Kill Ten Rats

I have a recurring theme that the human brain is an unreliable piece of hardware. Seriously, meat-based information processing with no expansion slots? Another weakness of the organ is that we have trouble predicting how enjoyable, satisfying, etc. we will find something. How We Decide discusses how removing information can improve our decisions because we get distracted by details instead of focusing on what really matters to us.

Another potential way to improve your decision-making is to outsource where relevant and convenient. While you may have trouble predicting your outcomes, you can look at those similar to you and see how they rated it. If someone with similar movie tastes to you does not like a film, you probably will not like it either, no matter how excited you are about that latest sequel. Hence a use for our gamer blogger peeps: if you usually enjoy the same games that X does, and X says the beta is going horribly, cancel the pre-order.

It seems that most people read and comment on reviews primarily to engage in religious strife about whether some upcoming game they have never played is the messiah or the devil, but if you are planning to spend more than 100 dollars and hours on something, it might be worth availing yourself of useful heuristics.

: Zubon

No, the study is not a slam-dunk. The sample is WEIRD and the size is not huge. But it does agree with a body of research on failures in self-prediction. You would think you would be able to predict yourself better than anyone else, but no.

For those interested in the (to be decided) Supreme Court case in which California claims that content-based restrictions on expression (video games) are constitutional, you can download the oral arguments. Popular bits include whether the State’s legal logic would also let it restrict Grimm‘s fairy tales, how censors panic about every new media type, whether there are established community norms for violence, and if it matters whether video game violence is against humans or if Vulcans are close enough. SCOTUSblog has assorted briefs from the case.

Personally, I am expecting a crushing defeat for California, and it is embarrassing that content-based restrictions on expression can still make it as far as the Supreme Court. I understand the political reasons why several state attorneys general jumped on the case with amicus briefs, and I am further embarrassed for my culture that seemed like a winning political issue for them. I know that some of them are not returning to office after last week’s election, but I cannot believe that many of them lost on free speech grounds.

: Zubon

H/T: Volokh

Reaching back a few years, this game combines a bit of puzzle and strategy with a bit of wanton mayhem. Decent, better in the early parts, but not recommended given the better games you could spend your time on. For a flash version without the puzzler parts, you could try .

You are haunting the house. You get a variety of settings with some movie allusions, including Ghostbusters, Evil Dead, and the Blair Witch Project. You empty a sorority house and uncover murder victims. Some of these are straightforward hauntings: scare some people, built up so that you can use bigger scares, and empty the buildings. Some toss in wrinkles like wards or exorcists. The puzzle parts come from the less straightforward levels and from unlocking new ghosts. In some levels, you lose for scaring people away before they do certain things, and you may not need/want to scare anyone away. In all levels, there are a few captive ghosts you can rescue by solving their personal puzzles.

Those puzzles are usually solid. They will have multiple solutions, so there are several ghost powers that will work for each situation. For example, if you need to light a campfire to unlock a fire spirit, you could cause a cold front in the area so that humans will light it, or you could lure a human over and use another spirit to cause the entire area to burst into flames. Some of them are less flexible, and some suffer from the usual computer game puzzle question of “what was this developer thinking?” Other times, you might be doing the right thing but not enough of it, or you might be doing everything right but the NPCs are being randomly uncooperative. If you have played Majesty, you know this last factor: “no, walk over THERE!” As with many puzzle games, what you want is not so much a hint or a guide but rather someone who has already done it who can say if you are on the right track. But there might be multiple tracks, so all they can say is how they did it. This aspect varies between trivial and ridiculous, with a limited number of satisfying puzzles in between. Few of the puzzles are absolute roadblocks; you can skip unlocking ghosts, and you will get the tools you need from free ones.

The haunting is briefly amusing. Scaring people and having neat tricks is fun. Some of the scares double as puzzle solutions, while some puzzle tools have no scare value. Hounding one particular person through a building, or just cutting loose with everything, can be entertaining. It palls fairly quickly, however, because you are just stocking the building with scares and waiting for people to leave.

A mix of interesting and annoying, the game includes problem-solving challenges, random guessing, and free-form mayhem. The first is good, the second is a little too common, the third is less visceral and satisfying than I had hoped.

: Zubon

This First Person Something was released just before Halloween, and I picked it up on the Steam sale. I have played very little, stymied by the question of whether and how you can enjoy it.

A first glance suggested it as a cousin to TF2: cartoony graphics, first person play, over the top violence, kill your friends and laugh. It is cartoony, with a variety of B movie victims and villains. It is not a FPS because it is not really a shooter; there are guns, but you might instead kill people with knives or exploding sheep. It does not appear to be fast-paced action, with people bouncing around and shooting rockets. You move quietly and ambush people, but it is not quite stealth-based. It felt plodding.

It strikes me as unnecessarily complicated. I assume it becomes more intuitive over time. You have a health bar, but most things seem to one- or two-shot you. You also have bars for needing food, sleep, or a toilet, and although refilling one of those bars makes you vulnerable to being one-shot by anything. You start empty-handed and can equip weapons and murder aids, and you have separate buttons for switching items, equipping them, and using them. You may not always want them equipped, you see, because security guards will tase you if they see you armed. And you may want to change weapons frequently because there are periodic announcements about how the value of each weapon has changed.

There are several game modes, and maybe some are better than others. I presume the handling makes more sense with experience, and familiarity with the maps always helps. I have yet to see anyone else playing or talking about the game, and I doubt it will be all that exciting to go about stabbing computer-controlled beach bums and killer clowns. On the plus side, it has a manual.

: Zubon