Valve makes a misstep: L4D2

I'll write about the current events surrounding the Left 4 Dead community this week.

At E3 Valve announced L4D2. The community's reaction can be summarized in this highly entertaining and informative video:



I really don't understand why Valve has not continued their "service" idea which has worked so well for Team Fortress 2. In an interview back before TF2 came out, Gabe Newell explained further: Valve was looking to offer a product that was not just a stand-alone game. Instead Valve is looking to offer a whole "service" to fans post-release.
In TF2 this has been successful. The D-Team has released practically a whole expansion pack's worth of material...free so far. New maps, weapons, and balance and bug fixes that go far beyond any normal FPS. And this strategy has brought them rewards: the game is still going strong and garnering new players at a ferocious rate.
So why the switch in gear for their other title in current development, L4D? Well, to start let me just say that the warning signs were there: New content has been decidedly weak (compared to TF2), and the community took notice. Countless posts went up on the Steam forums lamenting the apparent inattentiveness of the L4D D-team. With many L4D fans looking across the fence at the TF2 community, which enjoyed large updates of free, high quality content every three months or so, frustration grew. This build-up only made the announcement of L4D 2 worse. To the community, it feels like a stab in the back. It is hard to put it better than the above video: "You mean we paid $50 to essentially beta-test your game??"
I can certainly see how it felt like a beta test. One of the few flaws of the original game was that though it was long on replayability and quality, it was short on depth and variety. From my point of view, Valve put out L4D a bit unfinished. Though it was probably worth $30 (which it is down to now), the lack of maps and various other elements was noticeable. Now, after seeing their game turn into a hit, it seems that some suits in the Valve high office have said "Ok, now go back and do it Right." So that's what they're doing.

9 billion hours

I was reading a book today called "This Gaming Life" (Rossignol, Jim. 2008). By far the most interesting bit I read today was a section called Nine Billion Hours (pg. 102). It was short, and lasted about two pages, but it seemed to put into words some idea that had been in the back of my head for quite some time now. Simply put, the section asks: what if all the hours Windows users have spent playing "Solitaire" (a total of 9 billion hours to date) could be harnessed? Considering that only 20 million hours were required to build the Panama Canal, it is mind boggling to think what could be accomplished with even a fraction of an amount 450 times that.
The man who realized this opportunity, or at least the man who put it in those words, was Luis Van Ahn. The rest of "Nine billion hours" discusses his work in taking advantage of all those, effectively, wasted man-hours. It occurred to him that the way to get the most bang for his buck was to get users to play a game, accomplishing a task along the way which was easy for humans but difficult for computers. He settled on the task of describing photos. This is an uncommonly good choice in my opinion. Analyzing and describing a picture is something that is trivial to a human but impossible to a computer.
The game which Van Ahn designed was also exceptionally clever in my opinion. His game was called The ESP Game. It is a browser based game which connects two human players over the internet. They don't communicate at all aside from participating in the same mini-game: try to describe a random picture. They score points for describing a photo in the same way their anonymous partner did. I can see how this would actually be a compelling game.