Zach Baker: Story-Driven

Michael John is the best game designer at analyzing the gameplay experience I’ve ever seen. I was really pleased that he put together a blog about design and production, although it’s been a month and a half since anything new popped up there.

MJ’s talk at the DICE Summit is a great look at some of the systemic production problems in the game industry, but I cracked up when he showed his Brain Age slide, with guys moving from one development house to another:

Of course, that was what I was facing me at Luxoflux when I quit.

Did I say development house? I mean studio! MJ makes a great point that the word “developer” has become a source of confusing ambiguity in games. Developers are people, studios are where they work. Makes a lot of sense, so I’ll adopt that myself.

If you are interested in MJ’s blog, check out his design category for what I think is the coolest stuff.

So hey, if you’re one of the hundreds or so people that my family or I told to watch Jeopardy! last night, you saw that I won a close game against Jeopardy champion Monica Lenhard. It was an amazing, exciting, nervewracking and fun experience!

You pretty much only get one shot to be on Jeopardy!, so I was dedicated to preparing myself in the weeks before I got behind the podium. I played along with all the episodes I had on my digital TV recorder, pausing at the end of each question and keeping score on paper. Then I thought, hey, there’s an amazing website, j-archive.com, that has the record of countless games, and I’m a web programmer who uses the sweetest web framework ever, Ruby on Rails. I’ve got to make my own training setup!

So here’s what I did in a day and a half one weekend – just skip this part if you’re not interested in the technology. I put together two of the most useful Rails plugins, Mechanize (which uses the fantastic Hpricot parsing library) and attachment-fu. I was able to download and parse the games from J-Archive using Mechanize, and show the clues’ pictures instantly using attachment-fu. It only took 244 lines of Ruby and some Javascript to make it all work.

With this setup, I was able to pick my own categories, have my patient wife read the clues, stand back and click my clicky pen at the right time. Since it was all on the computer and based on actual games, I could see at a glance how I was doing, stop at any time, compare my scores to the actual contestants, and get a better sense of the flow of the game.

It kept score without regard to Daily Doubles, known as a Coryat score among the Jeopardy fans. This makes the score more comparable and predictable. The main page I went to was a list of the games I had played, which let me keep track of my progress.

For the benefit of future potential contestants who want a benchmark, here are the scores I got in my practice sessions, with both the number of questions I got right and my Coryat score for each. The total numbers next to them are the number of questions that were actually seen and the total value of the questions contestants got right in that game.

Did I go too far? Well, it took less than a weekend to write and was fun, so I would say no. And it really helped me get a feel for the game. Having been on the show, I now think it was even more useful than I thought it would be. I can definitely say that Ruby on Rails helped me win on Jeopardy!

So my appearance on Jeopardy! airs tonight. That was a really fun experience – I’ll tell more of that story later. But I want to share a weird circumstance I noticed.

Just about everyone who’s dreamed about being a contestant on Jeopardy! has fantasized about “their” category coming up, right? Not one that they’re the #1 expert in the world in, just one that they know more about than any random contestant.

Like, say, if you edited a Wikipedia entry for something and that ended up being the exact subject of the category. Maybe, let’s just say, you’ve only created one entry in Wikipedia ever, one you wouldn’t ever expect would be a category on Jeopardy, and then bam, there it is on the game board.

Well, I was exactly one month away from that scenario coming true:

The only contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Zachbaker

A month ago on Jeopardy, June 11, 2007 (see the second category)

Let me say I’m not bitter or unhappy at all, just amazed. So I had to mention it. Tune in tonight and see what categories I actually face.

Interviewing in the game industry, I often get asked “What’s your favorite game?” Sure, it’s pretty trite, and I’m normally not good at keeping track of my favorite whatever, but I have a pat answer to this one. It’s the 1996 Sega Saturn game, Nights.

Nights was built up as the Saturn’s answer to the immensely influential and popular Mario 64, so all eyes were on it when the team behind Sonic the Hedgehog debuted it at E3 eleven years ago. It was also my first time going to E3 as an pro – I worked for what was Sega’s LA office at the time. So as an exhibitor employee, I got to go on the show floor an hour before the general public. I went straight to see Nights and was surprised to see Shigeru Miyamoto checking it out already. Clearly, this was a much-anticipated game.

Well, it didn’t live up to the expectations that many had for it, mainly because it wasn’t in the same genre that Super Mario 64 had just created. But I sure enjoyed it. I played over and over and over, until I had to put it up in the cabinet to keep myself from playing it anymore.

So now here’s some gameplay footage from the upcoming Wii installment. I’m pretty excited to see this.

So every few months, I get an awkward-sounding call at home from a stranger. They ask if Zacky is there, or if this is Zacky. Zacky? Even my parents never called me Zacky. I think some of the kids in high school P.E. class called me “Zacky Farms” when I went up to bat in softball.

It turns out these callers are looking for this guy, the guitarist for Avenged Sevenfold, an O.C. metal band. It’s always been (apparently) teenage girls calling, until the last time when it was a dude. Come on, dude, what were you thinking?

So anyway, Zacky has the exact same name as I do, which is a little weird. I don’t even know more than a handful of Zacharys, period. Lucky for me he went for the pseudonym or I might’ve ended up like the guy in Office Space.