Protecting Your Personal Information

This wasn’t necessarily what I wanted my next post to be, but if I can even do a little bit to help given the unfortunate events in the gaming community this weekend, then so be it.

Ken Gagne from Gamebits was kind enough to send this list of sites to me and it’s a good resource for making sure your personal information isn’t easy for people with unkind motives to obtain. Some sites are more difficult to opt out from than others, but given that it’s your safety, it’s worth your time.

The most important one from this list is Spokeo; it’s relatively easy to opt out from, though you’ll need to search for yourself and provide the URL. The rest of the list is various levels of sketchy and some require additional information you may not want to provide to a random site, so proceed with caution.

http://www.spokeo.com/opt_out/new

http://www.checkpeople.com/optout

https://pipl.com/directory/remove/
https://www.peoplesmart.com/optout
http://www.zoominfo.com/lookupEmail
https://www.intelius.com/optout.php
http://www.zabasearch.com/block_records/
http://www.publicrecords360.com/optout.html
http://www.whitepagescustomers.com/how-do-i-remove-my-people-search-profile/

UPDATE: Ken’s collected all of this information into a feature story on Computerworld.

Player Two Start

Now that summer’s started, I had this grand plan of exposing my oldest daughter, who recently turned seven, to as many of the classic video games that I think she should get to see as I could. (Basically, I’m trying to catch her before she discovers Minecraft and then loses interest in everything else, video game related or otherwise.) We play together as much as we can during the school year, but the summer, with the lack of a defined bedtime for her, and less traffic that gets me home from work earlier in the evening, lends itself better to extra time to play together during the evenings.

I’d built up a collection of a number of classics, through purchases and judicious use of Club Nintendo coins: Super Metroid (woman in space kicking ass, so of course); The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (not among my favorite games, but she’d been asking about it for months and we were able to finally get it for free thanks to Mario Kart 8); The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (she’d read the manga books, and I can’t remember if I’d played it or not); Mega Man X (because I’m borderline obsessed with Mega Man and it has robot penguins, which should appeal to her); and probably some others I’m forgetting. We’ve pretty much covered all the Mario games, so this is the next level, as it were.

But then I went on a trip to the library with my wife, and went over to the video games they have available to check out. It’s a meager selection and all decidedly last-gen titles for the most part, but last-gen still has some good games and you don’t get a much better deal than checking out a game for three weeks for free. That’s where I stumbled upon the game that probably hasn’t derailed my carefully curated curriculum permanently, but certainly has put it on hold for the time being.

The game was Kirby’s Epic Yarn.

———

It should be noted that my daughter has developed her own minor fixation on Kirby over the last few weeks, mainly thanks to the recommendation of my supremely talented podcast co-host Maddy Myers, who talked on one early episode of Isometric about replaying Kirby and the Amazing Mirror because it brought her back to her childhood, and put the idea in my head that those games might appeal to my daughter as well. It just so happened that Kirby’s Adventure was available for the low, low price of 200 Club Nintendo coins at the time, so I purchased it and downloaded it onto my daughter’s 3DS that she’d gotten for her birthday (the Yoshi special edition, for the record), and just kind of left it there for her to discover.

It took her about a week to find it, and she had to ask me a couple of times whether it was OK to open the app because she didn’t know where it came from, but I assured her it was fine, and was hers to play when she was ready for it. She played it for about 15 minutes and then went immediately back to her game of Disney Magical World, but over the next few weeks she was spending less time with Cinderella and Donald and more time with Kirby and King Dedede. It reached the point where she asked me if there were any more Kirby games we could get, and by this time Kirby’s Dreamland for the Game Boy was available at Club Nintendo, so I got that for her as well. (“I can tell this is really old because it’s in black and white!”) So now it’s all Kirby, all the time.

———

I honestly expected to hate Kirby’s Epic Yarn. I’ve never really been a fan of either the Kirby or Yoshi games, even though I like both of the characters. By the time that the first games in those series had come out originally, I was already well past the age where they would appeal to me; I was spending afternoons finishing Mega Man 2 for the umpteenth time, so Kirby’s Adventure was downright pedestrian to me at that point. So basically, I have zero nostalgia for the games themselves. Also, we’d bought the Kirby Dream Collection, which has what are supposed to be some of the best games in the series, but she was too young to really be able to control them at that point, so it was up to me to play through the games, and I found them (Kirby 64, in particular) excruciatingly boring. They’re not necessarily easy games, but they’re really slow paced, and at the end of a long day at work, that’s not really what I’m looking to play. But I did for her, of course.

So when I booted up Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and I got into the saccharine sweet art style, I was completely prepared to be disappointed once again. The cuteness in the game, mainly because of everything being drawn out of strings of yarn, is over the top, and that’s really not what I go for. I felt like it was too much, and the read-along style of the voice acting in the cut scenes didn’t help, either. Of course, I’m not a seven year old girl; the art style played extremely well to the intended audience.

What grabbed me, though, is the co-op. Not only did it turn out that the gameplay done well enough to maintain my interest (which, to be frank, is secondary to my daughter’s interest in these types of situations, but it helps to keep me engaged more fully if I’m enjoying playing the game personally and not just vicariously through her), but the co-op was done well enough that it made the game for me, and it’s kind of amazing that so many games that are ostensibly aimed at kids get this wrong.

———

What you don’t realize when you’re a geek dad planning to raise gamer kids is how bad kids really are at playing games, for a long time. A controller, especially a modern one, is really tough for a kid to get her hands around, literally. They’re designed for adult hands with adult thumb lengths, and kids can try to reach, but it’s awkward for them. Plus, using an analog stick to remotely manipulate a character on a screen is a foreign concept, especially now that most of their early interactions with games are on some sort of a touch screen, where she’ll literally drag the character around on the screen, or the character will move on its own and she’ll just have to tap the screen to make it jump at the right time. Even the idea of press left on a d-pad to move the character left is kind of hard to grasp, and it can be frustrating when you’re trying to get her to follow along in a particular direction.

The better kid-friendly co-op games make it hard to get separated. Skylanders, for all its wallet draining superpower, does a really good job at this, because it keeps both players on the same screen at the same time and won’t let them go off on their own. (The first two games didn’t even have a jump button, which is also a difficult concept to get your grade school head around when you’re just trying to figure out how to walk in the right direction.) Ironically, the Lego games, which are more or less every geek parent’s first stop in co-op gaming with their offspring, are terrible in this regard. Not only will the game go split screen if the players get separated, but many of the puzzles require both players to be in specific positions at a specific time, and that can be really frustrating to orchestrate with a kid who’s still learning to simply work the controller. 

———

So while I thought I’d hate Kirby’s Epic Yarn, the game’s really grown on me very quickly in a way I didn’t expect at all. The yarn motif changes up the Kirby formula enough that it’s fresh, especially in sequences when Kirby and Prince Fluff (the second player’s character) merge into a surfer sliding over yarn waves, or a tank blowing up adorable enemies. It’s hard not to smile at some of the things the designers came up with.

The co-op is really well done, as well. It keeps both players on the same screen, and drags them back to the first player if they get too far away. This in itself can be hard to pull off (Skylanders, for example, has a bad habit of getting confused as to which player is further along and ends up making the stages more difficult rather than less), but Epic Yarn does a good job of only doing it when needed and bringing the character who’s falling behind up to the leader. There seem to be unlimited lives as well, which takes away some of the pressure of needing to finish a tough level for fear of having to start it all over again. If all else fails, one player can pick up the other and carry her through the level, or even use the other player as a projectile. This, as one could imagine, is endless fun for my daughter, who gets to pick up her old man and chuck him at the bad guys.

So, in short, it’s fun. It’s fun for her, it’s fun for me, and it’s fun for both of us together. Would I play this game on my own? No, probably not. It’s not really the kind of thing I’d look to play in my limited time for “Daddy games”, and the incentive of collecting furniture to decorate Kirby’s Animal Crossing-style apartment, easily my daughter’s favorite part of the game, holds no appeal for me. But as a game for the two of us to play together? We’re still early on, so the difficulty may ramp up to the point where this changes, but so far, it’s fantastic.

———

What I realized is that, while it’s fun to play through some of these single player games with her, it’s not as much fun for me to play through a game while she watches, or vice versa, as it is to be playing at the same time. Of course that sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in “Man, I can’t wait until she gets to experience a Zelda game,” and forget the mission at hand, which is primarily her having a good time, and secondarily the same for me. That’s not to say that we’re never going to play through some of those single player games that I’ve collected to play with her, but they can wait a bit. I’d rather have a game that’s not quite as much of a classic but can let us play together, at the same time. There will be plenty of time for Super Metroid and Wind Waker when we’re ready.

Ultimately, this stuff is important because this is our time together. I know there are concerns about screen time for kids, but I grew up with this stuff, and I turned out OK in the end. And from growing up with games, I know the positive effects they can have on a growing kid. They teach problem solving and persistance, just for starters, which are two traits that will serve my daughter well later in life. Even absent that, though, I’m not exactly a toss the ball around in the backyard kind of guy, but this is something that we both enjoy that we can do together, and that’s important no matter what. So even if it has no other redeeming value on the surface, we’re making memories together, and that provides value in and of itself.

So we play.

At one point early on in the game, we come to a level that involves climbing up a beanstalk on top of some enemies that are floating on balloons. This is a bit tough for her, so she asks me to pick up her Kirby with my Prince Fluff, and carry her through it. So I do, and we climb up the beanstalk together, me holding her above my head as I jump from balloon to ledge to balloon, up in the clouds.

“Now remember, Daddy, don’t let me go!”

I won’t, kid. I won’t.

"All Kids Are Like That"

I have three daughters, two of whom happen to be on the autism spectrum. One has what used to be called Asperger’s before someone decided that’s no longer a thing, and the other has what’s currently being described as high-functioning autism. You probably wouldn’t know if you met them, because they, by all accounts, seem like normal kids. They’re happy and talkative, not at all like Rain Man or the kid from The Wizard who most people think of when they hear that my kids have been diagnosed with autism.

(By the way, a complete aside, but did you know that when the girl from The Wizard grew up she became the lead singer of Rilo Kiley? I discovered that band completely independently and that information blew me away at the time, even though it was apparently common knowledge that I wasn’t privy to. If you didn’t know either, you’re welcome. And if you haven’t listened to Rilo Kiley or any of Jenny Lewis’ solo albums, you ought to, because they’re awesome. But anyway.)

So, as will happen, I’ll occasionally get frustrated, because, frankly, parenting any kid is a tough job and parenting kids on the spectrum can try even the most kind hearted person’s patience. I’ll vent online, as you do. And well-intentioned people will come out and do their best to try to offer support, but inadvertently end up leaving me more upset than I started.

So I offer this as general advice for you, non-caretaker of kids with autism (or really, any special needs, for that matter). You will be naturally inclined, in a situation such as this, to say one of the two following sentences: “Oh, all kids are like that,” or, “Yeah, my kids do that all the time too.” And I’m asking you, on behalf of those parents: Please don’t.

The short explanation: They’re not, and they don’t. What you’re hearing that you think you can relate to is either much higher in intensity than the parent is able to describe or it’s just one of a dozen or a hundred battles the parent had to fight that day. Raising autistic kids doesn’t mean just dealing with a couple of odd behaviors that you can work around; it’s more like trying to traverse a minefield on a daily basis, just trying to get through a simple activity without triggering a meltdown because your actions deviated from what they expect to happen. That’s what’s exhausting, but that’s hard to convey and have someone who’s not also living through it understand, so instead it’s relayed as individual incidents, none of which sound all that bad on their own. And they’re not, really, but it’s the sum of all those parts that leads to exhaustion. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

The long explanation: Determining that your child has high functioning autism isn’t immediately obvious, even to the parents. We spent over a year with our oldest going through various early intervention programs, occupational therapy assessments, speech and physical therapy assessments, you name it, before we finally were referred to a pediatric neurologist for the diagnosis of Asperger’s. The problem with all of that, especially with your first child, is that you don’t have anything to compare to, because you don’t know how it is to raise a neurotypical kid. So there’s a lot of self doubt (not to mention externally imposed doubt from concerned friends and family members, more often than not) as you’re going through that process. Even when you ultimately get the official diagnosis, it’s not a particularly climactic resolution, because the doctors say things like, “It’s probably too early for a full diagnosis but…”

So even once you have the diagnosis for Asperger’s or high functioning autism, there’s always that voice in the back of your head making you question if you’re really doing the right thing for your child by going down this path. There’s enough uncertainty, even after getting the diagnosis, that you can still question things. I felt bad about describing my kids as autistic at first, because, well, they’re not that autistic, really, and they’re happy and they can tell us what they’re thinking most of the time and they’re totally not mute and the list goes on. I almost felt like an imposter, like how dare I go around saying I’m a parent of autistic kids when there are parents of kids who are way lower functioning than mine, who have it way tougher, so I should just suck it up and deal. It takes a long time to get past that point.

So while “all kids are like that” is generally coming from a good place, what it does is resurface all of that uncertainty and doubt, because it can make a parent question whether what they’re describing is really autistic behavior or just a kid having a tough day. You’re trying to reassure the parent that things aren’t that bad, and the kid seems pretty normal, because that’s probably what you think you’d want to hear if the roles were reversed. However, what I hear is, “Come on, they’re just normal kids. Stop overreacting.” And that starts the cycle of doubt and frustration and anger all over again. And what’s worse is that I’m not going to get mad at the person who’s saying this, even if I recognize why I’m feeling this way, because I ultimately know it’s intended to try to make me feel better and not as a criticism or an attack, so I’ll just bottle those feelings up inside. And maybe I’ll think twice about venting next time because I’ll feel like other people just don’t understand, and probably can’t understand.

So really, if you want to make a parent of autistic kids who’s confiding in you feel better? Just listen. You’re not going to fix anything by offering suggestions or trying to convince them that things aren’t that bad. Just be there and let them vent. That’s the best thing you can do.

Casual Friday Has Gone Too Far. Or Has It?

As happens from time to time, I ended up sparking an interesting conversation the other day that got me thinking about the current state of where gaming is and where it’s going. It started out innocently enough, with a link to a study commissioned by a mobile gaming advertising company that “proved” that consumers like in game ads and will spend more when presented with them.

Before going any further, a note on WildTangent, which is the company commissioning said study. They are a historically scummy company. In fact, if you ran Windows in the first half of the last decade, you probably had their software on your computer and didn’t even know it. Their software got silently installed along with AIM, among other things, until Spybot identified them as spyware, which they of course denied, because they were providing a useful service that you didn’t even know you wanted until you had it (at which point you probably still didn’t want it). Of course, much like the mighty cockroach, these companies never truly die; they just find different victims to feed off of until the next exterminator comes along. So the discussion really isn’t about the validity of this particular study, which I’m pretty inclined to believe is flawed.

What really got me thinking, however, was this post that came out of the ensuing conversation around the study. And this is a really important point that needs some further examination, because whenever anyone puts out statistics around the demographics of gamers, it looks like an extremely large number, and it is. The underlying truth, though, is that the gamer population is split into two fairly distinct camps of casual and core gamers, and there doesn’t seem to be very much overlap between the two groups. One of the reasons behind that seems to be that there’s a fairly deep resentment of core gamers toward casual gamers, which is understandable given the circumstances but which ultimately can prove counterproductive in the long term.

I think what’s important to understand is that core gamers are experiencing a kind of existential crisis brought on by the sudden rush of casual games, particularly on iOS. When a casual gamer looks at something like Candy Crush or Flappy Bird, they see a fun way to kill a few minutes while waiting in line or relaxing before bed. A core gamer, on the other hand, looks at these games and sees glorified slot machines and poorly designed shovelware, respectively. On their own, this isn’t an issue; there’s an element of elitism there, sure, but the real problem is that these games are making an obscene amount of money. Gaming, like any entertainment industry today, is a primarily hit-driven business. When The Avengers makes it big at the box office, for instance, suddenly every other movie has superheroes in it. So the fear is that the big publishers see that they really only have to put in a bare minimum amount of actual gameplay into a game to make lots of money, so there will be no motivation to spend the kinds of resources on the big-budget games that core gamers want to play.

This has already come to pass to a great extent on the App Store, where the top grossing charts in the games category are full of free to play games that are essentially variations on two or three themes. You have to scroll down to #14 (as of this writing) to get to Minecraft, the first paid game on the list, which maintains its place there because Minecraft is less a game than it is a force of nature; the next paid game on the list is Pixel Gun 3D at #63. As a result, the overall quantity of non-freemium games has decreased dramatically over the past twelve months. A report was released this week stating that 92% of game revenue in the App Store comes from in app purchases, which is an astounding number.

So, for all intents and purposes, the wonderland that the App Store was supposed to represent has gone away, and what you end up with is Flappy Bird, which by itself isn’t a bad thing, but it represents lost opportunity. On the one hand, you could look at Flappy Bird as a prime example of the opportunity that the App Store offers; this guy just put out a simple game and became a global phenomenon, after all. But to core gamers, Flappy Bird represents mediocrity winning out over good game design; there are probably a hundred games with similar mechanics in the App Store that are better designed and more fun, but since they cost 99 cents, they’re banished to the tip of the long tail. Or worse is Candy Crush Saga, because it’s specifically engineered to extract as much money from the player as possible, with what one could describe as extremely cynical design. It’s one thing to create a game with a high level of challenge, after all, but it’s quite another to create what’s the digital equivalent of the arcade claw game, where there are prizes just out of reach, and the game will spit them out (in the form of allowing the player to advance in levels) just enough to get the player to keep putting money in for one more try.

It may not be fair, but it’s very easy for that frustration to be taken out on the people consuming those games, rather than at the people who are profiting off the environment that allows these games to flourish while “better” games languish. After all, if these people would just wake up and stop supporting these games, then maybe the developers would stop chasing the quick money and go back to spending time making quality games. After all, don’t they know or care that their money is effectively being stolen from them, 99 cents at a time? How stupid can you be?

The answer, of course, is that they’re not stupid at all. And a lot of them know what they’re getting into, but gaming isn’t as important to them as it is to core gamers who are looking for different experiences. Most core gamers have easily spent more money during the course of one Steam sale than the average casual gamer will spend across all the games installed on their phones. The fact of the matter is, these gamers aren’t necessarily seeking out games as entertainment; they’re just trying to kill some time here and there, and maybe it’s worth a dollar or two at a time in one of those games to continue the experience.

The solution isn’t directing anger at the casual gamers, but offering them alternatives that appeal more to what they’re looking for. That means that just putting an easy difficulty mode into a game designed exclusively for core gamers isn’t going to cut it. Even though the tasks presented in those games might technically be easier to complete (which usually just means that the enemies are worse at aiming and/or take fewer shots to kill, if we’re honest), most core games have a learning curve that represents a time investment that is more than those gamers are willing to commit. It’s not much different than the reason that most people who view their cars as simply a means for getting from point A to point B don’t take the time to learn how to drive a manual transmission; if an automatic works fine, there’s little perceived upside in learning how to deal with a stick shift, which feels like more work to get to the same result.

Even if we ultimately get games with simple mechanics that are still well designed and not predatory, though, core gamers need to stop looking down on casual gamers and start helping them find better experiences. It’s not just that the popular casual games are free to get into; it’s also that these games are known quantities. After all, if everyone on Facebook is playing Candy Crush, it must be a good game, right? Just as it’s a monetary investment to buy games up front which can add up, it takes time to find the games worth playing, and that time expenditure adds up too. Why waste time looking for something better than Candy Crush when Candy Crush is perfectly fine at killing a couple of minutes here and there?

Really, what needs to happen is core gamers need to be ambassadors for gaming, as opposed to acting as additional barriers to entry. Your co-worker loves Flappy Bird? Introduce them to Ridiculous Fishing. Your relatives are obsessed with Candy Crush Saga? Try introducing them to Threes. 

In other words, treating casual gamers as the enemy won’t make the situation better, and will likely end up making it much worse. But if core gamers can stop treating casual gamers as the unwashed masses and start treating them as Today’s Lucky 10,000, then maybe everyone can end up with better games to play five years from now.

Apple Store Kids Area: Now With More iPads!

Just noticed this while waiting at the Genius Bar to get my MacBook fixed (again), and then read the post while waiting for the repair. I’m surprised it took them this long to do this; when my kids are at the Apple Store all they want to do is play with the iPads but the tables are too high for them. The Macs were the right height but they weren’t up to keyboard and mouse gaming. This is a big win (and I’m sure it’ll end up selling a few more iPads as well).