Category: General

This will be my last Gödel, Escher, Bach reference for a while, I promise. This echoes gound that (I think) Raph covered in his Theory of Fun.

This is, it seems to me, a general principle: you get bored with something not when you have exhausted its repertoire of behavior, but when you have mapped out the limits of the space that contains its behavior.

I have cited this previously as sphexishness and piercing the veil. You don’t need to beat the game if you can see how to beat the game. At that point, it is just a series of motions. All mental activity is done, although you might enjoy the physical act of mastering the motions (more so in meatspace than “hitting the buttons in the right order”).

In MMOs, we have the grind: repeat x 5000 times to level. Many single-player games having something to be brute forced, such as perfecting the timing on a dozen jumps in a row (missing one means starting over, maybe a long run away) or randomly mixing together three potions to see what the combinations do. You might as well look up what the right combination is, because there is neither fun nor virtue in trying every combination until you get the right one.

We MMO players are probably too tied to our games. Can there really be enough content in a game to entertain you for years, not months? It is an unreasonable expectation, and we should not leave to bitterly once we have seen what all the game can do for us. The only reason you were sticking around in the end was for the people you played with or against. It is fitting that Mr. Hofstadter continues: “The behavior space of a person is just about complex enough that it can continually surprise other people…”

: Zubon

I had written a rather lengthy rant about the state of the industry and all of the things that just drive me to insanity, particularly design problems, mishandled operations, stupid funding deals, etc. etc. etc. After I wrote it and had some time to sleep on it, I decided that 2008 is a new year, and thus full of promise and potential. I’d rather set the tone with some optimism and deal with the scurvy side of the industry later in the year…

Continue reading Looking forward to 2008

I do not drink much soda, abstaining for weeks at a time last year. For the extended weekend’s New Year’s LAN party, we binged. My body was not prepared to deal with that much caffeine and carbonation. My wife, a devoted consumer of Diet Pepsi, was pretty wired after drinking half a case of Mountain Dew.

We are both still kind of ill from the experience. My thought had been that I am getting too old for living off Mountain Dew and fast food for days at a time, but I realized that I never did that. This makes me feel even older, because apparently I was never young. I went directly from 15 to 45, and I have stayed there.

Taco Bell’s spicy chicken burritos are tasty. Mozzarella sticks are just deep-fried cheese with breading; see the earlier comment about not living off biohazards. Despite that, cheeseburger fries sound tastier than they should.

Mello Yello is still out there, but Coca-Cola seems to have realized that “mellow” is not a competing force with Mountain Dew. This weekend was my first exposure to Vault, labeling itself an energy drink/soda hybrid. Wow, that tastes awful. If you drown the “citrus” flavored drink in orange juice, it does not taste bad, but you might as well mix the orange juice with peach schnapps. Wait, I don’t drink. I have all these wild oats, completely unsown.

: Zubon

The energy drink link is a video, maybe a little NSFW.

Happy New Year folks!

I’m working on a huge post that I will try to get up this weekend or mid-week next week. Mostly, I’m going to give my two cents on the state of the industry (mostly MMO) and explain why I’m so damned bitter and cranky about it. The problems are legion, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

In retrospect, 2007 was a pretty crappy year on a number of levels, but I think we are nearing the end of the downcycle. Expect some more horrific bombs, failures, and wtf? deals and press releases. However, keep in mind that this is still a relatively young industry with incredible amounts of hope, promise, and potential. I’m not seeing anything that really gets me excited /now/ but the winds are changing. I’ll talk about that more in my post.

In the meantime, hop on over here and leave some comments.

Today’s bit from Douglas Hofstadter relates to realizing you made a mistake back at the beginning:

…suppose you had written [a program for deriving theorems in number theory] but had forgotten to include TNT’s Axiom 1 in the list of axioms. After the program had done many thousands of derivations, you realized your oversight, and inserted the new axiom. The fact that you can do so in a trice shows that the system’s implicit knowledge is modular: but the new axiom’s contribution to the explicit knowledge of the system will only be reflected after a long time — after its effects have “diffused” outwards, as the odor of perfume slowly diffuses in a room when the bottle is broken. … Furthermore, if you wanted to go back and replace Axiom 1 by its negation, you could not just do that by itself; you would have to delete all theorems which had involved Axiom 1 in their derivations. Clearly the system’s explicit knowledge is not nearly so modular as its implicit knowledge.

A fundamental system in your game is broken or inadequate. You know it, the developers know it, everyone can see the proud nail sticking up. Why do they keep making tweaks to make the game work around it rather than just fixing it? Because fixing something upon which a lot depends is difficult, time-consuming, and risky. Adding something new is relatively easy.

Continue reading Band-aids and Surgery

We’re coming up on the new year, so this seems as good a time as any to ask:  what do you think the future holds for MMOs? More to the point, what do you hope it does? I’m not talking about The Future where we’re jacking into the cyberspace and hacking the Gibson, I’m talking in the next few years. What are you hoping we’ll see in the near term future for MMOs?
Continue reading The Future of MMOs

I forget which of our blogger friends pointed me towards Granado Espada, but it does not matter because it does not excite me. It does, however, have some interesting ideas, some of which may be worth pondering further. The basic gameplay is Diablo: click to move, execute some powers, get loot and level up. The fee structure is Korean: free to play with built-in RMT.

There are three significant variations in gameplay. First, it is small-unit Diablo, in which you control three characters. You walk in with your own tank, healer, and damage. Second, it uses a RTS-style auto-attack, so that your characters will attack, heal, and even self-rez without further guidance. Your participation is needed only for special abilities, moving them around, and picking up loot. You might think this would lead to AFK hunting, which leads us to the third point: AFK hunting is explicitly allowed.

Continue reading Sword of the New World