Author: Zubon

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Achievement Unlocked: Wander Blindly

The Basement Collection is on Steam and was part of a Humble Bundle. I have played most of these games on flash, and I presume they are all available at the usual flash sites. Aether is one of these, with a spirit evoking The Little Prince, in which you go make some planets happy.

Aether has the obvious achievement for completing the game, and then it has achievements for finding things in outer space. Five of them are obvious: the planets’ moons. Then there are eight other things in space. You would have no reason to know they exist unless you looked at the achievements or happened to find one. They are … somewhere. Just go wander in space for a while. There must be a methodical way to explore space, and once something is found you can direct others by reference to its location relative to the other planets. Until you stumble upon one of the floating things, however, you are just flying blindly about. While peaceful, this is perhaps not the highest quality gameplay to incentivize.

“Cheating” is defined collaboratively in gaming. It is not always obvious what is a bug or intended, and if not intended whether there is any negative connotation to doing something. In a puzzle game, looking up the solution is pretty clearly cheating, but you may also want to check with others for hints or “am I even going in the right direction here?” Because sometimes you are and the game is just not cooperating. So the achievement is for finding things in space, where wandering is the spatial equivalent of grinding mobs; there is no reason why The Crybaby should be in that bit of outer space, so you just keep going until you find them all (or don’t).

Looking up the locations is pretty clearly cheating, but I don’t know if the task is respectable enough to merit any negative connotation to that. In a game with trial and error gameplay, I see no shame in just seeing which combination you are supposed to find by random guessing or brute force. But at least you do not run out of air and die in space if it takes too long to find one.

: Zubon

It’s like Explorer content…

Quick Review: Lucidity

Use tools like boards and springs to guide a little girl through uneven terrain with dangerous bugs.

Lucidity was part of Steam’s Swedish Indie Pack, and I thought I would try it despite the Metacritic reviews. This was a mistake. It never became fun in the first half-hour, which is about as much benefit of the doubt as I could spare it.

You are guiding your one lemming through the level. Instead of working from a limited pool of resources, which usually gives you a lot of information about how to solve the puzzle, you get an endless stream of tools randomly generated from a small pool. An early level might have just one or two, but that grows. Avoid the enemies, walk through the fireflies, reach the end of the level.

I presume that some levels have actual puzzles, and collecting every firefly would involve some creativity. Just getting through the levels: dodge the bugs, span the gaps, and you’re done. That is occasionally frantic when the pieces that come up are not optimal, but that seems to be the whole of it. There are reportedly a few hours of gameplay, probably a few more if you want to get 100%.

The art is lovely and the music is gentle. The text snippets at the end of each level seem appropriate to the setting but irrelevant to everything else. Maybe they build to something if you get more of them.

: Zubon

Self-Maintaining

The lack of atrophy is a virtue of online gaming’s illusion of permanence. While enemies may respawn in a few seconds, the ratchet only goes one way on character and story advancement. You need not hit the gym to keep your points in strength from fading. Your house never gets dirty, and maintenance of everything you own is streamlined to a few clicks. You can wear the same clothes continuously for months, and you never need to iron the cloth armor in your vault. Your armor is always shiny and your sword is always on fire. Cooking and eating are optional, and the thousand stuffed cabbages in your backpack never rot.

Monsters and dungeons more closely resemble your floors and bathrooms. You can clean them out entirely, but you’ll need to do it again the next time you look.

: Zubon

Pareto Superior Testing

Our testers can veto releases at work, but we have an allied tradition that half a loaf is better than none. We may not get everything we want from an update, but if it makes some things better and no things worse, we go live. We can add the rest in a future update.

A gaming example comes from GW2 crafting. At launch, crafting could use items only from your character’s inventory. Soon after, you could craft from the vault but discovery was still inventory only. Now both check character inventory and the entire vault.

This is easier in my work than in gaming because our users are not competing with each other. If we can implement new functionality for one interface but need another month to accommodate the rest of our users, bonus for the users with the easy update. If your FPS added rocket launchers for PC players but needed another month to add it to the Mac client, forums would explode, especially if PC and Mac players were on the same servers. You can see this in games that are gradually rebalancing one class at a time rather than all at once. The relative values of classes are having large swings each month. LotRO had “the month of the [class],” TF2 had class-specific updates, and other games have similarly revamped single classes. See also City of Heroes gradually adding heroes’ passive archetype abilities over time, so there were months in which only half the classes had them.

Sometimes half a loaf is worse than none. Beyond the cases where it distorts your competitive balance, a function that only half-works can make some things worse and no things better. Adding something that only works for a known half of the users is inconsistent but reliable, which can be okay; adding something that works for everyone a seemingly random half of the time is inconsistent and unreliable, which is bad. The new functionality must work as expected, even if only under additional assumptions, and those assumptions must not cause other problems. Half a loaf is better than a whole loaf with gravel scattered through it.

: Zubon

Or Sometimes It Doesn’t

Yesterday we discussed the tendency of a new option to expand to all potential uses. Facebook was a digital whiteboard but now you use it to share family pictures and invite people to events. I want to discuss the failure to expand in two ways.

“The gimmick” is when it does not proliferate. They tried it once, it failed to spread, and it became quietly ignored outside its home. The blade itself is lost in the back of a drawer. In MMO-land, this is usually update- or expansion-specific, the neat new idea that never went anywhere. Will LotRO have mounted combat outside Rohan? You go through a zone and need to learn a new mechanic, but you will never need that mechanic again. Sometimes that is intentional, to give each zone its own gimmick.

“The forced feature” is when it proliferates but reluctantly and only by including it whether it makes sense or not. Developers may not have a use for it, but management said that it goes in everything. The Wiimote comes to mind: it may not make any sense for the game to involve wiggling the controller, but the Wii was sold around its innovative controller, and the games must justify it. Maybe every dungeon must have a physics puzzle or use the conversation mechanic or include a trap or have a secret door with a bonus treasure behind it. You learn to recognize when you have reached The Obligatory X Scene

These two go together really nicely. In the new expansion set, every single thing must incorporate the forced feature, and then it will not be seen again until someone uses the gimmick five years later in one boss fight as an intentional callback.

: Zubon

If you have better terms than “gimmick” and “forced feature,” comments are open.

Supply Creates Its Own Demand

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
— Homer, The Odyssey, although I cannot find a translation online that uses that exact phrasing.

It is not a slippery slope argument to say, “Developing the capacity to X makes X much more likely.” Beyond the tautology that you cannot do X if you cannot do X, we find that humans are more likely to pursue options that are readily available. Once you have the ability to do something, you start finding occasions for it. This is a driver of progress and source of anguish.

Continue reading Supply Creates Its Own Demand

The Lessons of History

I often cite smaller games because people are unaware of them or vastly underinformed. So if you like Darkfall’s prowess system, you can go play that right now in Asheron’s Call 1. Seriously, that system existed in 1999, although games did not have achievements at the time. You could even be playing the PvP version on Darktide!

To explain from the comments on that post, AC1 never had level adjustments. Levels are (were) estimates of relative power, not like in most MMOs where you must fight within the range of a few levels or there will be massive penalties that mean instant death. Level 30 archers can (could) hunt level 100+ monsters just fine with the right preparation. Levels give you more skill options, but the rest of the xp/skill system work(ed) exactly as described: doing things gets you a pool of xp that you can spend on whichever skills and attributes you like.

AC1 did mix in a bit of use-based skills by giving extra “practice point” xp for skill use. This involved an interesting formula that rewarded you for doing increasingly difficult things (rather than repetition), but it may not even still be in the game, so I am not going to spout algebra just now.

: Zubon

Chris Carter, Joss Whedon, Google, and NCsoft

[Warning: there are some TV Tropes links in here.]

I have confessed to contributing to self-fulfilling prophecies: if you do not commit to something/one because s/he/it may not be around for long, s/he/it probably will not be around for long. So how do you invest yourself in something when the producers have a left a wake of unfinished and canceled projects?

Continue reading Chris Carter, Joss Whedon, Google, and NCsoft

Lexical Ambiguity

“Expect,” like most English words referring to mental states, is problematically ambiguous. It could refer to considering something (1) likely to happen or (2) obligatory or reasonably due. Speakers may not realize that something obligatory is unlikely (or something forbidden is likely), and listeners can reasonably misunderstand which sense of expectation is meant.

If I say that I expect someone to do something, you’ll probably need context or nonverbal cues to understand whether I consider it likely, obligatory, or likely because it is obligatory. I have some employees who will not be meeting their performance objectives; we expect (meaning 1) them not to live up to their expectations (meaning 2).

Further ambiguity is introduced because expectation is not a single thing out there in the world but rather billions of individuals’ mental states. You and I have different estimates of how likely something is (meaning 1). We are more likely to agree about expectations (meaning 2), although beliefs differ radically on what is “reasonably due” (see: who deserves the most credit or whose turn it is to do housework). A particular person’s expectations (1) are a single thing we can reasonably discuss, as is a consensus estimate (“the publisher expects (1) the game to have 1 million subscribers”). In that sense, it becomes entirely reasonable to expect (meaning 1, personal) something to fail to meet expectations (meaning 1, consensus or someone else’s). I occasionally hear someone say s/he expects (1, personal) something not to live up to his/her expectations (1, personal); expecting disappointment is not fully coherent, but we are just a bunch of social primates with meat-based computers in our skulls.

To answer a recent question: my expectations (1) can differ from my expectations (2).

: Zubon