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Taking Joy

Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. … Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself-love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they are saying is, ‘You like stuff’, which is just not a good insult at all, like ‘You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.
— John Green

This has been my first con season, and I must say the best part is seeing so many people having so much fun. Gen Con has about it an aura of enthusiasm. Card games? Here is a tournament with hundreds of tables going at once, and that is not the only one, and over there is the entire hall devoted to them. Next to it are areas devoted to board games, from championships to “learn to play” sessions. The dueling successors to Dungeons and Dragons are there, with a large area for the launch of D&D 5th Edition and most of a floor for Pathfinder; just walking by the Pathfinder gaming area was an experience, with themed rooms, groups forming and shouting that they need one more, and generally an air that these people really are going to slay an army of dragons and save the world.

I have really enjoyed the costumes, but I think “outfits” make me happier. That is, there are many costumed characters, but even more people are dressed up without being a particular character. There are more hats and corsets than I see the rest of the year. There are Victorian and steampunk bits, from formal dresses to someone who just felt like wearing goggles. There are more utility kilts than I expected even given that these are gamers. Hair colors stretch far beyond the normal human range, and that was before I ventured into the anime area. People are here to play, and being playful is good. Your steampunk goggles and bronze rocket pack get admiring looks, not confused stares and laughs. The weirdos are the Colts fans who arrived in their thousands for the game last night; why wear a blue and white jersey when you could have a fez and/or chainmail?

: Zubon

Tinker Gearcoins

I don’t think we mentioned that our dear friend Tesh has a Kickstarter winding down: Tinker Gearcoins. These are a bit like the Tinker Gearchips he did at the start of the year, but with more art, different sizes, and a design that lets you use them as cogs if you want to get extra steampunk. It is past 700% of its goal and about to hit its last stretch goal (adding an extra gearcoin to the rewards), there are multiple options for shiny finishes, and all the previous campaigns’ items are available as add-ons. I gave a friend a Tinker Deck, because who doesn’t need a deck of cards with Ada Lovelace as a queen, so I need to replace that.

Hmm, too many links there. Let me point out the current campaign: Tinker Gearcoins.

It’s more money than you probably need to spend on fun, decorative coins, but less than you’ve probably spent on a night at the bar, and afterwards you’ll have fun, decorative coins rather than a hangover.

: Zubon

Smullyan on Enjoying

He does indeed sift and sort, but he does not know that he is “sifting and sorting.” He is much like a dog who is offered a dish containing a mixture of good foods and bad foods. He spits out the bad foods and eats up the good foods. The doggie does not complain nor criticize the bad foods; he is far too busy enjoying himself hunting out the good foods. And so after the meal is over, if someone asked him how he enjoyed his dinner, the doggie would say, “Delicious! I found so many good foods!” (By contrast, [the grinder] would say, “Horrible! Most of the food was bad! I had a hell of a time finding enough good food to make a meal”)
— Raymond Smullyan, This Book Needs No Title

Comment Spotlight: Meaningful Decisions

There’s a lot of writing about game design in both theory and practice, but what most of it boils down to is that the opportunity to make meaningful decisions on a regular basis is fun.
– Alexander Williams

That puts a lot in a nutshell. Why is too much randomness a problem? Your decisions have no meaning if they do not affect the outcome. When the outcome is known at the start due to radically uneven opponents, again your decisions have no effect on the outcome. If the outcome is mutable, how meaningful was that decision when it is wiped away with the next tide? And of course grinding is when you have stopped making decisions and are just carrying out a known algorithm 1000 times until you level, get that rare drop, etc.

The extreme case is “no decisions,” like Progress Quest or Candyland, but the less that it matters what decision you make, the closer you get. If randomness or the starting state determines the outcome far more than your decision does, you could just as easily make the opposite decision and get the same outcome. If the outcome is mutable, and 30 seconds after you’re done the result is wiped away, you could just as easily make no decision or just not show up and it makes no difference. The game plays itself, with the player just cranking the wheel to make it go through the motions.

In some sense, part of the point of games is to have low impact, mutable decisions. You get to fight dragons, blow things up, and conquer the world without any risk to yourself or others. No matter how important your decisions are within the game, once the game is over, you declare a winner and are done. But your decisions need to matter within the game or else your participation in the game does not matter even within the game, at which point it is recursively pointless.

: Zubon

Second Order Preferences

A first order preference is what you want or like. You want pie. A second order preference is your preference about your preferences. You also want to lose weight, so you do not want to want pie. You can keep going to higher orders, where you might run into ambivalence as you miss being interested in something, so you neither want nor want to want it but you kind of want to want to want. Don’t go too deep down that rabbit hole.

I frequently find myself wanting to like things more than I like them. “This is my kind of thing. I should like this. Why don’t I like this?” It’s like I have some misguided loyalty to “my type,” even though I know a thousand details can make it unenjoyable. I tend to commit and stick with things, which is good when something goes through a bad patch but bad when it parks in the bad patch and starts digging a hole.

I’m past wanting to play any MMOs, but I still faintly want to want to play because I want to like them. I miss the original ideal of virtual worlds. I love the gameplay of League of Legends, but the community is still highly problematic, so I want to enjoy the game more than I actually enjoy it. Ingress is interesting in the abstract but mostly tedious when I play it more than casually.

I’m not sure of my higher order preferences. I recognize that having a disparity between first and second order is a problem, so I do not want to want to want to play, but I have a certain wistfulness and I am going to cut that thought off there because that way madness lies.

: Zubon

[GW2] An Energizing Balance

The third installment of Guild Wars 2’s second season of the Living World has finally rebooted my love and energy for the MMO. I liked the first two episodes, including the new zone and story instances, but I didn’t feel that drive. Now, I feel like season 2 has become a full expansion of the game. All it took was a backpiece, a trip far from Dry Top, and balance. Continue reading [GW2] An Energizing Balance

Test Cases

I have been pondering our QA at work and how that must work out for game development. There is never enough time to do as much as we would like, and there are always more ways things could potentially go wrong. Let’s narrow that discussion to the multiplicity of test environments and the length of regression testing.
Continue reading Test Cases

[TT] Random But Predictable

Randomness is rarely chaos. In games, randomness is a pick from a pool with known and computable probabilities.

Roughly 1/6 of the rolls in Settlers of Catan will be 7s that activate the robber. Roughly 5/36 of the rolls will be 6s and another 5/36 will be 8s, which is why they are the most sought numbers and why there is so much groaning when there are 5 6s in a row or when there are 0 8s for 15 minutes. Some players think that still leaves too much to chance, so you can buy dice decks, giving you the exact probability distribution over 36 turns rather than knowing it works out in the long run (but maybe not over the course of this game). Strategic play in Settlers involves both getting the best numbers possible and diversifying over numbers and tile types, to survive the swings of fortune.

Deck-building games are substantially about probability manipulation. In Dominion, you start with 10 cards, so you always know exactly what your second hand will be based on your first hand, and you can predict turns three and four based on the (usually) 12 cards you own after those first two turns. From there, the deck-building mechanic is about increasing the number of good hands you have by getting more good cards, fewer bad cards, or just more cards, or perhaps by exploiting higher averages or variability. There are strategies that depend on knowing what is left in your deck based on what you have played so far.

I have been pondering Dungeon Roll. When you roll a lot of dice, the possible extreme swings in luck are large, but you are increasingly likely to be around the center of the distribution. You may have a random pick of a dozen heroes with a random roll of seven white dice against a random roll of foes on each level of the dungeon, but that averages out to reaching level 5 safely, plus or minus one, plus or minus a dragon. You probably end a turn with 4 to 6 experience points and 2 to 4 treasures.

Because you get only three turns, conservative play is encouraged, which is an odd thing for a “push your luck” game. If you go one level deeper, you get 1 or 2 more points for succeeding and lose 4 or 5 for failing. That is a big asymmetry, and you lose the game if you lose one round unless it encourages your opponents to also push their luck a little further (by why would they with a 5-point lead in a game where 30 is a high score?). I have yet to see anyone push his/her luck and fail, because you can predict your odds (two white dice left, enemy rolls six black dice) and your potential benefits (marginal).

On the other hand, there is some variation, particularly within one turn, and that can lead to unfortunate swings you cannot do anything about. “Leveling up” is worth about 1 more point in each of your latter two turns, so if a bad roll means you do not get the 5xp to level up your first turn, you are down even further against your opponents. Sometimes the dice make your special abilities useless. In my first game, I was the knight, and who turns scrolls (low value) into champions (high value); I rolled 0 scrolls on my last two turns. You can expect to roll 0 scrolls in 28% of turns, which means that 63% of games will have at least one turn where that ability does nothing, and it will not be used at all in 2% of knights’ games. In three turns, randomness can dominate long run odds.

: Zubon