Make your own game or make your own reality bubble - Games for stress disorder therapy

I have been kicking around the idea of an article on how players create their own games within games or game environments.  This is a bit of a ramble to get some of the thoughts out on paper and explore the topic a bit.


Abstract

A game is, at its simplest an activity with a evaluatable objective performed within a play-space defined by the "Rules".  The "Objective" is imposed by the designer of the game. 

What happens when the player self-selects another objective but coopts the rest of the infrastructure of the game.  Is this a distinct, personal experience worthy of investigation or is this such a common behaviour that we (the players) do it as a matter of our basic function.  


A paralell topic that I have been exploring is the construction of, what I term, a local reality bubble.   This happens all the time around me.  Different people and groups of people define reality and share it.  This is normal human nature.  Reality is a construct that we define with our perceptions of the environment, imperfect memories, rationalisations about causality and communication with other agents within the same environment.  This is just neural nets playing together.

But every so often someone defines reality that conflicts markedly with the reality agreed upon by others who are perceiving much the same stimuli.  We will call the majority the "Normals" and the minory the "Crazys".  This is basic social psychology.  However, what happens when there are very few people in the two reality fields?  What happens when the populations are 1 & 1?  Which is the normal and which is the crazy? 

The key word is "Conflict".  No one cares when two reality bubbles differ but do not conflict.  Its just different and quirky.  The problem only arises when the members of the reality bubbles cannot accept that other people have a difference of perception/reality/belief as it fundamentally undermines their faith in their own construct.  Note this may be bi-directional or only uni-directional.  I.e Only one of the reality bubbles sees the conflict while the other thinks they are happily co-existing.    To borrow from highlander... "there can be only one!".



Anyway, back to the "Make your own game" thread.   I think its time for examples. 

For instance,  the game is "Hitman", the objective that is supported by the game infrastructure, the scoring system, the game environment and the narrative is that the player is on a mission to "hit" one of the fictional characters in the scenario environment. The player then needs to escape the environment and the scenario will end and the score be presented.  Designers objective complete.  No problem here.  This is entertainment if your taste runs to fantasy assasination.

Now we move into the realm of the player-as-objective-setter.

Within the scenario there are quite a few "self-selected" objectives that the player could nominate to pursue.  They might be variations on the origional scenario objective. 

"Do the hit but without killing anyone else"
"Do the hit, but use only a knife!"
"Do the hit in the fastest time possible!" 

The third one is often called a "Speed Run" and has been a popular exercise for a small sub-culture of games for many years.  They create and post movies, tips, maps etc of various games with the objective of completing the game in the minimum time possible. 

Another group of players are those interested in maximising their expereince of the designer-objectives.  These are the players who write and contribute to walk-throughs and exhaustive exploration of every fascet of the games to acheive a level of master of the designer-objective in all its subtlety.

But what about the players who elect to just wander around the game environment and spot butterflies?  For a game like "Hitman" which has quite a limited environment beyond that needed to support the assasination scenario, this will be a reasonably limited experience, but it is still a valid objective to choose to ignore the scenario and simply explore the little pocket universe of the scenario.  Look for the quirks and bugs that the designers have left intentionally or unintentionally.

So why are these self-selected objectives interesting?

What do they say about the player themselves?
What do they say about the game environments, designer-objectives and scenarios?
What are the implications for the business of game creation and sales?
How can these kinds of activities be encouraged, discouraged or manipulated?
What are the implications for more free-form play spaces that lack strong objective systems?

An interesting aside that I have been poking at for a little while is using games as therapy for people with stress disorders, such as post traumatic stress disorder.  But equally for people who have stress responses to long term experiences such as victims of domestic abuse, school and workplace bullying, stalking, ideological suppression, discrimination, persecution and other environmental stresses that create an on-going stress reaction and coping mechanisms that when transposed out of the stress producing environment are difficult to adjust.  (Ties into the reality bubble thread quite a bit)



The designer-objective

My observation (as a player and reader) is that having a designer-objective in a scenario provides both a guided experience and in these old days of limited development resources a way to focus the player on the good bits of the game and try to hide all the compromises.   These rationales have faded a little as the game hardware and software had improved with large open world games with spawling environments now being more common.  These often have a tangle of small and large missions and objectives, side quests, ethical systems and multiple "endings" that dilute the effect of having a designer-objective and may facilitate more players to self-select their own course through the possible play experinence.

However, contrast this with a play environment where there is a much lighter touch by the designer.  An example that springs to mind is "Minecraft", where there is simply a play space and a tool set.  Players self-select their objectives and there is little in the way of any scoring or feedback system to impose meaning on their behaviour.  There are a few environmental stimuli such as monsters that will intereact with the player if they remain static too long, but otherwise there is no impetus to do any particular thing in the environment.

There are a whole slew of derivative games and game editor that allow the player to construct their own environment and then experience it as they see fit.  What is there to learn from this that could be generalised?  Apart from the fact that there is a sizable population of peole who enjoy this as entertainment and find it a satisfiying use of their resources... there is probably little to conclude about the actual choices they specifically make.  There is a huge range of possible research into learning rates, curiosity and objective setting but thats another rant.

Getting back on thread.  What is the deal when a player chooses to enter a game environment with a strong designer-objective but chooses to ignore that imperative and do their own thing?  
I have experienced this in games when I get bored with the designer-objective, or the game system is flawed and the objective seems "broken".  I do not loose engagement with the game but tend to get creative and start looking for other things to do.  
How would this impact for people who want to re-write their reality bubble?  Would it provide a bridge that they could cross if they became familiar enough with the "scripted scenario" to loose interest and try something new?  Or would they continue to have such strong emotional reactions to the cues that they would remain trapped in the coping mechanisms that they are wanting to change?  In which case, simply remove the cues until they reach a level that they can suppress and change, then re-introduce them and allow them to adapt at their own rate.  My hypothesis is that given some control over the cues that they are reacting to, most people would be able to adapt with exposure to a different self-selected narrative.  They would then be able to get on with self-selecting their objectives rather than being trapped in the imposed narrative.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the number of cues required to trigger a stress response would be quite small in many people with strong stress reactions, so figuring out how to "turn them down" may take some creativity but should be do-able.

This should be quite easily evaluated with something like eyetracking and galvanic skin response.  Stress is usually not hard to measure, so inducing stress and measuring interventions to see if they are more or less stressful would provide some objective insight into how stressful a scenario or environment is.

The other side of this is the feedback system.  Designer-objective games often have an abstract feedback system using quantitative "score" mechanics.  These serve to re-inforce the objective and behaviour required to complete the objectives as defined.  How do you create an abstract feedback mechanism for a very personal experience? 

I think a blunt instrument approch is probably a starting point.  Simply get the player to self select a simple positive objective and count the time taken to acheive it and some sort of progress clock.  This makes the feedback system alway a positive.  Like a progress meter rather than having any negative re-inforcment. 

For a complex environment with many stress cues, it may take a more complex scoring system with some boolean scoring items which could be represented as "medals" or "Acheivments" which add some specifics to the general "progress" score to address very specific issues in the persons scenario.  These medals can then be further refined into a small progression to give them a small scale of feeback where the therapist sees value in getting them to attend specifically to an issue in a complex scenario. I.e the medal can be changed to a progression of medals (bronze, silver, gold..etc) to represent improvments on that issue.

Finding my motivation to code again

I have been wonding about what to do to re-invigorate my love of coding.  I figure other peole have the same problem from time to time.

I have just come of the back end of a hecktic year of many small projects.  Because they are "work", there is only so much personal investment that I have in them.  I do them, and I do them well... but it's mostly repetative and ... well work.  It's not fun. Very little is novel.  There is little creativity or problem solving.

I find that after a while, this really sucks me dry as far as motivation to pick up a project when the pressure is off.

So my question to myself was, how do I find my passion again?


The first solution I tried was playing some games.  Honestly, most of the games seem very much Me-too type things that remind me of games from a decade ago.  The thought of diving in a fixing broken game play or hacking on yet another creation kit for yet another half assed clone game... blah!  These are solved problems... they are not even very fresh problems.

Brain training games are even worse... (since I kinda work on them all year anyway... ) they are utilitarian but not ... inspiring.  

The next thing I tried was some little coding competitions.  These were nice.  They got me back to my roots of solving small bounded problems quickly.  It was a challenge to do it and it forced me to use some basic coding skills that have been getting rusty through disuse.

The best problem set I have looked at so far are from Google Code Jam.  They are quick and bite sized.  The data sets are well developed and the online judge does not give you any hints.

http://code.google.com/codejam/

I have found a few more online but have not yet explored them...

https://facebook.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges

http://community.topcoder.com/tc

http://www.spoj.pl/tutorials/

http://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge&Itemid=8&category=3


The last thing I have tied is doing something old in a new way... I have started working my way through all the Kahn Academy videos... refreshing, renewing, re-finding ideas and concepts that I have not had to talk about or explain for ... well, a long time.  It's nice.  Kinda familiar, kinda half remembered.  A good refresher...

Maybe there is something there for you?

Doom 3 Source Code Reading

http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/index.php

This guy gets better with each release.  Fascinating work.

Roundup of HTML5 games technology

http://www.photonstorm.com/archives/2759/the-reality-of-html5-game-development-and-making-money-from-it

HTML5 C&C

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/23/command-and-conquer-html5

Another Skyrim Analysis thread

http://www.insidegamingdaily.com/2011/11/10/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-review/

There are some interesting feedback fragments in the comments post on this review.

Some posts on basic AI for NPC's

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=19455.0;wap2

Some good discussion of practical basic AI for game NPC's.

ifest in the land of Oz

http://www.ifest.com.au/

Looks interesting.

Digital Sydney Initiative

http://www.business.nsw.gov.au/news/nsw-announces-funding-for-20-digital-media-initiative-projects

Have a read of the proposals and try not to think... "this is the sadest bunch of me-too designs..."  clearly they were selected by funders that are both ignorant and foolish.  This is just perpetrating a parasite model rather than fostering businesses to grow.  Few of these products has legs.  As soon as the funding runs out they're toast.  The only novel one is the hearing assessment tool.. but again that seems more like an academic experiment than a viable platform.  The application is clear but the business model seems vacant.

Text vs voice chat

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2007/06/games_frontiers_0617

Looking at the impact both socially and individually of the change from

doom3 source

https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl

phd in game AI research

PhD opportunities


http://www.nicta.com.au/research/machine_learning/machine_learning_phd_opportunities


http://www.daad.de/deutschland/forschung/german-research-careers/14305.en.html?projektid=54473531&fachgebiet=0&finanzierung=0&stadt=&institution=&sprache=&personenkreis=&promotionsart=


http://www.jason.edu.au/scholarship/5365


http://www.statsci.org/jobs/2011a/110325c.html


http://topstudylinks.com/PhD-Positions-in-Computer-Vision-Machine-Learning-Freiburg,-Germany-2012-2013-s301.aspx


http://www.getscholarship.net/


http://www.utas.edu.au/research/graduate-research/elite/human-interface-technology-laboratory-hitlab-australia


 http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~adrian/

http://www.scholarships-links.com/viewdetail/3011/PhD-Candidates-Gaming-and-HCI-in-cars.html


http://scholarshipdb.com/


http://computervisioncentral.com/jobs/full

http://www.youngbrigades.com/postdoctoral-fellowships/france-two-postdoctoral-positions-in-computer-science-machine-learning.html


People and groups

http://gameai.itu.dk/index.php/About

http://www.unimaas.nl/games/

http://www.ieee-cig.org/

http://aigamedev.com/

http://home.cc.gatech.edu/ccl/2

http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/

 http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/

http://www.rit.edu/gccis/gameeducationjournal/


http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~bgorman/

http://cognitivecomputing.wordpress.com/ccl-team/

http://www.nicta.com.au/about


http://www.eecs.umich.edu/ai/faculty.html

http://www-kd.iai.uni-bonn.de/people.php?kristian.kersting


http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~herbertj/cv.html

http://gambit.mit.edu/credits/

http://www.csml.ucl.ac.uk/courses/msc_ml/

http://goertzel.org/Goertzel_resume.pdf

http://140.118.155.153/~pao/

http://gameai.itu.dk/psm/index.php?title=Members


http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~kulikows/


Australian Groups and People

http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/research/isg/people.html

http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~dkamen/research.htm

http://au.linkedin.com/in/drrobertlayton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Computer_Science

http://www.une.edu.au/study/computer-science/

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/chess.html

http://uob-community.ballarat.edu.au/~pvamplew/index.html

http://web.science.mq.edu.au/~manolya/cv-mk.html

http://ssll.cecs.anu.edu.au/speakers/mlss

http://chai.it.usyd.edu.au/Seminars/2011


http://strategicgames.com.au/index.php?p=1_14

http://www.flinders.edu.au/people/tom.anderson

http://seit.unsw.adfa.edu.au/staff/sites/kshafi/

http://www.uow.edu.au/~koren/

http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~xiaodong/aciss09/tutorials.html

http://charybdis.mit.csu.edu.au/crics/members.php


http://www.ict.csiro.au/staff/shiping.chen/

http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~visual/kaixu/


http://www.handbook.uts.edu.au/it/area/pg.html

http://cs.anu.edu.au/research/groups/ai

http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/liuw/index.html


Conferences

http://gameaiconf.com/

http://geneura.ugr.es/cig2012/

http://gcap.com.au/

http://summit2011.singinst.org.au/bios/ben-goertzel/


http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2011/aaai11tutorials.php


Journals

http://ilk.uvt.nl/icga/journal/

http://www.gdmag.com/homepage.htm

http://gamestudiesbook.net/category/journals/

http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/

http://www.newmediaandsociety.com/

http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/

http://www.gamejournal.org/

http://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/

http://gamestudies.org/1102

http://gac.sagepub.com/




Commercial AI groups

http://www.spirops.com/

http://www.ekione.com/

http://www.pathengine.com/

http://www.havok.com/

http://opencog.org/


http://gdaa.com.au/

http://kioloa08.mlss.cc/files/hutter2.pdf

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/people.html


Mailing Lists

http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.machine-learning


Interesting articles that turned up in the search

http://aigamedev.com/open/interview/racing-games-computational-intelligence/

http://aigamedev.com/open/article/preview-biologically-inspired-ai/

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ijcaiigames/

http://www.gametheory.net/lectures/level.pl

http://doras.dcu.ie/view/subjects/CO.html

http://www.igi-global.com/book/machine-learning-human-motion-analysis/701

http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/garmitage/publist.html

http://www.dtic.ua.es/~jgarcia/IJCNN2012/organizers.html

http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/mix4c/am_i_planning_it_right_for_a_phd_in_ml/

http://sml.nicta.com.au/isml08/fsml.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments

Skyrim Analysis

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/20/review-skyrim/

This is an interesting analysis of the UI and play models in Skyrim. Its interesting to note how reviews are generally no longer focusing on graphics and performance. I feel like we are past that point (as long as you can throw enough CPU/GPU horse power at the game) My point is that playability and User Experience are now the weak points.

From the review above, the cons are:

• Combat isn’t very visceral, and victories and losses feel unearned
• Menus and interface are terrible
• While the world is wide open, most quests and dungeons are very linear
• Bugs abound, especially with physics

These issues are the next things to be addressed in games research.  The fact that everyone has been banging on about them for the past two decades shows just how hard they are to get right.   Especially in the context of producing a AAA title across a couple of platforms with different User experiences and interface models.


Combat isn't very visceral
Combat as a visceral experience... interesting idea from the reviewer.  While I agree that its the objective of this kind of game, to make any interaction really immersive is going to take something more than a mouse(insert UI device here) and a single dimension screen to make me feel immersed.  The monitor wall's and head mounted goggles are a big step to remove the need to manually track your head around in an environment, but there is still a long way to go before everyone has access to something like that.  Kinect is a step in the right direction but its too loose at the moment to really work well.  I think it would be much improved with some additional channels of resolution and maybe a few precision channels of data like a head axis positioning system,(crown with some position knobs) precision line of sight and precision location and orientation for hands (maybe some simple cuffs with 3D position knobs) and let the rest of the Kinect data stream fill in the gaps.

The second part of combat being visceral is feedback. Haptic controls have not really evolved much and are still trying hard to solve the most basic problems.  This is more about technology and materials than about intent.  The strategies are still the same.  Immerse the player in some system that can simulate feedback with reasonable resolution.  For a CRPG game this could be as diverse as holding an object, taking blows, falling or flying, jumping, landing, being swept down a river or just walking on a soft surface.  The ability to simulate these kinds of environments safely is not here.  Everyone will want one when they are availible from your local gadget seller... but they are just not here. So wishing combat was more visceral is important to keep the bar high... but its just not feasible to go beyond the limitations of the UI devices we currently have.


Victories and Losses feel unearned
This is an interesting problem that is much more complex than simply a limited UI.  There are real issues with perception and feedback at work here.  To complicate it, individual players will have quite different perceptions and desires in this particular space.

Lets break it down a little.

• How hard should a player work for an objective? ( be it a victory or some other objective)
• How balanced should this sub-section be of the overall section of narrative or mission? 
• What are the highs and lows of the variable reward model currently in play? 
• How do you keep something fresh, if the scenario itself is repetitive ( attacked by wolf?)

This is as much about player perceptions.  I have written about this particular group of problems and proposed some solutions before but honestly they are just guesses until I have the resources to get paid and solve these kinds of problems.  The strategy that I propose is that both the narrative engine and the perception engine are abstracted and deal with the narrative and player models explicitly as a construct that the game engine manipulates.  (Not that the game manipulates the player, just that the players state by explicitly measured and modeled continuously so the game engine has some concept of player state and can then make decisions based on that understanding.)
The key point is the abstraction of the narrative structure and its relationship with the player state at any point in time. The information in these two models can then be instantiated via the concrete game objects, characters and scenarios, rather than, as currently happens, each of these elements acts as either discreet and independant agents or as a chain of artificially scripted agents who hopefully fit all players equally (badly).
Again, this all comes back to the "commonality" of experience, which is based on a basic desire for repeatability and predictability.  This is essential for debugging... but only until the game engines evolve and abstract all this functionality out into a higher level construct.

So how does all this rambling address the "victories feel unearned" issue?  Well, if the player model was reasonably well developed and informed via some subtle evaluation of the players behavior, the game engine should be able to tune the "encounter" appropriately to provide the player with a challenge of sufficient uniqueness and magnitude to keep the player engaged.  This information is then combined with the current narrative model, to determine if this "encounter" should be big or small depending on the stage in the current narrative arc that the player is within.

This kind of model points the way forward for managing the engagement and satisfaction of players in the game.  Which then points the way forward for using these kinds of  immersive environments for specific training purposes.  


Weak AI
The reviewer took time to critique the same-ness of the AI used in the game, which I feel ties into this point.  For a game of this scope to have weak AI is pretty embarrassing.  I would suggest that after the epic re-write of their engine, the AI subsection is just not as polished yet.  This is a fairly solved problem, so it does raise the question of priorities in the development process.  My guess would be that "good enough" AI was acceptable by the majority of the playtester and they stopped putting resources into that section.  After all, development is a resource constrained activity.

Hopefully the mod community will be able to patch this particular problem or expose the API enough to let others have a run at building better AI for the game.

Menus and Interface are Terrible
There are some novel interface metaphors in Skyrim ( such as the star constellations for the progression tree) which add a very nice immersive touch.  These are more information visualization elements, rather than functional information navigation tools.

The fact that the interfaces have been tuned for navigation by a controller with limited buttons is both a blessing and a curse.  Having a slew of hotkeys availible on a PC keyboard is useful but can present a steep learning curve for novice players, this affects the pace that the game can be played between novice and expert players and has detrimental effects for players who want to play in a "pickup" style.  ( It could also be argued that these kinds of games are probably not intended for a "pickup" audience... they are almost study Sims that need a fair bit of experience before you can get into them.) 

Anyway, by keeping the Interface approachable, it forces the designers to reign in the control explosion that can happen and keeps the cognitive load manageable.  On the other hand, it puts a ceiling on the way expert players can drive the interface.  This is the sort of thing the mod community is probably better at solving than the initial development team; as long as the API's are open enough to allow the modders to rebuild the UI.


Linear Quests and Dungeon
This is where my interest lies.  Again, as I stated above, I believe this is strongly tied to the problem of "commonality" of experience.  (Again, both for debugging and for comparison between players)
The reason that the quests and dungeons are linear is that its simply to expensive to hand tune quests and dungeons with multiple permutations of possible paths.  This is simply a manpower issue that is not solvable by current development teams.  THIS PROBLEM CANNOT BE FIXED WITH CURRENT TOOLS.

The only solution is to make the computer do the heavy lifting (which is what we keep them around for), but for this to happen, we need an abstract way to describe the narrative which the computer can then manage and for this to work, we need an abstract model of the player as a component in the narrative.  See above rant for more details. 

Once we have a functional model for narratives ( .. oh wait there's a bunch already...) that are easy to implement and a control engine that can handle it under resource competition with the graphics and animation engines ( resource budgets again) it should be fairly straight forward to script.  The problem is that "commonality" of experience may evaporate.  This has been happening already so it's probably not going to be the radical shock that I suggest, but it will still be a revolutionary change that will overturn a couple of the conventions that exist in the game world.  How do we know we are playing the same game if it evolves every time we play it?  My experience will be totally different to yours... theoretically down to really fundamental levels that currently we take for granted as completely immutable truths in the environment. Well immutable until the modders take a hack at it anyway. But even mods are fairly static. I am talking about a system that can dynamically mix and match the narrative and experience to the player at many levels.  Unless the player is exactly the same each time, every replay, even by the same player should be distinct.

I still expect some mechanism to emerge that will allow side by side comparisons of player experiences, perhaps the idea of "set" quests that do not dynamically adapt or some sort of set "level" to play at that fixes the player model so the game can be tested and debugged as well as allow "walkthroughs" and other advice services to still have a frame of reference. But beyond these I expect a fully dynamic play experience that focuses on the player and adapts the world to provide the maximum play experience possible using all the narrative trickery possible.

Bugs in the physics 
Ok, the bugs in the physics engine is just embarrassing, but this is kind of accepted for a game of this magnitude and will probably get tuned out in the first round of patches.

The same problems are still around that have not been solved from the first CRPG's.  The thing to keep in mind is that unlike FPS games, CRPG games are usually solo experiences, online MMPRPG's have a different dynamic and will never be the same type of player centric experience.  

Here's a link to the skyrim site for more info and pretty pics
http://www.elderscrolls.com/skyrim

Here's a link to the skyrim modding community (I'm sure there are more sites growing as I type...)
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/index.php

Analysis of portable gaming device market

http://www.asymco.com/2011/11/16/the-end-of-the-dedicated-portable-device/

This is both an interesting analysis and an analysis of an interesting topic.  Good work.

HTML5 Games and Tools

http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos

This looks like an interesting tool kit... its in beta too ... so how much better can it be without bugs?

More Kinect SDK stuff

http://www.kinectforwindows.org/

Is there a limit to the Kinect goodness?  Will Sony finally release something similar....

Basic Computer Games

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/index.php


Old skool....

Basic Game Hardware Project

http://pragprog.com/magazines/2011-08/make-your-own-video-game-system

Hacking video games with Arduino... maybe I can fix that N64....

Reading Quake 2 Source for Pleasure

http://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php

Time on your hands huh?  I would really like to be able to do this...

HTML5 Games

http://www.html5grind.com/category/games/

Interesting site on HTML5 for games.  Need to read some more here.