The Butt Ugly Weblog

Here's a fairly simple way to explain agile programming: When cleaning your apartment, you can either clean it bit by bit so that you keep a reasonable amount of cleanliness all the time - or you can just let it be, and then have big cleaning days.

With the first, agile, method you need to maintain strong discipline and actually make the effort of keeping things clean, even though it isn't fun. The second method, is a lot easier day-to-day, but the cleaning day is usually a source of agony to all participants. Neither method is inherently superior to the other, but they have different advantages and disadvantages.

For example, if you have surprise guests, or your spouse arrives a few hours early (ahem), the agile method of keeping the house clean all the time works well. The house is already in a good shape - just do some dusting and that's it. With the second method, you will find yourself apologizing for your messy apartment many, many times. Or out of laundry detergent just when you need it. On the other hand, the second method works really well if you don't spend a lot of time in the house, and/or if you have contractors, er, a hired cleaner coming in every week.

Agile methods can usually cope with changed plans, schedules and scope - but they require a lot of discipline to maintain, and they're not necessarily fun. The laissez-faire methods may be fun, but they're inherently brittle when it comes to change. Waterfall (=doing lots of planning what to clean before actually doing any cleaning) is usually brittle and NOT fun ;-).

There's a bit of a public debate here in Finland again: a Green city council Kaisa Rastimo member asked the police to investigate whether a Pirate Party member had broken the law by reposting some comments she did on a public mailing list. She apparently doesn't quite know what the problem is (she keeps hovering between libel and email confidentiality), but asked the police to figure it out anyway.

Ok, so it's kind of fun to laugh at people who don't quite get the Internet. I'm personally kind of pissed at the Green party, who doesn't seem to be able to pull any coherent opinion on these internet things and tends to treat them as matters of conscience more than a party line. Not even individuals in that party seem to be able to form a defensible opinion.

Then again, this internet shit is actually really hard to grasp. Think about it: there is a growing mass of twentysomethings, who have been living on the internet their entire life. They are digital natives. They can build a world-changing service in a weekend (not all of them can pull it off, but some do). They live in two worlds at the same time - in fact, they're one and the same for them. They rewrite reality as they see fit and they LIKE to twiddle with it. They are used to rapid iteration - you build something, you toss it out to the public; if it doesn't work - you change it or abandon completely. Doing, not planning.

In contrast, the politicians talk endlessly, and then they vote, and that's it. No iteration - bugs may get fixed after a long process. The Finnish criminal code - which is still in use - dates from frigging 1889, though obviously it's been patched since. The entire legislation runs on waterfall, but the current generation is growing in complete agile mode. Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) doesn't care about what the legislation says about privacy - he does it, and if enough people complain, he changes it. That man is one of the most influential people on this planet when it comes to privacy, and whatever politicians talk about it does not matter.

And no, I'm not advocating using SCRUM for legislation - I wouldn't like to be tried under "law 2.0 beta" - but the clock speed difference is real and it's there. As Lawrence Lessig says: "Code is Law". I would even go as far as saying "Code is Reality", since many aspects of our life are now completely dependent on the Code: banks, jobs, communication, traffic... It's everywhere: we almost breathe it. But few people are really, truly aware of it.

And to me it seems that this is what is missing from this whole discussion around "digital property" and DRM and piracy - at least here in Finland: the realization that piracy is not a disease. It is a symptom of something more profound which is happening in the society as we speak, and henceforth any attempt at stopping piracy is about as useful as painting the walls when the house foundations are crumbling: might fool some people all of the time, and all people for some of the time, but the house will still collapse.

The interesting thing is that since it's unstoppable, watching people and corporations kick and scream while they're being dragged into the new age is kinda fun. In 20 years, the 20somethings of today will be in their fourties and start to have major power in corporations and governments. And in 40 years, everybody who gets to make decisions is a digital native, and they'll be fighting their own inability to grasp the changing world.

It just really bugs me that people just paint the walls and try to sell me the house as "fully renovated."

Pitäkääpä se Rastimo nyt kurissa, jooko?

Yksi Rastimo kumoaa yhden Kasvin vaikutuksen, enkä koe enää sopivaksi antaa ääntäni puolueelle, jossa ollaan noinkin pihalla nykyisyydestä - saati sitten tulevaisuudesta.

Since I've been asked a couple of times - and apparently quoted as an example - I figured that it might make sense to put some words on paper on this one. Note that this technique is not my invention, but it is an adaptation to horror gaming from a little-known game called "Puppetland" by John Tynes (rules freely available from the internets).

One of the key ingredients in horror genre is stress. Usually this comes from powerful visual imagery or - in the case of gaming - the players own imagination as they visualize the horrors that their characters encounter. Or it can be more subtle and come from collapsing relationships or watching someone you love destroy themselves. However, it's a bit difficult to get yourself into the horror genre when one player is hunting for Cheetos and another one is reading a rulebook. Focus is very important.

Deadlines tend to focus people very efficiently. They also generate loads of stress, as anyone who has to live by a calendar knows. So I figured that it's worth a shot: introducing artificial deadlines into gaming should introduce stress and focus into the game, even though it is not a horror element as such. As players are very good at suspending disbelief when it comes to imagining that dice can represent monsters, surely it would be easy to believe that one kind of stress is actually some other kind of stress?

Turns out this theory works wonderfully. So I'm running a Call of Cthulhu game, in which each game is limited by a chess clock to a period of maybe 35 minutes at its shortest to 1h 30min at its longest. I set the clock to a shorter time if the scenario is straight-forward and needs lots of action; if I want to get a darker, threatening but slower game, I give the clock a bit more time. There is an in-game device which does tell the characters the time as well, and it's fairly easy to explain as an "alien device which tells how much time there is left before the portal closes, but sometimes it runs faster and sometimes it runs slower and you don't really know when and how." If they players say "we fly to Paris", then the clock runs really slow; if they enter combat, the minutes drain very fast. But I am unsure whether you would really require that kind of an in-game device at all. Do try and tell me.

Of course, since the clock does not stop for anything it means that the GM needs to be very knowledgeable of the game as well. There just isn't time to go leafing through the sourcebooks: everything has to come out in a snap. I joke that in this game, writing a scenario takes longer than playing it. But the increased intensity of the situation is well worth it; it's very rewarding for the game master to get swept away by the emotion flowing from the players.

And buy, is there emotion. I am not sure as I was rather immersed in the game myself too, but I think I saw a player jump to his feet in excitement last time we played. And you can hear the creeping terror in their voices, as they try to figure out exactly how to keep a gigantic fluid creature in a barred cage (answer: there is no way) with 15 minutes left on the clock and the friendly receptionist they tied to a table so that she would be safe is going to be EATEN ALIVE by a thing that crawls on the floor and ululates in a terrible, forgotten language and they possibly don't have time to do everything they NEED to do and they simply have to choose who to save...

For a middle-aged guy with a family, gaming with a clock does bring in other benefits as well: games have a well-defined length, which means that they're easier to plan for. They're also easy to play as fillers or when all people can't make it - since the sceneario ends by clock, there's never a case where the scenario gets "adjourned in a suitable place so that we can continue later on". It does not preclude long campaigns, but it does require certain advance planning, since the players will not spend time digging up all the clues.

Obviously, this wouldn't work for everyone and for every campaign, but I was surprised to see how well it worked for us. Instead of a book, think of a TV series: 42 minutes, and that has to be the whole story. Think Pecha Kucha: you have time to tell maybe one or two things, and then it's over.

And hey, if it's boring, at least it's over fast. ;-)

There's positive feedback and there's negative feedback. The old rule is that you should also try to be constructive in your feedback, so that's clearly a third kind. However, there's still a lot more than just those tree, so here's a list of some of the different kinds I've met over the years.

• Whining. This is the lowest form of feedback, because it mostly just concentrates on why the complainers life is useless without such-and-such feature, and often also includes predictions of doom.
• HelloKitty. OMG LOL LOV UR SITE KTHXBYE. Probably positive, but one can never be too sure. Also known as "fly-by thanks."
• Complaints. People who have a genuine problem and have gone through the effort of actually filing a complaint. While they can be annoying, the concerns they do raise are genuine and can really make a positive impact on your product. After all, they care about your stuff. Can become good allies, even ambassadors.
• Reviews. These are an old-fashioned and not always very relevant form of feedback. Since they come conceptually from old media, they usually are not changed after publishing, and therefore work only for products which are changed rarely. For a modern web site which are updated sometimes several times a day, they are obsoleted quickly.
• Bonepicking. No matter what you do, some people have a bone to pick with you or your company, and will take everything that you do in negative light. Slips easily into whining, but can be a genuine complaint too.
• Awards. Awesome stuff, if given genuinely.
• Ambassadors. Folks that are so into your product that they go out and spread the word. Treat these people well, for their feedback carries extra weight.
• Faux criticism. This is usually just cloaked whining. It appears on the surface to be useful, but often turns out to be a complete failure to understand what the product is supposed to be doing and applying it to a focus group of one. ("My cell phone does not whip cream very well. I think there's a big portion of people in the world who would like to whip cream with their phones. If you cannot bring such a product to market, you will lose all those people.")
• Fair criticism. This is the kind of stuff that one should really grip when it comes in. It doesn't mean that you should do what it says, but at least you should understand where it comes from, and preferably respond kindly.
• Mehs. "Yeah, it's kinda okay." This is a good warning sign that your product isn't rocking the boat, but as for its informational value it's pretty much zero.
• Anons. Anonymous/pseudonymous commentary on web sites. This is almost like noise, and going through it is usually as useful as peeling your skin with sandpaper. Yeah, it does exfoliate, but it's painful and you could spend the time more wisely.
• Peekaboo. Comes in, gives you an incomplete bug report, and then completely disappears or is unable to give any more information. Often does not have very good language skills.
• Thanks. Just simple, heartfelt thanks. While they may not make your product better, they do make you feel better, and that's really why you do what you do, don't you?