I finally got around to installing Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend. I just kept putting it off because personal projects and a lot of other good games were vying for my meagre discretionary time outside of day-to-day work. I loved the look of the game and found the first few hours of game play absolutely enthralling as I made various choices, both moral and banal, to advance the story and determine how my character treated other people.

My room-mate was playing the game too, and her character was much more aggressive and short with various non-player characters in the game so that the attitude of how her character interacted with the world was far different from mine.

And on Sunday evening, just as I am really getting in to the game, and moving towards the “big ritual” I rage-quit during a cinematic.

Yep, I rage-quit a single player game.

This isn’t the first single player game I have rage-quit during a cinematic. Probably my first ever was Half-Life, during the opening sequence that cannot be skipped, that sets up the story, because I have no interest in watching some film school drop-out put his boring ass, directorial debut in to my video game. I took that one back to EB, and when they wouldn’t take it back I left the box on the counter and did a charge back on my credit card.

I don’t play games, emphasis on “play”, to be a passive, non-participant sat docilely at my computer whilst a non-interactive movie plays in the background.

For Modern Warfare 2, from reading the forums before purchase, I understood you could not skip the various movies that play until you had watched them at least once (three times because the stupid game is so prone to crashing on many systems that it doesn’t save your progress).

Ten minutes with a dis-assembler and some NOP instructions took care of that nonsense.

Now I get to play MW2 with no more stupid cinematic sequences along the lines of: “I’m your archetype, gruff voiced Special Forces General here to tell you all about what you need to do. You’re going in there and you’re going to shoot people. And then you’re going to shoot more people. And after that, I’ll ask you to indiscriminately shoot more people. Why? Because it’s an FPS son and that’s what we do. We shoot people.”

If your story/plot/cinematic for an FPS is any longer or contains any more exposition than that, you are seriously fucking over-thinking it.

I don’t need exposition and plot to play Pacman, or Space Invaders, or Tetris.

I don’t need that crap in an FPS either.

Yeah, yeah, very pretty story, bad guys need killing, what was my role again? Oh yeah, I shoot people in interesting ways with high powered semi-automatic weapons whilst running around hallways.

You think the people playing the multi-player version of MW2 give a shit about why they are killing the other players or require ten minutes of exposition on who screwed who?

Nobody cares if they are good or bad. Black, white or yellow. American or Russian or British. My role and your role, in an FPS game, is to kill stuff. Just tell me what needs to be eradicated and give me enough bullets to do the job properly.

But Dragon Age? Ah, that’s a different beast. The cinematic sequences advance the story and are tightly woven in to your decisions. You are presented, at every step, with moral choices that need to be made that shape your character, that determine how the story proceeds, to some degree at least within the confines of what is possible in a badly written branching plotline that ultimately has to be quite linear.

I quit the game, and have no intention of ever returning to it, over a moral choice.

I quit the game because when presented with a moral dilemma. I made a choice that was congruent with my character in the game, with how I wanted to interact with the world. I made a conscious choice to stop the game at that point and effectively initiate permanent character death. I made a moral choice, from the perspective of the game, and the only one I could make. Yes or no? Black or white? Good or bad? Justice or injustice? I chose “No.” I chose “justice.”

My character fought alongside three brave companions. We went in to the wilds together. We slew many beasts and foul creatures together. We gathered the necessary items for the handful of quests laid before us. I was their leader. I made the choices of whether to abandon an injured companion that was slowing me down or heal that person with the rare herbs and poultices available to us. When done with our quests, we all hurried back to town to take part in the secretive joining ritual to become one of the Grey Wardens. The ritual is so secretive they don’t tell you there is a high probability, in this case, 33%, that you could die during it. And they also don’t tell you that after you have been informed you have a high probability of dying, that should you then refuse the ritual, you will be killed.

One of my companions died after ingesting the poisonous blood that is to be drunk during the ritual, and my “trusted leader” stepped over his corpse as it fell, less concerned with his death than if he were a piece of damaged property that was no longer useful.

When my other companion protested this, and fear showed in his eyes, a seasoned knight of battle with a wife and child, our leader gutted him with no more thought than if he were practising his knife skills against a wicker and straw target.

I was bade to drink the poisonous blood that had already killed one of my companions, and as the cinematic began to play. I pressed ALT+F4 and said to myself “No. Here I make a moral choice. Here I change the story. Here is where I draw a line in the dirt. Here I say this is my decision. I will not join a regime, one that proclaims so much goodness against so much evil, that wants to bring justice to everyone, when it conducts such injustices against innocents itself. I raise my blade, and on this spot I will die, but I will die knowing that I stood for what is right and proper, and not because it was convenient.”

When you present someone with moral choices, and put the hype and spin on how wonderful your game is in how those choices can shape and alter the character and the story, but are so lazy that when the choices, for the player, become difficult, and it comes down to “enjoyment of the game” versus “the right thing to do” after preaching “the right thing” for so many hours, you break my suspension of disbelief. You break it so solidly that I have no interest in continuing to hear what you have to say no matter how entertaining you believe it may be.

Some people will overlook the problem, and go on to enjoy it. But if you, as the game designer, find the adulation of the crowd for a flawed product satisfying, perhaps you should consider a new vocation.

In fiction or game design, your world should be consistent and suspend disbelief. If it is not and does not, you are just a lazy hack whose frequent recourse to exploit deus ex machina is laughable. This “device” wasn’t interesting in Greek literature and plays, it is even less so in modern fiction. Fiction which also includes the “detailed and intricate plots” (I find this statement so laughable when I read it on the back of game boxes) found in games.

“Because I said so” makes for a very unsatisfying advancement to the plot. It is, as my old creative writing professor clearly stated, “the hallmark of a lazy hack who will be lauded for his cleverness by the common sheep who bleat because they know no better.”

“But dude, it’s just a game!”

No. It is “entertainment” and all good forms of entertainment, to be successful, to be interesting, to be enjoyable, must adhere to certain inviolable tenets. Anybody who consistently disregards these tenets is forever doomed to remain a “lazy hack.”

It seems, that after reading through the entire plot tree for Dragon Age : Origins, helpfully published online, I can unequivocally state that I would not have enjoyed the game for it’s story. As Dragon Age : Origins is supposedly all about the story, it would have been a frustrating experience to say the least. Glancing at the plot tree there are several “deus ex machina/because I said so” places that do not leave you with any choice but to go along for the ride.

Thing is, I don’t play video games “to go along for the ride.” I play video games to have an interactive experience where I make the choices. If all I want to do is ride, I can visit Disneyland or Universal Studios and be bored to tears because those places are stocked full of non-interactive “because I said so” rides.

Dragon Age : Origins – Enjoyed by sheep.

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I was at my local Fry’s Electronics on Wednesday evening and am still surprised by the street level pricing of some components. I know it is not news to most people, and this is probably the “old fart” side of me showing, but 2TB hard drives for less than $180 and Patriot 128GB SSD for $350 is really quite amazing. I still remember the days…

Two weeks ago I picked up a 16GB USB drive no bigger than my thumb nail for $25. Last week I snagged two 32GB USB drives for $50 each. This week, a duo of Patriot TORQX 128GB SSDs at $350 each. The Patriot drives will go in my workstation in a RAID 0 configuration, replacing the dual 10K RPM drives it currently houses, which are also RAID 0. I am currently investigating a decent SSD for my IBM Thinkpad X61 to replace the 5400 RPM 160GB drive that it currently houses.

I am expecting both machines, once upgraded, to get eerily quiet and considerably faster.

Originally when I was investigating SSD drives I was leaning towards the rather pricey, at this time, Intel X-25 G2 128GB SSD drives, which are currently listed for $466 each. Including tax that would have driven the storage upgrade to over $1,000 for a pair of them in RAID 0 configuration.

It is time for a new operating system re-install anyway, as the current Vista operating system has been humming along quietly for two years now but it has begun to grow carbuncles what with all the software I install and uninstall on an almost weekly basis.

Windows 7 is available on my MSDN subscription so I thought, “why the hell not?” I’ll probably live to regret it but at least I can get to see what all the fuss is about.

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I just got done reading the Google Interview Questions over at Gizmodo and came to only one conclusion about them, and it is the same problem I have with most “clever” interview questions. Why bother?

So you’re asking clever questions in an interview, what does this tell you about the candidate?

Can they perform under pressure?

Can they think on their feet?

Do they already know the answer?

Have they heard this one before?

I am sure that somewhere in the whole wide world, someone found that in the framework of an actual interview these questions have some utility, but mostly I find that they serve only three purposes for the company doing the hiring:

1. To demonstrate how clever the interviewer, not the interviewee, actually is.
2. Give a poor interviewer a crutch to lean on.
3. Give a lazy interviewer something to ask rather than actually do real work during the interview process.

I guess I have been lucky when hiring employees for my company in that they are all people I have had the pleasure of working with in the past at other gigs. I don’t think I have ever asked a “clever” interview question in my entire career. I’d rather the interviewee demonstrate a clear understanding of their chosen profession than their ability to “answer a pop quiz.”

I have been asked “clever” questions, and they are mostly unoriginal and something the interviewer looked up on the internet.

What the questions are supposed to do is provide insight in to how you think, how you perform under pressure, and so on.

The problem is that the lazy interviewer doesn’t give a damn about how you perform, just whether your answer matches up. And the poor interviewer doesn’t have the skills to usefully evaluate your performance so they, again, focus on the answer you gave.

Usually if you don’t give the exact right answer they have memorised or have written down in front of them, in their eyes, you failed. It’s this pedagogic culture of only one right answer that John Gatto and many others rail against through their works. On the whole, the interviewer generally isn’t smart enough to actually understand the question themselves, or even come up with an original question, again, it is the lazy and/or poor interviewer.

I’m angry at lazy, poor interviewers the and companies they work for. But I am even angrier still at people, the potential interview candidates so enamoured of the company they want to work for, who focus so much on these questions, because the questions themselves are self-serving, self-fulfilling prophecies – “Look at how clever we are to ask these kinds of questions!” and so it goes “Gosh darn it, that must be a top-flight company if they ask interview questions only they know the answers to.”

Perhaps I am sore because I cannot answer the questions satisfactorily? Well, I have to admit I am of below-average intelligence and mostly self-taught due to life-long learning difficulties, but I found the questions neither difficult nor interesting.

So how did I do on these “mock” interview questions? I answered each and every one, except for #8, to a satisfactory level in under a minute, with the CTO of the company I am currently consulting for, acting as the “heckling interviewer.” And boy can he heckle. The heckling provided a “realistic interview scenario” to apply a little pressure.

Question #8, “How many lines can be drawn in a 2D plane” stumped me because I simply didn’t understand the question as stated until I got up and drew it out on the whiteboard. Total time to solve: less than 3 minutes.

And question #9 is just plain silly. The answer is obviously 0×10000000000000000. Proof that the interviewer was attempting to be clever but the interviewee can be cleverer. Also, the question ignores the fact that any competent software engineer knows their powers of two, off by heart, all the way up to 128 bits, in decimal. And if they don’t, they probably have no business calling themselves a developer. It is one of the basic skill sets of being a programmer.

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