Posts filed under 'Online'
Here’s a fun tool for tabletop roleplaying games and MMORPG players who actually want to do some roleplaying over Ventrilo and Teamspeak. Pulp Gamer is offering a dialect-training CDs. In the past, I’ve looked longingly at the advanced—and expensive—dialect training courses and coaches Hollywood stars use, but I’ve never been able to justify the expense.
Along comes Pulp Gamer, offering two CDs that cover various British English dialects. The first covers “Cockney and the Queen’s English,” which is just what I need for my surly gnome rogue in World of Warcraft. The second tackles “Irish and Scottish.”
Will these CDs help me attain true verisimilitude? I rather doubt it. The sample, for instance, sounds very good but not perfect.
But hey, I don’t want to spend years mastering a throwaway dialect for my upcoming Victorian countryside survival horror campaign. Instead, I want to sound good enough that I can voice several different characters convincingly enough that my players can distinguish them. If I can coax even a few smiles—or widened eyes—the $13.95 I blow on each CD will be well worth it.
While you’re ordering yours, you might want to subscribe to Pulp Gamer’s very good paper game podcast, too. It’s their main product, really, and well worth your time.
August 2nd, 2007
Here’s a complete spoiler of the answer to the day fourteen puzzle in the Ultimate Search for Bourne.
Our briefing tells us Bourne is lying in the video we captured yesterday and recommends getting in touch with Mustapha Nayet, the video expert, through the instant messenger for ideas on how to deal with lies in audio samples.
It’s been a while, so if you don’t remember, you need to use agent handle Mouslelion and passphrase Vive le maroc in the instant messenger to get in touch with Mustapha. When you do, he’ll tell you: “You’ve got the tools. Search for yourself. These keywords may help: Bourne lie detection Treadstone.”
The trick is to enter the phrase bourne lie detection treadstone into Google Image Search (images.google.com). When you do, you’ll see a picture stored at the Dater Notes site called “How to spot a lie.” (The French “mensonge détection” is there, too, with a miraculously identical coffee mug stain. Spoils suspension of disbelief, but I have to admit I’m impressed that Google Image Search found a relevant non-English version based on the English text entered into the search box. It didn’t find a German version, though. I suspect there’s one out there.)
For once, we don’t have to enter the image into the Decryption tool (which doesn’t work at all for some readers). Instead, we have to follow the final advice from the sheet: “Digital studio analysis can expose a marked increase in transients and visual distortion of the waveform due to stress and the constriction of the larynx under duress. Though the lie may pass aural cues of detection, often the best liars can’t escape waveform analysis.”. The video we found yesterday is in the Media section under Videos and is called “Waveform Video.” I had to click the Video button about three times to get it to show up.
Since Jason Bourne helpfully included a visual waveform readout of his spoken message, all we have to do is watch for those phrases in which the waveform becomes agitated and distorted, as illustrated on the “How to spot a lie” sheet. This happens with the phrase: Stay here.
The answer to today’s puzzle is to type Stay here. in the message transmitter and hit Submit.
Since neither of my camera’s caught a shot of Bourne yesterday, including the one that did catch a sighting the day before that, I’m back to just random guessing. Anyone have a better idea for camera placement?
(Edited to correct a minor error in the answer. Thanks, O Great Commenters!)
August 2nd, 2007
Here’s the complete spoiler for the day 13 challenge in the Ultimate Search for Bourne game.
Our briefing tells us that amoung our video files is a “very public” apparent trailer that contains an instant message handle, straight from Jason Bourne. We’ll use this in the transmitter to get the answer to today’s puzzle. This video showed up as “Altered Trailer” on my wife’s machine and started playing automatically, but I was completely unable to get it to display on mine. More evidence that the UI is irritatingly buggy, as some commenters have observed. (Note: I was able to get the video to play on my own machine about five minutes later.)
The video has many promotional titles that, together, read, “His identity erased. His loved one murdered. His past stolen. On August 3rd, Bourne comes home. The Bourne Ultimatum.” Slightly harder to see (I used the pause button to catch them exactly) are JoanneBrous (an anagram of “Jason Bourne) and the familiar TREADSTONE ALL LIES. Key these in to the Instant Messenger as the agent handle and passphrase, and you’ll get a link to a YouTube video (here) with an audio message from Bourne: “This is Jason Bourne. Listen. Stay here. Do exactly what I say. And you’ll get further instructions.”
That’s all well and good, but don’t be distracted. As with the other days’ puzzles, the answer is very simple. It’s the URL itself that we have to put in the Message Transmitter to solve the challenge.
Click “Submit Answer” under the daily briefing and paste the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0iKP8c3D0 in as your answer. Transmit it, and you’re done.
It’s possible there’s a clue to camera placement in today’s video, but I didn’t recognize any of the shots of the Big Apple, even when the clip had someone saying “within 1000 yards of this building,” which sounded promising. So I went with proximity, and put the nearest camera at 5 West 37th Street. I don’t know if there’s anything exciting or spyish in that building, a high-rise office building, but it’s right next to Madison Square Park, yesterday’s solution and the place where my first New York City camera caught a sighting of Bourne.
August 1st, 2007
Here’s a complete spoiler for the answer to today’s challenge in the Ultimate Search for Bourne.
We’re in New York City now (the metropolis that was the solution to yesterday’s puzzle), and the briefing tells us to head back to Dater Notes to check Nicky Parson’s (buckeye2099) profile. As I guessed yesterday, the photo of a napkin with a rough map with Broadway on it (and a kiss) scribbled on it is the key. It’s named with one of Bourne’s earlier aliases—John Michael Kane (as a reader pointed out in yesterday’s comments; thanks John!). The briefing explicitly tells us to key the photo’s URL into the image processor.
Applying filter C reveals the solution: Madison Square Park. Paste this into the communication panel, and we’re done.
Edit: Note that commenters discovered that the photo can be displayed without the “www,” but the image processor requers it. Use the URL
http://www.daternotes.com/images/profile_photoAlbum/
JOHN_MICHAEL_KANE.jpg
(with no line break, of course) in the image processor if you want to get it to work. You can also right-click on the link and choose “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Link Location” or your browsers equivalent and paste it into the image processor.
If I ever said it looked as if the puzzles were getting harder, I take it back. This is absurdly easy!
Since we’re in a new city, we only get one camera. I went with the obvious choice: Madison Square Park.
July 31st, 2007
People have long discussed what it’s like to play a character of a different sex in an MMORPG, and there’s not much left to say on the subject, but a post by the Infamous Brad about the treatment of his female character in City of Heroes made me realize that men playing women may be shocked my something that’s all too familiar to women players.
Brad argues that, when other (male) players think the player is a woman, they will treat that player as stupid or, if the player is assertive, call that player a bitch. To such assholes (as Brad accurately dubs them), women players serve as viable flirtation targets, and possibly as audience for long-winded instruction they don’t need. But the assholes simply don’t think real women deserve respect.
I’ve found this to be completely true, I’m afraid. About half my MMORPG characters are female, and players usually assume (wrongly) that there’s an actual woman player behind the character. When they do, some—not the majority, but a significant minority—treat me like a fool.
To some degree, I think it’s mostly players like the Infamous Brad and me—men who convincingly play female characters—that make a stink about this sort of thing. My wife plays, and plays female characters almost exclusively. She gets this sort of treatment all the time. But she doesn’t say much about it. I suspect that’s because she already deals with it in real life. Let’s face it; this sort of treatment isn’t at all unique to the anonymous online worlds where we slay dragons.
It’s endemic to academe and meeting rooms, too.
There are women players who roll with the punch, others who make a fuss even at the risk of being branded a bitch. But men simply don’t expect to have their ideas and suggestions dismissed without being considered. When men speak, they expect their contributions to be given due consideration. When they participate in an activity, they expect their efforts to be equally valued at least until they prove themselves unworthy.
So for us men, it’s absolutely shocking when we encounter it online. For women, it may be enraging, but it’s not altogether surprising.
Women simply don’t get respect from everyone. They consistently get dismissed, ignored, ridiculed for no other reason than that they’re women. Not by everyone, no. But there are enough assholes, online and off, that the experience can’t be all that unfamiliar to most women.
The real point, here, is that convincingly playing a woman may give men a chance to experience the downside. (The upside—free crap in exchange for typing /dance and acting like a complete moron in major in-game cities—is well-documented and not all that much of an upside.) Men, it’s your chance to do what Eddie Murphy did on Saturday Night Live so many years ago. (Go watch the video if you haven’t seen it. Hilarious.)
So if you’re a man eager to experience to prejudice and condescension women face regularly, roll up a female character and play her well. This is an interesting wrinkle to the roleplaying aspect of these roleplaying games, one that’s not truly available to tabletop gaming or online games with voice chat (but that is available to online interaction outside of games).
As a humorous endnote, I’ll mention here that I’ve had good success being perceived as a woman player when I play woman characters. I attribute this to a lot of the same things Brad mentions in his blog post. But I never expected it to have anything to do with my training as an editor.
Apparently, though, grammar helps! Several years ago, while playing my main in Dark Age of Camelot, a female mercenary, I formed a pretty good online friendship with another player. Eventually, he worked up the courage to ask if I was really a woman. I don’t know why, but I told him I was. “i knew it,” he wrote. “want to know why? because of the capitalization and punctuation. men don’t do that.”
July 30th, 2007
In today’s challenge in the Ultimate Search for Bourne, which I’ll spoil completely here. Having solved the Day 10 puzzle, we’re rewarded with a video congratulating us on finishing up with London. Our briefing tells us Simon Ross has led us to a briefcase belonging to Jason Bourne that contains a crossword puzzle, then links to it here and advises us that we have lots of tools to use to figure out the answer.
Once again, the crossword puzzle (which is surprisingly easy) is basically a red herring. Some words are already filled out (like “silencer” and “terabyte”) and the correct “canada” has been crossed out. The word “metropolis” made me suspect the correct answer right away, but so far the puzzle itself doesn’t really matter. The key is not to solve the puzzle or use any fancy Google Searches on the words. All you have to do is process the image in the Decryption image filter and the answer appears, a de-scrambling of seven random letters from the puzzle.
And that answer is New York. Pop it in the message transmitter, and you’re ready to place your cameras.
I won’t be too surprised if this puzzle features in an upcoming challenge in the next few days, with a slightly more involved solution involving actually solving some of it, or at least with hints pointing to some of the completed clues. We may be going back to Nicky Parson’s Dater Notes profile, too. There’s an image with “Broadway” scribbled on a napkin arranging a meeting. There are other Broadways in the world, but New York’s is probably the most famous. The question is, who’s John Michael Kane (the filename of that photo)?
My spy shop guess from last week didn’t work with camera placement, so I went with my two successes (the London Eye and Waterloo Station), then chose St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London since they’ve been mentioned before.
July 30th, 2007
Okay. The camera strategy worked. Both of yesterdays caught shots of Bourne.
But now for a complete spoiler of today’s challenge in the Ultimate Search for Bourne. Don’t keep reading if you don’t want the mission to be spoiled for you.
Our missions briefing tells us Simon Ross, our current contact, is a liar. We’re instructed to revisit the clue sites from the last two days to see if we can find a more accurate rendezvous location. Those locations are Google Group “Sightseeing in London” and a page at Priceless.com. Note that the Google Group is exactly the same, but the Priceless.com page linked to in the mission briefing is definitely different.
The Priceless.com page contains almost exactly the same text as the message thread in the Google Group that wasn’t relevant in yesterday’s challenge. “T.Gray” posted it on the Google Group, “T.Grey” did on Priceless.com.
The Priceless.com page includes a photo of what appear to be bus routes connecting to Waterloo Station, judging from the icons. This is an alternative to the image of the statue of Terrence Cuneo, an English painter whose statue features prominently in the station.
It’s easy to get distracted by red herrings today. Cuneo, the bus routes (or train routes), and all the Googling you could possibly do is a waste of time, as Agent Simon Ross has told us directly in the text—and with a big, bright-red circle on a map in the Google Group focusing on the Station—exactly where he is.
Just transmit Waterloo Station in the communication panel to solve today’s challenge.
As for camera placement, since my last two cameras both worked, I’m leaving them in place at the London Eye and Waterloo Station. For the third, I’m going with the camera at 62 South Audley Street, because searching for that in Google reveals that it’s the location of The Counter Spy Shop. This is a spy game, after all, so maybe Jason Bourne will stop by to pick up some surveillance gear.
The game won’t continue till Monday, so check back then if you need spoilers for day 11.
July 27th, 2007
Today, Tobold wrote about what may be the death of turn-based strategy games, pointing out that even though technical limitations don’t force game developers to opt for a turn-based model, in some cases a turn-based model can offer greater depth of play.
Attempts to move tabletop gaming online have mostly failed. For instance, I ran a campaign in Neverwinter Nights that didn’t work for two key reasons. First, it took an enormous amount of time for me to create the game world between sessions. Even if I’d had more and more time to practice developing the world with the provided toolset, I’m sure I would always be spending more time creating scenarios than running them.
Second, as soon as combat began, the players were hopelessly outgunned. I kept lowering and lowering the difficulty of the fights in the game, but the players couldn’t keep up. Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games are designed to simulate combat to some degree of accuracy, but the all depend on a turn-based model.
Sure, this means a few seconds of battle can take an hour to play out. Sure, in a real fight people don’t have time to make such decisions. But it allows people pretend they actually have combat skills. No one’s ever penalized for not remembering a keyboard shortcut and losing because her war-hardened combat veteran character forgot to raise her shield at the right moment.
(Neverwinter Nights actually was a turn-based game, though by default set to simulate real-time action. In a multi-playered, game-mastered game, though, allowing all players to pause was impractical. It simulated D&D reasonably well for the solo campaign, but failed for group play.)
Porting board games to computers has been more successful simply because no one’s trying to change the rules. No one wants to play speed-Monopoly, with button-mashing magnates making a Trump-like killing in the real-estate market simply because they can roll their dice the fastest. (Okay, maybe that’d be fun, but only in a weird way.)
But something breaks down with roleplaying games. Computer RPGs are an almost completely different genre than tabletop RPGs, even if they’re built around the same ruleset.
I asked before (in the context of voice chat) about non-MMO online roleplaying. But I’m thinking about it even more, now, ’cause I’ve got a friend from college who wants to start a campaign up again.
How can I get the tabletop roleplaying experience with remote players? Now that video conferencing is effectively free, we can at least talk to one another. And I’ve mentioned Gametable before, which provides a shared map and die rolling.
But are there any tools that really take advantage of web-connected computers to simulate the game itself while still giving the richness of turn-based play? Any tools that can handle the intricate interplay of a multi-character fight—with positioning, fancy moves, conditions that persist from turn to turn, all the number crunching—while still giving the players freedom to choose at (at least moderate) leisure their characters’ next actions? If so, I very much want to hear about them!
Has anyone successfully moved a tabletop campaign online? If so, what tools did you use? If it failed, what didn’t work?
July 26th, 2007
Yay! Caught a shot of Bourne with my Waterloo Station camera yesterday. Did anyone get a shot of him with a camera placed at a different location?
Now on the the complete spoiler for today’s puzzle in the Ultimate Search for Bourne.
We’re instructed to contact Simon Ross again using yesterday’s contact information. In the instant messenger, we use handle CRUYFF74 and passphrase don’t silence the truth.
Simon tells us: “Taking the day off to visit these places I found on a Google Groups. If you can’t reach me on my mobile, I’m most likely on the Bakerloo Line on the Tube.” The Google Groups phrase is a hot link to a specific “Sightseeing in London” group, obviously created for the game. You can find it here: http://groups.google.com/group/sightseeing-in-london?hl=en.
Poking around at the site reveals two discussions about sites in London—including Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral—as well as a map that helpfully outlines the brown Bakerloo Line Ross referred to in his IM. Of the sites mentioned in the Sightseeing in London thread, only the London Eye stands out as a landmark anywhere near the Bakerloo Line.
So submit London Eye in the communications panel and the challenge is solved.
As for placing the cameras, I’ve decided to leave my first camera at Waterloo Station. Sure, it seems silly to put it in the same place, but other clues in the Google Group make detailed mention of it. For the second, well, why not go with the London Eye? If I get two shots of Bourne before tomorrow, I’ll be happy. If I get only one, I’ll be left wondering which nabbed him. And if I get none, well, then I really won’t know where to look for clues.
In the end, I found today’s challenge significantly more fun that the last few. Sure, it’s still easy, but there were other possible clues and red herrings at the web site. In the end, only the London Eye made sense, but you actually really do have to look to multiple resources to work this one out.
Go, Simon Ross! Now you’re acting like a spy!
(Incidentally, what happens if you put in the wrong answer? Would it be possible to sledgehammer your way through the puzzle by just entering site after site till you got a hit? Or are you penalized for mistakes?)
July 26th, 2007
This post contains no spoilers (unlike my other posts on the game). Instead, as in my first post about the advertising vehicle that is The Ultimate Search for Bourne, I thought I’d put the big question out there.
Is the game fun?
I have to answer, “Yes.” I enjoy solving the puzzles, poking around the web sites, and writing up quick blog posts about each challenge.
But it’s not huge fun. I don’t need this advertisement. I’m already a big-time fan of most Google products, and I’ll probably see The Bourne Ultimatum eventually.
And as a game, the Ultimate Search for Bourne has a few little problems:
- It’s too easy. Once you “get” how a day is likely to go, you can resolve the challenge in a minute or two.
- Camera placement may be random. This is an ongoing question, and today’s game may have the most obvious clues to camera placement so far . . . or it may prove that there’s nothing but luck behind it.
- The interface is buggy. On my Macintosh with Firefox at home, bits of the interface keep reloading. For the last two days, my wife has been unable to place cameras on her Mac or on my work PC laptop
- The game feels less and less like a spy drama every day. This is party because it’s basically the same game every day. The fact that, with almost no practice, it gets very easy also removes a lot of the cloak-and-dagger feel. And finally because the willing suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain the more I realize how the places and mysteries are calculated to create another day of play and advertise another tool or service, rather than to help a story unfold.
But I did say the game was fun, right? It is! I still believe, passionately, this could be the seed for a very exciting and innovative form of massively multiplayer roleplaying game. It has moments that do still feel delightfully cyber-spyish. And I still like solving puzzles that at least pretend to be tied into adventure and story, rather than just arbitrary rules resolutions.
And any chance at a free iPhone is hard to resist.
So what do you think? Are you having fun? What do you like, and what do you hate?
July 25th, 2007
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