I help curate a website called Build New Games, which contains longform tutorials about making games for the open web with technologies like JavaScript and HTML5. One of our most popular articles is Sven Bergström’s Real Time Multiplayer in HTML5. I wrote something in the comments that I thought might be valuable to people setting out to make their first realtime online games, so I’m calling it out here. Note: none of this is going to be news to most professional game devs, but I’m putting this here because it’s an important thing for beginners to be aware of (it kind of blew my mind when I first learned it).

Yesterday someone named Chris posted the following comment:

This article was amazing for teaching the basic points of networking in games. That said, I tried out the demo and it was still nowhere near smooth. What’s the next step? There was pretty frequent jerkiness in your demo especially when changing direction after several seconds of holding down a key. What is this demo missing? If it’s so hard to make a rectangle move smoothly on a network connection, then I can’t even figure out how to make a networked pong game look smooth!

I wrote the following in response:

Believe it or not, you actually have MORE leeway when you’re not using rectangles. A lot of games compensate for lag (and hide lag) through careful game design. For example, in most MMOs, when you press the “action” button to do anything, there’s usually a windup animation of some kind: your character swings the sword back for about a second, or starts conjuring a spell, or whatever. The client is already sending a message to the server the moment you press the button: the animation gives the server 1s-2s (or even more) buffer in order to acknowledge that it happened, calculate the result, and return the result back to the client. Then, by the time your animation is done firing (and the sword actually “hits” the enemy”), the client says “Oh, the server already told me the enemy lost 5HP, so now I can tell you that at exactly the right moment to make it look like a zero lag transaction.”

The point is: a lot of the game design in multiplayer games exists solely to catch or hide lag and other edge cases. You’re never going to be able to guarantee a “real” lagless experience, so you design around it (and sometimes, for games like Halo, that involves a massive server infrastructure that you control, and really smart matchmaking that attempts to match people geographically close to each other, etc).

Compensating for lag in a way where you’re not “cheating” too much on the physics is a huge, huge, huge technical undertaking, which most games avoid by cheating like hell.

I just finished playing BioShock Infinite. It’s a game with very high highs and very low lows. Plenty of people have said really interesting things about the game, and I won’t retread their words.

What I do want to talk about is Thomas Pynchon and videogames. It’s been a while since I last did that.

In 2006 he released a book called Against the Day. It takes place from 1893 to an unspecified time period after World War I. And I want to point out that there are an awful lot of parallels between Against the Day and BioShock Infinite.

***Plot spoilers for both works ahead!***

The World’s Columbian Exposition

BI is heavily influenced by the great 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago. The entire game takes place at approximately the same time period in the airborne city of “Columbia,” whose architecture is heavily, heavily influenced by the architecture of its famed White City. When you arrive, there is a massive World’s Fair-like festival going on, and a character makes a reference to a Ferris Wheel, which was invented for the Columbian Exposition. Anyway this is an obvious and well-known thing about the game.

AtD opens with the Chums of Chance piloting their airship to to the Expo, and the first five or so chapters take place at or around the Expo.

While the idea that two creative works would both reference the Expo (one of the pivotal moments in American history) is really not remarkable on its own, the fact that AtD opens with both airships and the Expo is kind of interesting.

Bifurcation of people

One of the major themes of Against the Day is bifurcation, or doubling. As Sam Leith noted of the book in The Spectator:

“The book is shot through with doubling, or surrogacy. There are the palindromic rival scientists Renfrew and Werfner. [...] Events on one side of the world have an occult influence on those on the other. ‘Double refraction’ through a particular sort of crystal allows you to turn silver into gold. Mirrors are to be regarded with, at least, suspicion. It gets more complicated, and sillier. We’re introduced to the notion of ‘bilocation’ — where characters appear in two places at once — and, later, to that of ‘co-consciousness’, where someone’s own mind somehow bifurcates. ‘He wondered if he could be his own ghost,’ Pynchon writes of one character.”

There are several pairs of “twins” in AtD. Scarsdale Vibe hired a substitute to fight for him during the Civil War–a common practice among the wealthy. After the war, his substitute Foley Walker finds him, and they become mystically connected, referred to as “the twin Vibes”. Renfrew and Werfner are rival scientists who (if memory serves me) used to be the same person, but a botched experiment split them in two.

BI features notable twins, botched experiments, and multiple realities of its own. The Lutece twins (the best characters in the game) have a very Pynchonian origin. Rosalind Lutece is a Tesla-like genius scientist who harnesses quantum phenomena to open holes to other dimensions. In one of these dimensions she discovers her “brother”, who I think is just herself but born as a boy. She pulls him into her reality, and they form a weird pair that act as the player’s mysterious guides through the world. Comstock and DeWitt are also “twins”: they are twins who split at a key moment in DeWitt’s life involving his life as a soldier. Dewitt bifurcates into Comstock after experiencing trauma at Wounded Knee. Walker and Vibe merge into the same person after one of them experiences trauma in the Civil War.

Multiple realities

In addition to the reality-bending stuff above, AtD features plenty of alternate realities.  There is an eerie scenes (my favorite in the novel) where someone notices that a photograph is essentially a differential of light: the dx/dt is a moment and that moment is captured by the photo–so they invent a way to take the integral of a photograph, and are able to peer inside and infer what life the moment that was captured lives: almost but not quite our own reality.

BI of course, is all about multiple realities, the “infinite” in its title referring to the infinite number of BioShock-like universes out there. Paraphrasing Elizabeth at the end: “There will always be a man, and his city, and a lighthouse.”

Anachronism

My favorite conceit from BI is that many of the songs you hear in the game are actually modern pop songs, sung in old timey style to the point where you might not even recognize them (I sure didn’t until the credits rolled!). Pynchon loves filling his books with anachronistic references (see my Tetris piece, or this famous Simpsons reference) and especially songs and references to pop music.

I’ll end with this quote from Louis Menand’s review of AtD, summarizing the overall theme of Against the Day:

An enormous technological leap occurred in the decades around 1900. This advance was fired by some mixed-up combination of abstract mathematical speculation, capitalist greed, global geopolitical power struggle, and sheer mysticism. We know (roughly) how it all turned out, but if we had been living in those years it would have been impossible to sort out the fantastical possibilities from the plausible ones. Maybe we could split time and be in two places at once, or travel backward and forward at will, or maintain parallel lives in parallel universes. It turns out (so far) that we can’t. But we did split the atom — an achievement that must once have seemed equally far-fetched. Against the Day is a kind of inventory of the possibilities inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination. [emphasis mine]

If that doesn’t ring  a bell for anyone who’s played Bioshock Infinite, I don’t know what would.

A brief note: this past weekend I launched two projects.

Clickbait is a little page born of my anger at Complex Magazine’s 40 Hottest Women in Tech article (purposefully not linking it here, you can find it if you want to). To see two of my friends reduced to a “hotness” ranking made my blood boil, so I got really super drunk and coded up something that would maybe make people who write “listicles” consider that they’re barely fucking human.

Since I’m not attending the Game Developers Conference this year (for the first time in a decade!), I built @darius_at_gdc. It’s a Twitter bot that pretends to be me attending GDC. So for all those who will miss my presence, they can get 90% of the good stuff by following that bot! The bot is roughly 90% templated writing with randomized parameters pulling from random dictionary words, and also from a sizable jargon file that’s full of game industry buzzwords. It also tracks night and day, so its behavior changes depending on what time of day it is in San Francisco. It’s going to run for the week of GDC, and then will be retired.

So you want to make a Twitter bot! That’s great! Here are some basic rules for making a bot that isn’t an asshole (and also reduce the chance of the bot getting banned by Twitter).

• Don’t @mention people who haven’t opted in
• Don’t follow Twitter users who haven’t opted in
• Don’t use a pre-existing hashtag
• Don’t go over your rate limits

These are the four basic rules a Twitter bot should follow. Basically: make sure your bot is an entirely opt-in experience, and don’t go over your rate limits. The latter is simple enough and you can avoid it by programmatically watching your API usage. Avoiding unsolicited @mentions should be obvious enough (@RedScareBot is such an asshole) — but then there’s the following and hashtag usage. Twitter doesn’t like when a bot autofollows a bunch of people at once, or people who use a particular keyword, or stuff like that. That’s what annoying spambots do (“I mentioned ‘iPad’ and now a hundred weird sexy ladies are following me”). Then there’s hashtags. Using an existing hashtag, particularly a trending hashtag, is what Twitter refers to as “hashtag pollution”. You can see it when you search for pretty much any trending topic: a bunch of bots selling pharmaceuticals or whatever and then tagging it with “#americanIdolFinale” or whatever.

You’ll notice that I say “who haven’t opted in” for the first two. You could ask people personally, or manually monitor the bot, but also you could automate it. An example of automation would be to program your bot such that whenever someone tweets “@examplebot mention me”, the bot adds their username to an internal list of users that it will sometimes mention in tweets. You could even have the bot occasionally tweet “If you want me to mention you in tweets, please @reply me with the text ‘mention me’, thanks!” Same would go for following (or you could just do an automated followback).

I recently released a new project, called RapBot. You go to the site and it generates an absurd ’80s freestyle battle rap for you.

I also wrote a blog post for the Bocoup blog that covers some of the technical implementation details.

And lastly, you can check out the source code for RapBot here!

I was talking to Cameron Kunzelman today and he mentioned that he has a hard time blocking people on Twitter.

I used to have a hard time hitting the block button too. It seemed like I was being rude or maybe I was purposefully ignoring inconvenient opinions or something. Then I noticed that women, people of color, and LGBTQA folks that I know did not share my hesitation about blocking people. The reason for this is simple: they experience people on the internet being assholes to them way more frequently than I do as a white guy. How often do I deal with someone being a dick to me on Twitter? Maybe once a month. I can make bold statements about, say, the game industry, and nobody questions my authority to make the statement: they usually just argue the statement itself, which is how it should be! Meanwhile, it’s a frequent occurrence when my spouse tweets something and then someone descends on her to question the ethos of her argument, rather than the logos.

So when someone’s annoying the shit out of me on Twitter, I have the privilege of just ignoring it, and it eventually goes away, and then I’m fine for a month or so. Other people don’t have that privilege and so they’ve got to deploy the block button often. Otherwise Twitter becomes an untenable experience for them.

Once I realized that, something clicked and now whenever someone annoys me consistently on Twitter, I block the shit out of them. (The rule is, if you’re annoying me [edit: I mean by not engaging in good faith discussion], and I can remember another time you annoyed me, you’re blocked.)

When people write about Super Mario Bros., they often include an image like this:

Look at those pixels: clear as a crisp Spring morning! For a lot of people, this signifies a retro aesthetic. It’s also a wholly modern aesthetic, divorced from the experience of playing on physical monitors in the 80s. (Jason Scott wrote a good article about how most old games look better on old monitors.)

Even though I grew up playing Super Mario Bros. on my NES, pictures like this mean close to nothing to me, on an emotional level. I don’t get pangs of nostalgia for it.

This is because when I played Super Mario Bros., it was on a shitty CRT monitor with tons of bleed where I turned the tint control knob up to the max. This resulted in Mario living in a world of day-glo magenta where the barrier between objects was tenuous at best, and everything had a halo. What can I say, I was 5 years old and I loved the little knob that turned things neon!

I spent a few minutes this morning trying to recreate what that original image was like. (To the pedants: the following image is not technically accurate: I just threw it together by learning a little bit about YCbCr decomposition and applying a PAL and a lens filter–I would have experienced NTSC as a kid in America.) Here’s what nostalgia looks like for me:

I had a few too many drinks last night, and made a Twitter bot called @LatourSwag as a birthday present for Ben Abraham.

Basically how it works is I get the last 100 Twitter search results for “#swag” that also contain the word “and”. Then I grab the last 100 tweets from @LatourBot. I take every #swag tweet that’s not an RT and push it to an array. I take every @latourbot tweet that has “and” or “,” in it, and push it to an array. Then I say there’s a 50% chance it will be latour-then-swag, and 50% that it will be swag-then-latour. If Latour comes first, I take a random Latour tweet from the array and take all the text up to the “and” or the “,”. Then I take a random swag tweet and take the text after the “and” in it. Then I do latour + ” and ” + swag. There you go.

It’s slightly more complicated than that, but mostly it’s just a few tweaks I did to make sure I had enough Latour quotes to pick from. The results are actually pretty good sometimes!

I learned later that Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) was the name of a book and a cheerleader! #swag

— Latour Swag (@LatourSwag) January 12, 2013

Orly was the prototype with laboratory methods; the CET is still the prototype and badass she is!! #SWAG!

— Latour Swag (@LatourSwag) January 12, 2013

In the other area (“the secretariat”) there are typewriters and dancing #drunk #vodka #vegas #swag #dope #drinks #bff

— Latour Swag (@LatourSwag) January 12, 2013

The technician who sacrificed the guinea pig is held responsible and shyt mua fuckas aint no shit to me #blazeit #swag #yolo

— Latour Swag (@LatourSwag) January 12, 2013

LOL the moment u understand subtweets and set free.

— Latour Swag (@LatourSwag) January 12, 2013

2012 was overall a shit year for mainstream games, and as far as indie-games-that-you-have-to-pay-for go, it seems like there were plenty of games people loved but not many of them struck a chord with me (Journey, Dear Esther: I’m lookin’ at you). I also played far fewer videogames this year than in the past, as I’ve been doing other things with my free time. ANYWAY here is my obligatory list of Games That I Really Liked That Came Out in the Last 365 Days.

The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan, thecatamites (PC). Some sort of virtual reality nominally educational tour of Kubla Khan’s Mongolia, through the lens of the wretchedly bad Coleridge poem, with a dash of what appear to be sex-crazed Fraggles thrown in for good measure.  When I first played this game, which takes only about 10 minutes, I thought “Huh, okay, that was funny and weird.” But the game stuck with me. I find myself thinking about it whenever I see an educational game, or sometimes in my introspective moments. It has wormed its way into my psyche, and that is terrifying.

Smooth Operators, by Heydeck Games (XBLIG, coming soon to PC). This game is a call center simulator. It is pretty detailed: you have to build out a physical office space and hire inbound and outbound marketers, project managers, account managers, IT staff, janitors, etc. Each individual employee can be micromanaged to the point where you can control their actual shift schedule, their individual salary, etc.  The game has a rhythm to it that makes it incredibly relaxing to play. While aesthetically it reminds me a lot of the phone game Tiny Tower, on a mechanical level it’s much more like a Sim Tower or other classic management titles (here you’ll find no forced “energy” mechanic, thank god).

FTL, by Subset Games (Win/Mac/Linux). I’m a huge fan of “roguelike-likes”, and FTL kept my rapt interest for several weeks, even inspiring me to write up a short strategy guide. A wonderful game that does exactly what it sets out to do (giving you the command of the crew of a small spaceship), and consciously manages to improve upon one of my favorite games, 2005′s Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.

Dishonored, by Arkane Studios (Win/360/PS3). Plenty has already been said about this game. What I’ll say is that any game that causes me to utter the following sentence is a winner: “Next time I play through it, I’m going to focus on possessing fish as my primary strategy.”

City Tuesday, by Return to Adventure Mountain LLC (XBLIG). I’ve always been shocked that more indie games haven’t used The Noun Project as a resource for free art assets, so I was really happy to see these screenshots pop up on my Xbox dashboard. City Tuesday is a short, stylish puzzle platformer that features sharp, sardonic writing and an overall aesthetic that reminds me a little bit of Robert Yang or Brendon Chung.

Tokyo Jungle, by PlayStation C.A.M.P. and Crispy’s (PS3). This game made me laugh more than any other game released this year, and it’s another one of those “roguelike-likes” that I love so much. I’m really not sure what to say about it! I just enjoy the hell out of it.

XCOM, by Firaxis Studios (Win/PS3/360). Turn-based squad tactics is one of my favorite types of game (Jagged Alliance 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics being among my favorite games ever), but they are rarely done right, usually collapsing under the bulk of their own complexity and tedium. XCOM takes the original XCOM formula and streamlines the hell out of it, leaving only exactly what is good about the series and the genre.

Dys4ia, by Anna Anthropy (web browser). In addition to adapting the framework of WarioWare to tell a story about being transgender and electing to start taking hormones, I just have to point out that the music is my favorite videogame music of the year. Composed by Liz Ryerson, it is available for free here. (I also need to point out that Liz is my favorite new videogame critic/blogger/smartperson whose work I discovered in 2012. You should especially read her brilliant take on Hotline Miami and videogame violence, and her adventures in level design series.)

Proteus, by Ed Key and David Kanaga (Win/Mac). Just fucking magical.

Cart Life, by Richard Hoffmeier (Win). Just fucking brutal. Cameron says it best here, as I had the exact same response he did.

December 2012, by Courtney Stanton. Okay so I’m a little biased in that I’m married to Courtney, but I think this is a really important project. As an exercise in learning Twine, she’s making (not quite done as of today but almost!) one Twine game for every day in December. But it’s not just a formally interesting exercise in personal-journal-as-hypertext-game: the games consistently surprise me. One of my favorite moments was when she used the technique (common for Twine games) where you embed a YouTube video to get background music, but tweaked it by layering a whole bunch of different videos to get a cacophony. Each day is its own little experiment, each day does something (technically, content-wise, or design-wise) that all of the previous days have not.

Bonus! Games I fucking hated.

Spec Ops: The Line. I go into more detail here. While I regretted every moment I spent playing it, I even moreso regretted every moment I spent reading about it.

Dark Souls (came out in 2011 but I played it this year and I have to rant about it somewhere). I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. It took me four hours to beat the tutorial boss. And yes, that was with knowing exactly what I was supposed to do and taking the advice of many, many people on Twitter. It’s not like I don’t like hard games. I love FTL and Spelunky and Liberal Crime Squad and have beaten all of them multiple times. But playing that Dark Souls tutorial was the only time in 2012 that I yelled at the TV screen and threw my controller. The game transformed me into some kind of angry, rage-filled monster of a person, and I will hate it forever for doing that to me. Tons of smart people I know like this game, but for me, all that I really want to say is: fuck Dark Souls. Fuck it straight to hell.

I took 20 minutes and made a thing for my buddy Cameron Kunzelman.

GAZE UPON ITS GLORY HERE