Have you heard?

Mudpie Parable Myst Online Uru Uru Live Myst Online: Uru Live is back for yet another iteration, MORE¹. Not the outliner from the days when Winer was still relevant and Symantec could still publish useful software; no, MORE is short for Myst Online Restoration Experiment. I suppose I appreciate the candor on Cyan’s part that this isn’t much beyond an “experiment”, but that doesn’t make me worry any less that it hasn’t been thought through much.

I know for a fact that I’m not alone with my opinion, but I remain shocked by how few people share it. The popular type of response to Cyan’s announcement², judging from the average post on MO:UL Forums, is cheerful.

I cannot blame anyone for getting excited. I can, however, ask that people refrain from attacking someone for being critical. So when someone writes:

It is my firm belief that a major contributory factor to the low numbers on MOUL was the vociferous presence on this and other public forums of a section of the player base who felt their function was to complain, at each and every opportunity, that there was no new content [..]

…then I can barely contain my anger. There’s about a thousand reasons Uru has yet to be much of a success, and it is my firm belief that too much criticism is not one of them. Seldom has this been as obvious as with this announcement.

Among the people who do dare be critical is Zardoz, who writes:

At the risk of incurring the wrath of the NCC (No Complaints Crowd), that is one strange press release. It uses the word “roadmap” three times, yet never clearly identifies what the heck the “roadmap” is.

He goes on to quote the release³:

The plan is to start to move the content creation - the “Art” - to you.

You could argue that this is little but a 2008 version of Untìl Uru, at a higher price tag, with a far more mature toolkit. Or that the above statement is a euphemist means of saying “we’re turning Uru into little but a hobbyist project”?

I’m cynical enough that I’m not even quite sure MORE is better than nothing. Depending on how well it goes (and I hold that Untìl Uru did not go well), it may very well end up damaging Uru’s reputation even further, thereby needlessly making it even less likely that there will ever be an “Uru” that remotely resembles the original vision.

But my criticism isn’t that they’re doing this; it’s that they’re making it sound as if they did their homework. Perhaps there’s something significant we’re not being told, but while getting the rights back is an impressive feat⁴, it is a great exaggeration to speak of a “plan”, much less a “roadmap” here. What is MORE but a piece of unfinished technology thrown at its enthusiasts for them to play with?

The hard part of Uru has never been to play it. It hasn’t been to create worlds for it (for lack of experience/motivation/effort, a lot of fans are struggling, but interesting concepts are out there), or to want for it to become popular. If you ask me, the hard part has been to convince yourself that the concept is compelling, capable and coherent enough to, well, actually work. And MORE hasn’t made that any easier. If anything, it has shifted the burden of ‘making much sense’ towards the fans to resolve.

The Uru concept fails as soon as you try to imagine more than 200 people roaming about the city. Or as soon as someone solves any puzzle on, say, Eder Gira. In-story instancing just doesn’t cut it. There likely is no alternative to instances, but it confounds me that Cyan chose to put it inside the storyline. Quite the breach of suspension of disbelief, don’t you think?

Challenges

In fact, popularity aside, believability will certainly be among the hardest challenges for MORE to face, and I can’t help but worry that the leadership of the explorer-based guilds just isn’t up to it. Is anyone actually expecting fans to accomplish what Cyan couldn’t: to deliver a concept you can immerse yourself in?

Closely linked to this is avoiding retcons. Again, this is something Cyan didn’t fare too great at during Myst Online: Uru Live. Examples include “Bevins” (I can hear some people shudder)⁵, or, as mentioned, instances suddenly being part of the story. And in the original Uru already, the drastic change of making linking rules optional was implemented.

Next up: quantity. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: you’d rather have quality. But, see, the most gorgeous, breathtaking place with the most frustrating, tough but rewarding puzzles and immersive, suspenseful, inspiring storyline isn’t going to be worth much when everyone has gotten through it. I’m not discouraging the Guild of Writers from putting a ton of thought and work into what they do; far from it. But when it comes to (most of) Cyan’s content, especially what they did for the original Uru Live, it had quality. It delivered.⁶ What they didn’t deliver on — and, given the low amount of resources they had, I don’t blame them at all — is quantity. Now, while there are naturally many more fans (thus, potential Age designers) than there ever have been Cyan employees, churning out a sufficient amount of content that keeps people busy (and joining!) won’t be a breeze.

Sustainable growth. This was already alluded to with Untìl Uru’s name, but MORE makes this even clearer: Cyan is doing this as an attempted precursor to an ‘actual’ Uru where they get to contribute again. For them to do that, MORE needs to attract two kinds of people: those who have long since given up as well as those who have never bothered to try, or possibly never even heard of it. Growth doesn’t mean someone new joining in every day or two. Growth means having such an influx that everyone — Cyantists, Age writers, guild members and mere explorers — is equally motivated to keep going. Such an influx that, at some point, Cyan can flip the switch and turn this into something commercial again, which — like it or not — needs to happen sooner rather than later. Nobody could possibly want for Uru to remain in the life-support state of MORE.

Example. While Cyan has pushed out a lot of content over time, they haven’t actually shown much of the development process. Conversely, the explorers who are more open about that don’t have anywhere near as much experience. It’ll be a while until suitable tutorials and “Good Practices” guides start appearing.

These challenges aren’t easy. They are difficult enough that Cyan never truly managed to tackle them. They’ll be even harder for the community to work on, given its relative lack of structure compared to a company. That’s probably part of why Cyan emphasizes guilds and authority in their statement, but we’ve seen this fail miserably before with the liaisons. Not because the liaisons failed to try, but because their authority, despite elections, was not taken seriously by community members, as well as because their function and non-function hadn’t been clearly defined by the DRC (or anyone else) beforehand.

Likelihood

You can call me cynical and accuse me of pessimism all you want, but I don’t feel the odds are good. I’ve seen too many failures around Uru, and then too much finger-pointing in the aftermath. And bluntly? I haven’t seen a truly successful product come out of Cyan since Riven. Hard to live up to, but then Presto’s Exile or Ubisoft’s Revelation were probably successes about as big as realMyst, Uru: ABM, Uru: tPotS, Crowthistle, End of Ages and MO:UL together.

I could make my job simple and ask Cyan to think outside the box, but everyone and their son and mom have already evoked that cliché… or have they?

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You have to admire the doggedness Cyan has shown about wanting this to work somehow. But then, you also have to wonder if they’re doing themselves — or anyone — a favor with it. Try as I may, I just cannot stop wondering what would have happened had they not discarded the original, single-player idea of DIRT. Still ambitious, sure, but much more within the realm of what they were familiar with. And the best part? Had it been a smashing success, they could have built Mudpie on top of it. With more money, more resources, and an existing, excited, user base. A user base that — excuse the pun — would have wanted “MORE”.

Et toi, Cyan?

And don’t they still have that option? Sure, they have since retconned the fictional universe like crazy, and yes, End of Ages features much of what DIRT would have, but don’t they still have the opportunity to show us D’ni from a completely new perspective? The Myst Movie purportedly does, by interpreting The Book of Ti’ana in its own right.

As much as I agree that casual games could be a way of getting Cyan’s name back out there, I also believe they shouldn’t throw away their potential of doing something more… grand.

Fortunately, they’re not ruling it out entirely: the roadmap does list a suitable “pie in the sky milestone”. The other very positive aspect of it; one that exceeded my expectations:

Release of the 3DS Max Plasma plugins for creating MORE content. Release of the source for the plugin (only) to the Guild of Writers.

This is great, unexpected (to me) news. Their toolkit likely won’t compete well against Spore Creature Creator, or even just Second Life, but it will be a leap from what has been possible so far, especially for people already familiar with 3dsmax.

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I don’t want to be that guy. The one who incessantly bashes. I don’t criticize to make everyone feel bad, to discourage, to destroy.

Truth be told, I’m scared. I think that’s the right word. I’m scared that, once again, Cyan comes up with a concept that isn’t really thought through entirely, and everyone gets all excited over something that, as it will turn out mere months later, just isn’t going to work. Proof?

Create methods and processes for testing fan created MORE content. How this will work has not been determined but is crucial for fan created content.

If it’s “crucial”, its mode of operation should be “determined”, wouldn’t you say?

I don’t trust the community to simply figure out and fill in blanks like that. I do, however, wish them all the best. Cyan deserves it, the fans deserve it, and the original vision of Uru sure does.

1. Not listing DIRT here because that was a distinct concept. ↩
2. They don’t seem to consider important enough to put on their website’s news page. Instead, a blog broke the story. Does Cyan want to garner attention? ↩
3. Despite its name suggesting as much, it neither has the typical form of a press release — where’s the company description? what does “Shorah” mean to the average person? — , nor has it apparently been spread to any news distribution companies such as PR Newswire. Why not? ↩
4. It should be noted that Cyan did not entirely accomplish this:
   

   [A]t some point, if a commercially successful revival comes about, [Cyan and GameTap] have an agreement on how each will be compensated, he added.

   ↩

5. Previously, Bevin was one single particular neighborhood; now, it has become the template of a particular common kind of neighborhood. Not quite the same. ↩
6. Arguably, not a single of Uru’s ages were quite as magnificient as Riven, but then that one’s going to be hard to top. ↩

Call social networks overhyped, or call them part of the giant buzzword bubble that is Web 2.0; I think they have their uses, and I also can’t imagine them going away, short of being replaced by a superior concept. So, instead of waiting for this bubble to burst, let’s separate cream from crop.

Arguably, relationships are the core aspect of your personal network. Facebook calls them “friends”, as do MySpace and similar sites. LinkedIn, in an attempt to come off as more professional, calls them “connections”. And Twitter? The URL says “friends”, but the concept is largely presented as “following” someone.

And “following” is indeed what it is: when they shower, leave for a trip or have thoughts while doing somestufforother. From the mundane to the intriguing, plenty of information is constantly pushed to the site, then pulled by clients and distributed to many a user.

Some “tweets” are amusing, including the occasional nerd humor; others provide in-depth insight. E.g., despite the common misperception that Apple employees are barred from publicly participating on the Internet¹, people like Deric Horn or Bill Bumgarner have happily done exactly that².

But our hours per day are limited. We could just follow everyone, thus minimizing the risk of missing out on something worthwhile, but would that be practical? Bizarrely enough, some seem to think so. Others pride themselves on a seemingly absurd number of followees, such as nearly twenty-five hundred, or close to seven times the monkeysphere. Apparently in response to me having BarackObama, “he” (presumably a staff worker or bot of his) added me back — but so did “BeatMcCain” as well as, uh, “RudyGiuliani32″. I’m hardly alone in my bewilderment of this apparent desire to follow such complete strangers in person as well as personality. Says Matt Gemmell:³

Why do such random people follow my tweets? “Married mom of 3 toddlers who’s loving real estate”, welcome to… Cocoa development?

I still pile on to my list of “friends”, “connections” and “followees”. But I also occasionally carefully pull some out from the bottom. Instead of the entire stack falling apart, it actually ends up more stable.

This may seem too much of a business approach, but I find that if I don’t build my network carefully, choosing whom to include as well as whom not to include, the concept doesn’t benefit me. Following fifty people on Twitter, give or take a few, works for me.

When people add me on top of hundreds of others, are they really interested in me? Inspired by me? Do they learn from me? Uli Kusterer is, of course, right:

Well, if they don’t have anything better to do, let them

…but my puzzlement remains.

1. As found, for example, in this article’s assertion of “Forget corporate blogs — Apple doesn’t seem to like anyone blogging about the company.” (which, unsurprisingly, isn’t backed up at all by any references). ↩
2. Consider Deric’s enthusiastic fielding of questions after the iPhone SDK press event, such as here. ↩
3. Update: turns out she’s a Mac user. ↩

Something I unfortunately neglected to mention during yesterday’s post: conceptually, I was quite impressed by the wealth of information presented during the Location Survey.

In addition to average three-star hotel rates as well as airfare (split by coming from West Coast, Central or East Coast) and notable attractions, you are presented with a quick breakdown of relevant taxes (to the uninitiated and/or European: those can vary quite a bit from region to region in the US).

The data could be presented better, as I have already discussed with Matt, but even as it is, it helps people answer the survey better, and gives a good “we did a whole lotta research” impression.

Possible improvements include:

• Extracting this data from the survey itself, maybe even with one page per location, as to make the survey itself more lean and clean
• Adding hyperlinks for each town, such as to the respective official tourist information site (e.g. visitdetroit.com), Wikipedia article
• Yet another hyperlink per town to some mapping site (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Windows Live Local, whatever), which would also give you information such as distance, not to mention showing you available hotels, etc.

Last year, the annual Mysterium convention held in North America (particularly its planning committee) seemed in a bit of a crisis, with attendees and organizers similarly disillusioned by the process and results. Most of the committee stepped down, accusations were made, and… some stuff was written. Over the months following that, several enthusiasts surfaced as wanting to organize themselves to build an exploratory committee, settled on what they deemed right and wrong, good and bad about previous management, and then joined together with the remainder to form a new, larger committee.

(I’ve done better summaries. Honest.)

Overall, the result is a tremendous improvement. I’m stressing this because, towards the end of this post, I’ll talk about something not-so-positive, so let me say it again: I think the new committee is very much steering in the right direction.

But how is that, and how is it not?

The Pleasant

• The committee has been oh-so-much-more transparent this time. There is, oh my, an actual about page! With names, functional descriptions and even photos! There are meeting protocols, like this one. Long overdue, but better late than never. A big win.
• There is a clear, streamlined process for donations, instead of leaving potential donors in agony over wanting to help.
• There’s a news page that you can also subscribe to as a feed if you so desire.
• There’s no confusion left as to what is the official, real, current, proper Mysterium website. mysterium.net it is. Puzzling that this was so hard in the past, but here we are now.

The So-so

There’s a bunch of ‘glitches’. The “Volunteer” page is empty; the “Links” one even more so. No e-mail address to contact the committee has been set up yet (ouch), although the alternative of contacting individual committee members is given.

Finishing the “Location Survey” while not having finished the “Date and Attendance Survey” redirects me to the main page when going to “Polls”, which makes it unnecessarily hard to even try to finish the latter survey. There’s also no clear explanation on why I am being redirected; while it is clear to me that I’m not supposed to be going to the survey twice, I would imagine it quite confusing to most people that they’re not even being shown a piece of information. (Why not redirect to a “you have already taken this survey” page?) Update: According to The World, “[The redirect] should now tell you that you’ve taken it :)”. You can, however, manually go directly to the latter survey, a link to which can be found in a recent post, so you’re not prevented entirely from participating.

Except… the survey doesn’t make sense. The first page of questions is innocent enough; the second is just plain unanswerable to me.

What weekend works best for you?

*Please rank them from the best weekend to the worst weekend, with your best choice being #1 and your worst choice being #4.

The question, in my particular case, isn’t what weekend works best for me, but which one works at all for me, and only so if I’m lucky. I cannot imagine that I’m alone with this; the premise that adults get to pick a weekend based on preference rather than based on when they have time at all seems a little contrived to me. I was told I’m supposed to simply rank them either way, adding a comment that I cannot attend at all on choices two, three and four. Uhhhh. Update: The World acknowledges the problem, stating: “you’re right, it probably shouldn’t be a ranked-type survey. We’ll probably just end up using the top suggestion.”

The Aggravating

The above would be relatively minor, tolerable issues. I don’t think they alone make for fair arguments for not attending. Sure, they give the impression of an amateur-ish, perhaps sloppy approach, but the former is what it is (the committee don’t get paid full-time for the organizing, or at all), and the latter is part of being human. It can’t all be smooth; it never will be. But there is one kicker left.

Not all of us have relatively short trips to Mysterium. Some travel a few thousand miles, perhaps from one North American coast to the other. Others travel even more, perhaps across the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps even all the way from the Southern Hemisphere, like that weirdo I met (hi!). It doesn’t take rocket science to understand that, the further your travel, the more complex and expensive it will become. But in addition, as everyone who has travelled relatively long distance before knows, you better book your flight a long time in advance. Months. Perhaps a year. And if there is one thing that has remained constant with this reformed committee, it is that, whatever the reason, they seem unable to commit to a location and set of dates early on.

What does that mean? It means that, when in early March there’s surveys for location and dates for a convention that will take place in late July or some time in August, something is screwy. Assuming there won’t be an extension, the polls will close on the 15th, only to be evaluated then. For anyone keeping track, that gives people roughly four months to book the airfare, and that’s assuming they even can do so at that point, i.e. have enough in savings, have time to figure out the airline, and so on. That’s ignoring hotels and other kinds of accommodation, getting crucial info from the embassy, etc.

That’s not enough time to prepare. And yet, it has happened this way every passing year. It is something that could be easily prevented by, gee, planning a liiiiittle bit further ahead. If, by the beginning of the year, you still don’t know the location, it feels like a slap in the face. And if, more than two months in the year, you still don’t know it, you screwed up even more. What do you think I’m going to tell my boss? “Oh, I don’t know when to take my holidays yet, I need to wait on the Mysterium Committee to pick the date first! But I guess I do have a bit of a say on that through a survey… sorta…”

I really don’t understand how this has gone on for so long, and continues to. Are you trying not to have international people come and join in the fun?

Again, I think things have gotten considerably better. But, the above has to change. Or, in the words of Fry, FIXITFIXITFIXIT.

I haven’t fully moved to CoRD yet, largely because of various quirks in its UI. (I see that a new beta is out that may address most of my issues, but I haven’t had a chance to test that.) As a result, I mostly use Microsoft’s ‘official’ Remote Desktop Connection client 2.0.0b2. Plus, I’ve always loved its icon (props to Iconfactory on that, I believe).

This morning, it crashed. [Not a] big deal; crashes happen. I was curious why, though, and while the crash report didn’t help me figure that out (the topmost call in the stacktrace is MBUMutex::Acquire(unsigned long), which tells me absolutely nilch about the actual intent), I did find something else.

Here’s a portion of the Binary Images section from the crash log:

Binary Images:
    0x1000 -    0x23fef +com.microsoft.rdc 2.0.0 Beta2 (2.0.0 Beta2) <0775a7210cb4454ea17af3dfdec33e2c> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/MacOS/Remote Desktop Connection
   0x92000 -   0x108fe6 +com.microsoft.netlib 12.0.0 (12.0.0) <9fac28ca22ff49bf9185194497585126> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/Frameworks/Netlib.framework/Versions/12/Netlib
  0x436000 -   0x5bafc7 +com.microsoft.rdc 2.0.0 (2.0.0) <ad448d7a974d4d90ad5b89b5dfa08bc1> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/Frameworks/RDCPAL.framework/Versions/12/RDCPAL
  0x86c000 -   0x94dff7  libxml2.2.dylib ??? (???) <ccd6e2cb514fcd0b541bf153aae13481> /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib
  0x9c8000 -   0x9e6fe7  com.apple.OpenTransport 3.0 (3.0) /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/OpenTransport.framework/OpenTransport
[..]

Notice something? That they still use OpenTransport strikes me as weird, that they use the same bundle identifier com.microsoft.rdc for the two distinct bundles RDCPAL.framework and Remote Desktop Connection.app, which furthermore run simultaneously, is even stranger, but oddest yet? This explosive combination actually works.

After all, a bundle identifier is supposed to be globally unique. There are several API calls that let you launch and otherwise access a bundle through its identifier. How would that ever work when two bundles which clearly, while related, are distinct in their nature and purpose, have the same identifier? Should Xcode prevent you from building a project whose identifier matches one that already exists? Probably impossible to do on a reliable basis. Should dyld refuse to link or XNU refuse to launch a bundle when one with the same identifier is already running? Or should Microsoft simply have someone smack the CFBundle documentation over developers’ heads?