I started playing Bioshock 2 today. Drew had started a couple weeks ago, but told me he had a hard time working up the enthusiasm to continue putting time in. Of the two of us, Drew tends to be the less willing to stick things out (and that’s not a dig at all!) to get to the good parts of games. With that in mind, I set out with modestly reduced, but still high, expectations for the game.

I’ve played about one hour of the game. I’m having a hard time working up the enthusiasm to continue putting time in.

Why the struggle? Drew observed that he can spend hours actually enjoying the in-between-action moments in EVE, but struggled with Bioshock. I’m contemplating playing Mass Effect 2 a second time just to see how the same situations might play out differently with different choices, but I utterly failed to get hooked by the new experiences of Bioshock 2. How could such a pretty game in such a fascinating world fail so completely to draw either of us in?

When I started playing Bioshock 2, I felt something very familiar, and it took me a while after I put the controller down to put my finger on it. It was the feeling of being in the middle of a game.

I’m going to assert that, in rough terms, the first third of most story-driven games is all about introducing the world, the core problem, and the mechanics of the game. The middle third is about using already-introduced mechanics to slowly expose more of the world. The final third is a race to an exciting climax. Bioshock 2 feels like it starts somewhere in the middle third of most games. The motivation for the protagonist isn’t really explained in any detail, and the introduction of the world and the core game mechanics is (seemingly) expected to be inherited from the original Bioshock.

I have faith that, as in the original Bioshock, things will become clearer as things progress. I’m generally supportive of games that try to do this, and doubly so when there are extra rewards for players who look around carefully. Games like the Marathon series, Deus Ex, and Halo: ODST all do this extremely well (and are among my very favorite games). What separates them from Bioshock 2, though, is that we understand why the story needs to be revealed slowly. Marathon begins in the midst of a surprise attack by an unknown force and evolves throughout the series into a complex meditation on agency, control, and free will. Deus Ex is all about the slow revelation of a conspiracy. Halo: ODST is almost a detective story in that the protagonist is searching for clues that explain the events of the past day (for which he was absent).

Like Bioshock 2, all three of those games are presented from a first-person perspective. We, as the players, are supposed to be in the shoes (or head) of the protagonist. Marathon, Deus Ex, and ODST help us understand why we, as the protagonist, should be confused. Bioshock 2 does just the opposite. Bioshock 2 opens with a scene that is supposed to fill the protagonist with a sense of purpose, rage, and determination. For me, it does none of those things. It’s clear that we, in the role of the protagonist, are also supposed to be confused for the first part of the game just as we are in the other examples. What’s different about Bioshock 2 is that confusion is supposed to exist in parallel with a clear, emotional, and stand-alone drive to move forward. When that emotional drive fails to hit home, as it did for me and Drew, there’s nothing left to drive the player forward.

I’ll almost certainly play through all of Bioshock 2, and may feelings may change as I continue to do so. For now, though, I’m moving forward out of a sense of duty rather than an interest in the game’s story.

I’m keeping a new blog of my experiences playing EVE Online, written for non players. Lots more info over at the new site! Jump On Contact!

Lest it go unsaid, I updated the Sort by Log Size plugin to work with Adium version 1.4. I also added a bunch of user-contributed translations. You can download the update from its page on Adium Xtras.

Suppose you want to invite a bunch of friends over to watch a movie. You start to write an email and start adding your friends’ email addresses. You probably add addresses in the order you think of them; maybe you think about who lives nearby, or who you’ve seen most recently. If you’re like most people, you probably stop there, send the email, and proceed to have a lovely evening with your friends.

If you’re like me, though, you start worrying that somebody might be offended that they’re near the bottom of the recipient list. What to do? My approach is usually to alphabetize the list after I’ve added everybody. That way, anybody who’s looking at the list carefully enough to be offended will notice that it’s alphabetized and doesn’t imply any kind of preferential ranking. Sorting the list by hand, though, is tedious and error-prone. To that end (and also to learn more about writing Mac software), I’ve written a little doohickey for Mac OS X that will alphabetize email address lists on demand.

You may have noticed a “Services” menu under Mac OS X. It lives in the application menu (if you’re reading this in Firefox, it would be in the menu labeled “Firefox”), and has a bunch of system-wide contextual actions. The thing I’ve written — the Email Address Sort Service — adds an “Alphabetize Email Addresses” item to that menu. The idea is that you type a bunch of email addresses into the To: field of the email client of your choice (either a client-side application or a webmail application), select all of the addresses, choose “Alphabetize Email Addresses”, and then the email addresses get sorted in place.

The sorting algorithm is smart enough to recognize “real names” mixed in with email addresses. It will try to alphabetize first by real name (last name first), then by email address if all else fails. The service can be downloaded from the project page, which also has some usage instructions.

In terms of the people-who-care to hours-spent-on-project ratio, I suspect this is personal low for me. Still, if you find this useful or can think of ways to make it better, I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks!

(Also, I’m aware that this doesn’t work with the Firefox 3.0 series. Firefox 3.0 doesn’t support Mac OS X services, but I hear 3.5 may.)

I had a strange problem installing the new Pandora One desktop player under Ubuntu Linux. I had previously installed the beta Pandora desktop player, and the Adobe AIR app installer complained that it couldn’t install the new client over the old one.

I couldn’t find a clean way to uninstall the old one, so I just removed it from /opt/Pandora manually. When I tried to install the new player, the installation failed as follows:

I did some digging and discovered that it’s possible to capture installer logs per Adobe’s knowledge base article “Logging Adobe AIR 1.5 application and runtime installations.” It turns out that the AIR installer for Linux (or at least Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu) uses dpkg to install AIR packages. Here’s the line that tipped me off:

subinstaller: Error occurred; beginning rollback: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text=" error: dpkg: error processing /tmp/FlashTmp.mdgH0a/setup.deb (--install): received unknown message type from subinstaller: received unknown message type from subinstaller: trying to overwrite/opt/Pandora/bin/Pandora’, which is also in package com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1`

When I removed the Pandora directory by hand, there was still an entry in the dpkg database, as shown here:

$ dpkg -l | grep -i pandora
ii  com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1

I removed the package (sudo apt-get remove com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1) and everything worked great.

I realize this is even less interesting to most of you than usual, but Pandora doesn’t officially support Linux, so I want to make sure that this gets written down somewhere in case somebody else has the same problem.