Category: General

Whatever you do twice will be perceived as a permanent policy decision. If you do something once that others have adopted as a permanent policy decision, you will likely be perceived as having adopted the same.

That is, expectations matter and create second-order effects, and previous actions set future expectations. This becomes self-reinforcing once people start acting upon those expectations and your choice becomes fulfilling those expectations or dealing with the many who feel as though they have been cozened, even if you explicitly told them not to have the expectation.

The ad hoc becomes an institution. Continue reading Plausibly One-Time

There is a reason Zubon’s seminal post “A Fable” is consistently the biggest draw to our humble little blog. It brings perspective. A perspective that a fellow gamer, significant other, or concerned friend might feel is missing. The big message underneath the three short paragraphs, for me at least, is to be mindful of my actions, especially with regard to time-consuming MMO games. Last week I received a huge dosage of perspective. My skinny, non-smoking 30-year old wife had a stroke.

Continue reading A Bit of Perspective

Can we agree to call them “achievements”? I know we mostly do, but some games seem to re-name things in the interest of being special snowflakes. Now that the largest systems in the North American market are using the same term, let’s accept that as the proper English word for those gaming account celebratory decorations.

Giving your new game a different term for the sake of being different creates verbal confusion and is just asking for really annoying forum discussions in which simpering trolls rack up post counts by “correcting” everyone for not calling them “trophies” or whatever. Double points are deducted if you have multiple and similar terms, triple points if you use “achievement” as a subset of “trophy.” You get a pass if there is a good reason for using a different word. Games that pre-date this consensus can keep calling them badges, deeds, etc.

I do not think we have a similar consensus on “guild” yet, especially given the range of games in which “guild” feels inappropriate. It would be fine in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ (“kinship”), but not so much for City of Heroes (“supergroup”) or EVE Online (“corporation”). Maybe for some instances in each. “Group” seems pretty standard; CoX’s “supergroup” unfortunately leaves them with “team.” “Clan” seems a strong competitor between games but rarely within them. Let us not get into “character,” “avatar,” and “toon.”

: Zubon

Achievement screens need some way to indicate that some achievements you will get in normal play, some involve wacky circumstances, and some involve playing for a really long time. As it is, everything gets grouped together, and the fact that you get quite a few suggests the others may be nearly within reach.

This annoys teams in multi-player games in which one player is trying to take 5,000 damage in one life, another needs to kill eleven people with a fish, and everyone else is trying to win. This haunts completionists who see “39/40 achievements” when the last one is “have 1000 levels of characters.”

I like the common division of achievements into categories like “exploration,” “monster slayer,” “fishing,” or whatnot within games. I would just like to see them also classified according to the sanity of achieving them, so you might have:

• 10 benchmark achievements, earned at various points in a normal playthrough
• 10 difficult achievements, earned by doing some things well, quickly, etc.
• 10 epic achievements, earned by doing things 100 times
• 10 wacky achievements, earned by selling all 12 types of rare fish to the pelican; by dying from falling damage 1 higher than your hit points; by defeating the end boss using only paint and sandwiches; by winning a multi-player round without drawing your weapon; …

That way Alice can have her sense of closure from meeting all the benchmarks, Bob can showcase his mad skills from beating it all on hard mode, Cindy can demonstrate how hardcore she is with 6/10 achievements that each took 500 hours to earn, and David can find a server or group that supports wacky achievement-acquisition rather than causing strife with folks trying to play the game non-perversely.

: Zubon

The hoarding and collecting impulse is deep in the gamer heart, driving us to get that last achievement or finish out a dungeon, character, or game after it has stopped being fun. One tool I like for reducing my meatspace clutter is having an online distribution channel. As long as I can trust them to stay in business and available, an archive somewhere will hold my stuff. All the things that can happen to your physical copies no longer matter, from losing them in the move or house to soda and pet messes to figuring out how to read 3.5″ floppies these days. Someone out there, with better backup practices than me, will let me download a copy if I ever need them again.

The same applies to the Steam Cloud and my saved games. Horrible things happen to my computer more often than they happen to my Steam access.

I had not explored Battle.net before StarCraft II. They have a place to input your keys for Blizzard games. Conveniently, I still have every CD and every key; I am best situated to use the service because I do not need it (irony). But I do not need to bring my CDs to LAN parties “just in case.” I need this service for all my old games, so I can input a code and stop hoarding physical media, although I am likely to keep and protect my Master of Orion CD and manual forever.

: Zubon

Opportunistic actions are less precise and certain than specified goals and intentions, but they result in less mental effort, less inconvenience, and perhaps more interest.
— The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

This is a throw-away line that contains much, particularly in the “perhaps more interest.” He is talking about running errands and “oh, if you stop at the grocery store, could you pick up some plums?” but by now you should be familiar with the parallels between MMO quests and chores and errands.

“While I’m here” has long been the reason I get to bed late. Because we are finishing up this dungeon, oh maybe one more run to finish the achievement, and a resource node just respawned near the exit, and ooh is that a rare mob over there, and then I want to hit the vendor and the vault, and I can pick up another quest while I am here, and maybe I should process those crafting resources I picked up, and just two points to the next tier, and my plans ended before bedtime but it is now much later. A couple of those steps are embracing the illusion of scarcity, because you never know when you are going to find that rare spawn or when you are going to find such a good PUG, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

Opportunistic actions prevent the feeling of grinding. Even if you run through 20 of them, they are 20 unplanned opportunities to exploit. When you have a plan, you have a “to do” list, a set number of times to run the dungeon and earn badges or an expected 2% chance of getting that rare drop. You know what you are doing tonight, and it is just a matter of getting through it. “Getting through it” is not a mindset you want in your entertainment.

Of course, we are MMO players. Given events or public quests in random starting states, we will plan out grinds to make the night more efficient. You have these four events to complete to fill the bar and get the achievement, and you are really annoyed about needing to wait another 4:30 for the bandits to reset so you can get those wolves.

: Zubon

I found a good enough sale to overcome the DRM risk, and I do not know that I have anything useful to add to what has been said before. The campaign really is that good. I have not tried the multi-player, and I am unlikely to spend much time in competitive play, but I look forward to some cooperative play in my future.

There are enough reviews, so I will go with idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive comments. And it turns out I have a lot of them, after the break.

Continue reading Now Playing: StarCraft II

If you hit for 5 damage each time and your opponent has 100 hit points, you are weak and low level, and combat is slow. If you hit for 500 damage each time and your opponent has 10,000 hit points, you are powerful and high level, and combat is epic. I hypothesize that most people have trouble conceptualizing division.

StarCraft II has an armory where you can upgrade your units. Everything is in the thousands. There is never a point at which the “,000” matters. There are no single thousands either, so you could divide everything by 5,000 and nothing would change or even need a decimal place. But it might not seem terribly epic if the Moebius Foundation offered you 2 credits per research point.

: Zubon

There’s been some recent activity at Undead Labs.  You might recall they are the newest MMO hotshots in town going to create a console-based zombie MMO.  The best thing is that Jeff Strain and Co. are taking a page right from their alma mater ArenaNet and creating some brilliant concept art right off the bat.  You can check out their art director’s post here, but one of the scariest, most haunting zombie pieces ever I just had to include after the break.  I seriously can’t believe it’s just concept art.

Continue reading Undead Labs Ticking Along