A grand day out

It was Kevin's birthday yesterday, and we went into Coventry to have dinner and see Cars. Before this we stopped off in Boots so that I could get a few bits and bobs.

When the woman at the checkout scanned through my items, she told me I could choose two free gifts from the N^o7 range since I had spent over £12 on their products. I hadn't seen the special offer, and didn't want to hold up the people behind me, so I said, "Never mind".

"But you've spent enough; you qualify for two free items," she reassured me.

"Come and pick something," chimed in a second assistant standing next to the desk, so I rolled my eyes at Kevin and hopped over to the free items counter to quickly grab something. Nothing really appealed, so I made my way back to the checkout empty-handed, shaking my head at the assistant.

"Never mind," I told her.

"But they're free!" she said, with a big reassuring smile.

"There was nothing I wanted."

She got a worried look in her eyes. "What, nothing at all?"

"Not really," I said, with a sheepish grin.

The two assistants exchanged anxious looks. "Couldn't you take something for a friend?" suggested the second one.

"No, it's fine," I said, getting slightly irritated by now.

"Why don't you just take two body lotions then, how about that?" said the first woman, already standing up to retrieve them.

I gave in.

(I am not making a word of this up.)

When the shops shut at 5:30pm (on the dot, we got locked in Ottakar's) we realised that we had half an hour to eat before the film, so we swallowed our pride and ducked into Burger King. It was like a parody of bad fast-food chain burger restaurants. We stuck to the floor (and we were in the clean section. When I took the tray over to the bin, I could scarcely see the floor for all the grime encrusted on it).

They had run out of a) milk, b) all milkshakes, and c) water. Since this covers everything I am ever likely to drink in a Burger King, I was stuck with a dry mouth, salty food and nothing to drink. They refused to even get me some water from a tap. I suppose I should have asked for an empty cup and got some from the bathroom. Happily my thirst was quenched with delicious Häagen-Dazs icecream at the cinema shortly afterwards.

And then we saw Cars. It was wonderful, although unfortunately the credits contained the biggest laughs of the film. As a bonus, Odeon will give you four hours of free parking in their car park upon presenting your ticket, and we drove out with about three minutes to spare. Perfect timing.

Gaming Convert

I've never been much of a computer gamer. My most game-filled period was probably around 1993 (aged 7/8) when my brother and I played Ecoquest, Wolfenstein 3D, and some Super Mario Kart ripoff with a squirrel character that we got from a cover disc from one of Dad's magazines. (That one we had to play on our snazzy computer with a CD-ROM drive (ooh!) that Dad had, to no avail, insisted was not to be used for games. Oh well.) Oh, and I played Civilization II a lot about 8 or 9 years ago.

Since then, the only games that have interested me were the three Discworld games (1,2,3), the first two of which were 2D point-and-click puzzle games. Although the dialogue was witty and well-written, and the voice acting was great (with Eric Idle as the protagonist), there was little plot since it was mainly puzzles for the sake of puzzles. And some of them in the first game particularly were incredibly obscure, almost requiring a walkthrough to get through the game. It was mainly the lure of seeing the Discworld characters and locations which captured my interest. At the beginning of this holiday I played the third game, Discworld Noir, which is rather different to the first two and which I had got halfway though three years ago when I should have been revising for A-levels. Ahem. Anyway, I really enjoyed it. Plot. Film noir atmosphere. New characters who both seemed and were 3-dimensional. More great voice acting. Puzzles that contributed to the plot! Matching up clues in your detective's notebook to work out who-dun-what. It all worked really well. And, to my horror, I found that what I wanted was more! More cool adventure games to idle my life away with.

I asked Metafilter for recommendations, and explored Wikipedia to get an idea of what was available. The Longest Journey emerged as a general favourite, so I started with that. (I then got sidetracked by the Blade Runner game when that arrived, but more on that later in the week.) I quite liked it, particularly the enormous variety of landscapes and locations. In retrospect I think I should have turned off the subtitles (instead of reading them and skipping through all the dialogue, very disruptive to immersion in the game) and tried just a little harder before reaching for the walkthrough. In my defence though, endless puzzle-solving isn't really my thing, and I was anxious to move on with the story. However, it didn't stand up nearly as well as the other two games I've since played, in terms of-well, everything really. Script and plot originality and acting and especially graphics. Blade Runner from two years earlier has (IMO) noticeably superior graphics, both in the user-controlled scenes and the cut-scenes. As I said, I liked the wide-reaching plot, but at its base it was a little too "restore the kingdom" for my liking.

Other games I have bought and which are waiting to be played (in chronological order):

• Myst (1993)
• The Dig (1995)
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1995)
• Grim Fandango (1998)
• Syberia (2002)
• In Memoriam / Missing (2003)

The best thing about having missed out on games for so long is that all the ones I now want to buy are old (i.e. 1+ year), which makes for cheap purchasing. Dreamfall (The Longest Journey sequel) is on my birthday list and there are at least a dozen more — some of which may even run on XP! — that I am interested in once I've completed the above.

How will I ever pass my degree? ;-)

Game review: Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy)

The basic concept of Fahrenheit is that it is a truly interactive story: take the actions you want, decide the character's fate, and they will have consequences later. However, I didn't really find this to be the case. Yes, you can to a large extent do what you want, but if you want the game to continue you have to do at least what is required of you. There are some choices to make, e.g. what to say during conversations, but for the most part it won't affect anything after the current level is completed. There are all of (wait for it:) 3 alternative endings to the game, all of which depend on the outcome of (and are reachable from) the final scene.

Story

You awake from a trance to find that you have killed a man in the bathroom of a diner. Do you try to hide the evidence? Escape through the backdoor? Or pay your bill and leave as though nothing had happened? Any of these decisions will affect your mental health (which has already taken a turn for the worse upon your discovery). You need to preserve your mental health throughout the game by, e.g., taking a nap, having some food or playing guitar a little, lest your mental state should plummet too low, leading you to be institutionalised or to commit suicide. Nice. Of course you can end your game in other ways too, say, being caught by the police.

Unusually, you play both the suspect and two detectives assigned to the case. This can make for some conflicting decisions, particularly when you play both against each other within the same scene, but overall I think it adds a lot to the story and game play.

Gameplay

Every now and then there are long, exciting action sequences to thrill you to the core! Um, except that you don't get to control any of the action (I'm not sure why not, but the lack of required skill suited me fine). Hmm, thought the developers, wouldn't that make the game too dull? I know: Let's make the player hit the right keys as they light up on the screen overlay (the so-called "Simon Says" sequences), thus distracting them and making them completely unable to watch the action going on behind the overlay except in their peripheral vision. Great idea, guys.

They also occasionally make you alternately hammer the left and right keys, usually to represent stamina onscreen. This can be very annoying and tiring. (Note for anyone who's stuck on one of these sequences: have a look at this guide from the developers. lf that fails, take the easy solution and lower your resolution and graphics quality to the lowest setting. It works.)

The action sequences and awkward "mouse gestures" used for actions make Fahrenheit feel like a bad Xbox/PS2 port — so much so that it led to me buying a joypad/game controller so that I could feel properly in control. (And climb the damn fence in that flashback scene.) Unfortunately though, mapping the movement and actions to the analog sticks (clearly what it was designed for) also mapped the Simon Says sequences to the sticks, instead of the buttons. I couldn't see a way around this, and some of the faster sequences were impossible to complete with the sticks, so I ended up switching between keyboard for the action sequences and joypad for the rest. Not ideal, but workable.

The graphics and music were wonderful, particularly with my notable lack of gaming experience. All in all, I greatly enjoyed it. Too bad it's not really the kind of game you'd replay; but I got it for £4 (uh, plus £10 for the joypad), so I'm very happy.

The harsh and crippling burden of accessibility

There are a couple of recent articles on accessibility floating around the blogosphere that have got me a bit riled up. The less controversial of the two I stumbled upon randomly, and is by Peter Bowyer pondering about graphical CAPTCHAs. He says that he dislikes using them because of course they don't comply with the DDA, and although he has good eyesight, he finds them difficult to read (I agree). However, he says, they're the best solution to the problem of spambots.

He then compares the graphical CAPTCHAs to the much more accessible and usable text-based ones, such as Jeremy Zawody requiring commenters to "Type 'Jeremy' below". It's hard if not impossible for spambots to supply the correct response, and so he cuts out automated spam without denying commenting to blind or partially-sighted readers. Peter seems to think that all text-based questions:

• These set up a barrier for dyslexic or dyspraxic people.
• For people who don’t speak English (or whatever language your website is in, they are difficult if not impossible.
• They require more effort than reading a list of characters! OK, so CAPTCHAs are hard to read and require effort, but not mental work. I don’t want to drag my brain onto another topic after writing a post (and I have a physics degree, so it’s not like they’re impossible)

Um, excuse me? You shouldn't use a text question because of the people who have such overwhelming cognitive disorders that they will find it impossible to comprehend it, but who have already read the article on your website and would like to respond? Come on. Pretty much everyone finds graphical CAPTCHAs annoying or hard to read (as he himself says). But a text-based solution is the real culprit? Right.

And now onto the high-profile designer and his accessibility rant. Excuse me if I come across as rather caustic but, in addition to the content of the article, I have a "thing" about people who make their commenters' font two sizes smaller than their own. Really gives you an indication of ego.

Jeff Croft's article, entitled Has accessibility been taken too far?, argues that so-called accessibility zealots routinely take things too far in the name of their idol, making inordinate demands of web designers that have large cost and very little benefit associated with them.

The web is being limited creatively by accessibility and usability zealots that [. . .] overcomplicate the matter.

Gosh. And you know, so many accessibility measures have an aesthetic impact and require that the designer not be creative. Oh look, folks! It's that old chestnut again: Accessible websites are boring. This is disingenuous at best: accessibility and usability "zealots" (hereafter referred to as AUZs) are doing nothing of the kind.

Jeff points out that the print world has for decades, if not centuries, produced materials that have non-resizable text, dark text on a light background with no alternative colour schemes available, and other monstrosities, but that a) AUZs aren't jumping up and down over this, and b) "no one's died from it to date". Therefore, he asks, why do they insist on demanding that web designers cater for absolutely as much of their audience as they can? It's impractical, he says.

And here's my point. Because we can. Because the web is not print and we as web designers/developers are not constrained by the physical and practical requirements of print. Because the web is a magic technology (lit.: sufficiently advanced) that allows us to deliver content in a dozen different ways with a relatively tiny extra initial cost, and none thereafter, to accommodate people accessing the information with a thousand different environments. To recognise that 10% of the population have a disability, and while these disabilities may not all impact on their ability to use the internet, there are also many other people for whom consideration can and should be made. People who use different browsers or lower resolution than the designers, who still have slow dial-up connections and pay for their internet usage by the minute, who have different or fewer technologies installed, people who can't use a mouse, people who use voice-assisted technology or text-to-speech, people who are blind, partially-sighted, short-sighted or colour-blind, people who are unfamiliar with the internet or who don't have English as a first language. Hell, I have good eyesight and am used to staring at a computer screen all day, and I still find many trendy designers' websites hard to read because of extra-tiny text and/or low contrast between font colour and background colour (Zeldman, I'm looking at you).

And the point is that, while in the print medium a lot of these things are hard, expensive or impractical to cater for (although, for instance, the government provides all leaflets and information in braille, large print or audio tape on request), with the web we can do this. And we should, because of what I believe is a fundamental principle: on the web, everyone is equal. Everyone should be able to access the same content regardless. And it's possible to make this happen.

Jeff states that making accessibility improvements for the last 10% of people who can't view the website without difficulty would be nice, but the cost-benefit ratio doesn't allow for it. It's fine for a geek's personal website, but in business terms it's impractical.

Feature x is going to take 4 hours and benefit 0.5% of our readership? Nah, it's not worth it. We don't have the time.

I take issue with this. It's the geek and his personal website who can afford to exclude 10% of the population. It's business who can't afford to exclude 10% of potential customers, and who will actually see a return on investing in accessible website. And besides, where did this nebulous 0.5% come from anyway? If this is the number of current customers who would benefit, well, Mark Pilgrim once put it rather succinctly: "Yeah, none of your customers are f-ing cripples, because none of the f-ing cripples could get into your f-ing store, so they all took their f-ing money and spent it somewhere else."

And finally, Jeff brings up the print analogy again, saying that print designers have always taken decisions to benefit the majority of people who found the resultant design readable/usable/accessible. And the rest?

They dealt with it. It wasn’t the designers job to account for every possible difference in the individuals who would be reading or using their product. Got poor vision? Get a magnifying glass.

How empathetic. He states that it is not, nor should it be, the web designer's responsibility to cater to their audience. Anyone who has a problem with the website needs to find tools to solve their problems, not look to the person who designed the site in the first place.

“What’s that? You’re complaining because you can’t scale the text of my site in Internet Explorer 6?” That’s your problem. Get glasses. Get a better browser. I can’t account for the fact that you have low vision and have chosen a shitty browser. The tools are out there to make your experience better, so use them.

That's the browser with 82% market share? What was that you were saying about catering to the majority? And is it really so difficult to say font-size: small; instead of font-size: 12px;, especially when you know that the latter will cause problems for potentially 82% of your customers?

The comments on the entry seem to at first consist primarily of those whom I shall term the web-design-trendy-bandwagon-jumping-fanboys who lap up everything that has been said. Some of them seem to take the article as an excuse for being lazy and not bothering so hard with that weird accessibility stuff in future. One person, John Foliot, says mostly what I was thinking at this stage:

[T]he reality is that standards, and compliance, and understanding are important, and too bad if you have to work a little harder to meet these goals - we're supposed to be PROFESSIONALS.

[. . .]

Of course it's hard - it's hard to understand and anticipate the needs of these users, of all users. Us web accessibility zealots - we try - real hard - to get that, to understand and to share those perspectives. And yes, we push, we complain, we shine the light where others wish we wouldn't. Sometimes it may seem that us zealots, over here on the fringes, are un-compromising, unwilling to accept, pedant and "stuck in our ways". You think that it's easy being this hard-nosed?

But, when someone like Jeff Croft stands up and says, "..well, ya know, we really should always try, but sometimes, well, ya, I know, the business case..." - well, that's when zealots like me get angry. Because people like Jeff Croft get listened to; people read his blog, they quote him back and link to his articles. He's got a bully pulpit. And when he uses that platform to somehow excuse or justify not striving for perfect every time... well, I for one get mad. ...

[. . .]

[I]t's comments and opinions such as yours that need to be challenged all of the time, it's the slippery slope, the knife's edge.

That's why I got so angry at this article. I think it was irresponsible of Jeff Croft, with his platform and, well, call it influence, to write an article in this tone and essentially give any "followers" a free pass to not care about accessibility. I feel that in the near future there may be a bit of a backlash against accessibility once the non-compliant web designers realise that we're serious, this isn't a Mickey Mouse tickbox measure. This is for real.

Game review: Blade Runner

Blade Runner. Los Angeles, November 2019. The dream-like world that captivates me every time I see it. Watching Blade Runner usually has me mesmerised by the beauty of the film, the deliberate slowness as though every moment is distilled. No matter how good the plot and dialogue, it's the atmosphere and direction that really make it the film I love. I maintain that Blade Runner is one of, if not the, best-realised visions of the future I have seen on screen.

The 1997 game is an almost-perfect rendition of the world presented by the film. (Yes, this means dark, moody lighting and constant rain. But it's okay.) Rather than being a quick cash-in from the movie, the game was obviously made by people who care about the film, and with a lot of attention to detail. The sound alone brings the game to life, bringing the film to mind with sounds you never even knew you had registered at the time — the curiously comforting background sound of the elevator; the chattering-shutter noise of the ESPER machine (also known as the infamously-ludicrous-seeing-around-corners photo machine) used for the title credits; the whooshing noise made by the spinners as they, well, spin on landing and take-off. The developers also got hold of the rights to the Vangelis soundtrack and used it occasionally through the game, though not as often as I would have liked.

But the game is far from a direct copy of the film. It takes place within the timeframe of the movie, but rarely overlaps with it. You don't play Deckard, but a rookie blade runner, Ray McCoy, investigating a different set of replicants. There are, however, many of the same locations and characters as in the film — JF Sebastian and the Bradbury Building, Tyrell and Rachael, Gaff, Chew and others. There is also the occasional references to occurrences from the movie: Zhora's "retirement", Deckard's visit to the Tyrell Corporation, Dave Holden having been put in hospital, and so on. Although there is thus a certain amount of piggybacking on the film, the game very definitely relies on its own cohesive storyline.

Gameplay

Unlike many games, there aren't any meters on your screen, no inventory icons or measure of how many bullets or how much money you have remaining. Although it's in the point-and-click genre, there aren't any little text labels that pop up over objects you are hovering over. Nor are there subtitles (to my knowledge). The net result is a game that totally immerses you in its own reality. You have a clue database that you can switch to (fullscreen) and which details what you have found or learned so far. I did like the idea of being able to sort clues by case, suspect or crime scene, and filter out certain types (e.g., photographs or interviews), but ultimately I can't see that it had any effect on the way the game progressed.

The graphics are very good, doubly so for 1997, but are of course quite low resolution and unfortunately get a bit pixellated when playing in character (and not a cut-scene). However I did like the realistic foot-shuffling, occasional random walking around the room mid-conversation (and the other character swivelling or moving to face them again) and, thank god, feet that actually connected with steps when running up or down stairs! (The Longest Journey annoyed me somewhat in this regard with the dubious "floating down the stairs whilst randomly moving one's feet" technique.)

And finally, the most impressive aspect. The developers really tried to give you a new game every time you play. As well as having the choice to make major decisions on which the plot pivots (for example, whether to retire a replicant or to be sympathetic and let them escape), there are apparently a number of pre-determined elements which are randomly set for every new game. Game characters may have different agendas each time you play, may decide to shoot you or not, or have their human or replicant status determined randomly. Combined with your ability to alter the course of the game on your own, this adds up to a huge number of branching possible ways to reach the end of the game, via one of (I'm told) more than a dozen different alternative endings.

All in all, a very impressive game, and one that I'll surely play many times in future.