Norms of digital communication

I have this really, terrible habit of writing incredibly long e-mails. They’re as long, if not longer, than my blog posts. This is something I’ve done since junior high, and I’ve essentially never gotten the hang of writing short e-mails. I apologize for the length, I edit to remove junk, and they still wind up being huge. To the recipients of these e-mails over the years: I’m sorry! It just happens!

        I was trying to come up with an excuse, and I had a really brilliant thought: I write e-mails the same way I write letters. I sit down, I try to fill them with everything I wanted to say, and then I send them off with the intention of taking a bit of time before the next reply. It used to be that I didn’t have notifications for new e-mails, so it was something I only checked every once in a while - so it feels like I need to have all the information there in the original message. Even now that I have notifications, and I can get updates to an e-mail thread in Gmail without even refreshing the page, I still have a hard time thinking of e-mails as a fast form of communication.

        Instant messaging feels much more free, like a slowed down version of a face-to-face conversation. I speak in sentences rather than paragraphs. I like being able to take the time to figure out what I’m going to say; I’ve never felt comfortable saying “hang on, I need to stare into space for a few minutes while I decide how to answer your question so I don’t stick my foot in my mouth”. I… really don’t think people do that, even though an internet advice article said it was okay. At any rate, I do a lot of instant messaging and I’ve always loved having quick, easy contact with my friends while I’m doing other things on my computer. For a while, I guarantee I had more IM conversations than I spoke to people in person.

On Offline Messages and Photo Albums

        What I’m getting at is, there seem to be analogues between how I treat digital communication and more primitive things. The interesting bit is how much the ability to send offline messages changes the situation. I suppose they’re like the phone call, if IM is like a conversation face-to-face, because it doesn’t require both people to be in the same place (but they do require you to be around at the same time; I can’t think of a better analogy, if only because nobody checks their voice mail anymore) Calling someone on the phone to tell them something you just thought of seems so… primitive by comparison. They have to be available at the exact same time you are, and you’re potentially disrupting something because there’s no way to know what they’re doing at the moment. Offline messages can be sent whenever you want, and read whenever the recipient wants, and they don’t carry the long-form expectations I personally have of e-mail. If nothing else, I don’t need to think of a title for the message, which is always a challenge with e-mails.

        When Facebook chat was merely IM, I didn’t see the point of it - I rarely spend more than a few minutes at a time on Facebook, and I only visit a few times per day. I’d get ambushed by people I didn’t really talk to when I logged in, and it sucked because I got tired of being a jerk and saying every time “sorry, don’t have time to talk right now”. But now that they’ve merged the chat with messages, it’s actually become my primary method for IM. To the best of my knowledge, AIM and Xfire don’t support offline messages, and those are where I have most of my other conversations. When I have a link or something IM-worthy, I can send it over Facebook and the conversation tends to stay there rather than moving somewhere there’s less surveillance. Not to mention the people who don’t feel the need for dedicated IM now that they have Facebook messaging, which is a totally valid option, just like not everyone needs to use IRC.

        The one downside to offline messages on Facebook are that they’ve hidden away little artifacts that used to land on people’s walls. The other day, a friend of mine discovered Facebook’s “view friendship” feature - with the Timeline update, you can give your friendship a cover photo, provide a picture and a story for the first time you met, and it’s like the best photo album ever. There’s all these little pieces of conversations we were having that continued after the other person had logged out, full of references to games we’ve long forgotten about playing and jokes that are still pretty funny. But it’s all old stuff, from before Facebook messages existed as an alternative. And when I look at the page for my friendships with some other people, the amount of activity just doesn’t reflect how close we are. That’s perfectly fine right now, but it’s a missed opportunity for reminiscing in a few years.

Barely-qualifies-as-one Conclusion

        Anyway, I’m not sure there’s some grand thesis for me to argue for here. I just thought it was really illuminating to think about the influences of older forms of communication, and the expectations and norms that go with them, on more modern ones. It’s a relationship that goes both ways, too, though I’m mostly happy to discard phone calls, sending letters, and physical photo albums as entirely inferior to the alternatives. But I can say for sure that I’ve started to really appreciate actually spending time with people, in a way I’m not sure I would if I expected all interaction to be face-to-face. IM isn’t exclusive, though after a certain point it’s hard to manage a lot of high-volume conversations at once. But hanging out with someone is, and that means there’s nothing they’d rather do with that time than spend it with you, and I think that’s important.

Re-posting old essays

A while ago, Vael and I started talking about my experience learning French and generally being bilingual. Then I realized, oh yeah, I wrote an essay about this already! So I started thinking about what portions of my schoolwork might actually be interesting to you folk, and I’ve come up with a rough list of my least esoteric (and least embarrassing) essays. I’ll post, maybe, one per week, in chronological order. I’m not going to edit them, so it should be fun to look back at how I used to write.

I went through all the essays I’ve kept copies of, and came up with three I’d like to post. There are a lot of others I looked at and decided not to post because I failed to make a good argument, said nothing of interest, or picked a terrible thesis and struggled to do anything with it. I was hoping to post more, honestly, but just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Making my other essays worth your time, dear reader, would require a complete re-write and I’m not that excited about any of the topics I’ve previously written about.

If a given essay seems to require a lot of background knowledge on the topic, that’s entirely my fault. Most assignment descriptions say something like “write as if your audience knows nothing about this subject,” but it’s really hard to do that when there’s a hard limit to the length of your essay. I don’t doubt that it’s possible to completely explain several pages of philosophy writing in a few hundred words, but it’s incredibly difficult and would require a lot of editing time. Still, I hope some of you find some of it interesting.

Papers I’ll be posting:

• Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies 1001 paper, written October 20th, 2010 - French Immersion in Anglophone Canada
• Linguistics 1001 bonus assignment, written December 7th, 2010 - Response to R. M. W. Dixon’s The Rise and Fall of Languages
• Intro to Philosophy of Mind paper, written October 26th, 2011 - Non-verbal minds

Interactive fiction jam results

Summary: The theme we wound up with was Metaverse. Four hours wasn’t a whole lot of time for us to get familiar with Inform 7 and create something interesting. Managing scope is really important!

So, we ran a little bit late and started around 12:30, but most everyone was able to stay until 4:30 so it worked out. Unfortunately, announcing the theme at the start of the timer might not have been the best idea - I don’t know about everyone else, but I spent at least 30 minutes brainstorming. Still debating with myself whether picking the theme in advance and dedicating the four hours to implementation would have been better.

On the other hand, being a prolific writer, Crate was able to mostly finish what he had in mind. Not sure if it’s because he had a better idea of the scope of what you can write in 4 hours, or simply because he wrote so much faster than I did. Either way, good on him! For what it’s worth, Inform 7 source code is measured in words, and I had 800 vs his 1600. Still, I know I wouldn’t have my initial idea “completed” even if I had close to 2000 words. Vael and Maryanna are in a similar boat, I think. So much for putting our completed work online after four hours!

We all had fun, though, barring the occasional frustration with learning some of the more complex idioms of Inform 7. So we’ve agreed to get together once a week, for an hour or so, and continue working on our ideas. I don’t know how long we’ll keep it up, but it should be fun.

Lessons learned:

• The metaverse theme inspired me (and possibly the others) to work on a much grander scope than was actually reasonable. Most metaverses are developed over the course of multiple novel-length works. That usually takes longer than four hours.
• Creating an environment for your player to mess around with is difficult. There are a lot of tiny details to take care of when their actions have no constraints. What if they want to lick the torches you put on the walls? What if they try to run off with a giant stone statue? You have to decide early on how you want your game to deal with that kind of behaviour. Maybe for the theme of your game, it’s better to insert funny easter eggs everywhere. Or maybe you should have a terse “I don’t see any reason to do that” response to all unintended commands.
• Writing descriptions of all the areas and objects your player will see is time-consuming. I spent almost all of my time doing that, in fact, and ran out of time before I could introduce the player to their first NPC and have them learn their first spell. So what I ended up with, after four hours, was five areas and a handful of objects, all with nice descriptions in case the player decides to examine everything. Oh, and I had a sweet door connecting two areas. Also, I had some plural objects I’m pretty happy about ( eg: The pews are here. They are scenery.They are supporters. The description is “Some pews.” – I would like to be able to say “their description is”, however)
• Working with NPCs in Inform 7 wasn’t as immediately obvious as I had hoped it would be. Having conversation that doesn’t rely on “tell NPC hello” or other awkward constructions requires a bit of research. I’d like to find a way to have dialogue “come from” an NPC instead of the standard narrator. It seems more natural to write something like ‘NPC, say “Blah”’ in my code than 'say “NPC says blah”’. I assume it’s possible, but I didn’t have time to find out in the last 20 minutes. But perhaps I’m just being too object oriented, and there’s no real difference between the two.
• The documentation support in the Inform 7 IDE is pretty awesome. The manual for the entire language, and a pretty extensive Recipe Book, has built-in search from the IDE. The index is even better, though - among other things, it lists all the objects you’ve declared and allows you to navigate to their definition with a click, all the rules that have been defined, all the verbs the player can enter, all the phrases you can use in your code (with examples and links to the manual), the entire object hierarchy of your game… It took me a while to notice all of this stuff was there, but once I started exploring the index, I was able to find most anything I wanted from within the IDE.
• DSLs can be pretty cool! Everything about Inform 7 is focused on making interactive fiction, and it’s a superb tool for that task.

I put my code up on GitHub in case there’s any useful tricks in my source (warning: doesn’t compile right now). One thing I will point your attention to is the use of square brackets around the names of objects in prose - I learned that from a blog post by Aaron Reed, and I think it’s a great idea. Essentially, all you have to do is put square brackets around the names of nouns in your descriptions of locations. What this does is send the compiler looking for an object that can be referred to by the bracketed text, and if the compiler can’t resolve that name to an actual object, you get an error. If you wanted the object to exist, this is a good warning. If you don’t want such an object to exist, then you have to change the description so that it doesn’t imply there’s an object that the player can’t actually interact with.

As a bonus, if you find yourself using too many nouns, you have to get a bit more creative with your prose - I happen to love the noun-less version of the second description. I’m used to that sort of intense editing, though, and maybe you’re horrified by the idea of spending so much time thinking about every little sentence. That’s perfectly ok, because it is time-consuming. But in the long run, I’d much rather play a game full of awesome prose like that second version. Plus I wouldn’t wind up wasting time playing around with non-existent objects. Think of your players! Think of your satisfaction as you read your beautiful prose in the future! I’m often pleasantly surprised by the writing in my old blog posts, when I go digging through the archive, so obviously I think it’s worth putting in the effort.

Interactive fiction jam delayed; more resources

Rather than lose ¼ of my participants, I got everyone to agree on moving the date to Monday instead of today. Which works out well because it’s Labour Day, a useless holiday that has no festivities to keep people busy! Of course, the people participating who have spoken to me already know this, but who knows - there could be lurkers.

Anyway, I’ve been realizing the kind of effort that goes into making an awesome Inform 7 game like Violet. It would take more than four hours to produce something like that, especially as complete beginners. So I’m thinking that we’re going to have to tend more towards creating short stories with a bit of interactivity, for fear of having things spiral out of control.

At a bare minimum, I’m thinking of suggesting that everyone watch this video by Aaron Reed to get a basic introduction to Inform 7 and its integrated development environment (IDE). Then, go through this tutorial by Stephen Granade for a more hands-on introduction to the system - learning to create rooms, props, and rules. I’m hoping that’s a good enough baseline to produce something in a few hours without losing time on learning the basics.

Aside from all of that I’ve been busy looking into a variety of Inform 7 things. I get to be like that when presented with an extensible system. Rather than clog up my tumblr with a huge list of stuff, I’ve put everything I’ve found up on SimpleNote:

• General notes: https://simple-note.appspot.com/publish/pnNXVd
• Extensions I’ve found that seem like they might be useful: https://simple-note.appspot.com/publish/blW3Q2

It’s worth looking through to see if there’s anything that inspires you. Maybe you want to make a really conversation heavy game - if so, check out Eric Eve’s numerous conversation-related extensions (among other things). Maybe you want to make something modern involving computers and other real life objects - Emily Short has some extensions for that (again alongside a lot of other stuff). She also has an extension for incorporating mood variations in your non-player characters… And now I’m just repeating everything I wrote in SimpleNote. Go on through the general notes for some information on best practices and other junk, and then the extensions one for fiddly stuff you might like.

Finally: I’m working on making a list of themes to pick from. I’d be happy to take suggestions. My intent is for the theme to provide a mental challenge, since you can’t just write whatever you want. At the same time, it should be broad enough that different interpretations are possible. So here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Companionship (writing other people/creatures is hard, this may be a cruel option)
• Underwater (courtesy of Vael, though I’d rather we didn’t all write some Atlantis/BioShock story)
• Possession (interpret any way you please)
• Metaverse
• Duality (courtesy of Crate, but I dunno - contrasting two disparate parts or elements is a pretty abstract theme)
• Underworld (Crate)
• Recycling/renewal (Crate)
• Hostile negotiations/enemy of your enemy (Crate)

I know, it’s not a terribly impressive list. I thought of a few more but.. uh… I forgot to write them down. So, please do suggest more! Just don’t say Brave New World or Stranger In A Strange Land or anything like that. Come now, we’re better than that. To make life easier, I’m also going to suggest we avoid high fantasy sort of stuff because it’s incredibly difficult to do well.

So yeah, that’s where we’re at! I’m having a lot of fun with this.

**Link to a .rar of extensions I thought might be useful, up to date as of September 2nd 2012: http://uninotes.thebcn.net/i7x.rar

Installation instructions: * Extract all .i7x files into one folder (note the ATTACK extension in its own folder) * Open the Inform IDE * Click File * Click “Install extensions” * Ctrl+a to select all files * Click ok

Bonus: documentation for all extensions is available once they’re installed. Go to the Documentation pane, click on “Installed extensions” below the final chapter of the manual, and then click on the name of an extension.**

Interactive fiction jam

We’re doing what?

While I was researching a post I’m working on (you’ll see it soon, I’m really proud of it), I took a bit of time to look into interactive fiction. This led me to a Stack Overflow question with a lot of good answers about IF tools/systems, and I realized once again how cool Inform 7 is. I’ve also been listening to episodes of a Destructoid podcast called “Sup, Holmes?” (itunes, feed with mp3s), and in a number of episodes (episodes 15-18) he has interviewed people from the Toronto indie game community. They all spoke of things they had worked on at various game jams in Toronto, and I thought that sounded pretty cool. A game jam is just a bunch of people gathering (often physically, but sometimes digitally) and working on a game for a set period of time. At the end, you have a thing that probably sucks but gosh darn it you made it and you’re going to be proud of it!

Light bulb: why not combine the two?

So here’s what I’m proposing:

• Date: Monday (Labour Day)
• Time/length: From 12 pm until 4 pm, Eastern Standard Time - we all have other things to do, and we don’t all get up early. Note that I originally had allocated a lot more time for this; but I didn’t want to exclude people who have, you know, adult responsibilities. Next time we’ll do five hours. Perhaps it will be a two-part event, e.g. we all work on the same story next time.
• Who’s invited? I’ll get a few interested folks from Ottawa in my living room, but distant participants are welcome - I’ll set up some kind of video chat through Google Hangout/Skype/TinyChat/something so we can taunt each other and discuss stuff
• What do you make? The day of, I’ll announce the theme we’re going to write on by pulling one of several candidates from a hat - I’m open to suggestions on what our criteria are for a “finished” story, as I don’t necessarily want one person to write 10,000 words and someone else to write 300
• Then what? Then everyone works on their story all day, in whatever way they see fit!
• What happens when I’m done? We’ll use Inform 7’s export thing to put what we’ve made online!

This is meant to be difficult, because to the best of my knowledge I don’t know anyone who writes interactive fiction. The random theme aspect is designed to make it that much more challenging. What you produce doesn’t have to be awesome; it will probably be more fun to create than to play. At any rate, it’s just meant to be a fun event for us to hang out and do something interesting. I literally have no experience with this, and haven’t written creatively in a while, so I expect this to be really difficult. But you’re up for it, because you’re awesome!

Resources

I’m going to be continually adding resources that seem useful here, if you want to do a bit of research. Just try not to show us all up by reading everything like some kind of genius, alright?

For a practical introduction to Inform 7, check out this screencast by Aaron Reed. I’d forgotten about this video, actually; this was the first thing I ever saw about Inform 7 and it’s really quite impressive. He paints the system in a more prose-based light than some of the other more programming focused resources below. So at a bare minimum, give that a watch and then grab things below that seem useful.

One programming-language-y thing that I expect to be quite useful is rulebooks. I expect he’s right that using rulebooks as much as possible is a good idea, so do give that post a look and consider making use of them. Thinking about it a little, rulebooks are kind of like quirky interfaces - you have some behaviour that you want a bunch of things to share, so you put it in a single place and have them “consult” with the rulebook on what to do. Depending on the approach you take, this will either be incredibly useful or utterly irrelevant.

For in-depth tutorials on Inform 7, there’s a section on their site. The Recipe Book seems particularly useful.

For those of us with the background, Inform 7 for Programmers is long but informative. I actually find it to terse to a fault in some ways; it’s not very good as reference material to flip through.

If you’d like to see some source code as an example, check out the bottom half of this page which implements Cloak of Darkness, which seems to be an IF “hello, world” sort of story.

One of the StackOverflow answers recommended the section on design from the old Inform Designers Manual, Fourth Edition (DM4). So I’ve extracted that into its own PDF, which I’ve uploaded here.

Inform has an extensive library of extensions (shut up I am normally better at writing than that), which you can check out here - once you’ve got an idea of what you’re going to do, you might want to look around in there.

If you’d like to write a fight-y sort of game, you can check out an extension for Inform called ATTACK.

He also has a series of posts about designing a text-based dungeon crawler in Inform 7, if that’s your jam: pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

If you run into anything interesting that I haven’t directly linked to, please do send it around to the rest of us. We’ll probably all be doing wildly different things, but you might inspire someone to change direction with whatever wonderful extension/blog post/whatever you’ve found.

Kickback: All The Right Reasons

Years ago, when I would listen to songs that made me think of anything related to relationships, I didn’t stop to put into words what the song made me feel. I’d get a vague approximation of some thoughts, and I’d be appropriately happy/miserable/both, and that was all I needed. Now that I’ve got more time between myself and the relationship in question, I don’t get the same feelings, and so I literally can’t remember what it was that I liked about these songs. Listening to them now, I know there was something about the song, but can’t quite grasp it.

        You can see the vague, unformed idea effect in some of the music posts I made back in 2010 - I’d post the song and the lyrics, but not say a whole lot about it. A prime example is this post about Kickback UK’s All The Wrong Reasons. I was listening to the song last night and thinking it meant something to me in 2010, but I couldn’t say what it was. At a guess, I’d say I felt like I was trying to help people so I could feel better about myself - the most cynical way of reading my behaviour at the time. There were a couple people I was “friends” with at the time mostly for that reason, and it took me a while to realize that wasn’t the way to go. But that’s only a guess - I can’t say for sure what I was thinking when I made that post.

        What I can tell you is what the song makes me think now, which you will (hopefully) be glad to hear is much more positive. I was up late writing an essay for my Linguistic Analysis class, and I took the lyrics in a very different way. (Chalk it up to vague interpretations, I guess, when the same song can mean a totally different thing two years later.) I was feeling good about the essay and wanted to reflect a bit on how I’ve changed lately, and where I’m heading in the future. Moral of the story, for the tl;dr crowd - I feel like I’ve gone from “all the wrong reasons” to “all the right reasons”, and I’ve got big plans. Read on if you’re interested! Best if you take a stop by the old post, first.

        "Head’s in the future, but your heart’s in the past" is an apt description of me circa 2010. Things were looking up, but definitely not all the way up. Which is a stupid metaphor if you try to picture it, but it works verbally. “And we’ve seen it all before, you’re holding out for more” follows from that, obviously. Neither of those things still apply to me, which is a good sign. Head and heart are both set on the future, I suppose. Getting to the future I want means working hard in the present, but it feels more and more and more natural as I put out work I’m legitimately proud of. Nobody’s ever going to look at the C++ assignment I’m working on right now, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make it good and shoot for a mark of 110%.

        The next line is what gets me now, and probably what got to me in the past as well. “When that call never comes it’s time to face what you’ve become - there’s no point doing all of this unless you know you’re having fun.” At the time, there were a lot of things I wasn’t terribly happy with. I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun with the work I was doing back then. Although it got me here, so I can’t complain - but it was all delayed gratification at the time. At least now I get some of that gratification! A little, anyway. Still lots of delay right now. But I’ve recently realized what I should be working towards, although I’d been thinking about it for a few weeks. I said I didn’t have many important goals for 2012, but I take that back now! I’ve got two, which I strongly feel I can accomplish, and which all of my work now contributes to:

• The first: have my name on a publication.
• The second: learn as much as possible, with an eye towards distinguishing myself from the competition.

Both of these are practical goals that will, hopefully, put me in a great position when I finish my education and set out for a job. So - “what have I become”? Someone who strives to be the best they can be. (Time will tell where I’ll fall on the sweet/awesome dichotomy.) I’m not necessarily having fun, but I’m seeing the big picture now.

        From where I stand, that means a number of different things. Most recently, it means improving my writing consciously, the way I used to while I was in AP English. (If you’re interested in that writing analysis tool but not interested in Emacs, I can look into creating an independent version, with the author’s permission.) Going back a few weeks, I’ve started to really dedicate myself to programming well. I’m getting tons of inspiration on that topic as I dig up tidbits of information about Emacs, and inevitably get linked to some other brilliant piece. There’s Steve Yegge and Avdi Grimm over the past few days, who have both Emacs secrets I can steal and general programming knowledge. Meanwhile, Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman write about quality of life as a programmer - improving your tools, improving your office, improving your lighting, etc. Aside from that, I’m always trying to synthesize what I know about the seemingly-disparate areas of linguistics (at least, that’s what the separation in course content would lead you to believe). I want to say with some confidence that I’m a linguist - not some kid who “maybe heard about that in university, but didn’t think it was important”.

        In a similar vein, I’m connecting all the dots in this “cognitive science” thing. Philosophy is cognitive psychology, cognitive psychology is neuroscience, neuroscience is linguistics, linguistics is computer science… And the whole conglomerate is cognitive science. I may not use every part of it for the rest of my life, but understanding them all matters. Even if I were to be a career programmer, I’d keep usability testing in mind. Even if I were a linguist for the rest of my life, I know for a fact I’d land in a crossover field - computational linguistics and neurolinguistics seem equally likely right now.

        So what I’m getting at is: I know what I’m doing here, and I know who I am. I can’t tell you what I’ll settle on for a job, but I know what the core components of that job will be. This is where I belong. The lows may be low, but the highs are home.

Halifax Explosion poem

[Apparently I wrote this when I was 12, for some school project I think. If you’re interested, google Halifax Explosion. It’s pretty short, but enjoy it while it lasts!]

The wind,

The snow,

The bitter cold,

None can hide, the 

Devastation, the sorrow.

The Lord shall visit

Halifax to take the

Innocent to

Heaven.

A daughter crying,

A Mothers tragic fate, 

A Fathers heartfelt wish

for an end to this war

Three years fought.

Babes cry, adults weep,

Families are torn apart,

Shattered like the windows

In their homes.