Designing serious games - a request for help

I've been hanging out a lot on Less Wrong, which is a community for people trying learn about being more rational.

Some of us are also programmers... so we've decided to get together and have a hackday (in London). But we're still trying to figure out what would be both cool/interesting *and* help us build our rationality, *and* still be doable by an odd collection of random hackers over a single day.

One idea would be to have a go at designing serious games - games specifically created for improving our rationality, a bit like Lumosity builds games for improving mental agility.

But we need help coming up with ideas. Ideas that are not only small enough to fit into the time-schedule of a hackday... but that also demonstrably improve some aspect of our rationality.

If you have any ideas (or would be able to comment on those we've got), come over to our site and add our comments to the Designing serious games discussion.

Thanks

Link: UX lessons from Angry Birds

Angry Birds is one of the most successful games out there right now - consuming millions of hours worldwide every day. What have they got right? This article tears down the user experience and explains Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular. It's a thorough and thought-provoking look into the sorts of things that make up a truly engaging user experience.

How to learn about everything

In How to understand everything and why, Eric Drexler (author of Engines of Creation), explains the importance of a broad education simply:

"It’s important... because it makes creative work more productive and makes costly blunders less likely... "To avoid blunders and absurdities, to recognize cross-disciplinary opportunities, and to make sense of new ideas, requires knowledge of at least the outlines of every field that might be relevant to the topics of interest."

he then follows with a brief discussion of how to go about learning everything - a method that seems straightforward, and even fun. Worth a read.

Link: Assuming goodwill

Seth Godin's blog is packed full of great insights, but I thought I'd outline a recent one.

Assuming Goodwill is about the decision to trust, because trust pays.

It's one of those common-sense things that we often forget, that people will live up to your expectations. Expect the worst and that's what you'll get, but expect great things and you'll get the best. Seth talks about trust as it relates to, say, a restaurant trusting you to pay *after* you've eaten your meal... or Tiffany's trusting you to try on their expensive jewels... but obviously this has application to the full breadth of life.

For example, an employer trusting their employees to be productive and loyal builds an environment that is more conducive to productivity and loyalty, than one who micromanages productivity, or constructs labyrinthine rules about allowed corporate protocol.

Yep, sometimes your trust will be abused... life is like that. But sometimes you have to risk a little, to gain a lot.

Heads-up: new EU cookie laws

The laws are changing around cookies. From the 25th May, websites require explicit, opt-in consent for the use of certain cookies. It seems to be mainly (though not exclusively) aimed at targetted advertising, but it's worth having a read of a good overview of the upcoming cookie privacy laws to see if it will affect you.

Adding custom HTTP headers to soap4r request

When you're using soap4r, you don't have access to the bare httpclient - which means you have absolutely no way of passing in custom HTTP headers (note, not SOAP headers which definitely have an API).

Monkeypatch time!

See the patchfile below. You need to a) vendor soap4r (if you haven't already), then b) update several files with the given patch.

Then you can pass in your customised headers directly via the soap driver before you call the soap method. Here's an example of use:

driver = SOAP::RPC::Driver.new(url, SCHEMA)
driver.add_method 'MySoapMethod', 'MyParam'

driver.options["protocol.http_custom_headers"] = {'MySpecialHeader1' => 'abc', 'MySpecialHeader2' => 'xyz'}
driver.MySoapMethod 'MyValue'

and here's the necessary patches (note: they're in svn-diff style):

Index: vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/rpc/proxy.rb
===================================================================
--- vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/rpc/proxy.rb (revision 4217)
+++ vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/rpc/proxy.rb (working copy)
@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@
   attr_accessor :allow_unqualified_element
   attr_accessor :default_encodingstyle
   attr_accessor :generate_explicit_type
+  attr_accessor :http_headers
   attr_accessor :use_default_namespace
   attr_accessor :return_response_as_xml
   attr_reader :headerhandler
@@ -57,6 +58,7 @@
     @allow_unqualified_element = true
     @default_encodingstyle = nil
     @generate_explicit_type = true
+    @http_headers = nil
     @use_default_namespace = false
     @return_response_as_xml = false
     @headerhandler = Header::HandlerSet.new
@@ -135,7 +137,9 @@
 
       :generate_explicit_type => @generate_explicit_type,
       :use_default_namespace =>
-        op_info.use_default_namespace || @use_default_namespace
+        op_info.use_default_namespace || @use_default_namespace,
+      :http_headers =>  @http_headers
+
     )
     resopt = create_encoding_opt(
       :envelopenamespace => @options["soap.envelope.responsenamespace"],
@@ -168,6 +172,9 @@
     end
     reqopt[:external_content] = nil
     conn_data = marshal(req_env, reqopt)
+    if reqopt[:http_headers].present?
+      conn_data.extheaders = reqopt[:http_headers]
+    end
     if ext = reqopt[:external_content]
       mime = MIMEMessage.new
       ext.each do |k, v|
@@ -299,6 +305,7 @@
     opt[:default_encodingstyle] = @default_encodingstyle
     opt[:allow_unqualified_element] = @allow_unqualified_element
     opt[:generate_explicit_type] = @generate_explicit_type
+    opt[:http_headers] = @http_headers
     opt[:no_indent] = @options["soap.envelope.no_indent"]
     opt[:use_numeric_character_reference] =
       @options["soap.envelope.use_numeric_character_reference"]
Index: vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/rpc/driver.rb
===================================================================
--- vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/rpc/driver.rb (revision 4217)
+++ vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/rpc/driver.rb (working copy)
@@ -211,6 +211,9 @@
     opt.add_hook("protocol.generate_explicit_type") do |key, value|
       @proxy.generate_explicit_type = value
     end
+    opt.add_hook("protocol.http_custom_headers") do |key, value|
+      @proxy.http_headers = value
+    end
     opt.add_hook("protocol.use_default_namespace") do |key, value|
       @proxy.use_default_namespace = value
     end
Index: vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/streamHandler.rb
===================================================================
--- vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/streamHandler.rb (revision 4217)
+++ vendor/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/streamHandler.rb (working copy)
@@ -34,6 +34,8 @@
     attr_accessor :is_nocontent
     attr_accessor :soapaction
 
+    attr_accessor :extheaders
+
     def initialize(send_string = nil)
       @send_string = send_string
       @send_contenttype = nil
@@ -42,6 +44,7 @@
       @is_fault = false
       @is_nocontent = false
       @soapaction = nil
+      @extheaders = nil
     end
   end
 
@@ -230,6 +233,13 @@
     extheader['Content-Type'] = conn_data.send_contenttype
     extheader['SOAPAction'] = "\"#{ conn_data.soapaction }\""
     extheader['Accept-Encoding'] = 'gzip' if send_accept_encoding_gzip?
+    # allow us to pass in custom HTTP headers
+    if conn_data.extheaders.present?
+      conn_data.extheaders.each do |key, value|
+        extheader[key] = value
+      end
+    end
+
     send_string = conn_data.send_string
     @wiredump_dev << "Wire dump:\n\n" if @wiredump_dev
     begin

Gotcha: migrations with trailing commas

Trailing commas are bad m'kay?

I had a pretty standard migration, which included something like the following two lines:

    create_table :my_widgets do |t|
      t.string :name, :colour, :flavour
      t.integer :supplier_id
      t.integer :height, :width, :depth,    # note this extra comma...

      t.timestamps
    end

Looked fine at a casual glance, ran just fine - no hiccups. Been using it on dev for a week or so now... no problems... Only noticed an issue when I glanced at db/schema.rb

  create_table "service_report_stats", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "name"
    t.string   "colour"
    t.string   "flavour"
    t.integer  "supplier_id"
    t.integer  "height"
    t.integer  "width"
    t.integer  "depth"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.integer  "#<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0xb5c35504>" # WTF???
  end

Something seriously wrong with that last "integer" column... mysql shows that yes, that is actually the column's real name:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field                                                           | Type     | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id                                                              | int(11)  | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| supplier_id                                                     | int(11)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
.... etc ...
| created_at                                                      | datetime | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| updated_at                                                      | datetime | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| #<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0xb5c35504> | int(11)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Right now I have NFI how to actually remove the column... because trying:
alter table my_widgets drop column #<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0xb5c35504>;
Just results in: ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; , and it won't accept it if I put it in quotes either... so the column currently remains as is.

Luckily I was playing with a branch of the real system - so it's only my dev-box's code that has been mucked about... and I can change the migration before anybody else uses it... but this is seriously weird behaviour on Rails' part. Not a raised exception or even a raised eyebrow... it sailed right through and is continuing on regardless.

To actually fix it, I had to create a migration with the following:

    remove_column :my_widgets,  "#<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0xb5c35504>"

Seems the Rails itself can tell mysql about a weirdly-named column somehow. I'd still like to know the actual SQL involved...