As an aside: during this morning’s commute, I was introduced to Dokken’s version of Santa Clause is Coming to Town.

It looks like ARG Netcast #42, live from the offices of 42 Entertainment, is out. It’s on my iPhone, but I have yet to listen to it. I’m not sure how much editing jamesi did, but if I sound like a total tard when asking a question, keep in mind that I was put on the spot pretty quickly and probably should have rehearsed a few questions ahead of time. I had a couple of great questions locked away in my head, but translating them to eloquent English with all heads (and microphones) turned my direction seemed to be the problem.

I guess I should talk about the 42 trip itself–or at least, the things that are safe to mention without pulling curtains back too far. Going into this, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. It started with a sudden and surprise email to a half-dozen people, effectively stating “wanna come visit us and take a tour?” Were we Golden Ticket holders? Were each of us going to be hideously deformed in some way by not obeying the posted rules, until only one remained–the person who would inherit the business (including magical glass elevator?) Was it all a trick? An elaborate Rabbit Hole leading to a stealthy game launch? A day or two later there was the press release that several of the founders left to pursue other opportunities. Oh! Could it be spin control? While my left brain still thinks that could be the case (or, at least, a minor part of it), my right brain is still processing all of the coolness of the trip: how great everyone was, how many interesting things we saw, the fun of hanging out with all the folks I haven’t seen since ARGfest (which still seems like it was just yesterday), and the rampant fanboyism of meeting everyone.

Many of the specifics I cannot talk about, for fear of a team of lawyer-ninja-assassins materializing behind me with a piano-wire garrote. The 42 offices are the open and fun style I’ve grown to associate with entertainment and media companies. Lots of couches. Lots of video games. Lots of snacks. Free cake. (I can neither confirm nor deny the allegation that the cake may or may not have contained anything extra.) As mentioned on the netcast, there were a number of paintings around the office, in the same style as the NIN Year Zero billboards, containing many references and nods-of-the-hat to past games. And a whole lot of friendly, entertaining, creative people who were amazing to be around.

Overall, I was impressed by the past, present, and future of the company. They really know their audience. They’re great at telling stories people want to hear in a novel, engaging, and fun way. And most importantly, even with the recent change in staffing, they will continue to make amazing experiences.

Well, since jamesi spilled the beans, followed closely by thebruce, I suppose it is okay for me to pipe up. A bunch of folks in the ARG community (myself included) have been invited to tour the new offices of 42 Entertainment this weekend. For those that do not immediately recognize that name, they are the company behind many recent (and not so recent) cross-media entertainment ventures (a.k.a. alternate reality games or ARGs.) They are responsible for the really cool Nine Inch Nails Year Zero experience, the ilovebees promotion for Halo 2, and–way back in the day–the promotion for Speilberg’s A.I. among other things.

The whole thing is super exciting! I cannot wait!

As many know, and some may not yet know, something (what? I don’t know) went down at Mind Candy in the past few days, with regard to Perplex City. First of all, there is their Perplex City homepage, which states that Season 2 will be delayed indefinitely. Then you have blog posts from the in-game characters Violet, Kurt, and Scarlett that basically say the same thing. Add into that the blog posts from a lot of the company/game founders that say that they are leaving Mind Candy: Dan, Adrian, Andrea, and Naomi. Not that I have been following Season 2 (and/or Perplex City Stories) very closely, but two questions that are on everybody’s minds are WTF? and WHY? Did people leave voluntarily because of something going on (bad politics, new job opportunity?) Is a veneer of “voluntary” hiding something else? Or is it just cost-cutting measures? (They had a pretty large staff for being, effectively, a startup company.) Part of me is curious, but part of me just doesn’t care. For the most part, PXC dropped off of my radar when Season 1 ended–I needed a break, then never really returned with anything resembling enthusiasm. For what it’s worth, the wiki and catalog will stay up, despite events.

Edit to add: There is also a farewell message from David Varela, writer.

Here is another tip in the World Without Oil realm. (If you don’t know what World Without Oil is, look back at this older post for a description.) Kim and I are a young couple who recently paid off a lot of debt and are in the market to buy a house in the not-too-distant future. As such, we get a lot of snail-mail “spam.” Every day credit card applications, ads for newly built housing developments, preapproved loan offers, and other such things arrive in the mailbox. Because most of it is crap and I am security-minided, all of this stuff goes into the shredder, leaving a big pile of strips that the cats like to play with. Most people, at this point, would throw away the mess, or at the very least put it in the paper recycling bin. I end up using it in the fireplace. There are a few good reasons for this:
* It’s free (to me–someone else paid the printing and mailing costs)
* Free is cheaper than $3/gal for heating oil — if you burn it all at once, you get a nice flash of heat for about 5 minutes, although it doesn’t last much longer than that. Still–better than nothing.
* For longer-lasting heat, it makes great kindling for lighting larger logs

It even has an added bonus from a side-effect:
* In the summer, when it’s hot enough that a long-lasting fire would be silly, you can burn just the shreddings, then use the ashes to protect your garden (e.g. our tomato plants) from snails and slugs. It’s effectively wood ash, which can be sprinkled in a ring around the base of plants.

One thing to look out for when shredding/burning are those plastic windows that certain envelopes have. Increasingly, bill envelopes are using open windows (without plastic) or printing directly onto envelopes, presumably to cut down on cost. While, admittedly, it is small quantities as compared to the rest of the paper, burning plastic isn’t the greatest for the environment. It’s usually best to tear out the windows before shredding.

Introduction

So. World Without Oil. I have refrained from posting much about it because I could never quite wrap my brain around explaining it to people, but let me give it a try. It’s a “game” that is less of a game and more of a thought experiment. Let’s say that because of Peak Oil, war, limited resources, or whatever reasons, gas prices suddenly skyrocket. There are lots of academics and scholars that have all sorts of lofty things to say about the whole deal, but they are easily glossed over by everyday people because they seem so lofty or so far in the future that nobody cares. World Without Oil tries to look at it not from a lofty point of view, but from an everyday man-on-the-street perspective. They pose a lot of “what if” situations. If gasoline was suddenly $6.00/gallon, with limited availability, what would happen? How would it affect you. Yes YOU, reading this right now. Would you be able to commute to work still? Would you be able to buy new, imported things considering the cost of shipping is tied to gas prices? If your local power plant runs on fossil fuels–how would you handle the frequent brownouts and blackouts? And the most important question: what can/would/should you do about it all? People post their ideas and tips about conservation. You can read, learn, and post your own.

A lot of the ideas people post are granola-munching hippie community-building and self-sufficiency plans. The “hippie” part doesn’t necessarily say it’s bad, it’s just a label that conveniently describes a particular class of ideas. For instance, the obvious answers to an oil shortage and gas price hike are to bike to work or take public transit–or maybe buy a more fuel-efficient car. For some, it might be to grow your own vegetables. In Portland, we are pretty lucky in that there are plenty of Farmer’s Markets around with lots of organic locally grown veggies. Elsewhere, that stuff needs to be shipped in by the truckload, and if gas goes up, shipping goes up, so the cost of the veggies goes up.

Background

Okay, so after all that buildup, the particular tip I am posting today is not as lofty as, say, when I signed us up for wind power or revolutionary like some kind of at-home DIY biodiesel conversion kit for any make, model, or year of car. It’s pretty humble, but it adds up over time.

During the work week, I eat out. A lot. Virtually every day. Yes, I can save money by packing a lunch, but that’s not the point of this post. I don’t eat any fast food (the grease turns my stomach into knots), and try not to eat at “nice” sit-down restaurants too often. There are a class of not-quite-fast-food and not-quite-sitdown around here, usually Mom-and-Pop operated joints, usually with somewhat healthy items on the menu, where you order at a counter and sit at a booth and either your name/number is called to pick up the food or they come deliver it to you–no waitresses or anything. Everyplace has a soda machine, but I don’t drink carbonated drinks (see: stomach into knots, above.) I’m always drinking water, but the water from those soda machines is not always the best. It usually comes from the same spout as iced tea or super-sugared-lemonade. It’s filtered tap water, but sometimes the filter isn’t always so great. Most of these places have bottled water, though.

The Tip

So that’s a rather long-winded way of saying that I like to drink water at lunch, but the only palatable option, for all of the above reasons, is bottled water. Up until about a month or two ago, I would always buy the bottled water, assuming it was my only option. But that adds up. A lot. Consider someplace is selling a 1L bottle for $0.99 retail. Yes, you can get it cheaper by buying a case at the supermarket, but at a restaurant or 7-11, it is sold individually. That $0.99/L works out to be $0.99/0.26417 gallons. Flipping that around shows bottled water priced at about $3.75/gallon. That’s more expensive than pre-World-Without-Oil gasoline! And I was buying it almost every day. That raised a pretty big double-u tea eff. And when you’re done, you are left with an empty plastic bottle that gets thrown into the trash because most restaurants don’t bother with recycling them.

At that point, I decided it was time to bring my own water. I have filtered water at work that is, effectively, free. I have a nice Nalgene bottle. I tried carrying it to lunch a few times, but it is a little too large, heavy, and bulky to feel comfortable carrying the distance I have to go to walk to lunch. Then, I happened upon a rather nice find at a local sporting goods store:

It was only a few dollars. Now, I can comfortably carry a full 1L bottle of water to lunch, slung over my shoulder. It saves I don’t know how many dollars (or hundreds) a year in stupid pre-bottled water. Obviously, the DIY’ers can probably make something similar from scrap materials.

Like I said, it’s not an earth-shattering tip, but it has:
* ended up saving me lots of money almost every day
* made the environment better by not throwing away a bunch of plastic bottles (and reduced the demand for those bottles by one, which may eventually help reduce the amount of their production–helping to save the environment on the front end, by not producing them, rather than the back end, by not throwing them away)
* made the air every so slightly cleaner, as the distribution of those bottles is likely by a motorized vehicle (as opposed to a network of underground pipes) and there’s one less consumer

The following blog post is my entry into the “ARGs are Serious Fun” roundtable discussion. The concept is basically this: a topic or prompt is posted somewhere (in this case, on Giant Mice) and people have a few weeks to make a blog post as a response to that topic. As responses are written, links to all of them are collected together so that you can see and comment on what others have written on the same topic. So, here goes…

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I am writing this as “just some guy.” I am not an academic, nor is my degree in anything close to writing. The last and most advanced writing class I took, just after English 100, was something like Technical Writing 105. It pretty much consisted of writing user manuals that are neither Engrish nor kitten pidgin. I probably will not be citing references in footnotes or a bibliography or a Works Cited section or whatever the MLA has deemed correct and proper these days. I’ll write. You’ll read and (hopefully) be entertained. Deal? Deal.In the world, there are games and there are puzzles. Often, games are social and puzzles are solitary. Another typical view is that games are fun and puzzles are hard (but “fun” in that they are rewarding once solved.) Quick! You, the reader: think of three games! I bet you came up with things like a family around a Parcheesi board, a bunch of buddies at a poker table, a pair of old men at a chess board in the park, or perhaps a first-person-shooter deathmatch on the X-Box. They are usually social and have some balance of skill vs. chance: Chutes and Ladders is won entirely by lucky rolls of the dice, whereas poker requires some skill and some good cards, and chess is entirely skill–but they all have one thing in common: multiple players working with or against each other. Now think of three puzzles! The term “puzzle” brings about images of jigsaw pieces, crosswords, sudoku, and the like–more solitary behavior. That is not to say that there is a rigid link between game<=>social and puzzle<=>solitary. While there may have been true in past decades, that line is increasingly blurry. The same computer games that allow you to throw grenades at your friends and neighbors or play poker against someone a thousand miles away also allow you to play in single-player mode. Puzzles, too, can be quite fun in a social environment: a group of friends around a coffee table with a difficult New York Times Sunday crossword, a family around a cardtable assembling a large and complex jigsaw over Christmas break, and a disparate group of individuals across the internet trying to find the right sequence of commands to unlock a chunk of immersive fiction. Wait… wha? Yeah–this is where ARGs enter into my monologue.

Not all ARGs employ puzzles, but those that do almost always do so with the puzzles being a catalyst for getting groups of people to come together–much like the group of friends around the crossword. ARG puzzles are typically so large, difficult, and complex that no one person is expected to solve the whole thing. Collaboration is the key. Solving can be a lot of work, require some serious skill (and usually a wondrous “Eureka!” moment), but all of that serious work can be quite fun and is rewarded by unlocking the next piece or chapter of a larger story. The puzzles are serious work, but the collaboration and the payoff from completion is extremely fun.

With ARGs, even folks that are not “puzzle people”–who always say “I’m only in it for the story; I don’t do the puzzles”–end up with some serious knowledge and skill from something as fun and superfluous as “a story told over the internet.” With most ARGs, there is at least one point where a piece of information of questionable authenticity appears. This could be a website that may not be in-game (either through people’s misinterpretation or by deliberate gamejacking.) It could be a curious email. At any rate, nobody knows for certain whether the item is part of the game without employing some geek skills to do a little research. These skills used to be known only to a small subset of geeks, programmers, and internet architects. ARGs are helping expand that knowledge to everyday people. Folks that do not know how to write a single line of code are now quite proficient in performing WHOIS searches to look up DNS records, examining and interpreting email headers like a forensic scientist, and viewing HTML source code for anything that looks out of place. And, you know what? These new skills have the side effect of spilling over into other areas of internet usage. People whose knowledge of the internet consisted entirely of “if it’s underlined, it’s a link” started playing ARGs, learned these serious skills, and can now easily identify SPAM, prank, and phishing websites and email as if it was second-nature. I personally know several people who learned the power and ease of collaboration via wiki because of ARGs–and these people then went on to set up wikis in their workplace intranets. This is all absolutely amazing! A piece of entertainment, a diversion, with such beneficial side-effects!

At this point, I feel like I am writing the essay portion of the SAT test and should conclude with a closing paragraph saying something like “and this is why ARGs are serious fun.” quod erat démōnstrandum

Today we watched An Inconvenient Truth for the first time. I actually bought the used DVD from Netflix last month for a few bucks, but just now got around to watching it. We are now, officially, on 100% renewable power. I signed us up for the PGE Renewable Future plan. This means our power bills will be slightly more, as our power will be coming from the semi-local Klondike II wind farm, but our power usage will be entirely from renewable resources. This also means that our power rate will be fixed until 2012. In theory, as fossil fuels become more scarce and prices rise for everyone else, ours will stay fixed. In practice, I guess we will see how that works out.

In related news, my web host (Dreamhost) is now carbon-neutral:

We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something….

It only took us three days to go from “Hey let’s do this” status to “Hey it’s done!” status. Three days and several thousand dollars, but that’s another story. You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to appreciate the value of renewable energy and you don’t have to charge a premium for your services to afford it, either.

More information is available at their blog post on the matter.