Ten more blocks. They move carefully, nosing their boltguns toward the low hab windows, pausing for a split second on each alleyway.  This world has no moons, and their display is a grainy grey.

When they are within three blocks of the target one of the marines working rear cover breaks comm silence — greenskin in an alley.  The squad of eleven strong halts and forms a ring; six Space Marines taking a knee, five taking top cover.

Quintus chins his comm — take him.  The spotting marine unclips a grenade and steps out to hurl it into the alleyway, scrambling their night visors with the flash of the detonation.  When vision returns, so do the greenskins.

Orks, small ones, clamber from every nook.  Bent-metal axes and crude machineguns clatter against the concrete of the hab blocks.  Like the rush of water through a burst dam the orks spring their ambush and flow in toward the marines’ defensive formation.

The Ultramarines fire ten meters out and concentrate their fire, building a wall of twisted bodies.  Having worked together as a squad for some half a century, their timing is superb, their aim flawless.

The outer circle fire at a nearly uniform pace, the inner circle double-tapping when the outermost marines are forced to reload.  When they are done, they check their armour for superficial damage, check magazines, and tread through the slick ocean of broken bone.

For being so close, thinks Quintus, it is too quiet.  Orks do not camp, and they do not hold back from a good fight.  On the other hand, a Guard encampment would not be so silent as this place.

They form into two single file lines and cross over the red outline of their objective marker.

The reason for such silence becomes clear — they have entered a killing field.  Blasted and scarred, the rent bodies of greenskins and Guardsmen alike litter the cratered hab block, spilled over one another in a grisly portrait of battle.

The Space Marines are uneasy and tread heavily, the mechanical whine and hum of their suits scratching at the quiet of the night.  Small fires suck their last breaths and waver.  The statistical probability of a battle fought to a draw is minuscule.  Then, a skitter.  A whirl.  Some shifting in the darkness above.

Yes, thinks Quintus grimly, this, is a killing field.

“Seek cover!” yells Quintus as the shrill scream of alien weaponry sparks in the night.  One of his marines is knocked off balance by a blow across the back, some feathery, glittering substance.  Eldar.

Quintus and a group of marines take shelter behind the stumbled wreckage of an Imperial walker.  Still four marines back toward their location, trying to pick targets.  Taking the first shots into the grey background before them Quintus initiates covering fire and the black hab block lights up with the flash and roar of boltgun fire.

Deafening silence.  A brother marines wrenches the sizzling backpack off his fellow warrior, throws it out into the street where the power unit screams and detonates.  Quintus leans against the blackened steel.

A warp spider hunting party.  An eldar presence is to be expected on the Fringe.  But for what reason do they come planetside?  This is not their battle.  Then, it is probable this is more than a forge world.  The eldar have no need for the weapons of men.  They are here for something.  Exactly what, Quintus is not sure.

“Brother Renault, status,” Quintus breathes into his comm unit.  ”We are mobile brother,” the marine chatters back, “advise we lose this kill-team, and proceed.”  Quintus nods, pats him on the shoulder.  We move now.

The team extricates through the thin dark alleys dividing dark towers.  If the warp spiders were playing with them like game they were doing so in some grand, unforeseeable web.  Perhaps they had lost their nerve for the fight upon seeing the Emperor’s Space Marines on this world.  Perhaps not.  They would see, he was sure of that.

Two hundred years hence he had been plucked from a life of work and toil on a forge world within sub-space travel of Ultramar herself.  He had worked the forges for the Imperium, like his father before him, casting the hulls of warships under the glow of great molten waterfalls.  After ten years of labour, he thought himself lost.  His mind wavered.  Was this all there was?  Was this his life?  To live and die alone, fueling some dark war for an invisible patron?

On a Thursday, he started taking his first lives.  Three men tossed into the lake of fire, “The Cauldron” they called it, and another beaten unrecognizable.  After, he had felt a numbness. A tingling nothingness that hardened his eyes, slowed his breath.  It had washed over him, stripped his soul from his bones.  He had taken the beating from the local Guard.  He had liked it; rather he had agreed he deserved it.

Why they hadn’t canceled his life immediately in some dark room, death by torture or the quick blast of a pistol to the skull, he would never know.  But before his sentence could be carried out, he had had a visitor.  A tall man, unusually so.  Notably wearing what looked like a permanent re-breather cast into the bone; the modulated voice overheard suggesting the absence of a proper jaw. Not a common piece of hardware, not set into the flesh of a man the Imperium didn’t plan on preserving.

His appearance was ageless; looking not over thirty, but having the eyes of an old thing.  He squinted and studied.  For countless minutes the man stood there, Quintus too confused to pose a question and the strange man too busied, inside his own head. Judging, perhaps, his sentence.  After a time the man left without a word.

The next day he was released.  Released from prison and the sentence of death, but released in bonds. He spent two weeks in transport, in the hull of a freighter like a dog, in the dark, fed scraps and kept in chains as the dark craft sailed through the void that was space.

For the next decade he served his time as a scout for the Ultramarines’ Third Company, fighting in the border wars against the tyranid threat and undergoing stints of extreme genetic modification and organ induction.  His body to match his mind, something more or less than human.

With time his numbness was honed on the endless fight.  Ensconced in war, his desolation became his salvation.  He forgot life; became death.  With his genetic promotion to Space Marine he had proven himself time and again a tireless warrior, unconcerned with his own safety and unnervingly distant.  A leader of men, he was not.  But that had not been his decision, in the end.

Now, he led his cadre deep into the industrial heart of the dying world as their second and third objective markers faded slowly, the red rings pixelizing and blending with the chalky grey display of the night visor.  A new ring appeared, much smaller.  Their staging ground.

And every day the mansion offers tours to its guests.  In a caravan they ply their way to the little dark corners and caves of the desert to see odd things; slices of paradise in the barren desert.  They snake in and snake out.  As the caravans pass by peddlers, artists, salesmen and hucksters line their trail, making the occasional deal and receiving the odd handout; a coin tossed or even a long glance.  Most of the mansion’s guests avert their eyes and follow the caravan to the point of interest.

And this happens day in and day out.  The mansion gets greener and richer, attracting more visitors and traders.  The cracked desert does not change.  It gets what it can, and it’s a wonder the ground itself doesn’t fall and bend under the weight of the mansion that sits on it.

#1:  It’s not a movie.  I mean, in the strictest sense it is a series of moving pictures, but it’s not structured like a traditional movie; it’s a short story put to film (more on this later).

#2:  There are so many ‘___ chases’ in this movie that a friend actually remarked “There has been a car chase and a boat chase, all this needs is a plane chase”, and then Daniel Craig was evading a jet in a cargo plane.  Half the movie is basically a bunch of chase scenes cut together all over Europe.

#3:  It has no ending.  Sure, there is a point where they kick you out of the theatre, but there is no ending.  There was a point in Lord of the Rings when they faded to black in order to trick you into thinking the movie had ended, but then it went on for another hour or so.  People got up to leave and were then surprised to see the movie continue.  I thought this was what had happened with Quantum, and sat dumbstruck in my seat as the credits began to roll.  It has a unique structure, but ends with a pretentious and tired metaphor — it’s hard to believe even when you see it.

#4:  It’s not a Bond Film.  It’s clear that Ian Fleming had nothing to do with it.  Ever since Casino Royale, Bond has transitioned from a comic book world into a Ludlum inspired hyper-reality.  This movie has no more to do with Bond than any Bourne movie.

Why You Should *Maybe*

#1:  It’s a short story put to film.  The usual movie plot is something closer to the format of a novel — it has a beginning a middle and an end and those pieces work together to form a story.  A short story usually starts in media res (in the middle of a scene), and is about a moment.  You can write a short story about someone walking across the street.  Quantum is a short story about Bond killing some people and being chased; it’s not a good short story, but the cinematography reflects the format, and it’s beautiful.  You don’t mind that the movie makes little sense because it’s shot like a picture book.

#2:  You don’t have to think about anything.  Really.  Just sit back and watch people die, fall, or explode.

#3:  When the next movie comes out you can watch them back to back, hopefully negating the fact that Quantum has no ending.

And now, as World of Warcraft reaches its peak playerbase, you can see the same thing.  That level 40 Hunter isn’t really a level 40 Hunter, he’s a level 70 Paladin, who is a level 70 Rogue on another server.  It’s hard to find someone that’s still on their first character, who hasn’t transferred their experience to another class.

For the Cylons that means they’re incredibly dangerous to their enemies, and the same thing applies to WoW players.  In fact, I would guess that a WoW player who has lead several different virtual lives with different characters has built up a wealth of experience within that game system that is unparalleled.  An FPS player might be an excellent shot with the MP-5, so it should go without saying that he’s a crack shot with a pistol — it’s not like other games don’t have this transfer of knowledge, but firing a virtual weapon at a target isn’t a skill that takes long to learn.  It may take a long time to master, yes, but WoW’s nine classes all play quite differently.  A player who used to be his enemy has a lot of valuable knowledge at hand.

But I wonder if this isn’t detimental to a virtual world.  At the outset of the experience I felt quite a bit of wonder and excitement as I explored the world with others.  But now we all know where everything is, and what everyone does, because we’ve been there before.

– Fernanda Viegas, IBM

Something I came across while reading Wired.  Viegas runs a site called Many Eyes that lets users upload data and observe how it maps into a data visualization of their choice.

What really intrigues me as an avid writer is the way she is talking about the way words compress data.  Often I wonder what exactly makes good writing.  Some factors I had looked at before were things like sentence structure, a developed personal style, vocabulary, and in most cases a high concept.  Those are all pretty hard things; hard as in they’re easy targets, hard data that we can look at in order to determine something.  You can usually apply those criteria to writing and gauge relatively how ‘developed’ it is.

But just like game mechanics, there is always core functionality.  Something that operates at a low level, and is harder to locate and describe, especially when trying to gauge quality.  Why are some games just fun, and why are some writers just eye opening.

Data compression is an excellent theory (would you call it a theory?  It seems to be proven) to apply to writing in order to locate and evaluate those soft targets.

So at its lowest level, what is data compression.  You’re taking a good deal of information and pushing it all together into something smaller — when we’re talking about words, smaller means we’re centralizing ‘things’.  One word can contain several meanings, because just like compressing digital data, you lose some quality.  The cost of compression is the loss of specificity.

This is fascinating because it implies that what a good writer is really doing is arranging pieces of compressed data in such a way that people can unravel, or decompress, that data in such a way that it is pleasing to the human brain.  I’m no scientist, but I believe that’s called triggering the ‘aha’ moment, wherein humans think they’re quite clever for figuring something out.  Most of the time it’s something they already knew, but just hadn’t had it told to them in such a way before — confirmation of a belief is a strong sensation.

Anyways, I’m wandering — I think this idea of data compression is more or less where the idea of subjectivity was born.  If words are our way of compressing things in the natural world, and by compressing them they become more vague, then that means people can interpret those vagaries for themselves.

The same thing goes for art, although I don’t believe I’m quite as qualified to speak about semiotics or visual art.  In order to create something usable and transferable, such as visuals like symbols or words in a language, it was necessary to simplify things.  This doesn’t mean they don’t contain complexity, it’s just not inherent, but rather implied.  A painting of a landscape can evoke different feelings and inspire different thoughts in different people because each person is deconstructing that simplification and creating their own complex model.

This personal revelation has led me to second guess my use of certain vocabulary — we can say that the more complex a word is the less it is compressing data; the more specific it is being.  For technical writing that’s great sometimes, but for most of the writing I do I’m trying to stir emotions.  If using more simple words means that data is being compressed more, and is therefore left open for more interpretation, then great.  Simple words are easier for people to learn, and therefore you have an increased *potential* reading audience.

For a long time I was under the impression that having a wide vocabulary meant learning and using lots of ‘big’, or complex, words.  But as I’m learning now, for most of my work, it really means finding the ‘right’ words, not necessarily the most complex.

So that’s what this site is for.  Musings about game design that have nothing to do with videogames.  Sometimes, it will have nothing to do with game design at all.  But whatever is posted here will always be interesting, even if it is as seemingly random as heatwaves and gamma rays.