A week of Games, Games, OMG a lot of Games

Got back yesterday from spending almost a week in Ohio at the Origins Game Fair -- I tagged along with mindways, as I did two years ago.

It was a generally interesting time, although I was more of a fish out of water than usual. Arisia and Pennsic are both huge, but I usually feel like I have a built-in social circle, since I know at least a few hundred people at each. This time, I was coming in cold, and was reminded of the fact that I get rather shy when tossed into a huge crowd like that. Fortunately, gaming encourages interaction, and Darker knows lots of people there, so I met quite a number of folks.

The trip itself was uneventful -- Delta continued to fail to impress me, as it generally has over the past 10-15 years, but at least nobody lost my luggage this time. We shared a room with Darker's friend Trey, a game designer from Texas; that worked out reasonably well, although rather reminded me of living in a dorm room.

Rooming with a couple of pros was interesting. Since my roommates were both game designers, most of the people I met were as well. Towards the end of the con, I discovered that one of the people I'd been playing with several times was the author of the popular recent game Walk the Plank; in passing, we casually wound up chatting with the author of Pirate Dice. It was a curious experience, being the token "end user" in the crowd.

Didn't hit any significant restaurants, but was reminded that, as city-center markets go, Columbus' North Market is right up there among the best. It has lots of interesting and high-quality food stands, especially:

• Jeni's Ice Cream -- at least as good as anything in Boston, with a vibrant sense of experimentation. Their Bangkok Peanut was a particular favorite, described as "Pad Thai ice cream", which is bizarre but kind of accurate. (I don't often come across spicy ice cream, but it totally works.)


• Firdous Express -- a fairly normal middle-eastern food joint, but their Low-Carb Salad wound up my standard lunch for the trip. (Greek salad with shwarma on top, dressed with tzatziki. Yum!)


• Holy Smoke BBQ -- possibly the best pork ribs I've ever had: cooked to the point where not only was the meat super-tender, even the bones wound up soft and gnawable.


• Taste of Belgium -- because very little beats a well-executed, fresh-made Belgian waffle: crisp, hot, gently covered with caramelized sugar.

Most of you probably don't get to Columbus very often, but if you do find yourself in town, it's well worth wandering there and getting some food.

The purpose of the trip, though, was to play board games, and I seriously got my fill. This is going to run a little long, so I'll put the details of what I played behind cut tags. Thanks to Darker for his listing of what he played, and his pointers to the relevant BGG entries (he was taking notes and I wasn't). Comments and questions welcomed, especially while the games are fresh in my mind...


( Spirit Island: the point of the trip )

( Argent: the Consortium )

( Paradox )

( Cataclysm )

( Commedia )

( Alchemists )

( Smash Up )

( Subdivision )

( Castles of Mad King Ludwig )

( Cavum )

( The Duke and For the Crown )

( Fairy Tale: A New Story )

( Hanabi )

( Noir )

( Monopoly Deal )

( Fealty; Innovation: Figures in the Sand )

There are probably one or two others that I'm forgetting, but that's most of it. Questions and comments welcome...

Pushing embroidery to its ridiculous limits

*boggle*

This video has to be seen to be understood. It is a heavy metal song about terraforming gone horribly wrong -- animated in embroidery. Thousands of frames of increasingly trippy animation (and increasingly dark -- this is heavy metal, after all), run through 3500 hours on embroidery machines and then filmed.

The song isn't exactly high art, but the animation's actually pretty decent, and overall, it's one of the more remarkable dancing bears I've seen in a while...

Identities vs. Users

I am often scathing in my opinions about how badly the major social networks deal with issues of Identity -- in particular, their stupidly coarse-grained view of the world, which often ignores the fact that many people would like to be able to easily use multiple distinct online identities. (Work vs. Home vs. Play vs. Kink, etc.)

That said, the Querki project is reminding me that doing this stuff right is pretty hard. Consistently distinguishing between a User (an actual, real-life person, accessing Querki on their desktop or phone), and a potentially unlimited number of distinct Identities for each of them, requires constant, careful thought. Doing it *well*, so that Identities don't "leak", is especially tricky.

Mind, I'm not promising HIPAA-grade protections at this point, much less life-and-death security: it's infeasible for me to do that level of security auditing any time in the next year or two. But that *is* the long-term goal. I should be able to have a Facebook account, multiple Google profiles, an LDAP profile from work, a Twitter account, a native Querki login, an LJ login, and so on, all connected to the same Querki account, and I should be able to easily say that certain of those accounts aren't visibly the same person.

(Why? Because I'm trying to not build Yet Another Bloody Social Network. I would like folks to be able to use their existing flists from the social networks inside Querki, and have it Just Work. But that requires dealing with the fact that those flists aren't necessarily fungible: I might well be trying to keep them distinct. Querki should facilitate that, insofar as we can.)

The problem pervades almost everything. Take my current project, for a typical example: implementing Notifications. The trick here is that a Notification (a System Message, a Personal Message, a Space Change Notification, whatever) is sent from an Identity to another Identity, but is actually *delivered* to a User. That is, I should be able to easily see all of the new Notifications from all of my Spaces, regardless of which Identity I am using in any given Space. And when I reply to one, it should automatically come from the appropriate Identity, without me needing to think about it manually.

(Yes, there are nasty edge cases if I want to have multiple distinct Identities within the same Space. For the moment, I'm simply not allowing that -- it opens up all *sorts* of sock-puppeting abuses, and needs to be thought through very carefully.)

I don't think I actually know any service that has ever actually tried to do this right, although it wouldn't surprise me if a few exist. Making it usable is going to be a heck of a project. Mind, I'm not tackling the thorny UI issues yet -- so far, we only have the native Querki logins, and we don't yet have the ability to link those together. But if I'm ever to have the slightest hope of accomplishing this, I have to get the data structures and communication right, and if we're not going to have accidental breaches the system has to play completely fair internally: the knowledge of how Identities relate to Users is tightly controlled internally, and most subsystems don't have direct access to it.

It's a fascinating project, and it does give me a *little* sympathy to the social network companies. It doesn't require malice to not want to deal with this -- the simple truth is that, if you don't build it in from the beginning, with a crisp distinction between your concepts, it's probably nearly impossible to do it well...