Jonathan Dobres

Yesterday, the batteries in my Mighty Mouse finally died on me. It’s been about three months, so that’s pretty reasonable. On the whole I’m pleased with the Mighty Mouse. I’ve always preferred mice to trackpads, and I figured that when you’re already ponying up the cash for a MacBook Pro, what’s a few more bucks for the Bluetooth-enabled mouse?

In most ways it’s exactly what I want from a mouse. It’s got no cord to perpetually wrap and unwrap, which was a big selling point. The wireless connection is solid. It fits nicely in my hand, even with my Crypt Keeper fingers. The four-way scroll ball is well implemented and has proven surprisingly useful. This particular mouse, unlike certain others, doesn’t leave presents for me on the kitchen countertop. Another bonus.

The Mighty Mouse still has a few problems, some of them downright perplexing. Granted, Apple has always been…eccentric…about mice. Remember the hockey puck? Is there a word that means the opposite of ergonomic, because that would describe the hockey puck perfectly. And yes, despite not owning an Apple computer until this past September I have every right to complain about that ancient peripheral. My high school was brimming with first generation iMacs. I’m more than familiar with the hockey puck, believe me.

There are two things that one can do with a mouse:

1. Point
2. Click

One of my issues with the Mighty Mouse is that it doesn’t always click appropriately. When a product only has two functions, it’s a big deal when one of them malfunctions even slightly. Still, the problem crops up so infrequently that the benefits of the mouse weigh in favor of continued use. I doubt that the click problem has anything to do with the wireless connection. Instead, I’m almost certain that it’s a byproduct of the Mighty Mouse’s biggest problem, which usually plays itself out in three acts:

1. It’s a one-button mouse.
2. No, wait, it’s a two-button mouse.
3. What?

The Mighty Mouse is a two-button mouse. There are right and left mouse buttons straddling either side of the scroll ball, you just can’t see them or feel them. The Mighty Mouse is covered by a smooth plastic shell that conceals what should be the most obvious feature of the device. Even when you click the mouse, the shell depresses as a single unit. It’s a huge usability error that sows confusion and makes rocker gestures impossible. The fact that right-button functionality is off by default in Mac OS adds to the confusion.

Likewise, the Mighty Mouse has extra buttons on the right and left sides of the mouse, but in fact, these are one button. It’s supposed to, I don’t know, wrap around the bottom of the mouse? It’s nonsensical. Why would you trick me into thinking I’ve got two side buttons when I actually only have one?

Apple’s staunch refusal to leave the one button design is understandable. To a novice computer user, there’s pointing and there’s clicking (see List 1, above). I’m sure it’s hard for most of you to remember this, but the distinction between right and left clicks is something you had to learn. Naïve computer users don’t get it off the bat.

Still, this position is paradoxical for Apple, especially in 2007. Apple builds only high-quality machines and blatantly prides itself on that. They have neither the need nor the desire to build a computer for the lowest common denominator. Why, then, would they make a mouse for them? Sure, it’s possible to be a naïve user who also wants to start with a high quality product, but catering to that microscopic subset of consumers doesn’t make any sense. People who have no idea how to wrap their hands around a two-button mouse are a dying breed. No, literally, they tend to be elderly, and they’re dying. I rest my case.

You know what’s cool? Hardware that looks like what it does, not hardware that looks like an oversized Vicodin. Just my personal opinion.

I’ve often asked myself, “Self, do you think Harmonix was nervous as they built the original Guitar Hero? Was there some trepidation about the song list, the feel of the controller, and whether it would all fly with consumers? Or did it just hit them like a bolt of lightning? Did they just know, after some critical point in development, that this game was going to be one of the best things to ever happen?”

I’d really love to know the answer to this question, but the answer won’t be coming from Rob Walker. He’s written a little piece on Guitar Hero for the New York Times. Walker’s unsurprising conclusion is that people love Guitar Hero in part because it allows them to pretend that they are, at least for a moment, rock stars. The article’s title—“The Pretenders”—is a bit of a giveaway on that point.

Walker says that playing Guitar Hero is nothing like playing a real guitar, a statement that always bothers me when it is made. Incidentally, Doom doesn’t train you to be a Marine and Pacman isn’t actually eating anything. Still, Walker extrapolates this idea to an interesting place. If Guitar Hero isn’t real guitar, then it’s the game’s “aspirational” elements that make it so attractive to such a wide community of players. Everybody has had the rock star fantasy. Everybody wishes they could play “Freebird,” or “Black Magic Woman,” or “More Than A Feeling”. Are they willing to strap on a little plastic guitar with brightly colored buttons to make their fantasies come true? Of course they are, videogame stigma be damned.

The power of this fantasy should not be underestimated, and the makers of Guitar Hero certainly cater to it. The selectable guitars, the character models, the choosing of a band name, the silly in-jokes, and the increasingly dramatic tutorials all serve the fantasy. I would argue, however, that Guitar Hero succeeds because it is a fundamentally great game, and the fantasy is secondary to that. Like all great games, its play mechanic is simple at the start, made even simpler by the literal guitar controller which replaces the standard gamepad, and yet it scales upwards towards near merciless difficulty as the player masters the basic skills. Guitar Hero’s great achievement is that it tricks novices, by way of fantasy fulfillment, into thinking they’re not playing a videogame.

Yet a videogame it still is. The heavy metal trappings may lure in the novice player, but the ornaments vanish when you’re actually playing. Quite literally, all you can see are the notes, and all that carefully rendered rock-god animation is irrelevant. It’s hard to showboat without getting booed off the stage. Most players eventually make that critical mental transition from playing a song to beating a song. Yes, it’s fun to score 99% on Medium, but isn’t it even better to do it on Hard, to prove that I can push myself that much further? Stepping up to Hard puts me negligibly closer to “real” guitar, but tremendously alters my level of play (in both senses of the word). This is the game, not the fantasy. Like any great videogame, Guitar Hero has its psychotic adherents, and between these people and the casual players there lies a wide spectrum of commitment levels. I’d be thrilled to master Hard, but I have no desire to torture myself on Expert. The Tall One, on the other hand, won’t be satisfied until he’s conquered “Through the Fire and the Flames” on Expert with his eyes closed. By the way, all of Dragonforce’s songs sound like that.

The need to solve a puzzle. The desire to defeat an opponent. These are universals, and “videogame players” have been tapping into them digitally for decades now. It takes a game like Guitar Hero to open that door to the wide swathe of humanity that thinks the wrong things about videogames, that feels the need to put “videogame player” in quotes. So yes, Mr. Walker, we all want to be rock stars, and we’re all willing to settle for playing pretend, but that’s secondary at best. More importantly, we all want to beat the game.

Zeldman has some interesting thoughts on the neutral option often seen in opinion scales:

Let users choose from five stars, and they nearly always pick three. Three is the little bear’s porridge, neither too hot nor too cold. Three is neutral—a safe place to hide. Even in the virtual world, where nothing more consequential is being asked than an opinion, many people would rather equivocate than commit.

He makes some great points, particularly in regards to using the neutral option as a way to avoid offending friends (think “Maybe” in eVite invitations). This is essentially a designer’s critique of the ubiquitous Likert scale, by far the most common type of questionnaire in social science research.

Back in junior high school we had a semester-long class on careers. The class feels like ancient history to me and I only remember two things about it. One is that our teacher had that Southern tendency to overemphasize the “Wh” sound. “Class, remember, whhhat you put down on the whhhite paper should match what you put down on the whhhorksheet.” The second is that a big part of this class involved the administration of an extensive career questionnaire, with scales and question clusters designed to place you at a particular point along eight different axes. Are you a people person? Do you like working with numbers? Creating artwork? Filing things? You get the idea.

It’s been a while, but I believe there were seven billion questions on this thing, all coded using the standard five point Likert paradigm. I remember that when our results came back, my report showed surprisingly few career suggestions, mostly, I was told, because I had picked the neutral option so often. Showing a definitive preference for very few of the questions, the computer didn’t know what to make of me.

The trick here is that neutral doesn’t always mean neutral. I was fourteen years old. Faced with a question like, “I would prefer working with the sick or infirm,” neutral really meant, “I’m fourteen and I don’t know anything about the world or what I want from it. I don’t know.” In a certain sense, I still don’t.

Consider the Sastisfaction with Life Scale. We use this one as part of our research at the hospital, and judging by the number of citations the scale receives in scholarly journals, we’re not the only ones. I like to think of it as a five question existential nightmare. How can you expect a person to grade a statement like, “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing,” on a five point agree/disagree continuum? Lots of people get thrown when I ask this in our interviews. After administering this scale over one hundred times, I have a hunch that neutral often means, “I don’t know how to answer that.”

I’d be very curious to see what happens when you delete the neutral option and replace it with, “I don’t know.” Maybe come up with two different variations. In one, the new option replaces neutral’s position. In the other, the new option is listed as a separate entity from the levels of agreement and disagreement. Absolute neutrality is a rarity in real life. Republican? Democrat? Maybe you really are one of those coveted undecided voters, but I’ll bet that if it came down to it, you’d admit to leaning ever so slightly one way or the other. Professing ignorance is qualitatively different from professing neutrality. People generally tend to love the latter and hate the former. Replacing the neutral with the unknown gives people a reason to commit instead of a place to hide.

Reclusive rocker Sly Stone in a recent, rare public appearance. My coworker, squinting at the picture from a distance and at an odd angle, asked, “Is that the Pope?”.

The Pope.

I really wish it was.

Don Herbert, better known as TV’s Mr. Wizard, passed away yesterday at the age of 89.

I remember Mr. Wizard from the 80s Nickelodeon classic Mr. Wizard’s World (itself, I just learned, a revival of Herbert’s Watch Mister Wizard from the 1950s). Mr. Wizard’s science was of the gentle sort; he was the soft-spoken, professorial counterpart to Fred Rogers. He had a polite dignity, and I doubt he would ever stoop so low as to call himself a science guy. He needed none of that television harlot’s flashy tricks. Just a fridge, some salt, and an empty jar with a hole in the lid, and look what we can learn, thank you very much.

I have no idea when I saw my first episode of Mr. Wizard, or at least, I don’t remember the year or month. I do remember the time of day. I’ve never been a morning person, but on the rare occasions when I somehow managed to wake up around dawn, with no one else awake in the whole house (or the whole world, for all it mattered), my greatest pleasure was watching TV. Mundane as it sounds, it was anything but. Strange programs came on at this time of day, like something from a parallel universe. There was that one early, badly dubbed anime based on a videogame I had never played, there was my one brief, terrifying experience with a televangelist, and then there was Mr. Wizard.

Mr. Wizard’s quiet manner was already becoming a rarity in the early 90s, and it was perfectly suited to the way I watched this dawn-hour TV—secretly, and always just a click or two shy of mute. It was here, in the calm of the early morning, that I learned lessons about how ice freezes and how magnets work. Quite vividly, I remember Mr. Wizard’s demonstration of an early graphic computer. It displayed a simple, color drawing of a space shuttle. I watched enviously as that episode’s student got to move the cursor and effortlessly, miraculously, airbrush in the smoke of the liftoff and turn a brownish night into clear, blue day with a few easy clicks.

Mr. Wizard’s World started in 1983 on Nickelodeon and reran its paltry 78 episodes until 2000, making it the longest running show on a network I hardly recognize today. I’m sure that by the time it left the air it came off as more of a historical relic than an educational program, but I’m glad it was around for so long. I’ll always love the oddly surreal intro.

We rented Murderball this weekend. How good is it? On a scale of 1 to 10, I already have a copy on order from Overstock.

Murderball follows the U.S. and Canadian Quadriplegic Rugby (aka Quad Rugby, aka Quadball, aka Murderball) teams as they progress from national qualifiers to the 2004 Paralympic games in Athens. It also offers a look into the lives of people with disabilities that is remarkable for its emotional honesty. Murderball dodges the temptation to play the pity card. The movie does not look at these players and say, “Oh, how brave.” Instead it goes for, “Holy crap, badass!” As a person with a disability, I think this is perhaps the best aspect of the film. Living with a disability, any kind of disability, is not a matter of bravery. It’s just how you are and how you live.

So Murderball has frank discussions about quadriplegic sex, wheelchairs that look like they belong in Warhammer 40k, a heated rivalry between the U.S. and Canada, and the kind of pranks that only a person with no arms or legs could pull off. If you leave Murderball thinking that these people represent the power to overcome adversity and persevere in the face of great obstacles, you have not watched it the right way. You should leave the film with the impression that Mark Zupan and the other players will absolutely kick your ass any day of the week at any time of day or night. I love this movie, and critics agree. Wheelchairs and violence! Yes!

Some related links:

• The International Paralympic Association. The Paralympics are not to be confused with the Special Olympics. The Special Olympics is a very noble endeavor and does great things for people with physical and cognitive disabilities, but everyone gets a medal. Some disabled athletes find that condescending. The Paralympics, in contrast, does not allow persons with cognitive disabilities to compete, is held immediately after the mainstream Olympics at the same venues, and is intensely physical as you can get.
• Sled (or Sledge) Hockey. Take ice hockey, but put everyone in a specially designed leg skate, make the sticks smaller, and have at it. So cool. More here.
• The United States Quad Rugby Association. Warning: BAD design up ahead.