We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Please elaborate.

Well, it is a horror beyond words. The crux of it is... Steve Jobs insisted on being a CEO not necessarily because he liked the dreadful day to day stuff looking at your stock reports and sitting board meetings (maybe he did; I don’t know), or because he could be an imperious bastard (sometimes he was); he did it because he didn’t like anyone telling him he couldn’t work in the trenches participating in product design and having the final say. So for a lot of gamers, seeing EA make a lot of screwups like what you get with a lot of their games is when you see someone fumbling at something simple very badly and you want to go “no! here, let me show you”, but you’re not in the kind of position where that wouldn’t be pretty darn rude.

So let me attempt to resurrect the mess of a post I gave up on:

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SpoilerIt’s a game of a different stripe, sure. I can see why it’s popular (who else really makes a game like it, and also has such extensive content that you can only put out if you devote an entire division to it?), and a part of it was even enjoyable. It has satisfying answers to the big questions of life, like why am I not a celebrity? Why am I not one of those executives who apparently have skills so rare they need a full cool millions in “compensation” (and not salary or hourly rate like the rest of us schlubs) and a golden parachute; is it because I have not figured out some sort of life cheat code, or is it because I need to put in more hours at work? Why can you not just cause one such person to fall in love with you by showering affection on them at a chance meeting? (Hey, I said satisfying, not “right”; they are, without exception, the wrong answers.)

Yet to even get to this point, I don’t see how to reconcile this bug-ridden, slow-loading, freeze-crazy experience (that does NOT autosave, and in fact saving causes some issues, too) with the ridiculous amount of business EA gets for it. That’s where EA comes into mind, because there’s an inescapable logo involved every darn time the programs involved get in the way.

See, you have to put up with a mountain of UX issues just to start playing. I shall detail them in as much excruciating detail as I can recall just to underscore the point, but feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t want to have the frustration rub off.

To redeem the codes from the Humble Origin Bundle (no worries, not a single red cent goes to EA for this sale)—I was directed to, surprisingly, not Origin, even though I needed an Origin account to get started. To get started, you have to register for The Sims 3 Community, enter the 20-character alphanumeric serial code for the base game (you can’t just paste it all at once; you have to type it out). Then, if you would like to register the two expansions you get, you have to navigate a menu “My Page > My Account > Register a Game” and enter those 20-character codes. By hand. These expansions will sit in your Origin library as “games” even though they only need to be considered separately for installation purposes; you can only run The Sims 3, those other packages are not standalones, even though one of them is just a “stuff” pack and doesn’t even affect gameplay. But wait! Want to install the “add-on pack” you got with the bundle, too? Then just go to “My Page > My Account > Redeem a Code”, and type in its 16-character code! Why they cannot simply make the codes such that which kind of code it is is computer-detectable is a great mystery. And why they cannot simply make a single, bundleriffic code is a greater mystery. So now that you’ve purchased The Sims 3 and they know which copy you bought, it’s time to open Origin and install these suckers. So you go to Origin, you download them through the system, and you just wait however long that takes. Now they want you to do a separate install step. Wait, why does it flash my code at me again? Well, they use ordinary installers, instead of taking advantage of the fact that they made you install a content distribution thing on your hard drive already. And you have to run these installers separately (good thing Apple’s default installers lets you just paste the code this time), when Origin already knows what code I was using, because it’s in their system, using their registration methods!. So anyway, they could at least create the illusion that Origin just installs it for you when it’s done, if they really wanted to, without making the customer take care of the code. But wait, there’s more! Want to get the game’s latest available updates? (Yes, yes you do; you can’t download things like that add-on pack without them.) Well, Origin doesn’t handle that. You start up the launcher, and that tells you what the latest version is, and attempt to download it for you. It will probably fail; you should have just scoured the internet for the manual fix (but where does it tell you that?). In the meantime, Steam has gone beyond the crass need for such user-intensive installation methods, and possesses the ability to patch installed games in-place, thus placing such abilities outside the realm of “merely theoretical”; Origin acts like a digital-download website instead of like an application you installed on your computer and gave your admin password to. Anyway, once you’ve done all that, things should work; maybe there are some downloads you’ll want, but those won’t break. Oh, and there was one step I couldn’t figure out where to slip into the above dialogue; now here’s an Origin-al sin for ya: I already had an account, but they wanted to press the issue of a “security question” selection (it wasn’t previously required). The selection consists entirely of things that don’t apply to me, or are things that some people who aren’t me can answer, rendering them entirely insecure. But if someone has to supply a false answer to a security question, it’s just a second password to forget, rendering them entirely useless for the purpose of regaining/changing your password (yes, you have to answer the question to change your password).

Ways to simplify the above is left as an exercise to the reader (doesn’t need to be perfect, to be honest; it just doesn’t need to take like an essay’s worth of text to explain the process). Needless to say, they’re not getting their kaizen on over there.

I uninstalled The Sims 3 without accomplishing hardly anything in-game, because it always freezes when you start getting somewhere, or it’s always off doing stuff like getting your sims stuck in elevators and requiring you to cheat to get them out, and somehow I doubt that whatever reward lies at whatever end could make up for the frequency of these things. Six hours of playing, three crash/freezes; one of the freezes rendered my system unresponsive (good thing I had sshd running, too bad for people who don’t have a second computer and don’t know how to use a command line, huh?). No autosave at any point. Now I may be talking crazy-talk here, but I’m pretty sure they pay a number of people over there whose entire job is to make sure these incidents don’t happen too often, and that if they do, they pay other people whose jobs involve making sure it happens as infrequently as possible, and that if they still do, they pay other people whose jobs are to at least design something so you don’t lose hours of play just because you didn’t want to sit around for a minute watching it save very slowly, because those people are now going to watch the game load very slowly and re-do everything they were doing if they want to jump back in.

Where I’m going with this:

For a few years now, this is the experience that they’ve been asking people to pay for. Now, one of the suits (partially in charge of running the company on autopilot while they look for a new CEO), in light of things like the “worst company in America” awards*, recently expressed that they’re trying to change things up over there, but personally I’m skeptical if they can pull it off. Being in the the business of bigness is really not helping them accomplish the mission, either.

So, not to say someone could fix their woes with a magic wand, but that’s where we get back to the musing begun by the gameplay of The Sims: it sure would be nice to be the CEO for a year and walk away with the kind of money they paid the last one (just short of $6M a year), never minding that I don’t have that skill set; that kind of money is not rich rich, but it’s still enough that I probably wouldn’t ever need to work again.

And that’s part of the appeal of The Sims; it’s this near-utopic world without the danger (or critical thought) of all these “isms”, or all the needs for personal improvements (which are never really on clear, set paths) that make our real world kind of tough to deal with. Even getting robbed is not so bad: the police show up pretty quickly if you wake up in time to make a call, and it only ruins your day for one day. And besides that, you’ll just buy a new one if it does get stolen; jobs are easy to come by. If you end up becoming a celebrity, the paparazzi aren’t quite so invasive as they can be in reality such that even a committed pacifist might want to punch their lights out (no, in fact, you can make a pretty penny suing them). No fear of much worse happening, besides dying in a house fire or drowning thanks to MouseCursorGod being clueless or cruel. Nice world. Bit of a Stepford world, though.

* I don’t give it much credence because I understand elementary statistics and the nature of Internet polling, but some people like bringing it up, apparently.

e: holy mackerel that is kind of long