A number of the interviewees of GET LAMP are blind. Just like the BBS Documentary put me in the homes of midwesterners for the first time, so has GET LAMP caused me to spend time with blind people for extended periods, in real conversation. One thing I learned was that blind is relative; a number of my blind interviewees can see, just not very well at all; one was born with no lenses on her eye. One is aware of some aspect of light, but it’s absolutely an abstract hue. And so on.

Another thing I learned (or re-learned) is how flexible the human mind is; it will try to place items even though one might think it wouldn’t have any context. “Flame” means one thing, “mountain range” another, and interviewees mentioned how much text adventures expanded their knowledge of the world because you could “walk” among places with no guidance and all the salient features explained to you, right there. One mentioned how he didn’t understand how big an ocean liner was until he played a game that took place on one, and so on. Another was very sad for sighted people because of all the years we’ve watched television at 720×540 resolution. That’s so sad! His resolution is infinite.

As I interviewed someone who was deaf for my previous film and resolved then and there they should enjoy it like everyone else, so too does the interviewing of several blind subjects mean that I want them to enjoy the DVD as well. Hence, a blind-accessible DVD.

As opposed to my militancy regarding subtitles, I realize that I’m much further out on the edge with wanting to make a DVD blind or visually-impaired accessible. There’s just not a metric ton of these things.

I found a DVD that claims to be the first blind accessible DVD, with menus and the rest. That’s true, as long as you know what submenu to magically navigate to to turn it on. As my friend Andy loves to say, FAIL.

What is likely to happen with my DVDs is that when you put them in, it acts like any other DVD, but the first selection is an introduction to the disc, which says, out loud, what to hit to start audio menus. From there, we can have a bunch of other features, but then both “types” (blind and not blind) are happy. I hope. It’s the wheelchair ramp problem; functionality vs. aesthetics. I’ve seen it done right and wrong.

This means the episodes or films on this set will have descriptive video. Experiments are underway for that. It also means that everything gets descriptive video. This delays the project, or more accurately, the project takes the right amount of time to do this properly.

If you’re feeling cynical, you can also tell me how brilliant I am to market to the blind; the blind, after all, often were big customers of text adventures because these were games that were basically complete and total when read to you. You could play them in audio and get the same experience as others. And they were easy to hack into screen readers, since they always wrote to text rendering instead of doing graphics or whatever else your system used. So these were very popular so hooray, more potential customers. If it’s not obvious, this isn’t my main motivating factor, otherwise I’d “spice up” the whole movie with stuff that might, somewhere, appeal to a general audience even if it didn’t have anything to do with text adventures. Where does that crap end, anyway.

As I work this point, it also means I look at my editing in a different way; when you know your work has to be portrayed as much as it’s shown, you really want to smooth the thing out to the best quality. If I’m going to spend an extra week recording descriptive video, then it should be something worth describing.

We live in this great modern age, where machines can do an awful lot for everyone to enjoy content like never before. I hope this DVD set will be a favorite for blind viewers for a long time to come.

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I’ll give you what I’m doing, what I have, what I want.

I’d like to add a level of Invisiclues to the packaging for one of the versions of GET LAMP. Let me explain what invisiclues are in this context. They’re a method of printing in “invisible ink”, such that you can’t see the printing on paper until you take a marker, which has a different chemical on it, and rub it on the paper, causing the printing to turn opaque. It’s very neat to watch. It appeals heavily to children.

The massive giant in this field/approach currently is Lee Publications, who make a mass of products that utilize this invisible ink technology. I do not really see a way to hire them to make booklets and there’s no indication of if there’s some other printer they use to make this stuff (i.e. someone I could contract for a few thousand booklets).

Way back when, Mike Dornbrook and the folks of Infocom’s marketing department had to go around searching wildly until someone let them know they wanted “Latent Image” printing. Then it apparently fell into place. A citation because citations are awesome:

He was getting quite bored explaining what to do about the Thief, and giving the answer to the riddle. He wanted to do hint booklets if only he could find a way which would be easy to use without spoiling any part of the games for anyone. After months of searching for a solution, he came across an invisible printing process and InvisiClues were born.

An additional one:

At a party, a friend suggested using invisible ink, which could be made visible by running a special developing pen over the hidden answers. Mike loved the idea and immediately tried to get started on it – only to find a major obstacle in his path: Where to find a company to produce the books? It turned out there are only two manufacturers in the U.S. capable of printing up “latent image process” books, a fact Mike discovered after exercising the same sort of perseverance that helps him solve adventure games. Luckily, one of the printers was nearby.

This is less an easy process in the modern era because a lot of things call themselves latent image printing.

Good luck with the term “invisible ink”, too: I find way too many places sell ink pens that work under blacklight, like this one. Cool, but not what I want.

I am sure it will be a process of finding “the printer” who almost never deals with end-user customers, who has this buried in their catalog, which almost nobody uses but which I will produce a sizeable order for.

If you find this, you will get a credit in the movie.

Go.

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