When I decided to be a computer science major in college, I knew I was embarking onto a path that would lead me into a male dominated industry.  But I can honestly say I had no idea what that would really mean in the day to day goings on of the office.

I’ve been disappointed that during my time in the industry I haven’t seen more women joining the ranks of engineers.  There are more and more designers and artists in game development but I work with very few female engineers.  Of course there are exceptions, just by being there I’m one myself, and the others I’ve met have all been interesting and sometimes inspiring people to work with.

But that’s something you can think about any time.  The bathroom is another story.  There are usually screaming kids, makeup, someone crying, sometimes someone sick and people comforting them, someone is always out of toilet paper and trying to ask around for it etc.

Now take a peek into a women’s bathroom near the engineering team.  It’s like a graveyard which leads to a whole new social situation that no other women’s bathroom has preparred me for.

Assume you know the bathroom is a quiet place that there is rarely anyone else in, so if you need to have a quick phone conversation you duck in there.  Now assume you’re a person in the stall doing your business while this new person comes in to make a call.  Is it ok to flush or more polite to wait until they are done with their conversation?  A flush is going to be an unmistakable giveaway of where they are and who knows who they’re talking to.

We also have these nifty motion sensing lights in our office.  I’m happy to know we’re saving electricity, but when you’re sitting there for a few minutes and suddenly the lights go off what is a girl supposd to do?   It’s not like I can jump up and wave my arms around since I’m somewhat busy.  And if someone does happen to come in and realize you’ve been sitting there in the dark it is just a tad embarassing.

My favorite is what I call the “zombie  bodyslam”.  If you know you’re going to be the only one in the bathroom, and the stall doors always swing shut after you, the normal thing to do is walk into the bathroom and walk right into the first stall.  The problem is if someone just happens to be in that stall and you, in your zombie state, slam right into the stall door.  I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened and I still have a hard time not laughing out loud.  But I can’t for the life of me figure out when I was supposed to pick up the social etiquette for this one.

In the end it just gives me a lot more respect for all the women who had to brave a new path for the first time because I’m definitely not the first to do my job, but there are so many things I just wasn’t prepared for.

AFK BIO.

- Jen

For me the Sim games started on a black and white Mac with the original SimCity. I’ve heard people joke that their phone now has more power than their old desktops. But SimCity is the first game that I saw had been ported to my iPhone with more features than the first version of the game I played. It’s SimCity 2000 and it has color, two things that I salivated over when they first came out.

The Sim franchise is right up there with brands like “Levi’s” and “Coke” to me. If the Sims comes out with something new, chances are I’ve heard about it and considered buying it. If we’re talking the Sims 1 or 2 I’ve bought every expansion back and stuff pack sometimes more than once.

The Sims recently lost me when they moved away from Stuff Packs into the pay per item model. For $20 I would buy the pack of items from my local Target, but I can’t justify buying individual items for a $1 or $2. When it comes down to that level of detail I’m thinking I should be shopping for my own new clothes instead of my sims and it starts to feel like real work. Pressing Play is fun to me, not pressing Buy.

So while the Sims in all it’s incarnations has been a constant backdrop in my gaming life it might now be at the point where the Sims have moved into the RMT world and I’m not ready to followt. Fortunately , the base game runs just great without the add-ons.  When the mood strikes I can play, even if it means looking at a few ads while I log in.

I’ve been experiencing massive nostalgia for the arcade games I used to play on my GameBoy and NES. I’m the happy owner of a shiny pink Nintendo DS but I still miss that GameBoy despite its unfortunate name.

But enough of that train of though, the game that has probably stolen more hours from my waking moments than any other has to be Tetris. I knew it was a game developed in Russia, which was more than I knew about the development of any game at that period.

I used to try to play for as long as I could, giving up some of the big bonuses in exchange for playing longer and longer. I’d alternate between playing at high and low levels to see which would keep me going, but I’d often get bored with the easy levels. It wasn’t until recently that I found John Brzustowski’s thesis which states that you can’t play Tetris forever. I’m a little crushed, I was convinced that some day I’d get the perfect game and keep going till I just couldn’t move my thumbs anymore.

The other game I cut my teeth on was Galaga. The one thing these two games seem to have in common is the incredible number of versions and variations that have been made. They are also still widely available after 20+ years. I was at Best Buy this weekend and saw a hand held Tetris game. A quick google search found an online version of the Galaga which is eerily similar to what I remember. It has significantly delayed me writing anything for quite some time.

Most recently I’ve been playing Cooking Dash and Zuma. The difference between what I’m playing now and 15 to 20 years ago seems much smaller than what is the same about these games. They all have some obvious things in common:

• A numeric score
• Repetitive and simple actions
• The concept of putting something ‘right’ or organizing
• An endless play mode with light or non-existent goals

A score seems so tiny and yet is so important to me while playing these games. With a lack of social play and the lack of defined goals the score becomes the focal points for both. While you may never seen another person playing Galaga at the arcade, you can feel some competitiveness and camaraderie with the people on the high scores list. With no elaborate goals to track your progress the score is usually the only thing that signifies how you’re doing.

Zuma is something I drown into when I really don’t want to have to think about the game I’m playing. If you’re trying to pay attention to the storyline in a game like Zuma or Galaga, I think you’re missing the point of the game. Click, click, tap tap tap click click “Boing”.. it’s like music to my tired brain at the end of the day.

I’ve come across a few articles that seem to imply that Time Management games like Diner Dash might help people learn to organize their time. I’m having a hard time believing that. While I was playing Diner Dash I learned that it’s more efficient to feed everyone at the same time even if it means some people are blowing smoke out their ears, don’t tip or just plain walk out. While this might make for a better score, in real life if I was told by a waitress she couldn’t serve me right now cause Table A hadn’t paid yet and she didn’t want to break her combo bonus I’d be beyond pissed.

I don’t see any big leaps coming up in the future for this category of games. Almost any of the leaps I’ve seen in other games like graphics, great writing, voice acting, cut scenes, interactive stories and massive online communities would detract from the engaging simplicity of what makes me play and continue shelling out when a new one of these games launches.

Having recently hit the big 3-0 there has been a nagging desire to reflect on life and the one part I keep going over is games. This isn’t surprising since I spend my work hours making games and at home I spend a good chunk of my free time gaming or thinking about games. I’m sure that when I’m on a Sims 3 binge I spend more time planning out their day than I spend planning out my own. While in the shower, driving or doing dishes, sometimes it’s just more fun to think about what my sim will be doing tonight than what I’ll be up to.

I’ve been trying, but I can’t remember a time in my life where video games weren’t in the house in some form. Before I could read, I recall watching my Dad playing Adventure and Zork. I found the screenshot of Zork but it’s a bit fancier than I remember. We didn’t have a color screen then.

Soon, I became the player instead of the voyeur. Arcade games, MUDs, MMO’s and simulations are some of the high points. I think the lowest point was the time I saved up all my pennies and then wasn’t allowed to buy a Nintendo system because my parents were concerned about the epilepsy warning (I’m not epileptic but that warning was scary to young parents). We’re not talking a fancy Nintendo here, but the blow-on-cartridge-to-fix-every-problem kind.

They must have caved at some point, because not only did we have an NES for quite a while, but I remember my Mom really getting into shooting those ducks in Duck Hunt. By some quirk in the storage of memories the horror of being told ‘No’ to the NES stands out to my adult self but the time we actually got the NES is a long lost memory.

So I’ve grown up with games as a household fact. I’ve been influenced them for most of my 30 years and we know that in the computer world that’s a VERY LONG time. So my question to myself is, have my tastes changed in those years? Have games?

I’m thinking that this is more than a one post topic. So next time puzzle and arcade games get my attention.

Have you ever sat staring at a fish tank watching the fish swim back and forth.  As the fish swish up and down and back and forth your mind goes blank, calm and into a hypnotic state.  The fish aren’t going to do anything very interesting but just maybe there will be some unexpected interaction between two fish or a fish might hide in a piece of coral and then dart out unexpectedly from a little opening you thought too small to hide its small frame.

The fish tank is, for the most part, self sustaining.  It requires some feeding, cleaning and general maintenance on an easy to follow schedule.  And it is a place to decorate with cute little fish structures like hidden treasure and underwater plants.

I’ve never been interested in the games that try to mimic a fish tank on my computer.   I haven’t been able to sit back and enjoy the fake fish swimming around because it seems like cheating.  Shouldn’t I just get a real fish tank?  And plus I don’t even like fish (while they are alive and not smothered in butter that is).

But recently I’ve been enthralled with a facebook game called Restaurant City.  In it, my little restaurant has chefs, waiters, and janitors all working at a plodding pace to keep the restaurant churning through customers.  I only need to occasionally feed them, decorate the restaurant, and clean up some garbage to keep the place running.

Other than that I can just sit back and watch the little people go about their day of cooking, cleaning and eatting.  Sometimes they’ll do something interesting but always within their limitations of the artificial world created for them.

And it was today that I realized I was falling into the exact same pattern with this game that I had with fish tanks previously.  I had to wonder is this really a fish tank in disguise? Based on the amount of time I’ve spent watching the little people lumber around and the time I’ve spent rearranging their chairs and decorations I’m leaning heavily towards fish tank.

That brings up one other question for.  If this is a re-skinned fish tank, is it a game at all?  I wouldn’t consider a fish tank to be a ‘game’ if I had one in real life.  I might call it a hobby or a diversion but not a game.

Restaurant City refers to itself as a game but the more time I spend watching the little creatures go back and forth and up and down between their stations I’m more and more convinced it’s pushing the label of game a little too far.

Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that the name of the company that makes Restaurant City is Playfish.

Forums and comments on articles are usually full of people who don’t know the proper use of the caps lock key (there really isn’t one, just take it off already), don’t appear to be able to form a sentence, just write random words, use shortened forms of words that appear to be something other than English or just plain don’t seem to care if their post is comprehensible or not.  If it’s a popular thread, you’ll see all those plus the people who feel it’s their job to correct all of the above and call them out for their mistakes or ‘lazyness’.

If it’s a day I’m on the internet I can guarantee I’ll see most of those examples plainly laid out.  And I’m OK with that, it’s just a part of the internet I’ve come to expect and either ignore or try to puzzle out depending on my interest or commitment to the thread.  If it’s a post on the forums for the game I work on, I’ll try to figure out what that person was saying and even google abbreviations I’m not familiar with.  If it’s reading a blog post’s reactions from someone on foodnetwork.com I’ll probably get bored pretty quick and stop reading.

There is one thing I’m seeing more often that I can’t seem to just ignore and has become a pet peeve that gets me everytime I see it.  It’s the person who posts, either after an article or a in a long forum thread something to the effect of:

“I can’t be bothered to read this article/forum thread/blog because the title sucks/it’s too long/I don’t care about it and my opinion on this is [insert random opinion here]“.

Of anything I’ve seen since I got my first introduction to the net back in.. sometime a long time ago… this has to be the most ridiculous and it’s common!

After reading 150 pages of a forum thread on any topic why are people subjecting me to their opinion when they didn’t bother to read even the first two pages?  And if they only read the title of the article and not the full thing why do they feel they have an opinion other people would be interested in reading?  And why do they even want to take the time to post about it!

Maybe the only thing that gets me is the people who write a fairly long post and then somewhere near the end add in they didn’t read anything else about it.

My wish for all future posts is that people stop admitting they didn’t read the thread/article, just let me exist in peace pretending that they at least read some of what they’re critiquing.

This is probably the longest first day of Fan Faire I’ve ever had and definitely the most hoarse I’ve been after the first day from talking and screaming.

We started the day with a nicely timed 9:55AM flight that was a little delayed.  But all in all we got to vegas in short order, hopped in a taxi and I was in my room lickedy split.

Then came the sore throat inducing hours.  Chatting with people in large or small but equally loud rooms followed up by one of Brenlo’s Welcome Speeches that mostly involves getting the crowds to cheer for their game while giving away some snazy prizes.  I was right along in there cheering for the EQII folks.

I’m not sure what the numbers are but it sure does seem like a great turn out this year.  I’m having a great time seeing some people that I haven’t had a chance to see since last Fan Faire but I do miss some of the familiar faces that couldn’t make it this year for various reasons.  Hopefully we’ll see them again at future events.

So my big goal for tomorrow is to remember to take some pictures!

I lucked out on this book in a few ways.  It was another great recommendation from a friend and Amazon had it on sale ridiculously cheap.  I just couldn’t pass it up even though McKinley was a new author for me and my pile of books to read is getting pretty deep.

The novel has the now familiar construct of a young woman mostly on her own who somehow ends up with a horribly dangerous vampire that doesn’t eat her immediately.  Through the harrowing experiences they have she learns about herself and grows up.  But as with so many retold and remolded tales the story telling is what kept me turning the pages and regretfully putting it down when it got too late each night.

About half way through the book I started to notice the narrator has a tendency to spring major story changing facts on the reader without much lead in time or notice that you’re about to hear something important.  At times, they were presented in such a way I was turning back to reread them because I didn’t believe I’d read the past few pages correction.  After finishing the book and thinking about it for a week, I can’t decide if this helped me connect with what the main character was going through while she deals with sudden life changing events or if I was just annoyed by the mental whiplash I felt each time a new bomb was dropped.

Either way, I have a few more of McKinley’s books on my ‘want to read’ list now and if Sunshine has a sequel at any point I’ll be picking it up.

The rule seems to be that sequels never live up to the original story.  I’ve been fortunate to find the exceptions to that rule lately and this Kim Harrison novel is one of them.

The novel is set in a semi post apocalyptic time with most of humanity killed off but the bureaucracies remain.  Exempt, now they have supernatural equivalents that are just as if not more powerful than their human counterparts.

One of the things I truly enjoy while reading these novels is how the supernatural element is folded so neatly into what appears to be ordinary life for the characters.  The author is able to move through the story by relying on the personalities of the characters, not by making up some new kind of magic to save the day.  I’m left feeling that the characters are complete with their supernatural alterations, not just humans with powers smacked on top of them.

There is a part that leaves me a little disappointed at the end though.  The characters seem to fall in love a lot and for reasons that don’t appear obvious.  I’m not quite grasping what the connection or attraction is between so many of the players that causes them to have such strong feelings so quickly, which makes their decisions somewhat confusing when it involves them.

But overall, the williness to explore the characters as complete beings with their gifts and failings and veering off the so well tread stereotypes for this genre makes this a series I’ll keep buying and enjoy reading every page.

I buy the majority of my books based off of suggestions from friends.   “A is for Alibi” is the best recommendation I’ve received in quite a while.

The book was a true pleasure to read.  Once I got past the 80’s setting and could visualize the clothes a bit better the main character became a real person to me rather quickly.

One of the things that stood out particularly to me was the difference in how the protagonist was presented compared to other mysteries I’ve read.  Sue Grafton managed to avoid having to callout why her character was quirky yet likeable, there was no scene with her character looking at herself in the mirror to describe herself or reminiscing on how her grandmother always told her she was a certain way.  Instead the character came to life through her actions and her interactions with the other actors in the novel.

I’ve already picked up B and I’m looking forward to diving in.