Improbable Insights » Loyd Case on Technology » Improbable Insights

Uncertainties Launches

Loyd Case — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:02:34 +0000

I’m launching a new blog, Uncertainties. That blog will focus more on the tech side, with a side dish of gaming and photography. Improbable Insights will continue, but will become more a of a personal blog. So this is where you’ll come to read about my kitchen remodel, while Uncertainties is where I’ll spout off about tech. I’ll also make a stronger effort to link to articles of mine that have been published.

Thanks, and see you on the other side

Risk Legacy: It Begins

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:24:10 +0000

Typically, you buy a board game, play it a few times, and you’re done. If you’re really passionate about a particular game, you might play it a dozen times or so. But the game never changes, or if it does, it’s through house rules or by spending more money buying expansions.

But what if the game changed over time, in an immutable way? That’s the idea behind Risk Legacy, a game similar to the original Risk, but much more streamlined. Games typically take less than two hours, maybe even sixty minutes. The key innovation, though, is that players make permanent changes to the game board as you play.

Kublacon: Board Games, with Dollop of RPG on the Side

Loyd Case — Tue, 31 May 2011 21:05:11 +0000

Just a small fraction of Loyd's game collection

For the past few years, I’ve made a pilgrimage of sorts to Kublacon, a local tabletop gaming convention that runs over Memorial Day weekend. This year was no different, except that I managed to get in even more gaming than usual. Most of the weekend was spent immersed in board games, but also had some fun with Dark Heresy, a tabletop RPG based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

I’ll split this into two posts, one covering Friday night and Saturday of the con, and the other Sunday. The focus here is on the games played, not so much the atmosphere or people.

More after the jump.

My younger daughter, Emily, also came, but as usual disappeared into the bowels of the RPGA (which once stood for “Role-Playing Gamers Association), taking her D&D 4th Edition characters into the Living Forgotten Realms ongoing campaign for the entire weekend.

Dominant Species

Friday night, I had the chance to tackle Dominant Species, designed by Chad Jensen. Dominant Species is a Euro-style game developed by GMT Games. It’s an interesting product for GMT, which has classically sold deep, hex-based wargames that appeal to wargaming grognards. Dominant Species has been well received, hitting 23rd on the BoardGameGeek’s list of games. I’d received a number of suggestions that I should try to play it there, and managed to get into a game.

Dominant Species overall theme seems like it’s about evolution, since it’s about the struggle of differing classes of animals to survive an impending ice age. In reality, it’s more like you’re manipulating the genetic structure of your class in order to force adaptation. But ignore all that; it’s just a great game, not a commentary on evolution.

The game is essentially an area control game, but with tight limits on the number of actions you can perform per turn. Six classes of animals – mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, arachnids and insects – vie for control of an ever-diminishing landscape. One of the many actions players can take controls the rate at which the glacier spreads in your little corner of the universe. The artwork is a little sparse – more functional than thematic – but the game mechanics themselves hew closely to the theme.

We had four players in my game; I ended up winning with my usual beginner’s luck, spamming reptile species all over the map and going broad, rather than deep, on “elements” (the main game resource.) I liked it enough to pick up a copy the next day.

Arkham Horror

Arkham Horror is one of the most complex board games I’ve played; I own the main game and all but one of the expansions. It’s not that the rules set is that complex, though they’re fairly hefty. It’s that all the little cards and bits can interact with each other in unpredictable ways, and no Arkham Horror game I’ve ever played turns out the same way.

However, my older daughter, Elizabeth, and I spent a morning playing an even more intricate, customized version of the game. The game’s owner, Jim, had spent much love on the game, adding interesting little bits. The first player token was a miniature bust of Cthuhlu. A tiny street lamp post model graces the general store. But it’s not just the added little flavor bits; custom rules have been added.

Modified and enhanced Arkham Horror

In Arkham Horror, you play investigators trying to ferret out and stop an impending doom in the form of a Great Old One (the Gods of the Cthuhlu Mythos, originally created in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.) If you can’t stop him from emerging, you must defeat him at the end or the world faces wreck and ruin. If you’ve ever played the Call of Cthuhlu tabletop RPG, Arkham Horror is a Call of Cthuhlu campaign in a box, playable in a few hours – if you can wrap your head around the rules.

One of the interesting custom rules Jim added to the game is a randomizer for the Great Old One. In a normal Arkham Horror game, the Great Old One is chosen before the game starts, so the investigators know what they’re fighting. Jim added a special clue deck. Investigators (the players) would draw cards based on clue tokens they picked up in their travels. These cards would whittle down the list of potential Elder Gods, until the true danger was revealed.

We played with five people altogether including Elizabeth and me. The whole affair took about four hours, and in the end, we failed to seal five gates and faced Y’Golonac. After a tense few rounds of combat, we defeated him, with all five investigators still alive at the end, although one investigator survived only by the slenderest thread.

Quick Gaming Hits

Loyd Case — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:04:58 +0000

Relic’s Space Marine (four player co-op Warhammer 40K game) is available for pre-order on Steam for $44.99 ($5 off the launch price.) It will include a copy of the Blood Ravens DLC. Note that it’s not actually shipping until September.

Been playing some Brink. It’s actually pretty good, surprisingly good given all the negativity surrounding it. I particularly love the art design, although I do agree with the reviews: where are the female characters? But I’m all for anything this good that supports co-op through the storyline.

Also, if any of you are interested, but Shogun 2: Total War is on sale at Steam for $33.95 this week; don’t know how long that’s gong to last.

For your entertainment, check out the video for an odd steam-punkish game called Naval Warfare. It’s an indie title, and the gameplay doesn’t look all that interesting. But the video is entertaining, with even relatively decent voice acting.

Finally, here’s a comprehensive list of PC games (including a number of PC exclusives) coming out this year.

One potentially interesting title is Northstar (an SF RPG from Kerberos). The world needs more SF RPGs.

Recent Articles

Loyd Case — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:05:13 +0000

Not much time today for a lengthy post, but here’s some stuff I’ve written for a couple of different publications recently.

My roundup of DirectX11 graphics cards appeared recently in Maximum PC and also at Maximum PC Online. In addition to the roundup, which was actually written in December, I wrote reviews of several of the spiffy new GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards, including the MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II, which I liked very much.

My column on Tested runs twice a month, and recent columns have been on my experiences with SSDs and my thoughts on DSLR lens choices. Just go to Tested and search for “Living with Tech.”

Finally, I’ve got a feature on building a home theater PC capable of running 3D Blu-ray movies at PC World.

A Workout to Remember

Loyd Case — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 19:39:04 +0000

It’s a warm spring afternoon in 1979. Well, it’s a warm spring afternoon in Bellingham, Washington, which means it’s mostly sunny and around 62 degrees (F). I’ve just wrapped up my final varsity track season. I was always a middling-average runner, the seventh guy on the cross country team. Being the guy who could only deny other runners from scoring doesn’t make for strong motivation.

My final track season at Western Washington University had been great fun, but since my personal best for 10,000 meters was only 32:15, there would be no trip to nationals for me. There’s only one more postseason meet left, which is a non-scoring, multiple college affair in Bellingham’s Civic Field stadium.

My regular running buddy, Jeff Sherman, had prodded me into running the 1500 at the meet. I never run 1500s, having mostly focused on 5,000 and 10,000 meters. But the season is over, and it seemed like an oddly fitting way to end my varsity long distance running career.

So on this warm spring afternoon, I show up at the track to do speed workouts.

Speed is a relative term here, and I wasn’t feeling all that motivated. After a couple of miles of easy warmup jogging, I decide in a desultory manner to run quarters. I stretch a bit, then proceed to run 8 x 440 at around 71 seconds, with a 220 easy jog between. No one else was on the track at the time, so I was blowing through the workout solo. It didn’t feel all that hard, but it’s always hard to gauge your effort when running by yourself.

As I start jogging an easy cooldown mile, Dick Holloway shows up on the track.

Dick wasn’t a college runner; he was the plant manager at the local Mobil Oil refinery up in Ferndale. At the time, Dick was in his early 30s, and was known as something of a maniac. He was a 2:23 marathoner at the time, and worked harder than any runner I’d ever met. One of my more memorable runs was a trip up to Stanley Park in Vancouver with Dick after I’d been out drinking all night and sleeping about an hour. We ran 15 miles. He loved to run with people, but most of the better runners on the team avoided running with him because his conversational style was often abrasive. But we always got along.

Dick comes up to me, and asks me if I would work out with him. I tell him that I’d just finished, but he keeps badgering me, so I give in, and tell him I’ll run part of way. “And oh, by the way, what are you running?”

“Quarters, with a 110 jog,” he replies.

That’s a fairly intense workout, and I start to regret agreeing to join him, but the die is cast.

We proceed to run the first quarter, hitting it in 68 seconds. After that one, I thought, “That’s it, I’m done.”

By the third quarter, though, we were in a rhythm, hitting each quarter in 67-68 seconds. The 110 recovery between is fairly quick, too, not the typical easy, slow slog. We run twelve quarters in all, the last one in 65. After that, Dick and I run an easy four miles, then he says goodbye, jumps into his car and speeds off.

That weekend, I run 1500 meters in 4:09, which translates to around a 4:27 mile. It’s not that fast in the scheme of things, but certainly a high water mark for me. I don’t really remember much about the race, though.

But I still remember the workout I ran a few days before, where I ran 20 quarters, twelve of them in 68 seconds or less. All the races I ran back then are mostly a blur, but I vividly remember a dozen quarters on a track on a glorious spring afternoon.

William Gibson was a Prophet

Loyd Case — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:42:57 +0000

The headline in the San Jose Mercury was stark:

“Hackers Instigate Internet Warfare”

We’re not quite to the era where hackers jack into their decks, creating avatars that cruise the net doing battle with rogue AIs. But given the nature of what’s going on these days, the lack of direct neural interfaces is a minor obstacle. The dueling and posturing of various internet factions supporting or opposing Julian Assange seems to be the catalyst.

I read Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy not long after they were originally published, and re-read them a couple of years ago. What’s striking about Gibson’s tales isn’t the tech. It’s the way he captured human and factional behavior.

In some ways, the technology has outstripped Gibson’s predictions, while in other ways, we have yet to catch up. For example, the technology for connecting minds directly to computers is very much in its infancy. By the same token, Gibson missed the implications of wireless technology. His protagonist, Case, still needed a wired connection to jack into the net.

We’re also not quite to the point where we have megacorps with their own orbiting space cities plundering the planet’s financial systems. On the other hand, if you look at what happened during the financial meltdown, the byzantine financial instruments, rapid pace of trading and internationalization of the meltdown are all possible because of computers and high speed networking.

Then along comes Assange. Though much more public, Assange looks very much like the information broker that’s become something of a trope in the Cyberpunk genre. The cast of characters opposing or supporting Assange reads like something from Cyberpunk novels, too.

You’ve got Anonymous, who may or may not be members of 4Chan. You’ve got this guy, Jester, who’s taking on Anonymous and their supporters. You’ve got the Chinese, who may or may not have been monitoring and hacking Google. You’ve got the US military, who have recently been talking about building up a cyberwarfare force. You have rogue criminals creating botnets to attack financial institutions. Who knows, hackers may be part of the cadre that becomes a fifth arm of the US military.

It’s looking like reality is outstripping fiction.

Certainly all this has been going on for years, but the Wikileaks affair seems to have caused much of this to bubble to the surface of the public’s consciousness. What was once the purview of Internet hipsters has become water cooler conversations about the daily news.

To range further afield, technologists are even talking about preserving digital memories. Take a look at Microsoft’s Gordon Bell, who’s been experimenting with his entire life digitally. That’s still a far cry from being able to digitally back up your brain and restore it to a new, cloned “sleeve”, which is one of the more recent cyberpunk tropes. But there’s no doubt researchers are looking at the idea.

As a longtime technology observer, all this is both exciting and disturbing. Eventually, direct neural interfaces will become a reality. Couple that with powerful wireless mobile devices, and there’s nowhere that information will be able to hide.

Recently, I’ve just started watching season one of the TV series Lie to Me. It strikes me that the ability to always know the truth may be as much a curse as a blessing. Expand that thought beyond one guy who can tell when anyone’s lying.

Imagine living in a completely transparent world, without secrets. Would that be a curse or a blessing?

The Tension Between Marketing and Reviewers

Loyd Case — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:44:09 +0000

I write a lot of product reviews. It’s part of what I do for a living. Product reviews require a lot of upfront work, including testing and analysis, and it’s not necessarily a cost effective way to make a living. My bread and butter lies elsewhere, but I continue to write reviews. It’s through the review process that the real strengths and flaws of a product – and the company behind it – are revealed.

Companies don’t really want you to know those things. What they really want is positive coverage, so a review is always, always a risk. So companies launching new products shower reviewers with vast amounts of carefully tailored information, hoping the reviewer will become fully assimilated into their way of thinking.

It’s not overt brainwashing, but the goal is the same: co-opt reviewers’ hearts and minds.

Reviewers are different from ordinary consumers, particularly experienced reviewers. When you’ve seen a bazillion products in a category, it’s easy to become jaded about the next release. The way around that, of course, is to put yourself into the mindset of the person who’s going to shell out tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars of real money.

Whenever a hardware company ships a new product, they also release marketing literature aimed directly at the hearts and minds of analysts and reviewers. These differ from the marketing collateral for end users.

The goal for end user literature is to convince people to buy a particular product. The goal is really that simple, though reaching that goal is not a simple process. There are massive numbers of books and training courses on how to sell. But selling to an end user is very different from what companies try to accomplish with product reviewers.

Very different, indeed.

Indirect Sales Job

The goal for launch product collateral aimed at reviewers has several, interrelated goals. Companies realize that reviewers and analysts influence readers, directly and indirectly. So what a typical hardware company wants to do is convince a reviewer of several things:

The new product really is the greatest thing ever.
Well, it’s the greatest thing ever in a particular market segment.
Oh, and here’s how to test our product so you can prove for yourself it’s the greatest thing ever. Those other tests, that the other companies suggest? Those are biased, or somehow cheat. Only our way of testing products is valid.
In addition to this product being the greatest thing ever, the company understands the market, and has a product roadmap in place to maintain their dominance in the market forever.
Oh, those other trends that may affect our dominance? They don’t really exist. Pay no attention to those people lurking behind the curtain.

A particular product launch is just a snapshot in time. But it’s not a snapshot of the market at the moment it’s released. It’s a snapshot of the market as the company believed it would be when they started developing the product. That cycle is typically 18 – 24 months. As anyone who follows tech realizes, two years can be an eternity, and if a company guesses wrong, their shiny new product suddenly is irrelevant.

On the other hand, marketing people are not stupid, despite the scorn often directed their way by people who don’t know better. If a product arrives that’s the result of bad guesses on the part of the product development team, it’s up to marketing to figure out how to make lemonade out of lemons. So the PR and marketing teams roll into high gear, trying to create product collateral and directed conversations that convince reviewers that the new product really is worthy, and not a complete dud.

On the other hand, when a particular product hits the sweet spot, the marketing team still has a job ahead of it. Unless it’s a company like Apple, which automagically gets buzz and a grace period when they launch a new product, most companies still have to convince reviewers and analysts that the shiny new toy really is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel.

Whether the new product is a dud, a home run or something in between, convincing reviewers is still an art. Try too hard, and the company risks creating skepticism up front. Be too cautious, and the new item either gets very little attention, or reviewers start wondering what’s wrong with it.

Where are the PC Science Fiction RPGs?

Loyd Case — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:47:03 +0000

Of all the electronic gaming genres on the computer, RPGs are easily my favorite. While I can get sucked into a first person shooter, and have lost countless hours on all the various iterations of Civilization, it’s RPGs that grab me the most. I recently wrapped up Fallout: New Vegas, and may dive into the latest, updated version of Divinity II.

But what I want to know is: where are the science fiction RPGs?

In the past year, I’ve played Fallout: New Vegas, Mass Effect 2 , Mass Effect , Dragon Age: Origins (once) and Borderlands. As an RPG, Borderlands is thin gruel – a first person shooter with elements of Diablo-like action RPG layered on top. Similarly, Mass Effect 2 is really an action game with RPG elements, though maybe a little deeper. The original Mass Effect had stronger RPG elements, but Bioware streamlined most of them out of the game.

Fallout: New Vega is only marginally science fiction. It’s really more an alternate history game, though I don’t really want to parse these things too much. What I want is the grand old space opera, games that offer a sense of scale that stretches beyond the confines of this blue pearl we call Earth.

There’s been a resurgence of SF RPGs in the tabletop world in the past several years. We’ve seen some excellent, creative titles, like Eclipse Phase, Diaspora, CthuhluTech, Serenity and Rogue Trader. The old standards are out there, too, such as the various iterations of Traveller. And then there are the games that mix SF with other genres, including titles like Space: 1889 and Shadowrun.

It’s not like these things didn’t exist in the past. In the early days of PC gaming, quite a few SF-based RPGs came and went, including the Megatraveller and Buck Rogers games.

That’s my challenge to game developers and publishers. Given the interest in science fiction, there’s an untapped market, just waiting to plop down credit card numbers and download DLC. Let’s have some good, crunchy, science fiction RPGs.

Two Case Daughters and Their Tech

Loyd Case — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:06:22 +0000

“Dad, I need a Blackberry.”

Emily and Elizabeth Case

So the conversation with my oldest daughter began. This happened in late October, just after Elizabeth began a gig as a reporter for the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s well-regarded daily student-run newspaper. Until then, she’d never been interested in a smartphone of any type – in fact, she actively avoided them.

“Dad, I’d like Borderlands for my birthday.”

And that’s how a conversation started with my younger daughter, Emily.

Elizabeth is 19, soon to be 20 while Emily recently celebrated her 17th birthday. So they’re less than three years apart. Given that they live in Silicon Valley and have a tech geek for a father and a mother who works for a technology company, they’ve always been surrounded by tech.

While I’ve never pushed any particular piece of technology on them, I’ve certainly tried to pass on my enthusiasm for science and technology on to them. The “science” part seems to have rubbed off on Elizabeth more than the “tech” side, since she’s double majoring in Communications and Physics. (I suppose the side of me that’s a writer has also rubbed off.)

Elizabeth is an SMS fiend. She’s faster texting with T9 than anyone I’ve ever seen. That’s her main communication medium for keeping in touch with friends. But her Daily Bruin gig means she needs to receive and respond to emails on the go – hence the Blackberry request. I probed her a bit, to see if she wanted something like an iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile 7 smart phone. But she wanted to avoid touch screens and wanted the tactile keyboard. So her early Christmas present is a Blackberry Curve.

I have to admit to being impressed with just how light the Curve is. And after she figured out how to get email working, she’s been quite content.

In the end, Elizabeth looks at technology as a practical tool. She’s stuck with her aging 30GB iPod, but loves her Blu-ray equipped laptop. Although she loved gaming on PCs and handhelds while in high school, her current gaming itch are tabletop games, like Dominion and Race for the Galaxy.

The other piece of tech she loves is her Nikon D90. She’s an adept photographer, with a good eye for composition. She’s also quite talented with Photoshop, so much of her photography tends toward the artistic, rather than journalistic.

Elizabeth Case, D90 in Hand

Elizabeth recognizes the value of technology in the modern world. Her Communications major has an emphasis in programming, so in addition to the usual comm classes, she’s been taking C++, Java and others, preparing herself for an online media centric world.

Emily’s a Junior in high school, and so far remains a hard core gamer. Over the summer, she completed Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. And she asked for Borderlands for her birthday.

Emily’s brain works in interesting ways – she’s often very logical and literal. When she’s involved with a tabletop game, she’s often the rules lawyer – not the obnoxious kind, but the one who knows the rules, understands the exceptions and is willing to share her knowledge, rather than use it to exploit the game.

Emily Case, in Guard Costume

She’s also a little too trusting, at least when it comes to the web. I recently had to clean out some nasty malware on her system, because of one of those pop-ups that pretended to be an antivirus program. Once that chore was done, I showed her what the eset (NOD32) AV program looked like on her system, so now she’ll avoid other pop-ups.

Like her older sister, Emily played handheld games for a time, but seems to have lost interest in her Nintendo DS Lite. On the other hand, she always carries around her iPod Classic when traveling, as much for the games as the music.

Emily’s other passionate interest has nothing to do with technology. She’s part of the Homestead High School Marching Band Color Guard, and also participates in Winter Guard, which is the color guard participating in standalone competitions. It’s both a physical and artistic outlet for her. It’s also immensely time consuming. Being part of the guard has also helped her learn effective time management, although sometimes I worry about how little sleep she gets.

I have no idea whether or not Emily will maintain her interest in PC gaming going forward, once she leaves home. On the other hand, she’s a D&D veteran, and will likely keep going to gaming cons and maintain her D&D 4.0 chops. It’s entertaining to see her at an RPGA table at a local con, surrounded by big, burly guys, and holding her own in-game.

However they approach technology, both Emily and Elizabeth treat is as part of the natural order of life. They’re comfortable with new tech, even though they’re unlikely to be early adopters. Like most of their generation, technology just is; it’s not an externality, but a part of daily life. If that’s really the case, then I’ve done my job.