Not what you think!

I started a new contract yesterday at [large company you will definitely have heard of]. It’s short term - very short term and I’ll be lucky if I can stretch it out to a week and my primary job is to sort out an application they’re seemingly having difficulties with. At the moment it seems more like a case of users expecting it to do something that it’s not currently doing and was never designed to do.

What surprises me is the setup. Any work I do is going to be directly in the live production environment. There’s no development area, no testing area, no staging area, no nothing. Sure I can create a development/test application and work on that but it will be on a live server being used by 1000+ people so if, in the highly improbably and unlikely event I make a small, teeny weeny ickle coding error that happens to crash the server…

Oh yeah, and rather than go through the hassle of creating a seperate ID for me to use, they’ve given me full admin and access rights to the system.

For the next week, I get to play God. Fear me!

Oh yes, there’s a part 2! Did you not notice it said part 1 last time? It’s a brief interlude, again about story telling, before I conclude my trilogy. I know you can’t wait so here we are!

When Blizzard announced that Horde would be getting Paladins as a new playable class, I sighed and rolled my eyes (like just about every other WoW player out there). You see, Paladins are all holy holy, goody two shoes, god-fearing, hammer of might and justice type guys. Regular superheroes who have a real chip on their shoulder about undead dudes. And warlocks. And especially undead warlocks. Which my main character is. There’s a whole seperate issue about how the only thing they’re good at is summoning their protective force shield and running away and about how they’re entirely ineffective as a character class and yada yada yada.
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One thing that has really struck me about the new content in World of Warcraft is the storytelling. Of course it’s not going to win any literature awards but it this is fantasy and escapism and, obviously, a video game. I’ve always been a sucker for involving stories in video games from way back when I used to play lots of graphic adventure games. Highlights are Monkey Island 1 and 2 (blatantly ripped off by Pirates of the Caribbean and Ron Gilbert should definitely sue!) and the marvellous “Beneath a Steel Sky”* (with artwork by Dave Gibbons, comic artist responsible for illustrating the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel, Watchmen as well as Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and other 2000AD strips).
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I need to do another lightbox test but this time it’s a little more specific. I don’t need to explain any of this to you but I do need to write enough text that the following sentence will wrap and appear under this one so that I can test for sizing. You see, I’m laying with the lightbox function I demoed the other day. But rather than clog up the text with a large thumbnail, I thought I’d try a more ‘iconic’ representation of a lightboxed image. Hopefully, by placing it in text like this it won’t disrupt the flow too much.

Is it necessary? No. Is it useful? You tell me (and it will be getting used in a few upcoming posts). Is it fun? Of course it is! Come on - scream if you want to go faster!

Year Zero

Halo 23

April 17

The beginning of the end?

…I learnt from World of Warcraft!

Okay, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. However, this much is true. Today, I had a load of jobs to do - tidy the house and garden in preparation for an estate agent photo sesh, sort out contracts for new job, walk the dog, train for my 100km walk, do some website design and other stuff.

All in all, I got very little achieved.

So I sat down this evening and started writing a list and a plan for tomorrow. Lists are something Mrs D. introduced me to. The idea of planning and making lists was alien to me up until I met her all of, how long has it been? Wow! Almost seven years! To a certain extent, they still make my skin crawl. I’m just not a list-making kinda guy. But I have begun to recognise their usefulness and begrudgingly accept that my life is easier with them.

But how does this relate to WoW? Well, I’ve recently being practising powerlevelling which, for those of you who couldn’t care less, is progressing your character as fast as possible up the tiers of advancement known as “levels”. Trust me when I say it’s a piss easy concept to grasp. Levels are gained by earning enough “xp” (or “experience”) points through doing random shit like killing ten rats or delivering the package to Farmer Hogsmartin or picking 10 pretty Madeupnamius flower for the pointy eared, tree hugging elf. It’s pretty straightforward. However, powerlevelling is doing exactly this but doing it in such away that you maxmise you xp return vs time spent.

For example: Reverend Prettyboy wants you to redeem (i.e. mercilessly slaughter) ten (10) Goddamned Hoodies. Sergeant Brownnose wants you to find 10 mobile phones that the Goddamned Hoodies have stolen. You have two options: either you can do one of the quests, turn it in to claim the reward and then do the other one or (and you may need to sit down at the revolutionary thinking that I’m about to unleash on you) you could do both the quests at the same time. Which, for those of you struggling to keep up, means you can do 2 (two) quests in the time it takes you to do 1 (one).

Clever, huh?

Anyway, back to my list. While writing up my plan for tomorrow, I suddenly found myself thinking in exactly the same way I do when I’m questing in WoW. “So if I walk the dog over to where the car is parked then I can pick up the car at the end of the walk and don’t need to make an extra trip to do so. If I take the dry cleaning ticket with me, I can go straight to the dry cleaning, via the dump and the supermarket and then go back home and turn in all the quests which should get me enough xp to ding!*”

Like I said; clever, huh?

*Ding: MMOG slang for gaining a level. An in game sound effect normally goes “ding” whenever you earn enough xp (or experience) points to advance to the next level.

Digital Ethnography…

Marvellous!

(Via Alice)

Just installed a Lightbox plugin and this is to see if it works.