Armstrong the Explorer

Neil Armstrong Caps Classic Earth v. 1969

Who said achievements were meaningless?

And for those of us there, we all got a “Species First” achievement of witnessing the first time a human being set foot on an extraterrestrial object– our first steps as a species on some place not our home.  Hard to believe its been 40 years since my Mom dragged me as a wee four year old into watch the moon landing live on television (our old exceedingly crappy black and white)– one of my earliest memories.  I can only imagine that kids alive in the 1500s or during the great age of polar exploration could have been as captivated by tales of the derring do of the explorers.  Their exploits provide the spark to fuel the ambition of a generation or more.

After Apollo 11’s moon landing, having gone to the moon and done the other thing (not because they were easy, but because they were hard…), NASA nerfed moon exploration and introduce the raid grind with the New not-so-Galactic Exploration patch that  brought us Skylab and the Shuttle Missions.

Instead of continuing exploration of the old world “endgame content”….

Old Lunar Endgame Instances

…we were treated to the raid grind of Skylab and the Shuttle missions giving us such firsts as:

• First Latin America Get Away Special canister to fly aboard a Space Shuttle.  STS 108
• First occurrence of combustion product penetration into the J-joint of redesigned solid rocket motor (RSRM). STS 78
• First plants to complete a life cycle in space – a crop of wheat grown from seed to seed. STS 81
• First landing with new synthetic tread tires. STS 50 and
• First use of drag chute during landing; deployed after nose gear touchdown for data collection only. STS 49.

With all due respect to all invovled in the Shuttle program and a nod to the many, yes, lets admit it, boring but necessary and useful achievements (cough, Hubble fix, cough), lets face it, its not even as exciting as Ice Road Truckers.  Likewise with all due respect to the Shuttle crew members lost in the Challenger and Columbia disasters (and their families and loved ones)– both bona fide “where where you then” moments– don’t get me started with the attunement raid grind for the International Space Station which apparently requires no less than 3 international space agencies to participate and has a seven year reset timer.

We stand to lose the knowledge and wisdom of these first generation of extra earthly space explorers (Armstrong is now 78).  For those with the inclination, I highly recommend the Discovery Channel miniseries, When We Left Earth, likely the last documentary to include first person accounts of this extraordinary period of human exploration.

Fundamentally, I think Armstrong had it right.  He capped in 1969 and rather than pursue so called “endgame” content doing laps around the planet, he parked himself, remained largely out of the public eye and slowly faded into the icon of our last greatest boldest achievement.  Yin to Armstrong’s Yang, Buzz Aldrin has cultivated a more public profile as a zealous advocate for human space exploration.

With the more time that passes since those halcyon days in the early 1970’s, I gain even more appreciation of the extraordinary boldness, courage and achievements of all off those involved in the moon exploration effort.  Was a time when the saying “If we can land a man on the moon, we can certainly accomplish X…” was a good natured challenge for our society to match the best efforts of those in the vanguard and to achieve something truly human in scale.  As I scan the phrase with my eyes, I can’t pull them off the first clause– “if we can land a man on the moon…”  Frankly, I don’t know if that’s true anymore.

When I was young and naive and a life was full of possibilities, landing a man on the moon was no longer a goal, it was a fait accompli, a measure of our both our achievement and a testament to the possibilities open to us should we bend our efforts collectively toward the common good.  On July 20, 1969, for a brief moment in time we were all merely human and the universe stood before us through the opened door of space exploration.  Forty years hence, the audaciousness of such goals seem almost as inconceivable as they might be inachievable again in our lifetime.

Hopefully, the next expansion will rekindle the flame of exploration that is fading as Apollo receeds into the past.

SyFy Channel

SyFy Channel? Fayl.

Being a Place Matters

A number of bloggers, including myself, have ragged on Age of Conan for the extensive use of zoning and instancing. Too much use of these design elements leaves you with the feeling of the “world” being merely a series of rooms connected by jumps rather than the impression of a contiguous world. In a word, it doesn’t feel like a “place.”

I got waylaid this (U.S. 3-day holiday) weekend by a last minute work project and got almost no decent gaming in, but I made time to soak up some of the Mars Phoenix mission events. Being a total space dork, how could I not? One of my earliest memories was watching Neil Armstrong step on to the surface of the Moon.

The images returned of the Moon returned by the Apollo program transformed the Moon in people’s consciousness from being effectively a 2d small floating disk to a bona fide three dimensional world of its own. As Carl Sagan would say, the Moon became a “place.” A place where we could imagine that we could go and explore and see ourselves walking over a distant horizon.

A similar transformation occurred in 1976 when the Viking missions successfully landed on Mars and began returning pictures like these:

I’d been to places like that. I could see myself in that landscape and wanted more than anything to sprint off toward the horizon to see what was over that next ridge or hill. For me Mars became a “place”. Even though the Viking landers were totally stationary, they managed to convey the impression of a complete new world. Not bad with just a few static images.

Seeing the latest today from the Mars HIRISE observer, those feelings are rekindled. This is my new favorite picture (the first of a spacecraft in the process of landing on another world). Click for the full width shot. Its really breathtaking.

With images like this, Mars is more than a place. More importantly, space travel and planetary exploration is made more real in our minds. We’ve seen the NASA animations about how these landings are supposed to look, but we’ve never seen them happening until now. I can almost see the lander drifting across the Martian landscape in its last few minutes of descent not unlike so many other similar images or scenes we’ve actually witnessed back here on Earth. Its like we were there.

No human has yet visited Mars, so these images in effect create merely a virtual Mars in our collective minds (like the virtual Moon). With each new mission and new set of images brought back, the impression is created that Mars as a world has become larger and more unbounded. Its an illusion, but a compelling one.

To create a compelling game world, for me at least, the designers have to similarly stitch together their resources to create that illusion. Simply having zoning doesn’t mean that’s broken. In EQ, zoning, while a necessary evil, didn’t seem to break the illusion of a continuous world. A few seams, maybe, but if you’ve ever stitched a few side by side vacation snapshots together to create a panorama, you know that the resultant composite image says so much more than the individual ones that the borders between pictures don’t really matter. They match up, there’s a small hiccup going from one to another, but leaving from the left of one, you enter from the right of the next.

Even with zoning, EQ was able to create that sense of place which persists into EQ2. Likewise, environments like WoW and LotRO’s seamless outdoor worlds are indeed places in my mind. I never got that impression from games like PotBS and certainly didn’t from AoC. I felt boxed in like there was no horizon over which to travel. Neither in my mind’s eye, nor in the game did I ever get that same feeling I get just by looking at those few pictures from Mars.

Blogging Hazardous to Your Health

Came across this recent article in the New York Times highlighting the perils of blogging which apparently is just south of Bering Sea fisherman or coal miner in terms of occupational risk. From the article:

“Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.”

Fortunately, as my recent post count indicates, I’m OSHA-compliant and in no danger of succumbing to any blog-related malady. But for the rest of you, lets be safe out there. Take a break and do something healthy and relaxing like raiding…

Potshot goes console

Ok, not exactly. Its probably been 25 years since I’ve been seriously interested in a console.

To tell the truth, I’m still not particularly interested in console gaming systems.

Confused? So was I and then in a fleeting moment of clarity, it all came together: I needed to buy a Sony Playstation 3.

Two things led me to this conclusion: 1) Blu-ray Disc won the format wars and 2) I wanted to set up a media server so I could access music, video and photos from our home theater complex(tm). For us, that means the place where we watch TV and have a modest surround sound system hooked up. I’ve been jealous of a buddy of mine who archived all of his cd’s in FLAC and streams them all over his house using a SlimServer/Squeezebox on his home network. I wanted to do something similar. I also wanted to step up to Blu-ray since we love HD but are growing increasingly dissatisfied with anything on cable.

Two hardware purchases were not in the budget. So, after poking around a bit, the PS3 seemed like a pretty decent solution. They recently released a bluetooth “normal” remote so you can watch DVDs without having to do everything by game controller and a series of relatively recent firmware upgrades allows the PS3 to recognize DLNA compliant media servers. With a bit of wrangling, most internet radio is supported as well. In researching a bunch of this stuff, I’m now nearly cool having learned an entirely separate set of technology subculture jargon.

So in classic Potshot fashion, I went shopping for a DVD player and came home with a game system.

Sony seems to have a way of making neat things and then totally screwing up the support and marketing. PS3 today seems to be more of a media center/extender than a game system. Too bad they’re only just figuring this out. Something Microsoft seemed to figure out with Xbox earlier. Too bad they bet on HD-DVD. Oops.

I must say, hooking it up and getting it on our wireless network was pretty painless. Likewise, upgrading the firmware over the internet was one click simple. Downloading and setting up a media server on one of our other machines to share music, etc. was very easy. There are a number of decent free or low cost options out there (like TVersity). Enough that I probably downloaded and installed four or five and will continue to play with them to see which we prefer. Unfortunately, Squeezecenter (the new name for Slim Server) is not one of them. Its free and pretty slick, but its not DLNA compliant so the PS3 wont recognize it.

Overall, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. One box, two solutions. So focused on the Blu-ray and media center aspects of the system, I didn’t even bother to buy any games for it before it arrived. So it occurred to me, maybe I should pick up a game or two to play. But which one?

Of course, all the usual blam blam blam games came to mind, but I thought I might want something that was, well, more Mrs. P friendly and that we could both play. Now anyone whos gone PvP with Mrs. P knows she’s not afraid of fragging yer ass or getting fragged, but lets say the CODs and Ultra-Mega Death Champion fighting games of the world are not her strong suit. She does have a weakness for cute though.

Only one solution for the inaugural console game then: Lego Star Wars: the Complete Saga. I’ve gotten lots of feedback from friends that they’ve really enjoyed the game despite playing it with their kids. To paraphrase much of what is written about it: peeps love Star Wars, peeps love Lego, what’s not to love?

We’ve only just taken the plunge, but so far its proving amusing and entertaining. I’m sure there’s more where this came from.

Not bad for a blu-ray media center.