A gamer on his lunch break. Writing a paper. Be back later. Out.
Or as AIM put it, "away from my computer."
Pausing has connotations, and I'm not entirely sure what they mean. I'm a bit afraid they are gamer-ish. Not only gamer-ish, but evocative of '90s single player games. Like the guy who can't tear himself away for long enough to save and return later.
But I mean, what else should we say? "Time-out?" No. Teams call time-outs. The people who run the game don't call time out."Game Paused."
The verbiage here is, of necessity, imprecise and awkward. We're not sure what we're doing, but we're pretty sure it's something new. We're not an online game. It may say so on our home page right now, but the last month has shown us that our identity lies closer to a pickup game of coed football than World of Warcraft.
Okay, fair.
But what else do we say, then?
Game postponed? Too ominous. Baseball is postponed due to rain. They often don't reschedule the match.
Game on hold? What does this mean, exactly? It jumps out there, grabs you, and says "We don't know what we're doing with this thing." Too indecisive.
Game Break? "Now let's go to Chris Berman in the studio for an update on RPI!"
Game respite? Okay, now I'm just using thesaurus.com.
Now, let's get nerdy. The capitalization is critical here. "Game paused." means something totally different from "Game Paused." "Game paused." implies that we (the admins) took decisive action to pause the game, i.e., it is read as "[The] Game [was] paused [by us]." "Game Paused," on the other hand, is somewhat of a cultural meme developed within gaming circles and spread throughout society during the mid to late 90s. It's not a blatant example of such, but it does resonate as a state rather than a description of an action. That is, it is read instead as "[The] Game [is] Paused." rather than the more active "Game paused."
The implication is critical here. While "Game Paused." achieves the immediate communication objective better than "Game paused.", it nonetheless associates us with a specific gamer mindset and culture.
Note: To answer the inevitable cries that we spend more time thinking about this crap than actually fixing things, I assure you that many people with far more software development skills than me are extremely busy right now.
11 comments:
What on earth could have possessed you guys to even beta launch a game to the entire Ivy League which makes 800 SQL queries on every page load? Were you guys drunk and high at the same time? There was no way in hell that that would scale up to the proportions you envisioned.
hi john, no, no we weren't - we were just pressed for time. we quickly got this number down to 18 queries. but the number 800 is not unusual for many web 2.0 applications that use work-arounds such as SQL caching layers and other performance enhancing technologies. i've heard worse.
Not deep enough! Capitalization, pffft. Detail the etymology of "pause" and maybe we'll consider this nerdy. =P
Well, Sean Mehra was drunk one night and he thought everybody on the public chat should know.
Hilarious?
Not so much.
Sean, the Princeton team has really enjoyed the game. We actually were kind of thinking that all of the computer problems felt like real war -- stuff just does not work once the shots start firing, people lose commuication with their commanders etc. People were of course frustrated when they had armies go [poof] or when they could not login, but overall we support you guys and look forward to a system that is scaled properly. You all were working without a net. Hope the game gets back up soon.
James, thanks for understanding our situation. I'm glad you were able to analogize these technical difficulties to those encountered in real-time war.
We appreciate your support. We're almost all our resources to optimizing the game so that we can relaunch the tournament as soon as possible!
Many thanks :)
"We actually were kind of thinking that all of the computer problems felt like real war"
Oh please.
One thing that might help improve performance might be to update troop placements for other teams only at the end of the turn. Even if that doesn't inherently improve performance, it should help even demand, since there is no advantage in information that you get by placing troops right before the turn ends.
RPI rules.
Yeeaaaahhhh.
It's been 11 days since the last comment from GXC. Can we get an update?
It's even possible someone can help, if we all knew what was going on...
Hola Anonymous,
Sorry - long time no talk, you're right. We'll have a blog post up shortly to let you know where we stand at the moment. Thanks for checking in though. We appreciate it.
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