Well, it’s Valentines Day. Let the synchronized romance relay begin!

Everyone always groans when V-Day rolls round, for most men it’s a time of trials as we traipse around malls hoping to find the right piece of overpriced nonsense to melt the alien heart that beats within our significant other.

It helps if you remember that, despite appearances, women are closely related to your common or garden variety magpie. Dying vegetation, shiny bits of metal, colorful pieces of fabric and tasty morsels, these are the things which quicken her to delight.

I joke of course. (Please bear that in mind Denbeigh, if you read this. Don’t beat me again, I’ll be good, I swear it. )

Nah, the real trick is simply to make her feel special. Every women wants to feel cherished, if you do something that demonstrates that you’ve gone out of your way because of how much she means to you, well, you’re in like Flynn. (to her heart, what where you thinking? Get your mind out of the gutter!)

This is why all romantic comedies follow the same formula :

- Guy meets girl.
- Guy falls for girl.
- Guy does something to piss off girl.
- Guy performs some large, meaningful gesture and wins her back.
- Happily ever after.

It’s corny and kich but it works. You don’t need to serenade her in front of a stadium crowd, it doesn’t need to be exotic or clever. Just something which shows you’ve sacrificed your time (time, not just money) for her, put her happiness first in your mind and your list of priorities for a while.

Speaking of which, time to get off the computer!!! Denbs is out of the shower and she knows her primary competition for my attention isn’t other women, it’s this infernal, addicting device. I’d better not ignore her for my computer on Valentine’s day or it really will be a beating for me!

Later people. Have a romance filled day, all. Except you single people. You can…um…have an ice-cream filled day. Yes, ice-cream.

After cleaning up my forum I felt in the mood for a quick doodle. Enjoy.

*Action movie voice-over voice*

In the grim future of the 21st century, only one man stands between humanity and automated annoyance!

Spambot Attack

Gah. My forum has suffered a wave of spam bots recently, hardcore pr0n and WoW advertising in every board. I’ve spent a few hours cleaning up the spam and upgrading the forum software, installing upgraded security modules, getting the upgrades to work properly with each other etc. I’m an amateur when it comes to web dev and admin, it’s pretty much all trial and error and delving into support forum posts.

So please bear with me, hitches may occur in the near future which I need to iron out if I’ve missed something. The forum is backed up so I can happily break it, your posts won’t be lost. Except for spam bot posts, obviously.

And please, if you are a legit browser and have an issue registering don’t hesitate to mail me or leave a comment on this blog, I’ll sort you out. The new image validation safeguards I have in place may make it harder for a human to register (hint : READ the instructions!), hopefully everyone can agree it is a small price to pay so that I can spend my time actually making SoW instead of playing forum janitor. But if I find a lot of people are having issues registering I will tone it down.

I know the forum is fairly dead, activity wise, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned it to the machinations of the filthy robots, no. Not on my watch, you bastards!

Everyone knows the term “course correction", right? That’s when you are, for example, sailing your ship towards some destination. Let’s say you know your destination is North and so you set off in that direction. After a while, you take a moment to recalculate, to determine if you are still on course. Maybe you’re using computers, maybe you’re navigating by the stars, whatever. Anyway, you analyze and determine that you’ve drifted a bit too far West. Continuing to go North as before will just result in you missing your destination. So you calculate a new direction based on your current position which will get you to your direction. This is course correction.

One of the better descriptions of how to achieve your goals I’ve read described the path as a series of course corrections, not a single straight line. First, you have to know where you are going, what your goal is, or you will just bob around at sea. You might end up somewhere nice, but you might not. This is most people’s lives. Just kinda going with the flow. Without knowing where you want to go exactly you’re just going to be pushed around by the tide.

Once you know where you are going, you plot a course and head off in that direction. But it doesn’t stop there. Like the ship navigator, you need to stop every so often, analyze, work out if you are still heading directly for your target or whether you are drifting off course. And then you make any necessary course correction required.

I decided this week that it was time for a bit of life analysis, myself. I’d forgotten the principle of course correction, gone WAY too long without doing any at all. But two things have reminded me of it, and why it’s important.

Firstly, let me come right out and admit it, I’ve gotten far less done on SoW this month than I’d hoped. I’ll discuss the reasons in a moment, but it’s been a disappointing month, progress wise. Whatever I’m doing, I’m doing something wrong, since there wasn’t any noticeable outside cause like overtime.

The second thing that reminded me of the principle was a youtube vid I watched recently. This. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s a lecture by a Randy Pausch about Time Management. Randy was a professor who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the doctors told him he had about 3-6 months to live. If you watch the video, his calm equilibrium and sheer spirit even in the face of such devastating news, well, it’s inspiring. The video is a lecture where he teaches about some of the principles he has learned about Time Management in his life. There is another one here where he talks about achieving your childhood dreams, also great.

Anyway, it’s hard to watch something like that and not look at yourself and think about how you’d look on your life if you received such news. Would you be content with what you did with your allotted span?

It might seem a bit irreverent to talk about video game development and terminal disease in the same paragraph but I don’t think it matters what your goals are, so long as they are meaningful to you. I have more goals than just becoming a successful indie game developer, I want to draw like these guys, travel the world, write a few novels and have abs like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I’m sure I can think of more but those will do, for now.

You might be thinking, well Gareth, if you only had 3 months to live you’d die feeling unfulfilled, having achieved none of those things. But I’ve found there is a great deal of satisfaction in striving towards goals that are meaningful for yourself, the process, even before reaching the end goal. In fact I think I’d start to wither and die if I ever woke up and found myself out of goals to work towards, having done everthing I wanted to do. The long, slow death of the soul.

Right, melodrama aside, Time management is something of a weakness of mine. I waste way too much time on arbitrary crap. Detritus. Stuff that means nothing to me the next week on. With the accumulating dissatisfaction with my SoW progress this month, the feeling that I need to sort this out now has come to a head.

So I made a spreadsheet. Marvelous things, numbers. They help you gain perspective on life. As Randy suggests in his lecture, I created a to-do list. With, like, everything. I’m still filling in entries, it has details on whether a task is high priority, it’s deadline, how long I think the task will take, space to record how long the task actually took once completed for later analysis, whether it is a repeating goal (for example, spending time with the girlfriend is a repeating goal, women droop and get sulky if you don’t water them with time and attention ).

And then I schedule my week. Create a list of timeblocks, sort my list based on priority, allocate time for it. See how much I can do. At the end of the week, analyze whether I’m getting the important stuff done or not. And if not, correct the course as best I can. It’s funny how much clearer things become on (virtual) paper.

Even without a spreadsheet, I’m aware of the main cause of my SoW problems with month. It’s the Body-For-Life plan I’m on. It’s sucked up an incredible amount of time this month. I finish work at 6pm or so, head to gym, spend up to an hour and a half there, head home tired, get home about 8. Make supper, recover a little, it’s 9 before I’m really ready to do much. On nights where Denbs is working the late shift she gets home about 10:30, so that’s an hour and a half before I welcome her home, spend some time chatting, etc. So then it’s about 11. If I stay up and work or something, I’m tired in the morning. I’m one of those people who needs 8 hours sleep or I’m a zombie. If I wake up later it’s not a huge train-smash, flexi-time means I can just work later to make up for it. But then I leave work later and the cycle just gets worse. Just so I can have 2.5 hours a day to myself.

It’s not working out well, I have gotten home at 8pm every night for the last month and it’s hard to make real progress on SoW like that.

Some of you will have noticed that my other resolutions, finishing my website by the end of January and updating my artblog every day, have been less than successful. Completely failed to finish the website in the allotted time-frame, for example. Again, I’ve struggled to find time to fit in everything.

So I’ve thought about it. This lifestyle choice isn’t sustainable in light of my other goals. I want to get fit and healthy, but I need it to be in a way that becomes a long term, integrated part of my lifestyle, not a 3 month spike of unsustainable effort. I’ve achieved good results on the program, no doubt, I lost 5 kilograms in the first 2 weeks, I can feel myself getting stronger and running faster, my energy levels are much more stable. But I need this process to integrate with my other goals better, rather than displacing all of them. So I’m going to modify the system, tone it down slightly. I’ll cut the exercise down from 6 days a week to 4 and try to stick to the eating plan, but with slightly less intake since I’m not exercising as much.

I should still see good results over time and this should allow me more time to fit other things in my life. 3 months may not seem like a long time to stick with the plan but I can’t go for a quarter of a year without making much progress on SoW, I just can’t leave it to languish like that, it’s like an itch at the back of my mind.

As for the rest, well there are other areas for improving time management in my life. For example, I am still wasting too much time on the net. Haven’t quite mastered my argumentative nature. (Note to self, never argue religion online ever again. It is much too time consuming and pointless. Should have realized that before I posted that article though.)

We’ll see if this works. As Randy says in his lecture, you don’t find time, you make it. If SoW and the rest is really important to me (and I say it is), I will use this exercise to find the areas where my time is flowing down the drain and plug the holes. I’ll report back in a month or so on how it goes.

Brother None made a comment on the previous post about Gears’ DRM, and it was one I wanted to mention anyway.

Digital Rights Management is a fairly hot-button topic right now. Talking about it in a way that isn’t derogatory is like asking to be spat on by angry internet men. They have this list of things that they consider “totally unacceptable” about DRM, and they will not be silenced!!!

Luckily, I’m a contrary bastard. So I want to talk about how to do DRM right, and by right I mean do it in such a way that the public accepts it. It comes down to a simple understanding of human psychology.

Firstly, people are whiners. Especially on the internet, slight inconveniences get blown out of proportion into issues of life or death. If you can picture the biggest gossip circle of middle aged housewives in the world discussing something absolutely scandalous happening in their neighborhood, combined with the type of filthy gutter mouths found on 14 year old boys, well, you’re starting to come close to understanding the internet community. Add the lack of accountability of anonymous internet persona’s and it is out-of-control silliness at the best of times.

Right, so with that in mind, there is absolutely nothing you can do to introduce some sort of minor inconvenience into gamers lives without a huge amount of bitching. Nothing.

So how do you do it? Simple :

You just have to remember how to catch fish.

Because people are like fish. For all the complexity of the human mind, we still share some of the traits of our scaly friends. We like shiny things.

You see, fishing is essentially about convincing a fish that it wants to stick a sharp, painful hook into it’s mouth. Even though fish are instinctively cautious. You do this by wrapping the hook in something shiny and/or tasty. Fishy is never going to enjoy having a hook through it’s mouth, not ever. But you can convince it to bite anyway.

Right, so you were probably aware we were getting round to Steam, right? As BN pointed out, and as I discussed with a mate the other day, people seem to forget the huge uproar surrounding Steam when it was first released with HL2. A lot of the issues that people declare are “unacceptable” are just as valid concerns with Steam :

- You have to connect online to install. So you’re out of luck if you don’t have a net connection.

- If Steam servers die, you can’t install the game you bought with real money and supposedly own. So what happens when Valve dies as a company?

- Pirated copies of Steam games don’t suffer from this like legit customers do!

Personally, I remember when HL2 was released. I didn’t have a net connection capable of doing the registration/patch thing. So I was highly annoyed and didn’t buy it. A mate who was a HL fan did but had huge problems, the servers simply couldn’t handle the initial load and he couldn’t play the game he was desperate to for a day or so. Steam seemed like a terrible idea, and I wasn’t having any of it. Despite that uproar, the sheer brand power of HL2 made it a hit for Valve.

And time went on, and Valve chipped away at it. Steam got more stable. More games came out on Steam. Net connection speeds increased and line rental got cheaper in SA. I make much more money now. So when the Orange Box came out and I heard about this game called Portal I decided to pick it up. After all, I’d been bitten by the World of Warcraft bug a while back and played that for 8 months before quitting. After 8 months of downloading patches and paying monthly fees to play, a simple initial registration check seemed almost… irrelevant. Turned out there were a few large patches for Steam anyway, but still far less than an MMO. And Portal was wonderful. Wow, what a game, worth the entire cost and effort by itself, short though it was. Team Fortress 2 was neat as well.

And if you pay attention, the tide of public opinion on Steam is changing/has changed. Valve have turned their DRM scheme into an online distribution channel. Convenient browsing, a decent selection of games, cheaper prices. Bandwidth is plentiful for many, so for them digital distribution is super convenient. Steam is a success. And I predict it will simply get better and more accepted. In fact, come back in 10-20 years and I predict we’ll be using a similar model for most of our media consumption, movies, music, etc. We’re simply experiencing the birth pains of the shift to digital distribution as the primary method of media consumption, I reckon.

But let’s not get side-tracked with predictions of the future. The key thing is to analyze the Steam story. It’s launch was fairly unremarkable from any other DRM scheme : It met sheer outrage from the net community. But Valve did two things right, demonstrating their knowledge of how to “fish” for human beings.

First, they wrapped their “hook", their DRM scheme, in a tasty morsel. HL2 was one of the most anticipated titles of the time, and one of the most powerful brands in gaming. Combining the two was like promising a child a sweet treat for swallowing nasty medicine. A lot of people disliked Steam and the hassle, but did it anyway simply to play HL2.

Secondly, they worked to keep layering “bribes” on top of Steam, to keep people biting. If it had remained just a DRM scheme I doubt it would have been as accepted. But they worked to make it into a sales platform and distribution channel. Now there is a real tangible benefit to having this security app installed on your machine. And it provides a double benefit to Valve because they can use it for cheap advertising and promotions.

So, the lesson here is simple. People are never going to like DRM. In fact they will probably loathe it. The trick is to bundle it with something desirable. A bribe for swallowing down that jagged little pill.

(Insert Alanis Morisette music here)

Till next time, this is Gareth, King of the Goldfish, signing off.