I haven’t played the guitar for ages, and just picked it up and hammered out a few notes. I find doing so very frustrating these days. Years ago, I could easily practice up to 12 hours a day, but the guitar is like weight lifting, you need to keep doing it to stay up to a certain standard, a little each day (or a lot).

The thing that I find most frustrating is the lack of precision. I used to spend hours playing through the simplest scales, making sure each note was perfect, that there was no handling noise or slurs, and that every note sounded clearly and precisely. It’s important to practice really slowly and cleanly with a metronome if you want to play fast, because the slightest imperfection when you speed stuff up and it just sounds like a mush.

Life is much easier on the piano. you can’t accidentally apply some vibrato or a bend, and it’s very hard to actually miss a note as there is no bending involved. You don’t need two hands synchronised to play a single note.

But C++ is right up the other end. The code is either correct and works, or it doesn’t. Better still, I can step through the code and even step backwards through a frame render and see exactly what I did, when and how it went wrong. There is no fuzziness, ambiguity or degrees of perfection. The code works or it does not work. Its binary, not analogue.

Somehow, I’ve become inteolerant of analog stuff where you can screw up ‘a bit’. I find it frustarting and I’m never happy with what I’ve done. Years of playing thr guitar and working with wood have probably taken their toll on my ability to perform analogue tasks. Binary FTW!

People keep talking about micro-transactions and paid items on online games, but they are 100% focused on MMo games and nothing else. 

I’d love to have a few extra units for company of heroes. $10 for 2 new russian tanks and a few new infantry units? Go for it, my fingers are poised over the buy button. I wish I had a single mass-market game that supported that kind of stuff, because I’d love to be able to release ongoing expansions for stuff like Kudos and Democracy. The thing is, such expansion content is 99% fixed costs, and it’s just not financially viable. Maybe the next game it will be.

The problem will always be transaction costs. I’d happily release some new policies for democracy 2 for $0.20 each, but it would cost treble that in credit card processing costs. We need someone like google or amazon to set up a mass market, one-click economic micro-transactions scheme. Great things are ahead when such a system is in place.