The Irresolution: on software, quality, and why one works
I don't make new year resolutions; I never have. This year I almost did...
Some weeks ago, working on a project which has gone horribly badly wrong, I tripped on one of those nasty ugly non-orthogonalities which litter Microsoft software. In frustration, I wrote a very sarcastic comment in my code. In code review, a colleague whom I very much respect chided me: a bad workman blames his tools.
Inquisition: frustratingly close to good.
It's about time I wrote my first review of Dragon Age Inquisition. Not because I've finished it; I haven't. Not because I've explored all possible paths — I certainly haven't, almost certainly won't, and probably couldn't: this is a deep and rich game. But because I've now explored it enough to uunderstand its strengths and weaknesses to a considerable extent, and it's time to reflect on how the experience affects my own ideas about game design.
I've played, so far, about ninety hours. That's equivalent to about two and a half working weeks, which is a very hefty investment of time; I imagine that in that time one could have read War and Peace through at least twice. And I'm not by any means finished. I'm still clearly in the second act, although I think I must be in the second half of the second act. If I do finish I imagine the total time — for a single path — will be between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty hours. But Inquisition is not a creative product of the same class as War and Peace. Does it merit that sort of investment?
Colateral damage
Dear Richard Arkless,
I feel confident that I have no need to write you this letter; that you, and all your fellow SNP Members of the Westminster Parliament, will remember Hamish Henderson's words: Nae mair will our bonnie callants Merch tae war whan our braggarts crousely craw... Broken faimilies in launs we've hairriet Will curse 'Scotlan the Brave' nae mair, nae mair
Feu Duties, and Dereliction
I am a person of place; what in Scots we call a hamebodie. My place is between the granite and the sea, between Bengairn and Heston Island. My home is a matter of great importance to me. In 2010 I went mad, and, as one of the consequences of going mad, lost my house; and the darkest days in my life were when I realised that, with the money I had left, and given my age and my very unreliable mental health, I'd never again be able to afford a house between the blue line of the granite and the grey line of the sea.
Being mad is in some sense liberating. When you know that the balance of your mind is disturbed, when you know that your judgement is not to be relied on, when you know that any decision you take make may be bad, you can give yourself permission to make risky decisions; and when you're suicidal anyway, the consequences of any decision you make turning out to be really, really bad cannot make things worse.
Of cabbages, and kings
I don't know if you recall King Alexander the First. Personally I don't; he lived a long time ago. I certainly don't know what signal service Walterus Brown, a French mercenary, performed for King Alexander. He may have been his right hand man, his most trusted general; he may have been his enforcer, his personal thug; he may have been his bum boy. I don't know. What I do know is that, by the time Alexander died, eight hundred and ninety one years ago, Walterus Broun had possession of the rich lands of Colstoun in East Lothian. I know this also: his descendants live there still, as their reward for that far-off, unremembered service. They have lived there, and grown fat on the backs of other mens' labour, for almost nine hundred years.
And over that time they've turned off a lot of tenants. They turned off a Mr Walker in 1817; a Mr Brodie in 1838; William Hay in 1872; David Smith in 1880; William Gibson in 1896; and so on. As their present tenant says, 'no one has ever left Colstoun Mains voluntarily, most have been bankrupted or very close to it.' Their present tenant is, of course, Andrew Stoddart, whom you'll all recall as a doughty campaigner for the rights of tenant farmers, and for land reform.