Fanboy Flamewars is not a game

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Quick background: I’m taking a class on computer game and simulation design. This week one of our topics for discussion was to talk about what defines a game. One of the students posted to the discussion board that “Final Fantasy VII is THE DEFINITION of a game!” While I can appreciate the fandom, and don’t mean to take anything away from it, the sentiment did trigger the following rant that I thought worthy of publication:

I feel I need to say this before I start out, the point of this week’s discussion topic is not to crow about your favorite game and how it “defines” the notion of “game”. OK, so you love your favorite game. Big whooptie. “Talk about your favorite games” was kindof last week’s topic.

The idea for this week is to talk about what aspects of games are essential to games, and to try to identify the necessary and sufficient criteria for the definition of “game”.

Now, to understand the full weight of what I’m about to say, you should know that I have a degree in philosophy, and that basically means that I ought to rabidly devour this topic. But I’m going to commit a little blasphemy:

I’m not really at all interested in this question.

I’m sorry, I’m just not.

I’m not now, nor have I ever been, in an existential crisis because I did not know what a game is.

I’ve never once been in a situation where I found myself looking at something, and thought to myself, “Gee, I can’t tell if that’s a game or not.”

And I’ve never had someone point at something and say, “Hey, know what? I just realized that’s a game!” and then thought “Wow, hey he’s right! I never noticed that before!”

I mean, “game” is just a word. Let’s not get too hung up on it, OK?

What if, instead of video GAME, they had been called video TOYS?

Would we think of them differently? Would they be different?

How is a toy different from a game? I can see clearly that these are different concepts, and I don’t see all that much that I consider profound or interesting about it.

If I call them “video SPORTS” suddenly you start thinking about competitive play and winning and losing and being a champion. That’s not really essential to a game, but it is to sports.

Or maybe you think more literally, and think instead about videogames that are sports simulations, rather than Counterstrike tournaments and Koreans who play StarCraft professionally.

Does it even matter?

I mean, if I’m building something that I call a game, and someone walks up to me and tries to say, “Oh, that’s not really a game. See, a real game would have… blah blah blah” I would be very uninterested in hearing the rest of that sentence. I’d tell that person to go away and not bother me, and continue making whatever I was making. People would either get it, or they wouldn’t. They would either like it, or they wouldn’t.

Take a look at Electroplankton and Korg DS-10. Both not games. The makers of these non-games got my money. Do they care that it’s not a game? Do I care? Does anyone?

###

Now, on the topic of Final Fantasy… I’m about to commit a little more blasphemy.

Mind you, I’ve only played the series through the SNES releases. Now, I loved the original when it came out. LOVED IT. It was the most epic turn-based RPG available on the NES, and had the best interface (at the time) although still painful and primitive to use. I loved FF II and FF III. I never owned a PSX, and never had the time or money back when I was in college to play through the CD-ROM era games. When FF VII came out, I thought it looked impressive and really wanted to play it, but I never got the chance. A few years on, I watched a friend who had just bought FF IX play it. While I was amazed at the graphics, I felt that the FF series had turned away from being games, and more toward… well, minimally interactive movies.

Here’s what I realized about Final Fantasy: you spend a lot of time walking around doing stuff. Mostly exploring and leveling up, talking to people, finding things. This is fairly interesting, and it’s cool to find all the items, encounter all the monsters, see and do everything. It’s fun, even.

But — it’s not challenging.

The random encounters that you grind through are just there to take time. Overcoming them is trivial, and you can last through many fights before you need to heal up and resupply, which is always pretty easy, so there’s little risk of party death. Even if you did lose your entire party, you’d just go back to the last save point and start over, hardly missing anything but maybe the last few minutes of play. The monsters barely do any damage to your characters, while most of the time you hit them once and they die.

Even boss fights aren’t all that much more challenging. You just need to be at about the right level, and you’ll cruise through the encounter. FF II & III even took much of that challenge away by turning the boss battles into scripted events. You encountered the boss and dished out a certain amount of damage, which then triggers a story event or dialog. Some fights, intending to be dramatic, would let your party get knocked down to nearly being defeated, and then some deus ex machina would happen, and something would save you and turn the tide. It was supposed to be dramatic, except that it wasn’t. It just made you realize that all the fighting you’d done up to that point was part of a scripted routine, and that no matter what, you had to deal/take that much damage in order for the game to trigger the next part of the battle sequence so the game could continue.

And here’s the other thing I don’t like about Final Fantasy. No matter what you do in the game, you’re basically only going to have one possible outcome. You either play through the entire game, or you give up and walk away from it. Nothing you do in the game makes any real, lasting, meaningful difference to the eventual outcome. The choices you make have no real consequence. There’s one story, with very few if any branches. There’s no choice you can make which, once made, permanently excludes other areas of the game from remaining open to you.

There’s a good parody game that makes this point pretty well, called Turn Based Battle. It basically is a parody of jRPGs and maximizes all the things that sucked about them while removing all the cool parts, and turns that into a game. Give it a try and you’ll get an idea what I mean:

Turn Based Battle

If you actually enjoy it, other than to get the joke, I’m sorry.

In a like vein, check into Progress Quest — It’s kindof like SETI@Home in that it keeps your CPU warm, and you don’t have to interact with it at all.

I understand that the later FF titles did away with a lot of the random encounter grinding, in order to focus more on storytelling, and amazing graphics, but even so, the games are basically kindof like a movie. Only, you have a game controller in your hand, and you have to keep pressing buttons. Casablanca would not be a better movie if you had to press Play repeatedly in order to get to the end and see the whole thing. As for all the amazing graphics and animation, this stuff gets tedious in short order. Very pretty the first time you see it, annoying to have to sit through repeatedly. Imagine an action/fx film where the same exact action sequences get repeated again and again. YAWN!

So, sorry, Square/Enix, but I’d rather sink 60-100 hours into Geometry Wars than the newest FF. I like games with good story sometimes, but story and character are pretty inessential to me when it comes to enjoying a good game.

Also, this is a worthy read.

Honestly, I’m not here to tell you your favorite game sucks. If you enjoy it, who’s to say you’re wrong? Clearly, you like games for different reasons than I do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Enjoy what you enjoy. I just wanted to put some thoughts out there so people can see other sides to it.

wp_theme update

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I’ve switched WordPress themes. Formerly, I was using Thematic; now I’m using LightWord.

I really like both of these themes, they are high quality work. I don’t have a reason for changing, other than to learn though experimentation.

I did find that I needed to make a couple minor modifications to the default stylesheet for LightWord, to make the main article text a bit larger so it’ll be easier to read without having to resort to zooming the page. On my 15.4″ notebook screen, at 1680×1050 resolution, the default text size was uncomfortably small at 100% zoom.

I’ve tested it in IE8, FF3.6, and Chrome 5 on Windows 7, and I haven’t seen any problems so far. If you notice any, drop me a comment and I’ll look into it. Be sure to say what your OS and Browser are, and be as specific as possible about the problem.

Thanks!

Follow-up:

I’ve switched to the wider-layout configuration for LightWord, in order to accomodate YouTube videos. I think the narrower width layout is nicer for text, though, as it makes for a more readable line length for the main content column. I’m not sure if fitting default-sized YouTube videos is worth it, given that I can resize them down and that text is going to be the main thing people will likely be reading here.

Games: 5 Colors Pandora looks cool

design, games, reviews
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I love graphical minimalism, and this game by Jordan Magnuson takes it pretty close to as minimal as you can get. The graphics are so low res, and only use about four shades of grey for the most part, yet you can tell exactly what stuff is supposed to be, because the shapes and animation suggest and the brain fills in the rest. Caves, buildings, cars, doors, are all readily apparent.

“You” are just a 3-px line, yet it’s enough to convey “person”. Foreground/background objects are conveyed through how dark/light its color is. I have little idea what’s going on plot-wise, yet, but it looks like you go around exploring a world trying to figure out puzzles to take you deeper into the world. Musical cues seem to communicate something about what’s going on, but that’s all I can make of it so far. Stylistically, I really like it.

It reminds a bit of Terry Cavanaugh’s Don’t Look Back because of the low-res graphics + atmospheric and evocative background music. The gameplay is a bit simple and could use a little more elements to this basic formula, maybe, but I’m not sure what just yet. Mostly you explore these large, empty areas and it seems like there should be more things populating these spaces in order to make them more interesting. You get a good sense of travel and exploration, and figuring out how to navigate and get around obstacles is an interesting puzzle that will take some time to figure out, but once you get past that, there’s not much more to engage the player. Items to collect and use, creatures or other people to encounter would make it more interesting. I could see it being developed into a deeper game with a story, maybe. Certain aspects of the game remind me of so many different titles that I like — everything from Pong, Adventure, Zelda II, Mario, Don’t Look Back.

Built with GameMaker, the developer is even distributing the source for it, which is very awesome. I might have to tinker with this a bit…

Get it here

GET LAMP

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Today a long-awaited treat arrived in my mailbox: copy #858 of Get Lamp, a film by Jason Scott.

I’d already seen an early cut of this film from when Scott did a midnight screening at Notacon 7, but now here it is in my hands, two discs representing thousands of hours of work by hacker historian Jason Scott. I’ve been waiting for this for… almost a year?

If you used a computer in the 80’s, then likely you are familiar with text adventures. As a gaming genre, text adventures have all but disappeared, but at one time they were among the most popular software products available. There is nothing like them today, except maybe in some very tiny niches. They were games that required literacy and imagination, off the wall problem solving skills, a sense of humor, a love of fantasy, and could suck a player in for hours, even days at a time. It seemed like you could do anything in these games, all you had to do was figure out the right command to type in.

To my knowledge, I only ever played one actual text adventure on a computer: Zork. I might also have played Colossal Cave once. I was maybe about 10 years old, perhaps a bit younger. I don’t remember a whole lot about the experience other than being amazed that a world so rich could fit inside a computer, and that the computer could actually (well, seemed to, anyway) understand what I typed into it, allowing me to interact with it in a manner not unlike my experiences playing pen-and-paper role playing games. Growing up, I didn’t have a computer in the house for many years; all we had was an Atari 2600 gaming console, and later, a Nintendo Entertainment System, and an SNES. I only got to play text adventures if I was lucky enough to get a little time on a computer at school, or at my mom’s friend’s house. One time at my grandma’s house I got to play on a computer (I think it was an original Compaq portable) that my uncle brought home with him from college. When I couldn’t play on a computer, I spent hours reading and re-reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, and looking for people to play D&D with.

By the time we got an a computer in the house, an Apple //gs, text adventures were already falling out of fashion, and hybrid text/animation adventures like the King’s Quest series from Sierra Online were the new big thing. Graphics were here to stay, and it seemed no one really missed text-only games.

There really can be no way to adequately quantify the influence that these experiences collectively had on me during my formative years. Suffice it to say that I could not have been who I am without them playing the role in my life that they did. I can’t thank Jason Scott enough for investing the last four years of his life, thousands of dollars, hours, and miles to produce this wonderful documentary and DVD, and to the people who donated to his kickstarter fund to allow him to devote himself to this project.

This post isn’t going to be a proper review of the DVD, as I have barely had time to pull the shrink wrap off, let alone explore all the special features on it. But I have seen the documentary, and if you have any fond memories of afternoons spent trying to puzzle through the arcane puzzles and mazes that made these game such an obsession, or if you’re just curious to know something about a forgotten bit of computer history, you definitely should order a copy of Get Lamp.

On the death of Google Wave

development, reviews
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I read today that Google pulled the plug on Wave. This shouldn’t matter, since Wave was always supposed to be open source from the beginning. I don’t know if Google actually kept that promise or not, but if they did, then Wave should live on.

Even if it doesn’t, I believe that the future will look more and more Wave-like.

Perhaps Wave needed to happen to give us a clear picture of what the future ought to look like. I have little doubt that the concepts of cross-app integration and direct collaboration are definitely going to stick around.

Wave was ahead of its time. I remember when it was first announced, my first reaction was “WTF is Wave?” After I watched the video and understood the concept, I thought, “Wow, what a great idea.”

That’s about as far as I, and many other people, it seems, got with it.

The problem I had with it was I never had a reason to work in Wave for any document I was authoring solo, which, it turns out, is better than 90% of the documents that I author. The few times I had occasion to suggest to a group that we look into trying out Wave, we never got off the ground with it. Either there was a question of did everyone have an invite, or if that wasn’t the problem, then no one really knew how to get things started in Wave in order to kick off a project.

There seems to be something about working collaboratively on mentally-intensive (particularly creative) endeavors that makes it a struggle for most people, especially people who don’t already know each other well and have fallen into roles that are familiar to them, where everyone knows what they’re doing and what’s expected of them. Wave might have been a great tool for us, but in order to have had a chance it needed a Wave Evangelist, someone familiar with the tool and who had leadership qualities and would be effective at delegating tasks to team members. I’ve always found that working in a group is not much fun without strong leadership. By which, I mean, someone who knows what the group needs, and has a clear vision for how to accomplish that goal, and who can communicate effectively with everyone else.

Human teaming factors aside, I think that Wave didn’t stand much of a chance because it didn’t offer people a “gateway drug” kind of experience. If you’ll pardon the metaphor, Wave needed some way to get users’ toes wet, and encourage them to wade into it until they developed the skills necessary to swim. It never managed to do this.

Despite this, I think that Google was on to something when they announced Wave. Like many great ideas, it came ahead of its time. In 10 years or so, we’ll look back and see that it paved the way for a new cloud-centered, collaborative way of working with documents, with information, with other people. Eventually, Wave will happen. But it will not happen as a big announcement with an hour long introductory video to explain it. Instead, it will seep in gradually and immerse us all until we suddenly realize that the tide has come in. (Again with apologies for the extended aquatic metaphor.)

What I mean by that is this: Wave was all about integration of existing technologies that we’re already familiar with: word processing, calendaring, instant messaging, email, web browsing. Google’s mistake with Wave was thinking that they needed to convince everyone that the old tools should be cast aside in favor of the new Web 2.0+ hotness that Wave represented.

When a oceanic wave crosses a point on the surface, there are two ways that it can first reach that point: trough first, or crest first. Google’s approach, essentially, was a crest-first approach: Wow everyone with this new concept and generate a lot of buzz so that people would be excited and want to use this new, cool technology. Apparently this was needed in order to get everyone to ditch their old, pre-Web 2.0 ways of doing things and give Wave a try.

It failed. People are comfortable with their old tools, and didn’t know how to transition to Wave. And until their friends were all on Wave, they would likely never have a reason to.

But consider if Google had taken a “trough-first” approach. Rather than inundating the world with an hour-long video explaining just what Wave is and how you can’t live without it, they start simply by adding Wave-like features into the existing suite of Google applications. The convergence of gTalk and gMail is an excellent example of this. Gradually, Google extends all of their existing web-served apps until users realize they’re waist deep in Wave. Maybe it’ so immersive by then that it hardly even needs its own name. No one would have been asked to throw away their old tools. No one would have had to have been the first to dive into learning some new, strange tool, and try to get their friends or colleagues interested in trying it out. It would have just grown up around us, rolling in like a rising tide. That approach would have worked.

And indeed, I believe that it will happen, eventually. And it will happen just as I’ve outlined in the above paragraph. A combination of cloud storage going mainstream, plus open standards for data formats, plus extensible feature sets in applications is all that is needed. Given these three things, add time, and it will happen.

Why I <3 my laptop bag

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I don’t really travel a lot. At least, I haven’t until recently. But in the last month, I attended The Next HOPE hacker conference in New York City, and PyOhio 2010 in Columbus, OH.

Because of this, I’ve come to hold a deep appreciation for my Targus laptop bag.

I don’t intend to turn this blog into a product review site, but I’m not averse to speaking well of products that I use when they deserve it. Having used the case as an all-day carry-all for not just my laptop, but all my “stuff” that I need to survive at a tech conference, I couldn’t be happier with this thing.

After realizing just how much I liked what I’d previously thought of as “just my laptop bag” I felt compelled to find out what model it is, so I could properly credit it. I couldn’t find anything identifying the model on the bag itself, so I browsed google image search results until I found it. It took me a while, because Targus has probably produced hundreds of different bags over the years, but I finally managed to ID it as a Targus Brilliance TBB001US.

Anyhow, I bought this bag back in 2007 when I bought my current laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T61p (which also deserves a plug as it has been a very reliable everyday computer for me over the years, and still feels like it has plenty of life left in it). I needed a new bag because my previous bag for my previous laptop wasn’t big enough to hold the new one.

At the time, I didn’t really care too much about what I got, I just wanted something cheap. A few weeks after I bought this bag. It was a super deal, I think I paid like $15 for what is normally an $80 bag. And while I’ve never been disappointed with the purchase, I never fully appreciated it until I basically lived out of it for a weekend, carrying it with me all day long, and constantly opening it and looking through it for something I needed.

I don’t believe that I’ve ever owned a more thoroughly thought out product. This thing has more pockets than I can count, it seems like every surface has a zipper or a flap on it, and each pocket seems to have another pocket in it. Despite this, the pockets are well-placed, sized appropriately for their intended purpose, and are quite easy to get into, even with only one hand free in most cases. It’s a little bulky compared to a lot of notebook bags — with just the laptop in it it feels almost empty — but if you need the space it’s probably the most efficient way to carry everything you need. It even has a mesh bottle holder that zips away when you don’t need it.

It is very easy to carry, with a suitcase-style handle, a messenger bag style shoulder strap, and backpack straps. However is most convenient at the moment, I can carry it that way. It’s comfortable, too. All carrying methods are well padded and don’t dig in even after standing around with it for hours.

I’ve actually walked around with it all day, carrying TWO laptop computers, chargers, a 25′ ethernet patch cable, various papers, tickets, my cell phone, and a digital camera, a paper notepad, and various pens and pencils, a couple of t-shirts, and some other schwag, and a 350-page book, and it never felt like a burden. Most impressively of all, I could get at everything in the bag without everything else feeling like it was in the way.

It really helps out when you’re traveling to have the ability to carry everything you need, comfortably, and have all be readily available and convenient to access.

I’d love to have some insight into Targus’s product design process, to learn how they came up with such a great solution. I have to imagine that they must have done their homework, figuring out all the different things that most people typically carry with them, and prioritize based on how often they need to access each thing, and then design a bag that can carry everything in a compact, organized, ergonomic fashion, and protect any delicate items, and on top of everything else, be comfortable.

How to get a comment approved

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To date, my ratio of spam comments to legit comments is 35:0. I don’t get a lot of traffic yet, and I’m not surprised. But if you’re a real human reading this blog and are actually thinking about posting a real comment, here’s all you have to do to get it passed moderation:

1) Say something substantive. I don’t care if you agree with what I said or not, just say something substantive.
2) Ask a question.
3) Don’t post a suspicious url in the ‘website’ field. I’m probably going to turn this off entirely, but until I do just know that if you post some url that doesn’t look legitimate I’m not going to expose my readership to your probably-malicious url.

That said, if you’re a real person and have actually read one of my posts and have something to say about it, I’d love to hear from you.

msnbc.com: “show more text” links == still less elegant than scrolling

design, Uncategorized
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Recently, I noticed that msnbc.com changed from having paged articles to a single-page format. The way theirs works, when you get down to the bottom of where they would used to put a link to Page 2, they now have the text fade into the background, and there’s this link that says “Show more text”, and if you click it, it reveals more of the article, and you can continue scrolling down.

msnbc.com's 'show more text' link

A screen capture of msnbc.com's "show more text" link - click to enlarge

I’ve been mulling it over for a few days now, and have come to a conclusion:

I have no idea at all what purpose this change serves.

Paging is an annoyance on most web sites. Browser windows have scroll bars, and it’s usually (almost always) better to simply scroll rather than break to a second page. Web sites often do paging, though, because it gives them the opportunity to display additional advertisements. Some designers will also claim that long scrolling windows are a problem for some readers, who either get intimidated by the length of the document, or are prone to getting “lost” in a sea of unbroken text. And some will say that an overly-long page just messes with the aesthetics of the site’s layout.

This “solution” that msnbc.com is trying offends me, both as a web designer and as a user.

First, and most importantly, as a user:

While I like this better than having to click through paging links, it’s silly to have to click a link to show more text on the same page. When I call up to a web server to request a web page, I want to get the entire thing on page load, and not have to be bothered with interacting with the page in order to make the whole article visible. I want this because it makes it quite easy for me to File->Save As… or File->Print and get the whole thing. Also, should I lose connectivity to the internet, or the server goes down, I don’t worry too much, because I already got the entire article. Lastly, I don’t have to interrupt my train of thought to click a link and wait for more article to be revealed; I can just scroll as I need to, and read the entire window’s worth of content without breaking the stream of the author’s prose. As a user, this is what is important to me.

As a designer:

Scrolling windows is a fine convention, and has been around for about as long as computers have had screens, and itself is based on a technology (the scroll) that goes back millennia. Scrolling isn’t broken. Ergo, it doesn’t need a fix.

What did need a fix was paging. When web sites started to generate revenue from advertising, it became a no-brainer from a business perspective to break up articles into many pages because more pages == more ad impressions == more revenue. But this was always a disservice to the user. Everyone knows it, and if a site abuses it too much and splits up an article into 20 pages of just a paragraph or two per page, people complain about it. Very large hypertextual documents may make sense to page, but the divisions should be sections or chapters, not simply a way to break up an article because it hit a certain word count.

What it seems like to me is that the designers who are working on msnbc.com grew tired of the convention of paging, and wanted to try something else. Probably someone in the design department was still fighting for paging, and used a justification that articles that are “too long” need to be “broken up” somehow in order for them to be “digestible” for today’s ADHD reading audiences. The limited height of the screen already does this, but never mind that. Back in the day, there were wars fought over scrolling vs. paging back in the mid-90’s, and people on either side became emotionally entrenched in their way of looking at how to deal with a lot of text on a page, and since paging largely won that war, politically there’s no way to go back to pure, simple scrolling. But they wanted to do something different, so they brought in this AJAX-y “click to show more text” link at the midpoint of the article. Basically, they’ve conceded that scrolling was better all along, but someone obstinately held on to the idea that not “breaking up” a long article hurts usability. So the “show more text” link is a compromise between the paging camp and the scrolling camp. But it is a no-win compromise, which doesn’t gain anything for the user, and doesn’t do anything for the ad revenue, either.

I think that “show more” links do have a place, but the main content of a page is not it. “Show more” works well on RSS feeds, for example — where there are many articles and no single one is the primary focus for the page. YouTube video description text is another good use of the “show more” link — the video description needs to fit in a small area, and the description is not the main focus for the page — the video is. But the description may be lengthy, and show more/hide works well in that kind of situation.

Rosebud Games

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Last night I hung out with the Cleveland Game Developers meetup group and had a good time just sitting around talking about what we want to get out of the group.

I love hanging out with people who have interests that I share, and who can talk about them at length. I really get a lot more creative ideas when I’m in an environment where I’m being stimulated by exposure to the ideas of others.

I had two really great ideas last night.

First, we were talking about the sort of games we want to make. I was 6 years old when we got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. It wasn’t long before I was “designing” my own game ideas. I’d take a big piece of paper and draw my concept for the game, and then I’d have my mom write down a description that I would dictate to her. So, ever since then, really, I’ve dreamed about being a videogame developer. There’s a box in a my parents attic somewhere that still has these papers.

So, for me, I think it would be very cool to dig those out and look at them and see if I can turn them into games. I coined a term, “Rosebud Games” to describe the concept. The term, of course, comes from Citizen Kane, and really, it’s the same concept: the thing I loved most as a child is what I want now as an adult more than anything. I think as far as motivating factors go, this has a lot of legs. Most of the ideas I had back the were very simple and shouldn’t be too hard to do as beginner/learner projects.

My other great idea was for a taxonomy project to classify videogames. I have a very clear idea of what I want this to be like, and it is going to be beyond awesome when you see everything that I plan to do with it. I don’t want to give away too much on it until I have something ready to show the world, but I think that this may end up being my big project for the summer.

Deepwater Horizon: “Failure Modes” vs. “Fail-safe”

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The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been in the news a lot lately. Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) has famously asked the question about the blow-out preventer, “How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered failsafe?”

I’ve heard the soundbite enough times that I feel like I need to blog about it.

I believe Stupak misunderstands the terms he’s using, and is thus confused. Or quite possibly, the sound bite lacks enough context. Either way…

“Fail Safe” does not mean “has zero failure modes” or “cannot fail.” “Fail safe” means, simply, that when a failure occurs, the design ensures that the failure happens in a safe manner.

Obviously, in the case of the blow out preventer on Deepwater Horizon, not all of its failure modes result in a safe failure. However, the number of failure modes has nothing to do with whether it is safe or not. Obviously, the fewer failure modes a thing has, the better, because it means that there are fewer things that can go wrong with it. But just because something has a high failure mode count does not necessarily make it a bad thing. Indeed, quite likely it means that it has been analyzed and tested extensively, and is well-understood. Identifying as many failure modes as there are to discover is a good thing. You don’t want there to be a failure mode that you don’t know about, or didn’t anticipate.

I don’t know anything at all about drilling for oil, but to anyone with an engineering background who understands what the terms “failure mode” and “fail safe” mean, Stupak’s question sounds idiotic.

This sort of situation is something that people who work in technical fields encounter all the time. So naturally, the soundbite irritates me every time I hear it.

Customers and upper management usually seem to think that it’s the engineer’s job to design a solution that handles any conceivable problem, and does so gracefully. Moreover, they want solutions that are delivered on time and under budget. They want to never have to think about the tools they use, especially if that means having to understand how the tool works. They want their solutions to “just work”. Well, don’t we all.

This desire for solutions that just work and don’t have problems is indeed rational. Unfortunately, it is unrealistic. We can only do our best to make solutions which handle as many foreseeable problems as we can envision, as gracefully as we are able. This does not mean that there will never be problems. This does not mean that it won’t be more useful to have operators who have some level of understanding of what’s going on inside the tools they rely on than an operator who has no clue.

I try to deliver products which are as forgiving to the clueless as possible, but it will always be the case that a clueless operator will be at a disadvantage. The idea should not be that the purpose of human enterprise is to create a world that enables people to be clueless, and takes care of the clueless as though they are helpless. The idea should be that the tools we use should remove burdens for the user so that they can be empowered to do more. A great tool removes those burdens for the user, but also allows the user to understand the work being done by the tool if they need to.

It is my fervent belief that the world is improved by people who seek to understand it. Absent understanding, one can only be at the mercy of what they fail to understand. The modern world is a very complicated place indeed, and so the less one needs to actively deal with in order to get by, the better. But that is not to say that ignorance is desirable, a virtue, or bliss.

I’m not saying that Deepwater Horizon couldn’t have been prevented. Very likely it could have. Not all of the possible preventative measures were implemented.

But misunderstandings such as conflating failure mode count with fail safe certainly do not help to bring about a culture of safety. If an executive or legislative level person, who shapes policies that govern these systems that we must design to be safe cannot understand the terms they use, and the implications of what they are being told by technical people, then only badness can result from it.

Too often engineers who are doing nothing more than speaking plainly are not understood when they speak up about potential problems, only to be scapegoated when a worst-case scenario comes to pass. But ultimately, responsibility should be owned by the people in control who set policy on what is considered an acceptable level of risk. If these people cannot understand the language that is used to communicate about risk, then they do not deserve to hold the power to make the decision to accept risks.