What I Learned About China

  • Beijing is one big motherfucking city.
  • My stomach is not entirely capable of parsing the language of Chinese food (though it all tastes very good).
  • People who drive in Beijing, with few exceptions, are certifiably insane.
  • What they don’t tell you about the Great Wall is that it is freaking steep at places. It basically goes up the sides of mountains at 35 degree angles. It’s also an amazing sight to behold.
  • There is a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, and this disparity creates almost incomprehensible differences in cost of goods. An espresso at Starbucks = 50 yuan = ~$6.00. Our all-you-can-eat Dim Sum breakfast at our hotel = 2 yuan = ~$0.24 per person.
  • Speaking of Starbucks, there is one in the middle of the Forbidden City. That’s some hardcore marketing right there.
  • Peking Duck is quite a treat.
  • I would like to go back.

Thanks much to Mush, Jenny, and Josh at the IGDEA for such a wonderful opportunity.

Off the Map

I’m headed for Beijing this week to give a lecture about game design and programming. I’ll try to update while I’m there, but my access to internet may be sketchy. Updates shall resume when I return next Saturday.

In the mean time, why don’t you guys let me know what you’d like to see change on this site. I’m going to try to add some new features this summer, and I’d love to hear what you guys think.

Site Updates

This weekend I had some free time, so I decided to do something about the rather horrific quality of some of the user posts on my site. I’ve gone through every single game listed here and erased hundreds of posts. From now on, I’ll be quite a bit more strict about which posts I allow; one-liners, posts in other languages, “I have this game” messages, posts about games other than the info page, etc will be erased. I’ve added a brief FAQ page describing this policy.

And in a “when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” moment, I wrote some grammar-sanitizing code that tries to clean up common grammatical mistakes and leet speak. It’s not perfect, but maybe it will keep some posts here a little more legible. The forum is unaffected.

I’m thinking about removing the visitor comments section from the info pages. The problem with them is that the signal to noise ratio is very low (the amount of useful opinion and information about each game is small compared to the amount of messages asking for game help or arguing with other posters), and I don’t think they really add much to the site. It’d be better to centralize discussion in the forum, I think.

What do you guys think? Please leave a comment about how you feel about the info page message boards.