I recently finished Rocksteady’s excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum. It is a good game, but I feel that its detective vision mode is not particularly meaningful. It’s useful, but using it is not special nor interesting—and it could have been, if it were less powerful or less available.

Nothing lost, much gained

Detective mode includes a form of night vision, which makes it easy for the player to find her way in the dark. When close to certain enemies and items, detective mode brings up a little window with information on that item: stuff like its state, weaknesses, and backstory. It also highlights doors and vents, collectibles, destructable walls, hackable circuit boxes, and armed enemies. Further, the answer to many of the Riddler’s puzzles can only be found when in detective mode.

The only thing detective mode lacks is a downside. It gives the player a number of advantages over the game’s enemies and environments, but has no cost, no time limit, no weaknesses. Indeed, playing through Arkham Asylum, I found myself in detective mode all the time. As Yahtzee asks, “Why would you ever want to turn it off?”¹

Arkham Asylum tries to encourage the player to step out of detective mode now and then (it takes the player out of detective mode whenever she finishes off the last thug in a room or triggers a cutscene), but everything the game gives the player to do is easier when she’s in it.

Arkham Asylum misses an opportunity to present the player an interesting choice. As it is, the player never has to consider whether or not to use detective mode. The player is made to think when solving puzzles and during combat—should she attack, dodge, or counter?—but to stay in detective mode is a no-brainer.

Trade a strength for a weakness

Arkham Asylum could make its detective mode better by making it weaker or more limited. Vision modes in other games are not only useful, but also give the player a choice to make. They provide a trade-off between some advantages and disadvantages, and thereby make the choice to use these modes meaningful.

The flashlight in Half-Life can be used for a time limited by its battery power. Deus Ex‘s tech goggles provide night vision, but have a hard time limit, and cover only part of the player’s vision. In Doom 3, the flashlight occupies the player character’s hands, and so trades light for the ability to use more powerful, ranged weapons.

These simple costs and limitations make the player use special vision modes judiciously. The player can help herself with the flashlight in dark areas of Half-Life, but can’t rely on it all the time. In Deus Ex, the player saves the tech goggles for when they are most needed, and then must take advantage of them quickly before they run out. In Doom 3, the player often finds herself fighting in a dark room, desperately swapping weapons and the flashlight.

In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the player has a number of vision modes at her disposal: night vision, heat vision, and EM vision. None of these modes are limited by time nor by what the player can or cannot do when a mode is on. Their trade-offs are all based on what the player can and cannot see when in a mode. Night vision makes it easier for the player to see in the dark, but makes it much harder to see well-lit areas and distorts the edges of the player’s view. Thermal and EM modes each highlight a certain kind of enemy or item, but make it much more difficult to see other kinds of enemies or items.

The result is that the player has to decide when and where to enter into a vision mode, when seeing enemies clearly is more important than seeing any nearby surveillance cameras, for example. These trade-offs make modes meaningful tools in play.

It’s too bad that Arkham Asylum‘s detective mode isn’t meaningful in a similar way.

My friend Max and I have been playing Mass Effect 2 on the 360. Though not quite what I expected, it is an interesting mix of action and role-playing and, in many ways, a smoother experience than its prequel.

Unfortunately, there is one thing about it that has gotten to me: the powers screen and the B button. It may not sound like much, but I have been jumping out of the powers screen and into a mission prematurely every time—even after realizing what it is I’m doing wrong. To me, the powers are very important; knowing that I’ve gone in with less than the best Shockwave available to me is aggravating. Worse yet, I get into that situation because of a silly interface oversight.

Powerless to stop it

In the case of Mass Effect 2‘s pre-mission setup, the player must first choose two party members, equip them with weapons, and, lastly, upgrade their powers. In most of these screens, the B button is used to go back a step. In the weapons screens, B backs out of screens in which the player equips a certain party member with weapons to a screen in which she can then select a different party member to equip. To change weapons or check what each member will carry into a mission, the player needs to use the B button several times to navigate the weapons screens.

In the powers screen, however, the B button does not move between party members. Unlike the weapons screens that precede it, in the powers screen the left and right triggers are used to switch party members. Since the player has just come from a set of screens in which the B button is used to navigate between details and party members (and, perhaps, because she is somewhat distracted by the task of spending upgrade points on powers), it is not unreasonable that she press B to switch to the next party member and spend its upgrade points.

Unfortunately, B doesn’t work that way in the powers screen, and instead exits the party setup screens and begins the mission. From there, the player has to load the pre-mission auto-save and redo her party setup, or play through the mission without the benefit of having spent her hard-earned upgrade points.¹

This kind of error is known as a slip: intending to do something but performing the wrong action. In this case, the player intends to switch characters or go back, but presses the button that exits the powers screen instead. Slips often happen when someone acts automatically, doing what she is used to doing in a certain context.

The previous setup screens, and Xbox UI convention, cause the player to expect that the B button will go back, not advance. Even though the function of each of the buttons is stated on the screen, the player’s expectations and habits are so strong that, even if she bothers to read them, she may go ahead and press the wrong button anyway.

B consistent

This kind of error could have been avoided. The screens could have used a consistent arrangement and means of navigation. If every screen worked the same way, the player wouldn’t get caught expecting one thing but executing another.

For example, powers setup could have been designed to use the same multi-screen design as the weapons setup: one screen listing the party members, each of which leads to a screen with details of that specific member’s powers; B to go back. Alternatively, it would’ve been possible to have the Start button advance, and B go back², on every screen.

I don’t mean to take away from Mass Effect 2: it’s a pretty good game, and has improved on its predecessor. Overall, its interface is simpler and easier to use than it was in Mass Effect. The game’s design, generally, seems to be much more consistent and comfortable to play. It’s just a shame that this problem made it into the final release.

Dead Space aims to be scary. Its creators went to great lengths to create a spooky atmosphere, to make the player feel tense and, at moments, panicked. Its play, characters, environments, sounds, and user interface are designed to support such feelings.

Unfortunately, some aspects of the game undermine its scariness. Particularly, its way of providing the player with ammo and its storage system spoil opportunities to make the player feel desperate. Dead Space tries to convince the player that items are scarce, but does not deliver on the threat. Instead, it keeps the player well supplied and safe from making meaningful choices about what she carries. Monsters aren’t so scary when the player has a full clip.

Ammo, ammo everywhere

Early in Dead Space, tutorials and tips encourage the player to conserve ammunition. This advice is not useful: there is a lot of ammo in the game world. The player doesn’t need be too careful, as she can expect to find ammunition throughout the environment in boxes, lockers, and corpses.

Not only that, the player can expect to find exactly the kind of ammo she needs. There is a system that monitors the player’s inventory and sprinkles just what she needs a few rooms ahead of her. If she’s carrying the line gun, she’ll find more line racks. When the player drops or sells the line gun, line racks are nowhere to be found.

As it is, the player is not made to worry about being careful with her shooting. Firing at monsters’ weak spots is more a matter of efficiency than of conservation. Ammunition isn’t valued as highly as it would be if it were harder to come across.

The adaptive system could have been tuned to keep the player just barely capable of surviving: spawning ammo only when the player’s supply is very low. When the player is well-enough equipped, perhaps it could spawn ammunition for weapons the player does not carry, or lock some boxes and lockers.¹

Storage is too safe

Vending machines in Dead Space provide access to a personal storage space. Since ammo is abundant and storage available, the player is not likely to ever have to trade-off, say, four shots of the line gun for more stasis energy: the line racks can be kept for a rainy day. The decision to carry, drop, or sell an item can be put off by storing the item for later use.

Instead of encouraging pack rats, Dead Space should make the most of the tension that “comes from managing very limited resources.” If the player has a lot of items, she should be made to decide which are most important. This will make managing her inventory meaningful, and create a better sense of being alone, of getting by with the skin of her teeth (and the few medikits in her inventory).

It looks real because it is real

It is no mistake that, in WALL·E, trash looks real. The city-cum-junkyard in which WALL·E is marooned is full of texture, dust, and detail. The wasted city’s realness is meaningful¹: it is a vision of the future of the world outside of the movie, the real world.

Pixar’s realism is not used only to echo a timely, real-world fear, but also to argue that humans are responsible. The humans in old recordings of Earth are not computer-generated, but flesh-and-bone actors. Earth is ruined, and real humans ruined it.

Further, the damage is the result of familiar, even friendly forces. The mountains of garbage were not caused by some large, international conflict (Planet of the Apes), deadly virus (I Am Legend), or alien invasion (Independence Day), but by consumerism and apathy. There are no flashbacks to secret labs or mushroom clouds, but instead chirpy billboard advertisements; no glowing craters, but bras, tires, and other recognizable bits of trash.

In these ways, WALL·E uses realism and familiarity to tie its tale to the world outside the theatre. The unreal slickness of the Axiom and the goofy look of its inhabitants sets them apart from our experience. It is much more difficult to separate ourselves from the mountain of discarded boots and refrigerators, or the call to “abandon the planet” from a tired, wrinkled authority behind a White-House–like podium.²

From mothership to stewardship

As strong as its position on the dangers of pollution is, WALL·E fumbles its argument in the end. Though the realism of the first half says the danger is real and heedless consumerism a poison, the second half claims the solution is eagerness and care.

The film’s position seems to be what Rosemary Ruether calls the Protestant stewardship approach: “Nature must be regarded as an object, not as a subject. It is our possession, but we must possess it in a thrifty rather than a profligate way.” With care and hard work, the Earth can be saved. Nature and health are grand projects of conservation.

Hopeful though it is, this position often does not consider the historical and economic context in which damage and restoration occur. As Annalee Newitz notes, “everybody on Earth is dead except for those who could afford to take what is billed as ‘an executive class cruise’ on the BnL ship.”

This makes the film’s end seem not just naïve, but macabre. If unprepared humans (dreaming of “pizza plants”), galaxies and generations away from those familiar with Earth and the causes of its destruction, can repair the damage through good will and elbow grease, why did they not do so earlier?

Ultimately, as damning as WALL·E‘s opening setting may be, its philosophy is toothless. It reduces the environmental problem to one between Nature and Man (the only things mentioned in “Down to Earth”, the song that plays over the credits), discarding the economic dimension. Having shown the audience its own dire situation and condemned its destructive habits, the film tells it that everything can be okay, that we can have buildings and high technology and a green world so long as we plant enough seeds.

Mirror’s Edge, which I played through recently, provided me a patchy experience. It was sometimes thrilling, sometimes aggravating. In ways, Mirror’s Edge is its own worst enemy.

The most common actions of the game, running, climbing, and jumping, were great. The experience of free running through a modern city was sensational, in both senses of the word. I felt a rush when I managed to escape a dozen armed guards by running through an office building, vaulting over desks, then leaping out of a window onto another building’s roof.

There was a fluidity about doing these things, as if I were really pulling off something acrobatic. The lack of explicit health and speed meters and the presence of my character’s body—my hands would grab ledges, my fingers would push against walls, and when I looked down, I could see my feet, all while my character panted and gasped from exerting herself—reinforced my feeling of being in those places, of being a physical actor in that world.

When I carried out some clever combination of jumping and climbing to reach a distant catwalk, I felt as if I’d accomplished something. Sure, I was only pressing buttons on a gamepad, I was only following the paths created and allowed by the designers¹, but it was exciting, rewarding. In those moments, Mirror’s Edge was excellent.

Falling flat

In those moments, it was excellent—but not throughout. For each amazing run there were a half-dozen difficult obstacles or gaps that would bring the game to a sudden halt. For each puzzle there would be a frustrating fight sequence that required several playthroughs to memorize, optimize, and then, with luck, overcome. Flow turned to frustration as I was shot or plummeted to my death over and over and over again.

I know I’m not the best game player in the world (probably fourth- or fifth-best), so I expected to die a few times. Trouble was, I often didn’t feel responsible for my deaths. The obstacles, be they large gaps or police, appeared out of nowhere and took many attempts to get past. It felt unfair² and sudden. I had been running along well until I had to stop and fight through a dozen SWAT troops awkwardly, or have them shoot me to bits while I searched for that one way out. It was as if the designers were stuffing in infuriating play to break apart the thrill of parkour—exactly what is most enjoyable and original.

Story problems

I saw similarly harsh shifts in the way the game’s story was told. Some story sequences occurred in the game world and were told to me in the game, from my first-person perspective. These were okay. The majority, however, were presented in animated sequences that looked different from the world I was running through. The first-person, 3D, textured game world in which I could act would become a third-person, 2D, flat cartoon story world where I could do nothing but watch. The plot was divorced from game in perspective, presentation, and style, and these differences underscored just how irrelevant the story was to what I was doing in the game.

Faith, the character I played as, would visit places and interact with characters in the cutscenes that I never would truly interact with in the game. It was as if the storytellers were working on another game, parallel to the one I was playing, sometimes pulling me out of my body and making me watch the Erin eSurance commercials they’d made.

What confuses me further is that the game’s designers created this contrast purposefully. In an interview for Gamasutra, the game’s producer said,

We think it’s really cool the way you get glimpses of Faith in the game world: You see her in reflections, you see her in shadow, and I think that gives a really nice feel to the game. Obviously, in the storytelling we do, you see Faith, but we actually show her in a different way, so it’s 2D, more cartoon animation.

If glimpsing the character in the world gives the player a “nice feel,” why change that when telling the story?

We wanted people to take notice; we wanted people to look at the story, and understand the story, because that’s very important to us. We feel that you have a much stronger experience if you understand why, as you progress, and things change, and there are twists and turns.

It’s odd that they would want to point out how apart the story and game are. Rather than have it occur in the world of the player, as a consequence of the player’s actions, they set apart to be looked at and considered on its own. In my experience, the story did not motivate or reward me, it just filled the gaps in time and setting between levels.

An empty world

Though Mirror’s Edge communicated the sense of running across rooftops in a big city, I felt that the universe (characters, factions, history) in which it is set was not well established. The buildings are realized beautifully, but the city is not: there are almost no pedestrians and cars. The police are present on screen, but there’s no sense of the malicious surveillance and evil government that is to be behind them. I was told that times were rough, the the city had changed, but I spent the game running on shiny white rooftops or swinging from chrome flagpoles in a chic mall: it didn’t look so bad to me, just a little empty. Characters were introduced and suddenly of critical importance or killed off. Faith was supposed to be a member of a covert group of messengers, but I was only told who they were and what I did for them, I never did it myself—not that it mattered, as I was trying to clear the name of my sister, not save the city. (I ended up doing both!)

I think the game could’ve done with halving its cast, simplifying its plot, and showing (not merely telling) me who I was and why the city was so bad. A few early missions in which I would have had to have acted as a rebel messenger (perhaps take messages to political prisoners, or move a rebel’s supply of medicine of supplies from one cache to another) would likely have helped establish Faith, her world, and her cause. The game sped past this sort of tone-setting, motivational stuff, as if it assumed I was already aware of (and on board with) what my character did and why. In the game, I was a Person of Great Consequence without earning it, before I had a chance to understand how that was different from being Faith, parkour messenger.³ I was chased out of tutorial by gun-toting policemen, with only the narrator in my ear to explain why I thought it worth risking my life to go save some guy called Robert Pope.

Mirror-world Thief

I enjoyed Mirror’s Edge nonetheless because of the quality of the free running, wall climbing, and leaping shone through the frustration and story. Which brings me to Looking Glass’s Thief: The Dark Project.

Mirror’s Edge and Thief have a lot in common. They are both played from a first-person perspective, both are unusual in that they (arguably) don’t require the player to fight—they discourage the player from entering combat by make it difficult and close. Both take place, for the most part, in cities populated with few civilians, but many armed, semi-competent guards. Both convey the bulk of their narrative through animated, stylized cutscenes that come between missions. Lastly, Mirror’s Edge and Thief alike in that, despite identifying many shortcomings, despite being angered by the game for creating situations in which I failed again and again and again, I liked both games. I stopped playing out of frustration several times, I didn’t care much about the characters, but I genuinely enjoyed hiding from guards in Thief and jumping from rooftop to rooftop in Mirror’s Edge. Their mechanics—the verbs players use to describe their actions in the game—are what redeemed them⁴.

The nature of these mechanics (slow sneaking in Thief, speedy acrobatics in Mirror’s Edge), and the contexts in which players carry them out (Thief‘s dark, early industrial, somewhat medieval setting; the sunny, modern, near-future city in Mirror’s Edge) are almost entirely contrary, but, in essence, the games are alike: they both make it fun to get from point A to point B, without fighting (too much), by taking advantage of the environment and the player character’s skills.

So it is that I feel, as do many others, that the designers could improve Mirror’s Edge by admitting that the game is an exciting platformer and encourage players to run, climb, and jump over stuff, instead of hampering them with awkward combat or forcing things into a complicated and irrelevant story.

Thief: The Dark Project came under similar criticism for having players fight through zombie-filled catacombs rather than stick to sneaking. Its developers understood this, and, in the sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age, created a world challenged the player to do what made Thief unique and exciting: break in, sneak around, and steal stuff.

Likewise, the developers of Mirror’s Edge are now selling a set of environments designed to the strengths of the game.⁵ This makes me think that I would play through a sequel to Mirror’s Edge. The core of Mirror’s Edge is great, its faults are remediable, and its creators seem to know what they are.

…re-purposing scientific material to literary purposes without ever speaking that kind of spavined pop science-ese. The kind of lame language that says something like [holds up digital camera]: “You know, if you could see the tiny grooves that have been carved on the chip of this digital camera, why they would stretch to the moon and back three-and-a-half times!” Which is an attempt to invest wonder in a dry, industrial process. It’s the Carl Sagan school of trying to pump mystic scientism into the dryness of physics. There’s just something phoney-baloney about it because it’s taking an intellectual process that’s very much about methodically stripping the mystery out of natural phenomena and then trying to re-mystify it by approaching it from some more friendly sensibility. And there’s just something bogus about that. It has the bogusness of an adult telling a pre-pubertal child about the birds and the bees without talking about the burning needs of sexuality.

And here are a few of them.

The choice of films is a bit strange. Few would argue with including Blade Runner, Akira, RoboCop, or Terminator. But Aliens and not Alien? The entire Mad Max trilogy (more punk-looking westerns than cyberpunk)? What about Brazil, Videodrome, Johnny Mnemonic, or Strange Days?

These oversights are further compounded by the fact that six of the nine films Holden examines were written and directed by the same people. The similarities between Aliens and the Terminator series are due more to the lack of variety in Cameron’s writing than cross-generic commonality; ditto George Miller’s Mad Max. Holden’s analyses may hold for the handful of movies he chose, but they are not a very representative group of films to generalize from.

Holden often resorts to illustrating his points with pieces of other, indisputably non-cyberpunk sources. While these are refreshing to watch (Cheers dubbed over in German), they cast some doubt on the applicability of his theories to cyberpunk film. You see much more of what he talks about in bits from Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, and old NES games than from clips of Aliens.

This could be due to the level and type of analysis that Holden decides to execute. While I’ve nothing against Northrop Frye’s theory of myths—indeed, from what I know, they appear to be very widely applicable and informative—they better serve higher-level conclusions. They classify a work according to repeating structures and themes from Christian (and pre-Christian) mythology. Holden applies these large, medieval structures (the great chain of being, the seven deadly sins, etc.), and the aptness and specificity of his conclusions are just as abstract and general. What Holden says of cyberpunk films could be said as well of many other films, and likely not of many films considered to be cyberpunk.

Nothing Holden presents is wrong, really: it’s broad. It doesn’t get at the roots of cyberpunk. You would argue for a more Marxist approach. Much closer to the causes of what makes cyberpunk distinct from other (sub)genres of film are the socio-political, historical, economic forces at the time of their creation.

Although Holden never really justifies his decision to consider films from the 1980′s, by doing so (consciously or not) he has limited himself to the short period in which cyberpunk could have been thought culturally relevant. Science-fiction had moved away from the shiny space-age of the 50′s and 60′s, and the desolate post-apocalyptic imaginations of the 70′s, bringing the technological future together with desperation and sadness and into the city. The social anxieties of that time are reflected clearly in cyberpunk works: the oil scare of the seventies, the transparently two-faced reign of Reagan, fear of the Japanese, microcomputers, larger corporations, pollution, punks, and phreaks.

By the time Hollywood released Strange Days and Demolition Man cyberpunk lost cultural and political currency; it was more of an aesthetic, set dressing. The world was different by the early 1990′s, with its push for optimistic multiculturalism, awareness of truly covert and cooptive methods of marketing, and the accessibility of personal computers. The most obvious sign of this shift in mindset is the late 90′s dot-com bubble: a time full of (entrepreneurial) optimism and hopeful futurism, when money flowed as quickly and voluminously as rhetoric. Technology was thought to be liberating, democratizing, a way of establishing a new and open way of things. In some ways The Matrix demonstrated this change: beginning with what seems a straight conflict between man and machine, but ending in a very blended world where technology and flesh live together, rather than struggle. This wasn’t a rainy tragedy, it was a collectivist dream of self-sufficiency, peace, and no ethnic (even biological) social divisions.

Now, in 2007, the mid-80′s harshness of technology and corporate rule is much less pronounced, as are the glowing benefits of the internet many were keen on in the 90′s. Technology in post-cyberpunk work is not alienating, feared, imposed, an entirely separate world. It is symbiotic and ubiquitous, full of web 2.0 rounded edges: iPhones, not eyephones. Anxieties over corporate and government power continue, but the clear sense of good and bad has been diffused. Gibson himself seems eager to turn the myth of cyberspace “inside out.” His two latest novels concern characters much less certain of where they stand, working with an insubstantial but powerful, moneyed corporation that lacks a guarded dark tower headquarters. The dangers of technology and capitalism are amorphous and enabling, not evil and enslaving.

The Cyberpunk Educator does skip across the surface of this more situational interpretation, dropping lines such as “the main purpose of minorities in 1980′s film is to be shot.” Indeed, in its incidental discussion of punk and irony, it comes closer to describing the cyberpunk mindset than with its talk of seasonal myths. Yet it’s limited by its self-imposed constraints to the rather dull conclusion that cyberpunk films are “tragedies with strong ironic content.” Holden’s is a fun documentary, especially for aficionados of sci-fi film, but it does a far better job of describing the framework of Frye’s interpretations than it does cyberpunk. It can be enjoyed it for what it is, but “Cyberpunk Educator” is a bit of a misnomer.

Indigo wants its customers to know it’s all about Canada. Indigo stores often cover a whole wall or stairwell with the names of Canadian authors and musicians, printed white on red. The cynic in me knows these creators are being used to put a friendly face on a private company. This patriotism isn’t hokey, but it is marketing. It may be tolerable because of the obscurity of Canadian cultural personages; Canadians that do know them are probably eager enough to have these authors recognized, so forgive Indigo for covering itself with their names. Nonetheless, Indigo is using Canadian culture-makers to sponge good will from its customers.

Increasingly, Indigo is the primary provider of Canadian cultural products. Indigo enjoys an almost total lack of competition: it’s “the closest thing to an unregulated monopoly in Canada’s private sector.” Indigo owns Chapters, Coles, Book Company, SmithBooks, and The World’s Biggest Bookstore; only a few, city-centre–type independent booksellers remain. The company also dabbles in censorship through supply: Indigo doesn’t sell Mein Kampf and kept an issue of Harper’s off its shelves because of some cartoons.

This is not a very likable company—but I’m keen on books, so, yeah, I shop at Indigo without much hesitation. I pay to be a part of their iRewards programme (and, in doing so, let them track everything that I buy). I even maintain a list of books I’d like to someday buy using their online wishlist.

This wishlist is where I keep track of interesting books and DVDs. Even if I have no strong desire to own a book, perhaps only to keep an eye out for it at the library, I’ll add it to the wishlist because it’s handy. The wishlist is the first place I’ll direct people who ask me what I’d like for my birthday, Christmas, et cetera. Even when killing time in one of Indigo’s stores, I’ll often look up my wishlist using their self-service terminals to remind myself what I’m interested in.

The wishlist is where I store my book- and DVD-related intentions, which change a couple of times a week. So it’s frustrating when I’m kept from using the wishlist by some of Indigo’s short-sighted design decisions. Far too often, I’m not allowed to add an item. Sometimes, I find that my list has been re-organized. It’s almost like having your pen run out of ink, or have someone shuffle your notes while you weren’t looking.

These may not seem like big problems. I can maintain a list with del.icio.us, right? Sure (that’s where all the books I can’t add end up) but it doesn’t have live prices, pretty cover art, easy to buy links for less technically inclined gift-givers, or the ability to be checked in the store. I would much rather Indigo improve their wishlist service, and I’m pretty sure that Indigo would like that too. After all, other than their ubiquity, it’s the only thing that really keeps me a customer, and it’s at the centre of that business.

So I’ve made a short list of simple design changes that I believe would alleviate my frustration, as well as make the wishlist better for me and consequently for Indigo.

• Let me add any book in the database. I don’t care if it is “temporarily unavailable to order.” If I can find it in your database, I should be able to wish for it. In the cases where it is unavailable, offer to notify me when it does become available. If the book is out of print, why not provide a quick list of other editions that may be available? In either case, no harm is done by letting me add the item to my list. I may never be able to buy the book from Indigo, but I will continue to use the wishlist, and that’s sure to snare me in a purchase sooner or later.

• Allow me to sort my list. Me. Indigo should not re-order the list (as it has in the past, for no good reason). Doing so is confusing and off-putting. I can’t trust Indigo to keep my list my way. Oddly, items aren’t even sorted: not by title, author, price, availability, or date added. They should be, and the criterion for sorting should be in the user’s control. It’d be useful to see, say, which DVDs on my list are the cheapest, or which I’ve added most recently.

• Let me set how much I want something. Right now, there’s no way for me to separate the books I really want from the ones I may pick up sometime. A simple three-level setting would be enough to remind myself and show others which items would make a better purchase.

• Give my wishlist a friendly URL. I want other people to use the list, but I’m not eager to share it through Indigo’s email service or to cut-and-paste its unwieldy URL. Why not something easy to remember? I could jot down http://indigo.ca/my@email.address/wishlist/ on a Post-it, or read it over the phone without much trouble. It’d make it that much easier for others to buy me something I want.

• Tidy up the little things. Indigo should put some “Add to cart” and “Check for availability at local store” buttons next to each item, instead of check-boxes and a “Add all selected items to cart” button all the way at the bottom of the page. Further, they should replace the “Most Wished For Items” column with one showing relevant recommendations (items similar to those already on my list, perhaps). While they’re at it, Indigo should fix the page’s <title>.

C’mon, Indigo: let me give you my money.