Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

The Onion AV Club posted our Best 15 Games of the Decade today tar. I contributed to the list, and I thought I’d share my personal list here:

1. Portal
2. Braid
3. Baldur’s Gate II
4. Rock Band 2
5. The Longest Journey
6. Fallout 3
7. Left 4 Dead
8. Burnout Takedown
9. Half-Life 2 (franchise)
10. Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD

I’ll be doing an end-of-the-decade thing for my Edge column as well, but probably from a different angle.

In case you’re tracking bias, you can tell right away I’m not a huge fan of the FPS, RTS, sports, or MMO genres. But I was also surprised that neither my list nor the final slate included many indie titles. I’ve enjoyed a ton of great indies this decade, but somehow, the polished big-team games won out. And part of the blame lies with Valve.

Time and again, we’ve tried to set up a dichotomy between the big, dumb commercial games that cost millions to build, and the smart, svelte indie titles that represent art, and culture, and original thinking. But Valve proves that’s silly. Every time I read an opinion piece arguing that games should be more adult, or more sophisticated – I think of Valve. As Play Like a Girl points out, every time a commercial game throws an extra-large pair of boobs at you on the pretense that that’s what gamers want to see? Look at Valve.

Valve has proven that you can make adult games with believable characters and a sophisticated atmosphere, that leverage or even create pop culture touchpoints, and still make a commercial game that’s fun to play. They embrace innovation, but they also polish and package it: while I’ve played other indies that were as clever as Portal, none of them had Mike Patton adding a voice or Jonathan Coulton writing the credits theme. And while I’ve talked to a lot of people who build worlds – sometimes voluminous, painfully well-documented worlds with nooks and crannies and lore and texts up the yoohoo – one of the case studies we all keep coming back to is Half-Life 2, which tells you more about its back story with a few clues and some grafitti than a lot of games manage in tens of thousands of words. (Note to BioWare: all those codex entries aren’t doing you much good if nobody bothers to read them.)

I’ve just barely started playing Left 4 Dead 2, so I reserve judgment on whether it lives up to the tradition. (In fact, so far, the daylight thing is bugging me.) But the decision to move it to the south and make four new believable characters – characters who feel real, but still don’t actually get in the way of your telling your own story, bullet by bullet – was a good one.

Braid is the highest-charting indie title on my list and the only that made the cut at the AV Club, but in a way, I think Jonathan Blow has transcended whatever “indie scene” we might be talking about. He’s not a brash new talent: he’s more like gaming’s Brian Eno, or Lou Reed. “He did it practically all by himself” is no longer necessary as an introduction to his work.

I’m looking forward to more games from Blow. But I also want more games from Valve, and I wish every mainstream game developer was more like them. I wish they were all as sophisticated, as stylish, as smart and as mature. I wish they gave a shit about story and characters to the same extent as Valve, by which I mean, I don’t need to drown in your 100,000-word script; I’m just asking that you get it right. After all, Valve did.

And it even made them some money.

… and their fantastic new video for “Kalypso.”

Yeah, so.

A whole month of updates have gone by, and I think the column’s starting to catch on with the readers – more hits, more links, more guest stars, more discussion. Here’s what you have to catch up on, in order of how much I liked ‘em.

Brütal Legend: A Love Story. “Brütal Legend slagged my heart. I was ready for solos that shred, men that shriek, and monsters with teeth where they should have had faces. I was ready to dig the jokes and hate the gameplay. But nobody told me that Brütal Legend’s a love story.”

The Most Boring Game of the Year. Demon’s Souls is addictive and engrossing, and it’ll probably be my number one for the year. So why aren’t we talking about it?

Sonic the Comic. My kid’s fascination with the US Sonic comic leads me to a surprising case study in long-form storytelling and world-building. Also, fun fact: if you call Archie Comics, their on-hold music is The Archies.

The Mecca of Gaming. “John Teti thought I was nuts. He didn’t say it, but I could tell: here I was, a game journo who lived just an hour away from Funspot, and I’d never been there once.”

Let’s Burn Down D.C. Yeah okay, I kind of whiffed this one – it’s more of an “isn’t it interesting … ” piece than a “here’s my argument about why games will/won’t destroy the fabric of the nation” treatise. Also, I filed a piece on controversial content in Modern Warfare 2 even before the “No Russian” scene leaked. But the comments are fun.

There you have it! And a sneak preview for the rest of the month: I’ve got an idea brewing re: Dragon Age, and if you read my piece about the sex in Mass Effect, you’ll have a hint of where I’m going. Also, I’ll do something to mark the end of the decade, and I have an interview with the guys behind the funniest gaming website in the world. So stay tuned.

So I landed an invite to Google Wave last month (thanks to Ed Atwell), and I finally took a stab at using it for something. And boy, this is something that will change the world: it’s a bot that tells, and learns, “Yo Mama” jokes.

Google Wave makes it very easy to make bots in Java or Python. The documentation that I followed includes:

- The App Engine “getting started” guide

- The Google Wave Bots tutorial

After setting up Eclipse and using these guides, I had a simple bot up and running in a couple of hours (and my Java is rusty). The whole project took five hours.

Wave offers sample codes for very simple bots that will pipe up during your Waves. The trick here is that I wanted to save jokes as well as telling them – and idea I picked up from the game Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. This seemed like the real hook: as people across Google Wave interact with the Yo Mama Bot, it’s learning and then dishing out new jokes.

And it was pretty easy to code, using Google’s almost dummy-proof data store feature. Basically you set up the class you want to persist (e.g. Joke), add tags to the properties you’re persisting, let the built-in Data Nucleus thing “enhance” the class, and you’re all good. The App Engine gives you a dashboard where you can see and edit all the saved data, as well as browse logs, look at traffic, and so forth.

That said, although Wave does most of the heavy lifting for me, I also ran into weird bugs. At first, everything my bot said was repeated – like, “Yo mama! Yo mama!” I made plenty my own mistakes, but this turned out to be a Google Wave bug; luckily, it was easy to find a workaround. I also made a small change that was supposed to improve performance and then, somehow during my build, managed to screw up the Joke class so that it wouldn’t persist anymore, which made me go, “WHA?” and led me to the simplest solution, which was just to rename the class and rebuild the whole thing. The “new” class was correctly enhanced and persisted, and the app ran again.

Other hassle here: you still can’t deploy and test the bots locally; you have to do it in Wave. So the bot I was sharing with my close pals kept crashing all day Saturday. Whoops!

But now it’s up and running and I’m pretty pleased with it. I just need to spread the word, to people who actually have Wave access. If you want to give it a whirl:

1. Add “yomama-bot@appspot.com” as a contact.
2. Add it to a wavelet.
3. It’ll say hi. And after that, type in a “Yo mama” joke to get one back, or just say “Oh yeah?” to hear one that it knows.

Don’t run anything too offensive – I record the names. (Google Wave does not, so far as I know, have anonymous users.)

What did I learn from this? One, a lot of “yo mama” jokes. Two, even though this is a simple example – that was fairly simple to build – it’s also powerful. You could run a sophisticated Java app on the app engine, use Google’s data store for your data layer, and really be in business. If you wanted to run a tabletop-esque game session on Wave, you could code any number of very powerful bots to enforce rules, persist characters, deliver content, or really anything you want. Apparently, Wave can also be embedded in other apps, which opens the door to bringing a sophisticated chat-type thing right into your game or app.

And of course, the nice thing about bots in Wave, as opposed to Twitter, is that you can invite them in to specific waves. You only see them when you need them. Gaming on Twitter appears to have stalled because seeing other people’s posts and autoupdates is lethally annoying. But Wave is fertile ground for bots, and I see a lot of potential here.