Game length, gameplay, and story

There is an interesting article in The Escapist on the fact that one rarely finishes a game these days. Regardless of the affection you may feel for it, the Haloes and Witchers and BioShocks don't see many people get all the way to the final scene. Our best guess for Heroes 5 was about 10%, and we have a pretty hardcore following.
Tom Endo points out in his article a few points and problems; one is that once you figure out the gameplay the rest is just endless (more or less repetitive) variations on that gameplay. The designers try to pull you in with new tricks and some plot twists, but stacked against the odds of finishing is the enormous time commitment required to get all the way to the end.
I think that there are a lot of cogent arguments for trimming game story to a more manageable size while adding tons of extra gameplay content for the hardcore gamers. After all, if a player has to leave the game for a few days, will they remember who the characters are? What quest they are doing and why? Is there any point in writing an enormous sprawling plot that is the equivalent of two or three screenlays if so few finish it?
It might make more sense to make games smaller, tighter in both story and gameplay, and then provides tons of downloadable content for those who want to keep going. Mod kits, additional levels, and unlockable bonuses would probably be more than sufficient for the hardcore player who falls in love with the game.
Especially if the development costs drop, and the price tag along with it.
I recently played Portal, and was very impressed by it. It didn't have a story, more like an atmosphere, though I suppose you could argue that there was slender plot thread. It was brilliant playability, fun writing, and all over a great experience. It was widely lauded, won many awards, and took only three or four hours to play.
Is that the wave of the future? Maybe it should be, otherwise studios are paying to create, and players are paying to not play, an awful lot of game content.

The latest Yahoo! headlines

I see these every day -- Yahoo! takes a headline from the French newspaper Le Monde and runs it through some sort of translator. 'A' for effort, 'F' for execution. Recent samples:

"With the approach of the victory of Obama, arms manufacture filled the tank"

The article is actually about the fact that gun merchants are stocking up due to future regulatory worries. Doesn't quite come through somehow...

And this one:
"Garzon judge deprives himself of the investigation into the missings of Francoism"

Is subtitled:
"The judge, who was likely to see himself declared inefficient in this business, deprived himself with the profit of the courts of province."

Computers are just, well, not quite there yet...

Teens and reading genre fiction

Recently within my circle of contacts a couple threads have popped up on the question of getting kids to read more. This is sort of a classic question, posed by authors and academics as if it was some sort of cry in the wilderness (Potter-san notwithstanding). Richard Dansky had a particularly interesting question on developing a list of genre recommendations based on what kind of games kids like to play.
That one really intrigues me, as it is a very pragmatic approach to getting kids into books as opposed to asking the local English teacher who would probably reply: "You like First Person Shooters? You should read Cooper's Leatherstocking series. You like fantasy games? Gosh, there are a lot of fantastic elements in Love in the Time of Cholera."
Richard started with a few, and more have been added, and hopefully we'll end up with a lot of good ideas.
The other interesting thread was started by Cat Rambo here, and a lot of good comments were added by readers.
This is important to culture in general, I think, and will continue to be so until that improbable day in the future when game writers are nominated for Pulitzers, Nobels, and Bookers. As the game media takes over more and more of mass culture, and as generations grow up using that as their first window into art and writing, the question can only gain in pertinence.

The Bad Guy in video games -- why is he so much more interesting?

Part of it, I think, is inherent in the media. The player-character tends to be relatively generic; often either a voiceless cypher (Gordon Freeman, Master Chief) or a relatively unimaginative remodeling of the wise/tough guy that we have known and loved from Bogart/Cooper to Willis/Ford. The player needs to identify strongly with the main characters, want what they want, and love them enough to endure tens of hours of their trials and tribulations.

Too much "character" in the main character can turn off players; not everyone wants to walk in the shoes of a metrosexual angst-ridden teenager with a gravitationally impossible hairdo (yes, I am talking about Japanese RPG's).

So I think that both writers and designers play it safe with the main character. Easy to like, based on well-known and well-loved stereotypes, a comfortable pair of shoes to put on.

So where do you get to be crazy and creative? The bad guy. You get to make him as offensive, outrageous, irresponsible, unbalanced, and crazy as you want. He can be over-the-top sexy when the main hero can't, outrageously flamboyant when the hero is tough and restrained, insulting and offensive when the hero has to be cool and/or supportive.

So why do we make evil sexy? Because we don't want to put too much in the player-character and risk alienating the player. But the bad guy... there is no risk, only reward.

Removing the SFnal element from a story

During the VD3 workshop I presented a story that is really actually about marriage and family life, though it had a fantasy trigger element in it. A couple of reviewers commented that they thought it would be stronger without that; just the couple and their two kids (what? autobiographical? of course not...).

Then someone -- I think it was Chance -- started riffing on that idea. I mean, how many genres out there can you do that with? Could you imagine someone writing a Western, and then in the workshop someone says, "Why don't you take the cowboys out? And it doesn't really need the saloon and the Indians" Or a thriller, and someone says, "I think it would be better without the guns and spies." "You know, this Harlequin might be better without the tall handsome mysterious guy with the shadowy past." "I don't know... I think the thing under the bed should really just be a teddy bear."

It's a funny idea, but it does underline a point about the universality of good SF that is generally missed by most critics of the genre.

 
In the market of Avignon we happened across a local chef doing a cooking demonstration. It was for an apple crumble with honey and thyme; we watched him make it from A to Z and taste-tested (wow!) the final product. It was a great idea -- publicity for the restaurant, a bit of life and animation for the market, and a great little cooking lesson for those who happened to pass by.
Who knows? The next time you stop by chez nous it may be on the menu...

A guy I could like

Kevin Smith, the director who did (among others) "Clerks," "Clerks 2," and most recently "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," comes up with a great quote in an on-line interview. He calls "A Man for All Seasons" (also one of my all-time faves) "...basically porn for people who love dialogue."

That is just so true.

Obamoments 2

An SMS from a French neighbor:

"Yes you can.
Thank you America from the world."

Obamoments 1

 
I haven't felt like this since I watched Luke blow up the Death Star.

The south of France, eleven artists, excellent meals, plenty of wine... Ah, the rigours of a speculative writing workshop.

We did the third Villa Diodati workshop at the end of October, here in scenic Le Bar sur Loup. I dare to list the luminaries who were there, as their presence imparts a certain sheen of quality to my own pedestrian efforts:
Aliette de Bodard
Deanna Carlyle
Steve Gaskell
Sara Genge
Floris Kleijne
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Chance Morrison
Ruth Nestvold
John Olsen
Ben Rosenbaum
 
Here you can find a few of my photos, and many more can be found on flickr (few other things come up if you search for "VD3" ... ). The house we rented was thanks to good friends who also happen to make a living handling property rentals in the Côte d'Azur.

Onward and upward; the story that was critted at VD3 is already winging its way to F&SF.

Yes! Interzone 219 (11/08) will have one of mine in it.

I recently received an e-mail from Andy Cox that made it official; my tale "Everything That Matters" will be printed in issue 219 of Interzone, out in mid-November.

The story was born during Clarion in 2004, and actually started out as the tale of a tough-guy treasure hunter that was tussling with an amoral business tycoon. The Clarion folk rapidly helped me realize that it sounded a lot like "Here's looking at you, kid" versus "No, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond." So I had to put a dagger through the heart of the stereotypes, and do some thinking about what the real questions were and what was really at stake.

The story went through a number of workshop iterations, and lots of hand-wringing and gnashing of virtual teeth. In the end, it stayed dormant for a while because I liked it so much. The concern was this: If this story, that I think is so cool, doesn't sell, what hope do I have as a writer? Scary, existential writer questions.

But don't worry; I'm not assuming that this means I am a great writer. There is some reassurance, however, in finding out that I am not without hope.

Austin GDC: Andrew Walsh on "The Death of Linearity: Or, Who Shot the Three-Act Structure?"

Walsh did a very interesting presentation on the techniques for storytelling that he used for the latest Prince of Persia game.

If I can manage to summarize it, the idea was basically to have several different layers of narrative, only one of which was obligatory. All the others lurked in the background, waiting to be discovered by players who cared about them. The writers and developers referred to this as storytelling using "ondemand" dialog or ODD. As I recall, the layers basically approximated:

1. A minimal storyline that the player could not ignore. This was presented in a series of "signposts" -- primarily cutscenes or in-game scenes (like HL2). This story represented the absolute bare minimum necessary to be able to finish the gameplay.

2. Within each mission or level, certain events opened the possibility of a brief ODD with the player's love interest / accomplice, Elika. For instance, in passing a ruined building or temple, a conversation would have been written that concerned the history of that site. However, if the player was not interested the dialog would not be heard, because that type of conversation could only be triggered by the player pushing a button. Hence the term "ondemand". These ODD chunks had to be independent of time or place or previous dialogs; they had to be discrete and therefore applicable regardless of the player and their play style. Due to the fact that the game environment is 90% lethal, they also had to be a) extremely short, and b) take place on flat ground...

3. Again within each mission/level, further information that could be drawn out if the player desired it. For example, a line of obligatory NPC dialog could be extended into a conversation by talking to that NPC. Conversations could be launched at any time with Elika; these conversations would be specific to the level and to the story events of that level (unless overridden by the current situation. The game was smart enough not to start explaining the details of how the evil vizir came to power if the hero was in the middle of battling several enemies).
   Once a player passed a certain point, these conversations -- whether or not they had been triggered by the player -- were no longer available as they were no longer germane.

4. Another storyline existed; this was the tale of the the Prince and his relationship with Elika. This one had a beginning and an end, but could be played at any time throughout the game. Basically, if there was a free moment and the player was not fighting, or passing an object of interest, or already discussing a key plot point, the dialog button would pull up the next piece of dialog between the Prince and Elika.

Because the designers and writers could not control when and how the player would accesses the story -- other than the main and unavoidable storyline--  there were a number of difficult constraints:

• The dialog had to be worded so that it could be restarted at any time (after the next fight, or six months later when the player picked up the game again).

• The only control that the writers/designers had was when they opened or closed access to elements of ondemand story. These had to be carefully chosen and carefully written.

• In the event that a player liked the dialog and story, there had to be enough there to keep them from hearing repeated lines even if they were spamming the dialog button. For this reason there were numerous levels of Narrative ODD (OnDemand dialog), Relationship ODD, Ingredient dialog, Fight Taunts, and Foundation dialog.

• Many technical (in particular) AI issues had to be overcome to deal with the ODD system. For example the direction that the player's avatar was facing could affect the dialog as could the current relationship and emotional status, and any level scripting; plus the animation had to adapt to these cues as well.

For me this talk was one of the highlights of the AGDC, and I think that there are a lot of interesting techniques and lessons that I can use. Thanks Andy!

Austin GDC 3: Richard Dansky runs the "Game Writer's Workshop"

Yay Richard!

This was essentially a Clarion-style workshop for critiquing game stories and game design ideas. The workshop process, and in particular Richard's management of it, worked very well. There was a problem, however, which was the lack of a standardized document format. All five of the submissions were in different formats, and that made it difficult to do a few things:
- Read over the submissions rapidly
- Compare and contrast between them
- Standardize a series of points or questions in order to review efficiently

So though the workshop is useful both for the attendees and the peanut gallery, it would be improved with a more structured approach. I think that I will propose both document formats and a series of discussion points in order to slim and simplify the process for next year.

Austin GDC 2: Jess Lebow on "More Interactivity: A Storytelling Workshop"

Two minutes into this presentation I was very excited. Lebow comes from a publishing background and has been doing game development for many years; he has a profile of exactly the kind of person who should be a font of knowledge of writing and storytelling in a gaming environment.
In fact, I believe that he is a font of knowledge, but the format of his presentation did not (sadly) allow him to act as one. Instead, he presented a few very interesting questions or comments on game storytelling, and then asked for comments from the audience in order to open things up to a wider discussion.
The problem is that the audience comments were, as a general rule, lukewarm. Too many eager beavers were making comments just to make comments, and older and wiser heads were not engaged enough in the debate.
As a result, I walked away with a few new ideas but a lot less than I could have. This is too bad, because Lebow is a charismatic and experienced game writer/developer and a very smart guy, and the conference would have been better served (I believe) if he had done things differently.
Please, Jess, come back next year. But tell us what you know, present your challenges and ideas, and then turn to the audience for questions.

Interesting points:
- The use of the cell phone in GTA IV to delvier quests.
- The use of the car trips in GTA IV to deliver key story information (I remember how happy we were in Dark Messiah when the player got in an elevator and we knew we had his undivided attention).

Interesting questions:
- How can we better deliver story in MMOs (now called "crowd games" by us insiders who heard Bruce Sterling's talk) without the use of instancing?
- How can we develop storylines for important NPC's in a crowd game?

HBDTM!

Today is my birthday, and for some reason I am receiving the most eclectic bunch of greetings that I have ever had. So far I have been cheered by a member of my World of Warcraft guild, my wife and kids, two game writers I work with, an old pal from my MBA program, the producer I work with at Ubisoft, and a few friends from the area. Who knows where this may go?

Growing old rocks.

Austin GDC 1: Chris Crawford on "14 Conceptual Shifts: moving from games to interactive storytelling"

Crawford did a presentation -- more a polemic -- on the future of storytelling for games. Several of his fundamental tenets would be echoed on Wednesday by Andy Stern, as both of them are part of the movement that insists that proper game story must be non-linear and dynamic, and therefore machine generated. Whether you agree with his ideas or not, Crawford certainly was passionate and intelligent in developing his fourteen points:
1. Character comes first.
No disagreement there; in writing for any medium the characters' motivations define what happens and why. Conflict between characters provides stories with tension and drama, and any story full of weak characters will lack intensity and emotional engagement.
2. Primacy of interactivity
As the medium for which we are writing is games, which by definition include gameplay, the player is constantly making decisions and taking action. If the player is not active it mimics a passive experience like film or literature, and a story without interaction would probably better be told in another form.  A person buys a game with the idea that they will be actively involved in what happens, and it follows that the story must take this into account. This seems entirely logical.
3. Screw graphics.
One of the points upon which the presenter and I are in agreement. Graphics are a means to an end, though they are most often treated as an end in themselves.  However, storytelling does not require them. They have become an enormous roadblock for budgets, development cycles, and even for story. If 3D graphics cannot present what is happening in a game story, due to either technical or budgetary limitations, the most probable decision in a game project is to change the story rather than simplify or remove the graphics. Few studios have the bravery to put in Max Payne- or Thief-like 2D cutscenes to compensate for story elements that are difficult to present in the game or cutscene engine.
4. Ditch plot
His words, not mine. Crawford presented Story as something that is a noun and data and static, while storytelling is a verb and a process and is dynamic. It is the difference between a cookie and cooking; one is a thing, the other is an action and therefore interactive and therefore more attuned to what a game player wants. His thesis is that storytelling is the goal, not story. The process is what we as game writers should be focused on, rather than on the results of the process which are the plot and the events that make up the story. This is one of the points where his views and that of most writers diverge; on the one hand is the belief presented which is that the process of creating credible events is more important than the outcome of those processes and the shape that it has. This seems to beggar the most fundamental question that kept coming back to me: Who cares how good the storytelling machine and mechanisms are if the resulting story is uninteresting? And how do we program a computer to discern between an interesting and a boring narrative?
5. What does the user DO?
Because games are interactive the emphasis should be on what the player is doing; on what his or her actions are and what effects they have. This is what is important in a game story, and not what the player sees or hears. The player should be creating the story as he plays, rather than having the story presented to him as something that he is walking through. Again, this makes sense for a story that is told in a game.
6. What are the verbs?
The verbs, that is the range of possible actions that the player can have, are the linchpin of the gameplay and of the richness of the player experience in the game. The verbs of a game -- as of any software application -- define what the application is. More verbs in a game mean more expressive power.
7. Linguistic User Interface.
Here Crawford touched on the ideas of the user interface, starting with the old-fashioned and cryptic yet powerful command line interface of 20 or so verbs with many parameters. The combination of these commands created enormous possibilities for actions, however the interface is arcane and highly specialized. Next came GUI's, whose graphical menus and context boxes presented somewhere around 100 or so verbs for the average user. At this point Crawford made the very cogent point that even in a beginner's reading text -- one of the classic Golden Books -- there are already 122 verbs. If the verb capacity of a GUI is only on the level with a first grade text for storytelling, the average user interface is not going to provide us with a very meaningful experience.
The ideal would be a Linguistic User Interface, where a player uses everyday language to interface with the computer and can take advantage of the thousands of verbs in the English language.
Sapir-Whorf
The bad news came next; a computer system can never provide a natural language interface. The problem is that a language mirrors reality, and it has been mathematically proven that for a computer to provide a natural language interface the computer must be able to encompass reality.
Crawford's way out is to say that because stories are artificially created toy realities, all that is needed to "use" these realities is to have a created toy language. A toy language in a toy reality can fit inside a computer; our reality can't.
8. Language = reality
The caveat is that the toy language needs to be designed at the same time as the toy reality in order to be useful. In order to do this, Crawford stated that "we" -- definition never provided -- use a powerful authoring system called Deikto.
It was at this point that my skeptometer started pinging, and it went off fairly steadily for most of the rest of his session. Much of the remainder of his presentation discussed the system that he had developed in order to tell stories in his way on a computer. Deikto was joined by Sappho, a programming language for storytellers, and his talk concluded with a sales pitch for storytron.com, the site that he and his partner have created in order to promulgate their world view of what game story should be. However, in the interest of being unlike Fox News and presenting a fair and balanced picture, I will continue with his remaining 5 points.
9. Inverse Parser
For a natural language interface to work the computer must be able to read a string of incoming text, break it down into verb - subject - object etc., and then act on it. The human is the supplicant; the computer is the judge. There is in addition the paradox of the "parser puzzle", that the possible combination of words in a sentence approaches what is a good approximation of infinity for any practical desktop application, and that it is therefore almost impossible to parse natural language effectively. The user is therefore constrained to adapt to the needs of the interface, using a limited number of words in a limited number of ways. This is not good storytelling.
Crawford's solution is inverse parsing; limiting the scope of what the computer has to analyze by using dramatic and grammatical context filters. In the sentence "Look out, it's a ___", the blank will not be filled with the adjective "chartreuse," the verb "climb," or the number "twenty-three." In addition, if it is a horror survival game full of zombies, though the blank is a noun it will probably not be the nouns "belt sander" or "foie gras." Relying on grammatical and dramatic context, the computer can more rapidly translate the player's actions and desires.
10. Ditch space.
The presenter stated that spatial relationships are an annoying waste of effort and computing power; stories are about social, not spatial, cognition. I agree that spatial cognition has little to do with storytelling. However in a graphical game world, the distance that two NPCs keep between each other, or from the dog that may or may not be friendly, or from one group of NPC's or another, may speak volumes about the NPC and the situation and the story.
11. Programmers are not storytellers.
True. Crawford goes on to say that, therefore, storytellers must learn to program. I think that any writer who wishes to tell stories in a game setting is probably wise to accept this one.
12. Algorithms animate.
Algorithms are what programs use to control the choices of in-game characters. Context-dependent choices require the mastery of context-dependent algorithms; therefore, for Crawford, it is necessary that writers learn math and the use of algorithms.
One could argue this; one could also argue that all it requires is a half-decent authoring tool. I would dare to guess that Storytron handles the decision-making process of in-game characters through the use of algorithms with a bad or nonexistent front-end tool. This may, however, simply be my natural cynicism shining through.
13. A programming language for storytellers.
Apparently it exists, it is called Storytron, it will change the way we tell stories in games, it is inevitable, it is good, and it will prevail.
14. Kinder, Gentler Math
Storytelling requires special arithmetic, and storytellers must learn it.

Hummm....

The second part of the talk was given by Laura Mixon, an SF author who is the writer half of the team that is developing Storytron. She apparently believes quite strongly in the system, so I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. However, all of the examples that were given, by Mixon or Crawford, were what I would call "small". Conflict between two characters that leads up to a murder, emerging through the algorithms of Storytron, is a great and unexpected thing. I would not call it a story, however; I would call it an incident or a piece of a story. Nothing that I saw during these three days convinced me that computers will be able to create plot and character arcs -- the things that keep consumers hooked on a game, movie, or TV series -- in any sort of meaningful or interesting way.
What I liked very much about Storytron, and what I would like to try, is to use these kinds of algorithmic characters to add flavor and sub-plots to a given scene or location. The idea that autonomously-generated behavior can be going on around the player while he tries to to what he wants to do seems fascinating. No two players would live a game experience in the same way, and unexpected and unpredictable actions would make a game environment seem much more life-like. I will therefore download and test Storytron, and add further comments at some later date. For the moment, however, I cannot imagine that this is a story generating tool, even if it is a storytelling tool. And if it is "only" a storytelling tool, and generates interesting incidents and events, its place in the scheme of game development may have a limited, albeit useful, future.

Austin GDC Overview

Quite an amazing event. I had been waiting for four years to go there; of all the gaming conferences it is the one that most emphasizes the issues of writing and storytelling in games. After years of eagerly scanning the conference listings and following the articles and blogs that resulted, I came at last to the game writers' Mecca and saw it for myself.

All expectations were surpassed.

1. The People
I had the good fortune to meet a lot of incredible people and get involved in great discussions on how we should do what we do and where it may go in the future. These included the legendary Susan O'Connor (BioShock), my old comrade in arms Richard Dansky (the Splinter Cell series and everything else Clancy plus tons of other Ubi games), Marc Laidlaw (the Half-Life series), Andy Walsh (the latest Prince of Persia, Medieval 2: Total War), Wendy DeSpain (IGDA Game Writers' SIG chair), John Gonzalez (EndWar), Rhianna Pratchett (Overlord, Heavenly Sword), Sande Chen (The Witcher), Lee Sheldon (of many game and Hollywood credits plus the author of an excellent book on game writing), Bob Bates (20 years of success in game design and writing plus a game design book), Dave Grossman (TellTale Games), Jess Lebow (Pirates of the Burning Sea, Guild Wars), Ryan Galletta (Need for Speed, Company of Heroes), Haris Orkin (Call of Juarez 1 and 2), Stephen E. Dinehart, and etc. etc. If I forgot you, I apologize.
In addition there were a great number of passionate up-and-comers like Drew McGee (who also did a great job handling the local logistics), Ron Toland, Cory Barnett, Soraya Hajji, and more.
Outside of the pure game writing sphere I also met some great characters who handle other parts of the game development process, in particular Lev and Tim from Blindlight who are involved in the VO end of things and handle everything from procuring stars to the dialog direction and audio recording.

And, over and above it all, Bruce Sterling gave this talk.

2. The Content
Buzzwords like 'interactive storytelling' and 'non-linear narrative' tended to fall thick and fast. Occasionally they made sense. There is a very interesting dichotomy developing in the game writing sphere between those who wish to push writing towards an automated system that provides something computer-generated and non-linear, and those who believe that the hand of a storyteller is needed or else we will end up with interesting toys that lack any sense of story.
I will blog -- time permitting -- over the next few days on the sessions that I attended.

3. The Place
Austin claims to be the live music capital of the US, and judging from the number of live bands (many) that were heard playing every single night of the week I have no reason to doubt it. The weather was great, everything was easily reachable on foot, and the food was everything that I wanted. The convention center was properly cavernous and CMP's management of it was efficient and professional. The sole mishap was the fact that the IGDA Game Writers' SIG table suddenly disappeared between Monday and Tuesday, leaving a number of confused writers wandering about while Drew and Wendy hounded the organizers.
In speaking of "The Place", however, a special mention must be made of the Ginger Man. This is a bar with (by my count) 60 or so beers on tap. It is a high-ceilinged, relaxed place with friendly staff and a great little back garden that for four nights echoed to the sound of writerly laughter, verbal abuse, arguments, and polemics. The cabal of game writers spent a lot of time there, all of which was superlative. Imagine that -- a conference of intelligent and passionate people carrying on discussing topics of both professional and personal interest. For four days. With excellent beer. In easy walking distance from my hotel.

These are the things that make life worth living.

Lidia and the socratic waiter

So we have tickets for a play and are in a bit of a hurry for dinner. We stop in a restaurant next to the theater, and Lidia sees that risotto is the daily special. The following conversation ensues:

Waiter: Table for two?
Wife: Yes, but we need to eat quickly. Can I order the risotto?
Waiter (clasps hands behind back, assumes a somewhat pedantic air): Ah. You would like the risotto. Do you eat risotto often?
Wife: Yes, we make it at home sometimes.
Waiter: I see. And how long does it take you to make risotto?
Wife: Oh, at least twenty-five minutes or so...
Waiter: And you make it well?
Wife: I think so.
Waiter: So a good risotto takes at least twenty-five minutes?
Wife (starting to smile): That seems about right.
Waiter: So how long would you expect our risotto to take?
Wife (starting to laugh): I would assume that you make good risotto.
Waiter: Of course, madame.
Wife: Then I will have a salad.
Waiter: An excellent idea, madame.

Spam is a joy:

"Paris Hilton Starts Large Hadron Collider Today"

And I thought she was just an attention-seeking bimbo.

Vacation rocketh, and in biblical proportions. Just got back from three weeks in the U.S., getting my yearly ration of Maine lobster and microbrewed beer (the former does not exist in France, and nothing I have found in a French supermarket equals the latter).

More thoughts on travel, life, children, and awesome museums to come.