Games don’t need to be perfect. I’ve always maintained this. They just need to be good. Command And Conquer 3 was a pretty awful game, all told. Most things hadn’t changed since 1996, some things had actually got worse (AI anyone?), and the things that had improved were usually smothered by the idiots that populated the multiplayer anyway. But on top of being pretty awful, it was also good. Solid. Playable. Deus Ex, on the other hand, was far better. Not merely well-rounded, it had soul. It had something that made you mentally jot your experiences down to tell other people later. It asked you for five more minutes. You loved it. Bioshock is difficult, though.

Before we go any further, I feel the need to point out a few things. Firstly, I read nothing about Bioshock before buying it, save the very large, bold type of a few friends that communicated something along the lines of it having the potential to be quite good. I’ve also not played System Shock 2, any of the Thief games, and yes, I do sometimes have trouble sleeping at night. However, that’s irrelevant to the fact that, basically, Bioshock was an entirely clean experience. I went in there, I played the introductory chapter, I swore softly under my breath. Make no mistake - the introduction to Bioshock is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Then the game starts. And it sort of goes downhill.

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Welcome to the new look of Eff Seven - cold, empty and without many things to do whatsoever. Anyone who makes allusions between the sexy new theme and the blog’s owner will get sour looks!

I’ll be launching another blog called Human Error within the next two months, and that will attract some regular writing attention from myself, with luck. This means that Eff Seven finally takes its rightful place as being a loney, rarely-updated blog that charts the more personal events of life. And that’s a good thing for those of you out there who are into the personal stuff.

There!

Computers crack famous boardgame (BBC News)

This very nearly spurred me into launching the blog that I’ve been keeping for a while. It covers quite a lot of what I’ve come to find interesting since I looked into artificial intelligence. Not admirable or clever, necessarily - but interesting. For those of you without mice, or that don’t want to read the full story, here’s the summary - a team of computer scientists have ’solved’ the boardgame known as Checkers or Draughts.

‘Solved’ is a strange word to use for a two-player game. In fact, the word is lightly deceptive as it suggests that the team, led by Professor Jonathan Schaeffer, had discovered a winning strategy for the game. A winning strategy is as it sounds - a set of rules that allows a player to win in any situation. In fact, Professor Schaeffer has managed to do something equally impressive. He’s managed to get a computer to look at every possible game of Checkers. Ever.

This process of iteration, where every possible move is examined at every possible stage, allows the computer to look up the best move at each stage by examining the board and evaluating the ‘worth’ of every possible move that’s open to it. It’s got some quite simple maths behind it, but the actual feat of computing every possible game is not something to underestimate.

Lately, I’ve been looking at Game AI of all kinds. Both at the small-scale, where age-old and simple games such as Go! and Connect Four provide a challenge for learning algorithms and planning strategies. And at the large-scale, where complex systems of states and reactions control games such as Civilization and GalCiv. The former tend to supply a lot of interesting data and heuristics to research as a whole. But the latter - the latter is interesting, when we look at today’s news.

Because we’re working with restricted resources when making a game, AI programming has to take whatever’s left when you subtract everyone else’s requirements. Next-gen graphics? That’ll take out most of it. Then the networking code. Content management. Ai tends to get a very small slice of the pie nowadays. So when you’re working on a game that’s as big as some of the strategies and large-scale action games nowadays, iterating every single possibility isn’t just bad - it’s impossible.

Nevertheless, it’s exciting to have such a database. Even though there’s nothing particularly impressive in their methods, the outcome will provide a new insight into game theory, iterative methods, and rule testing.

And for Professor Schaefer, it’ll finally mean he can play a good game of Checkers.

Welcome to Summer on Eff Seven. Really behind with this blog, so let me keep it up to date by pinging off current affairs and nodding to the excellent blog at http://www.craigknott.co.uk. Soon - more things. But first, the Summer.

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“Joined at the hip” is the buzzphrase that’s being shot around the twenty-four hour news channels tonight, and I’d imagine it’ll find its way onto many a headline tomorrow morning. It reminds me of several things - firstly, I have almost entirely fallen out of focus with the political policies of Brown’s government. Other than, “I’m going to build so many houses, you’re not going to believe it. Houses, houses, houses. All over the place.” I’m not entirely sure where Brown is taking this country.

That’s not a particularly bad thing. In fact, kudos to whichever political manipulators decided to pull this one off today, despite having seemingly no interesting timing whatsoever. It’s almost a given move for an incoming cabinet that has done everything it can to distance itself from Blair. But nevertheless, you’re never entirely sure they’re really going to do it. It’s like some kind of cheap summer action movie.

Or it would be, but let’s remind ourselves that Brown’s government has got rid of so much of its predecessor’s spin that almost no movement whatsoever remains. They’re in the process of building up a stronger facade, one that makes people think that they are genuinely in control of what happens in that grand, brown building. And yet there’s something inherently dangerous in doing this. Spin might be bad when used as much as it has been in the past - but it was there for a reason, once upon a time.

“I’ve only been in the job for five days.” is a sentence that would have been unthinkable in the glossy, well-prepared Blair era, and it’s a phrase that should rightly come back to haunt Mr. Brown throughout his leadership of the party. Less than a week into leadership, he demonstrated - to me at least - the cost of removing spin from a political party. Not bathed in the light of truth and freedom, but showing the dirt and mess that PR hides so very well.

It may well be a risk worth taking, in political terms or social ones. But I’m still waiting to see if Brown is preferable over the option of the only other spin doctor worth voting for.

God alive. I never thought I’d be so unenthused about being able to vote.

Some choice character descriptions from Beyond The 11pm Coherence Barrier:

“He remains icily cold, as if defusing a large explosive on live television.”

“He’s a self-assured guy who will end up working for the Guardian one day, assuming he doesn’t kill himself beforehand.”

Script Frenzy is having the same brilliant effect on my writing habits that NaNoWriMo has - it drains them of all sense, and starts making ridiculous analogies and metaphors at a hundred miles per hour.

Turns out that that article did make it into PC Gamer, and you can go pick it up in the shops this week. I’ve also managed to get involved in some research work this summer through the Department of Computing at Imperial - I’ll be putting stuff about that on a new blog soon (you don’t need to keep looking at it though, if you don’t like AI!).

Owain just emailed me to tell me that my latest Pocket Gamer feature has made its way onto SlashDot. This generates a feeling of warmth and inner fuzziness that makes me want to write more of everything, and do less work. Huzzah all round!

While we’re on the point of writing, Script Frenzy began three days ago, and I began a tale of subterfuge, silly analogies, and kids. No Mi5, at the behest of Andrew and every Robert Ludlum reader, ever.

Alright, another one of those classic update posts, I’m afraid. Lots of things going on at Eff Seven, so here’s a little update. First - this blog has moved down one level. Hello there. This is to give the top-level doman a bit of pizzazz and allow me to open up a few other projects, and generally share stuff around. In particular, I’ve now launched a photoblog again, which will be kept fresh with my new camera (though it may not get much action until I get back to Bournemouth in late June).

Second is that the design here has changed - I’ve finally found a design that I genuinely, honestly love. I think it’s a great design, and the folks that made it do a host of other great looks so go and check them out. I’ll be using this design on a new blog opening soon, too, which will be accessible from the main page. It’ll cover some of the research topics I’m doing at Imperial, but this blog will hold most of the interesting life stuff.

That’s all for now. I have a lot of journalism and computing projects on the run at the moment, but nothing to show for it right now (except a page in the next issue of PC Gamer). Stay tuned.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=163207&site=cvg

More next week, but for now take a gander - if it all gets confirmed come May 19th, we could be looking at another MMO giant in the making.

Of all the demographic groups you could’ve pinned into a political situation, gamers seem to be the least obvious candidates. When Rock or Punk had their turn in the limelight of public disapproval, they were ready for it. For gamers, many of them barely look up from World of Warcraft.
And yet, represented or not, there’s a lot of discussion going on lately. Did the latest American high school shooter have contact with videogames? None were found in his apartment, but that didn’t stop the Washington Post from linking Cho Seung Hi to the popular online FPS CounterStrike.
And that means Jack Thompson.

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Not as easy as it looks. This was the first time I tried bidding for specifics instead of just using Buy It Now or going to a seller that had multiples. Outbid several times on many items - though this was partly because of my inability to get to the computer due to some rather unfortunate events involving leaking boiler pipes and everything I own.

Fortunately, all is well! No damage, and I’m back online. Kind of. Stay tuned for photography in tee-minus three weeks.