Potion Miscibility: the Jasmine

The name of this martini-style cocktail led me to expect something flavored with fragrant jasmine flowers, which sounds great for tea but nasty for gin. Instead, though, it’s a haunting combination of familiar ingredients that nonetheless evokes something of the exotic. Whoever named it probably thought of India, but I prefer to geek it up by imagining sipping this while overlooking the beautiful gorge that lies beneath Telaar in Nagrand.

In fact, it does go very well with World of Warcraft, as long as you’re not busy PVPing. Anything that calls for very fast reaction times also calls for stemware to be far from the keyboard!

Jasmine

Ingredients

• 1½ oz. gin
• ¼ oz. Cointreau
• juice of ½ lemon
• spash of Campari
• lemon peel

I have only tried this with Bombay Sapphire (my favorite) for the gin, but I’ve made satisfactory Jasmines with generic triple sec in place of the Cointreau and even lemon juice from concentrate instead of fresh.

Instructions

Combine all ingredients except the lemon peel in a shaker half full of ice, then strain into a martini glass (ideally chilled). Garnish with lemon peel.

Source

My wife found this recipe at Extratasty. I haven’t been to the site before. In fact, I haven’t been off the Jasmine page (except to get the code for the link to the right). I expect I’ll be back, though.

Add comment July 6th, 2007

Ding! (Level 70)

The fact that I just hit 70 for the first time in World of Warcraft should make it pretty obvious that I’m a casual player. I didn’t start playing at launch, but it still took me almost a year to get a character to 70.

The momentous occasion took place in Netherstorm, as I turned in a quest (I forget which one) in Kirin’Var.

The handy (if you’re into that sort of thing) LevelSnap mod ensured that I snagged a screen capture of the moment. (Speaking of mods, the image on the right is a detail. If you click through to the full screen, you’ll see that I’m using Mazzle’s phenomenal UI compilation—with a few tweaks, of course.)

The event was something of an anticlimax. Only two others from my guild were online, and I’m not particularly close to the guild. (Perhaps someday I’ll chatter about online friendships in WoW in contrast to other games.) So I didn’t boast about it in guild chat. None of my real-life friends were online.

I did coax a smile from my wife, sitting nearby.

But, though no one sang out high praise for my hardly unique accomplishment, I did think it worthwhile to job all the way to Wildhammer Stronghold to pick up my lovely snowy gryphon.

Flying is decidedly fun. I figured I’d take the opportunity to fly over the Horde town of Stonebreaker Hold to get it “on my map.” I naively assumed that the guards didn’t police their own air space. Boy, was I mistaken!

Just as the area was revealed on my map, I got a debuff that I think was called “Spotted.” (Can anyone confirm this?) I flew as fast as I could (which isn’t even as fast as an epic ground mount), but I didn’t get far before I got hit. The hit didn’t do a lot of damage, but the fall. . . .

Let’s just say I didn’t hit my Levitate key in time.

Now I just have to figure out what to do next. I’m inclined to dig into PVP battlegrounds and the arena. But I also want to help my wife get her paladin to 70 and play around with a few of my favorite alts. Any brilliant suggestions?

Add comment July 5th, 2007

UO: Fantasy World Simulator

Back when I played in the beta and early release of Ultima Online almost a decade ago, I almost couldn’t believe my luck. This would really be the game I’d longed for. I could meet people online in a fantasy world, and together we’d have emergent, collaborative stories unfold of derring-do, chivalry, and virtue.

And vice, of course! Mustn’t forget the vice. I eagerly looked forward to the duels that would take place when one character took in-character offense at another’s words. I contemplated a Robin Hood–style character who would help himself to the contents of rich player’s purses and earn fame handing out my ill-gotten gains to newer players.

I relished the thought of being a homesteaded in an isometric world, carving out a place for myself in Britannia through the work of my own two virtual hands.

I had a horrible time. My big mistake? Assuming that other players wanted pretty much what I did from such a game—or at least something compatible.

I tried to have fun. I didn’t worry about whether other players roleplayed the way I thought they should. Instead, I wrote a guide on how to speak “Britannian.” (Oddly enough, it’s still floating around out there. I wrote it as “Josephus the Scholar.” It even got mentioned in a book! I had no idea. Too funny.)

And when my young and idealistic animal tamer got killed seven or eight times in a row, I shrugged and started to gather feathers so I could make some more arrows. Mind you, I’m not complaining about UO being too “difficult,” even though a post at Tobold’s blog on that topic inspired this little ramble. (Oh, and I see it’s actually to the new Hardcore Casual’s first post. Good post, Syncaine!) In fact, I argued passionately for three freedom to stab my fellow players in their backs and rifle through their goodies.

I just didn’t count on people who played the game simply to dominate other players.

The PKers did ruin the game for me. The in-game law enforcement meant I could create my wicked characters, and the PKers themselves meant I couldn’t really function as a good guy. My hard-won equipment would be stripped from my corpse, and I couldn’t even get to the interesting places I wanted to explore.

And, of course, the “gamist” players cared mostly about advancing their characters, a more-subtle incompatibility to my own preferred style of play. (I wanted to level, but I wanted to do it while roleplaying.)

The PKers were a malicious minority who really did ruin the game for a vast number of others. But I was in a small minority, too, dreaming of a game that just couldn’t exist.

I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if a visit to Britannia today would show me a game much closer to what I hoped for back in the day. Can anyone still playing tell me?
Great gaming minds tried to make UO work, and basically they failed. (The game hasn’t failed. It’s still going! But for a while at least, it was nothing like what the creators—and I for that matter—envisioned)

Could a massively multiplayer fantasy simulation be made to work, one where talk of PVE and PVP were irrelevant, because the world functioned and you functioned in it? I now know the audience would be small. Most people don’t want a game where vendors go to bed at night or where the goodies on their corpses can be taken. And in fact I can fully understand why. But if someone set out to do it and make it genuinely enjoyable, could it be done?

1 comment June 29th, 2007

Not just a good educational tool

Games are the best (and second-most effective) education tools available.

Slate had an article yesterday on educational video games that I think serves as a pretty good high-level survey of the ongoing discussion right now, especially since it pointed to Koster’s key point from some time ago that adding an artificial incentive to perform an educational activity isn’t very effective but requiring learning in order to achieve a genuinely interesting goal does. (Koster responds directly to Slate’s article here.)

Here are two things I know:

• People will go way out of their way to acquire skills and learn things that help them achieve a goal that interests them and that they perceive as achievable.
• When people are motivated to learn something for such goals, they learn it faster and more efficiently than they will under any other circumstance (except in cases where survival is at stake, in which case they may achieve an even greater efficiency).

In other words, when people understand why learning something is worth their while—when they recognize for themselves the reward—they have all the motivation they need. Thus self-motivated, they will learn more rapidly than they ever would in a classroom or at a parent’s insistence.

I know a dozen people whose vocabulary exceeded their own parents’ (though with a geekier slant) thanks to Gary Gygax’s sesquipedalianism.

I knew a boy, something of a slacker, who rapidly learned the fundamentals of programming when he got caught up in a game in which you could tweak the code of your virtual robot to increase its chances in fights. (Alas, I don’t remember the name of the game.)

To make a video game—or any game, for that matter—that is effectively educational, the designer or design team has to focus on two key elements: goals and obstacles.

This is, of course, exactly what any halfway decent game designer already does. MMOs, for example, primarily focus on power-acquisition goals that are just fun enough to justify the obstacle of spending more time playing the game. The goals have to be satisfying, however arbitrary, and the obstacles have to be just challenging enough that people don’t think they can’t surmount them but do feel a sense of accomplishment when they do. A series of increasingly difficult obstacles centered on a theme, ubiquitous in all game design, is the right approach.

But to be educational, the obstacles have to require something more than just dedication or quicker button-pushing. Some RPGs (such as some of the Ultima games) require a little bit of language acquisition in order to complete them.

I’m willing to bet that a child (or grown-up for that matter) could get the benefit of six years of class-learning in a foreign language in the course of about two months of regular gameplay in an immersive single-player spy-based roleplaying adventure game in which acquiring the actual skill to learn the language was essential to completing the game and the mini-goals along the way provided the tools to do so. Early goals would require demonstrable skill in simple vocabulary and easy phrases. Later goals would hone in on those subtle points of a language that can trip a non-native speaker up, punishing sloppy and quick reading with setbacks and rewarding fluency with access to better in-game skills and tools and, ultimately, the final parts of the story.

The game could offer language instruction directly, in the form of mini-games or simulated classroom learning, but also reward language fluency acquired outside the game. If people find they learn faster on their own, they’re free to do so, but if they enjoy the in-game learning, that’s available too.

A couple of months after the game’s release (if the game is done right), high schoolers across the country would be chattering in French during study hall.

(I’m not an expert on the economics of the game industry, but I’m willing to bet that an A-list game of this sort sold at $50 would be able to make far more money than a language-learning program sold at $150)

Am I crazy? I know I’d drop fifty bucks on a well-written game like that in a nanosecond. Not because I’d finally learn French, but because I’d like a damn good, immersive spy-themed adventure-RPG set in the period after World War II. (Base it on Tim Powers’s incredible Declare to get some good supernatural elements, and I’ll spend $150!)

2 comments June 28th, 2007