Talk to the hand

I have a fair few names on my MSN messenger list and one of the more recent additions popped up to say hello and ask me why I had “Halol 3” as a suffix to my username. I responded to his query explaining that, after last week’s outburst I regard the game and it’s vocal fans as a joke.

I then went on to explain my complete apathy towards Halo and my overall distate at how such a generally underwhelming game (and its sequel) should be elevated to such lofty and, god help me, untouchable status in gaming circles.

What followed was a pretty intense brick-wall style conversation. The particular low-lights being the dismissal of pretty much any point I had about the game due to the fact that I worked for a company that made games this person didn’t particularly rate and, as such, meant that I really had no place criticising a game he did like. This, of course, coming from someone who has made precisely ZERO games and, by extension, has never made a game that anybody liked at all.

A few things became apparent throughout the conversation:

The person I was speaking with seemed to feel the best way of making any point about Halo was to compare it to a game he didn’t like. Certainly, it reinforces why you like one thing over another, I’m not arguing with that. However, making comparisons (particularly in such a one-sided way) is the laziest form of criticism available. If you want to convince me of the qualities or failings of a game then go ahead – but talk about the game and its content, don’t keep telling me how it’s not as good as brand X because you’re not actually telling me anything specific about your favoured brand. You’re not convincing me that you even understand what it is you like or dislike about one or the other – just that you have an opinion. I have an opinion too – if you want me to notice yours you need to learn to articulate your point of view in a far more relevent fashion.

Once things got heated a familar ploy reared it’s ugly head. This takes the form of knowing who I work for and then saying “Well, Halo is far better and sold far better than any of that rubbish you guys produced” or words to that effect. What does this achieve? In what way does this substantiate what you are saying? All it does is show that you felt, at that time, you felt the best and most reasonable response to the way the conversation was going was to direct a cheap shot at someone. It also damages the credibility of whoever said it. Credibility is pretty important if all you have to present an argument with is your personal opinion. That this little tactic got used a few times over the conversation really doesn’t impress me.

Here’s the thing though – the only people who ever use such a woeful ploy are the ones who don’t create and are directed at those who do. I’ve witnessed countless gamers tell me how developers don’t know how to make games. But I’ve never seen such people put any substance behind such claims. Gamers, it seems, have more right to criticise developers and industry than anyone else because (and here’s the most pathetic tactic of all) they pay our wages. It’s a knee-jerk reaction when you argue someone into a corner and it’s laughably desperate behaviour. It’s also rude and ignorant and always, always backfires. I know who pays my wages and it’s not gamers. Gamers pay my royalty bonuses – and I’m more than happy to top up my earnings by taking cash of arrogant shits who think $50 every couple of years means they own me or my right to an opinion.

The final, shameful tactic I wanted to mention in this post was the classic one of superiority-through-sales-figures. First of all, unless you’re a shareholder of the associated company then what the hell does it have to do with you as an individual. You’re using hi-score mentality to prove a point? Maybe it’s to be expected of gamers – hi scores mean something in those circles but, really, quoting how much money something made for someone else as a pillar of what a product means to you is hysterically misguided. Quoting sales-figures is just quoting a statistic. I have never seen any good come from quoting a statistic at another gamer. They’re open to interpretation and spin and, as some people have shown at this site, some will flat out deny the figures are real. The assumption that popularity equates to quality is simply broken logic. “This game sold loads – that proves how good it is!”. Arnold Schwarzenegger made movies that sold loads and were very popular. I wouldn’t call him a good actor. A popular actor? Yes. A good one? No – I’d say he’s pretty low on the scale of acting quality. Likewise, a game sells well so that must mean it’s good? No. Not automatically – that’s broken logic. That’s why loads of idealistic gamers cry “WHY??? HOW IS THIS HAPPENING??” when they see EA games dominating the all format top 10. That’s why the same cry is let loose when a great game doesn’t get the sales it “deserves”. In other words, for every example you show me that substantiates the argument that you can tell a game’s great by looking at it’s sales figures I will show you the same number of examples that proves that not to be the case.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ve got someone on MSN that keep interrupting the composition of this post.

If you feel like chatting with me, be my guest, add comments below, find me on Xbox Live, use the discussion area. If you feel like employing some of the tactics outlined above then, please, don’t bother.

Another head/sand interface

Three things :-

Two articles and a fascinating fact.

• Who really makes videogames?

I’d never really felt so out of touch as I did when a colleague pointed out a Gamasutra interview with developers TOSE Software. As Gamasutra put it, they’re “the biggest developer you’ve never heard of.”

• Working in games

“Designer” is the most sought-after position. These are the people who invent games. At their core, designers are responsible for making things fun. Yet, getting there requires a lot of tedium.

• My right foot really hurts.

Still not dead – The Return

Hello,

My two weeks in France are well and truly over. They were pretty good. The place the family stayed at was fantastic with great hosts and wonderful hospitality. The weather, on the other hand, was rubbish. Thunderstorms? In the south of France? In August? Gah!

Fortunately, for those times when staying indoors seemed the only sensible option, I had my DS and 50 or so games to keep me company. I will do a write up of my broadening impressions of the DS, my 2gb DS flash-kit and the games I think are worth it at some point in the future.

I also have a rant I’m preparing to write. The theme came to me in that period between going to bed and falling asleep when your brain starts to close its windows and put its lights out. I’ve been reading a lot of videogame news and an increasing amount is coming from sources that are, for want of a better phrase, enthusiast powered rather than anything else. When you look at sites outside the realm of IGN (eww!), Gamespot or Next Generation Online (the closest thing this culture has to proper online journalism) you see a lot of gamers telling the industry what’s right and what’s wrong. Now I don’t disagree that these vocal gamers are the customer to a certain degree (non-gamers and casual, less vocal gamers are actually a far more significant customer) but I do disagree that they have the faintest clue as to what they’re preaching about most of the time. So, in a rare role-reversal in this culture, you’ll have someone inside the videogames industry preaching to gamers about what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Let’s see them have a taste of their own medicine and see how gracious and diplomatic they can be.. 😈

Life at work is still blissfully wonderful. OK, it’s not entirely perfect but it’s as close as things are likely to get. If you hadn’t heard from Free Radical’s recent press release the top-secret project I’m working on has been partially revealed in that we’ve announced we’re working with LucasArts. I know what you’re thinking but I’m not going to tell you whether you’re right or wrong. I will say this though – I’d done a game for LucasArts some years back with my previous game developer employer. It was a GBA version of Jedi Power Battles and the collaborative experience had been quite a trial – particularly at the very end. Recently, LucasArts had made an announcement explaining their commitment to making great games and to raise the standard of their output. It may be too early to see just how that committed they are but over the last few months it’s become clear to me that, internally, they’re very focused on gameplay and fun. I’m looking forward to seeing their future games and am thrilled to find myself working for such a professional publisher.

OK, that’s all I’ve got for you right now – this post was intended to be a fairly short update. I do want to talk DS, rant a bit and write up about what I actually do as an Associate Producer at some point but I’m so easily distracted!

See you soon.

One good deed..

With my recent PC woes I’d been doing lots of unplugging and plugging in of cables and whatnot. The back of my computer desk resembled black spaghetti and I’d felt that a tidy-up was in order. With some cable-ties located I set about unplugging absolutely everything in this room – all the PC shenanigans and the console stuff too.

Three hours later it all looked a fair bit better and I felt hot and sweaty and virtuous.

Getting back online and checking a few things I was stunned to see my download rate go well above it’s norm and into the high 400kbps margin. I guess I hadn’t realised that my ISP had upgraded my service and until I’d reset my cable-modem (by unplugging it from the wall and it’s connection for a period of time) it had been using it’s earlier speed settings.

I don’t really know why cable-modems seems to have this sort of memory for things. I recall that I’d phoned my ISP’s service department (not the nightmare experience that many people seem to have experienced) to ask why I seemed my connection had appeared to slow down. I didn’t really get an answer but I did get a solution – switch off, disconnect and unplug the cable modem and PC for about 5 minutes, reconnect and it should have sorted itself out. The old adage of when in doubt, reboot seems to apply to this apparatus as much as any other.

So, all in all, a good result. I’m a bit happier knowing my cables are a little better organised and my broadband is now at 4mb. The only problem is finding enough goodies to download to make the most of it!

Ah.. life is good 😀

I grow old(er)

My 33rd birthday approaches so I’ve updated my wishlist page so everyone can buy me stuff.

What are your waiting for?

Monkfish!

Back in mid-March I wrote a post here. The point of the post was more for me to vent my frustration than to educate or inform any readers. I’d been having a pretty hard time of it at work due to ridiculous workloads being handed to me – the direct result of staff leaving my team and not being replaced whilst picking up all the work for my system that they covered. This, in a nutshell, saw me doing the workload of four people with little support and no reasonable solution being made by my employer. I was planning on making an official grievance and was looking to do things The Right Way. I understood that seeing my GP to comment on how this was affecting my health and mental state would be worth doing and support my grievance claim. Unsurprisingly, my GP signed me off work. I certainly wasn’t planning on communicating with my employer but felt a good “work sucks” post (that deliberately didn’t mention names) at my own website would be good therapy for me. That’s what the ‘I’m not dead’ post was about.

So, if you’ve not read the post in question then why don’t you do so now? It’s ok. I’ll wait.

I expected a few comments from regular readers but was pleasantly suprised to see a new commentator at my site – Monkfish. It turns out that Monkfish didn’t think much of my situation and had plenty to say on the matter. Obviously, I had a differing point of view and decided to respond to his comments. Monkfish in turn felt it necessary to respond again and a little exchange began. You can read all of this in the comments below the original post.

By the end of the exchange it’s fairly accurate to say that I felt Monkfish was being deliberately antagonistic and what I’d hoped would be a mildly stress-relieving exercise had annoyed the tits off me.

This played on my mind for a few hours and one or two people said a few things to me about it and suggested that I try something..

The software that powers koffdrop.com is called WordPress. It’s great. One of the many useful things it does behind the scenes is store information about commentators. A commentator must have a name and an email to be allowed to make a comment. It’s unlikely that any commentator will use genuine details and, for the most part, that’s fine by me. If WordPress detects a new commentator it will not publish that person’s comments until the Administrator (that would be me) approves them. After a commentator has had a few approvals WordPress regards them as a trusted source and automatically approves that person’s comments without asking me. This is a good way of tackling comment-spam which litters some blogs.

Another piece of information collected by WordPress is the commentator’s IP address. This is a number specific to the computer they were connected to the internet by. It’s a rather useful nugget of information to have if you need to moderate something troublesome. An IP number will look like WW.XX.YY.ZZ . Some of that number will be about one specific machine on a network. Another part of that number will be about the network itself. Just like a postal address has a line about the street and then the city and then the county, the scale of geography that each element of the IP address covers grows. With this, information I could block a certain computer or all computers on a specific network or an entire network completely. IP numbers are useful in moderating communities; anyone that has ever seen the workings of an internet forum will be familiar with this.

So, I fire up a DOS prompt and request a traceroute on Monkfish’s IP. Here’s what I saw:

I suppose now would be the appropriate time to tell you that my employer at the time of writing is Experian. Experian is a company all about data and they take their data security very seriously. Whilst my little PC’s traceroute request might knock on the door of Experian’s network, it sure as hell isn’t going to let me in unless I’m meant to have access. So that’s where the traceroute’s usefulness will end.

However, it doesn’t take a computer geek to work out what this means. Monkfish, despite the claims of posting from home on their day off, was clearly using a computer inside of Experian’s network. It’s not too much of a logical jump to assume that Monkfish is an employee of Experian. Which tends to put quite a different spin on the reasoning behind Monkfish’s comments.

WordPress notifies me by email of any new comments added to any of the posts here at koffdrop.com. So, with that in mind, the end result is that my employer is responsible for sending me antagonistic emails whilst I’m signed off work with stress. All in all not quite the therapy I had in mind when I decided to have a little rant.

Apart from the sheer amazement at my employer’s mentality to allow such behaviour to happen – (behaviour that certainly constitutes bullying and harassment as defined in Experian’s own grievance procedure documentation) I was more than a little bit annoyed.

I’m not thrilled that I’ve seen respected colleagues move to tears due to pressure put on them by other staff. I’m not happy about having to compromise my own level of service to the clients I speak to simply because my workload had increased to such a point that I simply couldn’t double or triple check the things I needed to check. I’m angry that Experian’s apathy of the impending crisis was magnified by their total indifference to supporting their staff and the sheer mis-management of the issue and accusations directed at the staff that were trying to get on top of the situation.

I’m not thrilled that so much was dropped into my lap that it affected my health and happiness outside of this underpaid role and that my employer clearly appears to resent the fact that I wasn’t prepared to sit around getting taken advantage of any longer. I am, of course, not happy that my employer allows their staff to persecute and antagonise the staff that they made sick whilst they have been signed off sick by making the comments that Monkfish felt it necessary to make.

I think that if you re-read Monkfish’s comments with what you now know you’ll see just what sort of agenda was being acted upon.

Fortunately for me, my employer and Monkfish were not quite as smart as they thought they were and, thanks to WordPress, they left a little digital trail of breadcrumbs that this post elaborates upon. Feel free to try out the traceroute command yourself based on the information I’ve provided on the screengrabs above – you can see precisely what you have to type in if you look at the top of the second screenshot. Knock yourself out.

I sincerely hope that both my employer and Monkfish read this post on koffdrop.com. I imagine they’ll feel pretty angry at me for daring to make such a post but will then feel embarassed enough to realise that if they hadn’t behaved in such an unsavoury manner I wouldn’t be sitting here typing about their failed little game.

As a final sweet note I’d like to point out that I prepared this post on my home PC. WordPress allows the user to draft articles in advance and then publish those articles with the push of a single button much like drafting an email to be sent at a later date. The very last thing I’ve done on my work PC is log into the WordPress admin panel at koffdrop.com and hit the PUBLISH button on this post. It seems like a very fitting final action to perform before I switch off this PC for the very last time and head down to the pub and say goodbye to Experian forever.

I’m not dead

Hello.

It’s been a while since koffdrop.com was updated in any way. I typically write posts when I’m at the office between bouts of work and boredom. I’ve touched on my workload in older posts. Well, recently the workload has become totally ridiculous – and not in a good way. To summarise, the system I cater for used to be covered by four people. It’s now covered by me alone. The reason for this is that staff keep leaving our team of eight due to the poor salary. The result is a constant cycle of training new staff and watching them leave. The thing is, we’ve been shedding staff for the last six months and are now down to three members (myself and two others) and ‘company policy’ has been quoted as reasons for my employer not getting their act together to solve the situation.

Things had got to a point where I’ve been losing sleep and unable to relax in my free time – affecting me and those around me. Recently, a director saw fit to add to my already impossible workload on the basis that their “isn’t a processing capacity issue”. It’s nice to know that I, apparently, am not a factor in overseeing this £7 million a year system for my employer.

Things got so bad that I have had to consider what immediate action I can take to benefit myself – it is painfully apparent that my employer doesn’t see any need for urgent action and I have absolutely no confidence in them supporting me in my work. Part of this action has been to see my GP who immediately signed me off work for a starting period of two weeks and insisted that I do all I can not to think about work. It’s helping to some degree, but I still have grave concerns about my work environment which I fear won’t go away just because I’m not there.

I’ve worked in some pretty interesting environments. I’ve had numerous instances of the need to do all-nighters and all-weekenders. Hell, I’ve even had times when I come to work on a Saturday and not leave the office until Friday. In the context of that particular job, I can accept that. Years ago I worked for a family-run businesses which, frankly, I would never ever recommend unless you’re part of that family. I’d seen many rules broken in those days. But my current employer, without question, is the worse of any I’ve found myself with. For a company that likes to quote “we’re not a blame culture” it’s telling that a good 80% of my work goes under the heading of “covering my ass”. I’ve not worked anywhere else where I’ve seen my team mates moved to tears by the insensitivity and unprofessionalism of other staff. I’ve never worked so hard for such an underpaid role and I’ve never seen management as shoddy or disinterested with the needs of the actual workers as this one. My employer proudly proclaims it is Business of the Year for the second year in a row. It is one of the largest employers in my city. It has offices worldwide.

Whilst I have not signed any contract of non-disclosure it is not my policy to burn any bridges. However, my employer seems to have a serious lack of understand of the needs of some of it’s employers and a tendency to rebuff many queries with “it’s company policy”. For example, I have unused holiday and the end of the financial year approaches. I have no interest in using this holiday as, with my current workload, it will be counter productive as my absence will create significantly more work for me on my return (after all, there is nobody else to look after my work when I am not there – my colleagues all have impossible workloads). So I am unwilling to take holiday due to the environment I find myself in as a result of the (in)action of my employer to provide support for me. My employer, adding fuel to the fire, likes to remind me that if I don’t take this holiday it is “company policy” not to carry it over to the next financial year nor is it “company policy” to reimburse me for it financially. The result? A lose/lose situation for me whilst the company ignores the exceptional circumstances it has put me in and quotes the “company policy” line. There are countless other instances like this that have taken moral to all new depths and I look forward to getting the chance to speak to my employers directly about each one during my exit interview when I eventually find another job.

I feel a battle with my employer is looming. Although my work is professional and my methods thorough and dutifully keeping within all the company’s many, many policies I am confident that the company will try to claim some moral high ground or accuse me of misconduct. I can only wonder what might happen if I was forced to play some of the aces up my sleeve.

Normal games-ranting service will be resumed shortly.

Gotta smack ’em all!

Posted around the internet in a variety of news sources, this excerpt from an article from the Independent on Sunday really makes me wonder about certain people’s parenting skills.

Well, at least when Germany invaded Poland they were out and about doing something.

Any kids reading this, I suggest you hold out for more – if your parents are insisting you drop Mario and pick up a needle then why not haggle for some street girls and a sherbert dip?

Giant Killing

Guys and girls, get ready for some spoilers!

Although the majestic Shadow of the Colossus isn’t available in Europe for another few weeks it appears to be getting the speed-run treatment in the far east.

I’ve not seen all the footage yet but the fact that the last Colossi can be beaten in a mere 2:18, a time that includes the hazardous approach as well as the ascent, is pretty astounding.

I love speed-runs at the best of times, and I love Shadow of the Colossus. This stuff is great!

Shadow of the Colossus – Speed-runs

It goes without saying that if you watch this stuff without having already beaten the game then you’ll ruin some surprises. Typically, the speed-runs do stuff in a way that breaks the expected path through the game – you won’t necessarily learn the intended way of beating the game by watching these – but you will definitely dampen the effect of the game if you intend to play it yourself.

Whilst on the topic of lesser-seen bits of Shadow of the Colossus you may want to have a gander at the NICO concept reel. NICO was the original project name for SotC and this footage is great. It shows that the original concept must have been pretty sound a good three and a half years ago as there doesn’t seem that much that’s changed from what’s was presented in this video. You’ll swear the opening vistas are real-world footage too. Enjoy.