Four weeks with the Steam Deck: a limited review

This past Thursday I finished making changes to my second paper and writing the response to the referee about it, and sent them around to my co-authors. While I'm not completely done at this stage, that should be the last really major bit of work I need to do on both papers, and I should – finally – start having a bit more free time to devote to other pursuits once again. Like, say, writing more blog posts.

My productivity these past four weeks has not been helped by the arrival of my long-awaited Steam Deck. If you don't know what a Steam Deck is, it's probably easiest just to show you a picture:

Briefly, it's a portable hand-held computer designed for playing games pretty much anywhere. Valve, the company behind Steam (the biggest digital game store for PCs), announced them out of the blue last year (I want to say around August), with a few days' warning before opening up a system where people could put $5 down to reserve a spot in a queue to be able to buy one as Valve produced them. Originally slated for Christmas 2021, they were delayed to the end of March due to supply chain issues, but have been steadily rolling out since with production ramping up over time.

They also turned out to be overwhelmingly popular. I got my reservation in about an hour and fifteen minutes after the system went live (which necessitated getting up at 4 AM in Melbourne), and it took over four months before they worked through all the reservations before mine and I got my eagerly-awaited email letting me know I could put in an order. (I'd have been in the first five minutes if the Steam servers hadn't overloaded and crashed with everyone trying to reserve one at once when it went live.)

It's basically the device I've been waiting for practically my entire life, though hardware and technology needed to advance to this point before it could be made. It's not the first portable hand-held gaming system on the market; there have been a number over the past few decades. But unlike the others, this is a full-fledged computer running a Linux-based operating system, which means it will run tens of thousands of games out of the box (including those from other systems via emulation). It's tightly integrated with Steam, which meant that upon starting it up and logging into my account my entire gaming library was available to download and play (though not everything works well just yet, as a lot of games don't have great controller support and have to use the trackpads for mouse emulation).

Take it outside and get some fresh air! (Though I wouldn't play in full sun. Also hand for scale.)

Anyway, this is the device I wished I had on every interminable, cramped, awkward flight I've ever been on. I've tried gaming on flights with laptops in the past, but laptops are a very imperfect solution to the problem of taking your PC games on the go. They're unwieldy in the confines of a tiny airline seat, and since they're general purpose devices you're wasting a lot of battery power on things superfluous to running your game. Ultimately, it was not a fun experience nor one I repeated more than once or twice. I'm still not looking forward to whenever I have to fly next, but at least I'll have something to help mitigate the misery now. 

Beyond future flight speculations, I've also found the Deck to be quite nice as a way to play games other than at my desk. This surprised me, since I've never thought of gaming at my desk as arduous, but it turns out to be really nice to game on the couch, or on my bed, or even (gasp!) outdoors. 3D games tend to sap the battery pretty quickly and I wouldn't generally play them on the Deck (I do still have a beefy PC for that), but smaller 2D games (of which I have a fair number) work quite well and many can be played for upwards of 6 hours (long enough to get me from Hawaii to the mainland or vice versa).

There's a lot more to the Deck that I haven't mentioned (like how it has a microSD card slot that you can put games on for effectively unlimited extra storage), but other people have covered it better than me by now, and honestly if you're reading this you probably already know if you want one or not. (Though I'll try to answer any questions people might have.) I've had it for a little over four weeks now, and I've really enjoyed having it around to pick up and play something for a short burst, or to do so away from my desk. I'm looking forward to years more enjoyment out of it (and some flights rendered less of an awful experience), and as it's getting late here I think I'll go do a little gaming in bed before hitting the hay. A hui hou!

Research recap, or: why I haven't had time to post this month

It's been pretty quiet on the blog front here this month, though not because things have been quiet for me. I realize now that I never mentioned it, but around the end of May (right when I had COVID-19) I received referee reports for the two papers I'd submitted back at the beginning of April (which contain basically all the work from my PhD project). After recovering from COVID I started working on making changes and writing our responses to the referees (one for each paper) at a leisurely pace. While I was certainly intending to be faster than the six-month deadline, I also wasn't in huge rush during the few-week recovery period where I still felt less able to concentrate or think hard. (Especially in the evenings after a full day of working my day job!)

At least, I wasn't in a rush until a few weeks ago. See, in addition to my two papers, there was a third (primarily written by my advisor but with all of us in my research group as co-authors) which we had submitted to the journal Science, with the intention that all three would come out at the same time. (If you don't know, Science is one of the two premier journals [along with Nature] in the physical sciences, so it being published there would be a big deal for our combined research.) Around the beginning of July we finally got the referee reports back for that paper, which were…mixed. Two out of three recommended the paper be published, while the third had some reservations and didn't recommend it for publication. One of their sticking points was that the Science paper relied on my papers for further details, and my papers hadn't been accepted for publication yet. Fortunately, the editor at Science in charge of our paper was inclined towards the two favorable reviewers, and after some back-and-forth indicated that my papers being accepted would go a long way towards resolving the unfavorable reviewer's qualms and help tip the balance in favor of our Science paper being accepted.

This had the immediate effect of turning my sedate response-generation process into a mad-cap dash to get the responses to the referees back and the papers accepted. In some good news, the changes needed for my second paper were quite minimal, I was able to submit it last week, and a day later I got the news that it was accepted for publication. Which is a big milestone, considering it's the first paper I've written that's been accepted; it's also the one which the Science paper primarily references, so its acceptance means that paper can move along as well. I've had no time to rest on my laurels, however, since my first paper still needs editing, and in order to have all three papers come out together it'd be good to get it resubmitted and (hopefully) accepted as soon as possible. So my free time has been in pretty short supply so far this month, as the first paper had a lot more comments to reply to than the second. That doesn't mean I haven't done anything else (I still have to rest and recuperate sometime), and I'm looking forward to sharing some of what I've been up to in future posts. (I originally meant this post to be about something different, but realized I needed to explain what I've been up to first.) But if those posts aren't immediately forthcoming, well, you'll know why. I'm optimistically projecting I'll be done with the first paper response by sometime next week, and then hopefully I'll once again have more free time on my hands. But we'll see! A hui hou!