Here There Be Monsters

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.

In western Europe, "eat me" monsters dominated, and the vast majority of both monsters and monster tales involved being killed and eaten. Vampires do not spread their state by a bite, they simply squat on your chest, eating your breath, until you die. Werewolves, similarly, just kill and eat you. Only later were new attributes introduced that made these monsters into their now-familiar forms.

On the other hand, eastern European monsters and monster-tales tended to focus a bit more on disease and freezing, things closer to their ancient culture's heart. On the gripping hand, Japanese monsters and monster-tales tend to involve enforcement of cultural norms. As one of many examples, the kappa that loves to eat children can be defeated by bowing to it. It automatically bows back and, in the process, spills its life-giving head-water and freezes.

You can see monsters change as cultures change. Our current obsession is with contagion. Most of our most memorable modern monsters are about being changed against our will, being forced to become something else.

Vampires are no longer simple eaters. Now they spread, turning you into a vampire. Werewolves, too, are contagious. Zombies as well. Classic Alien-aliens embed themselves inside you and use you for a host rather than simply eating you. Cthulhu drives you insane with its mere presence. Frankenstein's monster is just a man trapped in a horrific body. Grays do experiments on you, pull things out from inside and put things in that weren't supposed to be there. And Godzilla was a normal lizard until he was forced to change...

Sure, these monsters can also eat you, but that's rarely the point of the story. The point of the story is that you (or the monster) are being changed, forced to do or be something you don't want to do or be. Which we encounter a lot more in our modern culture than being eaten or frozen, so that makes sense.

Classically, a monster's defeat often comes at the hands of what the tellers consider their culture's greatest triumphs - expensive silver, holy symbols, respect... this, too, changes over time. Most modern, western-culture monsters are defeated by feats of creativity, high technology, or determination, things we hold in very high regard.

This is sometimes reversed, with the monster having attributes we regard highly, and using them against us. The terminator was a high-technology, very determined monster that could only be defeated by, you guessed it, creativity and determination.

Distilling the fear a monster causes and the thing which defeats the monster down into simple statements can allow you to create extremely creepy monsters by simply imagining a way to push those things a little further, a little purer. Instead of jumping out and going "boo!", the best monsters first highlight our fears, then our prides.

So instead of re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reinventing vampires, why not invent a new monster that more purely preys on our cultural fears and is defeated by our cultural prides?

It's not as easy as it sounds, largely because our culture's emerging fears and prides often have no agreed-on terminology. For example, a lot of us fear the fact that the rest of us sell ourselves and our information into bondage in exchange for a new trinket. There's no real name for that fear. What would you call it? Eulageddan? iFear?

But I'd be interested in hearing anyone give it, or any other fear/pride, a shot.

The Educational Game

_{This is a post musing about educational games.}

So, I've been playing SpaceChem recently. This is a beautiful puzzle game, and very long. Also, it has got me thinking about teaching via games.

SpaceChem is not a teaching game, it is a very earnest puzzle game that is more about space management than actually learning any kind of chemistry. However, it includes a (mostly correct) framework of fundamentals, such as number of bonds and fusion/fission. It isn't set up to be a learning game, of course: if you don't know the fundamentals going into the game, you're probably going to be completely lost from instant one. Plus, the puzzles are really freaking hard at times, I doubt a young child could do them.

But the concept made me think of educational games again.

How would you teach chemistry in an educational game?

There are two options used today: rote memorization and task memorization.

Rote memorization is glorified flash cards. Often it is glorified by embodying the flash cards as enemies or similar, so that the child pays attention and hopefully learns by osmosis. I don't much like this method, because even if it succeeds in teaching ten thousand facts, none of those facts will mean anything. If a child knows that oxygen has an elemental weight of 8, what does that mean? It's not important, it never was. It tells you nothing about the role oxygen plays in chemistry, and when you do need to know it, you can look it up in two seconds.

Task memorization is slightly better. This is where the game presents "challenges" that require the user (not necessarily a child in this case) to perform a specific task. For example, to teach that hydrogen and oxygen make water, the user might be urged to turn on the oxygen tap, turn on the hydrogen tap, and then turn on the flame. BOOM and water. More advanced tasks usually involve manipulating the amounts (twice as many H2 molecules as O2 molecules) or performing a specific sequence (then add sodium for another BOOM!).

Task memorization is significantly better than rote memorization because it teaches you what things actually do. In situations where there is no strong underlying logic or algorithm, task memorization may be the best choice. For example, learning a language, or an emergency response checklist for space shuttles.

But for most of the things I personally want people to be better at, there is an underlying logic. Chemistry, programming, scientific rigor, privacy/information awareness... all of these things have a fundamental algorithm which we can present, even if it has some holes in it sometimes.

For these things, I think an explorative game is more the speed we need.

Since there is an underlying algorithm and a lot of information about applied results, we can create open-ended scenarios as well as tasks, allowing the player to switch between them as they feel the need.

For example, the explorative chemistry game would give the players a basic set of chemicals and outside forces to experiment with. For example, seawater and a source of heat. The player is allowed to construct a desalination plant using simple pipes, tanks, and sources of heat. It is a tutorial mission that teaches you that different molecules are affected by heat in different ways.

But as you finish the mission, the chemistry you've done is put in context. You've created fresh water and salt. Some NPCs from the larger world should come up to you and give you game points for your desalination plant. The chemistry you've done is put in a larger context. You understand that you've created water for drinking and salt for... salting... rather than just accomplishing a faceless task.

As you explore the world, you will find new equipment (How about a laser beam? How about a fission reactor? How about an electric turbine?) and new chemicals to start with. Challenges presented by various NPCs can guide you to create specific chemicals for specific purposes, but you are also free to fool around on your own. When you create a chemical on your own, you see a demonstration of what the end product does (perhaps cataclysmically enough to scar the world at large), and then NPCs approach you to talk about potential applications, bid on it, or ask for a similar molecule with different characteristics.

A key element here is that there is a world here, a world you can explore and interact with, however shallowly. The chemicals you create play specific roles in the world, often in specific places. You are not learning in a bubble, you are learning in a larger setting.

I think this is probably the key to teaching games, and one we always seem to overlook. Even a simple world map where you can see your accomplishments is a lot more effective than just being told "good work!" and shuttled into the next task.

Why I Don't Use Steam

Every time it comes up in conversation that I don't use Steam, I get asked why. So this post is an easy link to keep me from explaining myself over and over again.

There are three reasons I don't like Steam.

The first is the one that made me actually stop using Steam: the full-price ($60) games I bought from Steam never seemed to work. They crashed my machine, or they required third party spyware that wouldn't install - just a nightmare. Customer service was never any good - they have the standard "did you try rebooting your computer, I don't actually have any power to do anything like refunds" shit.

So I was getting leery of Steam. I saw the newest Civ available on Steam and said, "No, I'll go buy it from a store." With my shiny physical box, I came home feeling giddy and went through the hour-long installation process only to find... yeah, Civ required Steam, even though I had a physical disk.

Well, okay, that's fucking suspicious. Sure enough, a week later Steam force-fed me an "update" that broke Civ. With no way to roll back.

So fuck Steam.

The other two reasons are less severe, but in the long run they would have probably resulted in me using Steam a whole lot less even if they hadn't actively screwed me.

One is that I really hate the bloatware Steam insists on running in the background at all times, especially when you're trying to run a high-end game that needs all your system resources. I love the way that it is part adware, part spyware - I mean, "piracy prevention". It exists solely to screw the customer, rather than be helpful.

"But it helps you search for games! And manage your downloads!"

Yeah, those things can be done with web pages. Try gog.com or GamersGate - they use no bloatware, no ad server, and I highly recommend them over Steam.

The other reason I hate Steam is because of the fundamental problems with "always on" gaming. This is a blight, and creates dozens of issues. Steam is far from the only offender - all three consoles have the same problem. Always-on gaming really deserves its own post, but I'll quickly mention a few things that are wrong with it.

1) "Piracy prevention" that requires you to have an internet connection, the same computer, be logged in, have the most recent patch, have not modified the game I own, and so on.

2) "Dead man switch": when the central server goes down, nobody can legally play the game. Happens far more frequently than you think.

3) "Social at any price": breaking the immersion of the game to keep reminding you who else is playing the game and what their scores are. The number of games I've bought that I wanted to play with strangers? ZERO. This is also responsible for the rise in "trophy rewards"... my life has been much more peaceful since I learned how to turn them OFF.

4) "Paid DLC". This concept is, on its own, a very serious and horrible nasty shitty thing.

Paid DLC has a lot going against it, despite the fact that many people support it. I'll enumerate those, using letters this time.

a) The first playthrough is the most delicate. It's where the user forms an emotional connection to the setting. Added content is great for extended play, but paid DLC doesn't want to wait, and disrupts the initial playthrough with ads and metagame madness. I think this stunts the player's emotional investment.

b) Paid DLC usually means suppressing non-paid (IE fan-created) DLC. After all, it's competition. While it's theoretically possible to support both, I haven't seen many successful examples and I don't expect to see many.

c) It is often an excuse to release less content and charge for extra. For example, the only reason Sony didn't have my credit card info is because they wanted to charge me the price of the full game for the DLC for Disgaea 3. I love Disgaea, but it's being ruined by DLC.

d) DLC fundamentally doesn't fit into the "flow" of a game. Allowing the game to be extended and twisted at any time only works for certain kinds of games. Most games have a beginning, middle, and end. If you add crap in somewhere, you'll end up with the pacing and balance getting screwed up. This seems like a minor problem until you realize you've quit before the endgame because it's gotten boring.

Anyway, that's why I hate "always on" gaming, and Steam in particular.

Beat-em-up Bombs

This is too hard to make a video about, so I'll do it in text.

In every beat-em-up there are moments when the tactical situation turns bad. So the designers give you the equivalent of a shmup bomb to get out of trouble.

I'm not talking about the emergency spin-kick that costs you 15% of your life. That's an entirely local effect for when you're really screwed. I'm talking about the larger picture, affecting a majority of the screen.

One method is the "magic spell" method, where you are given a tool with a limited number of shots. Whether it's a fireball or SWAT intervention, these serve two goals simultaneously. 1) They deal damage outside your normal range, and often higher than you normally can. 2) They knock down enemies at range and give you a moment to maneuver.

An example of a spell-heavy game would be the old Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups (Tower of Mystara, for example).

Another method is "throwing". Throwing locks your target while you act, and serves the same two goals as magic spells. It deals damage to the character you are acting against, and then you can usually hurl them to a point outside your normal range. In the process, they knock down all the other enemies they are pushed into.

Throwing serves the same role as a magic spell, but the restrictions are higher (requires nearby enemy, slower) and you can do it whenever. Also, I feel that using one enemy against another is fundamentally more interesting than just tossing magic death everywhere.

The obvious example of a throw-heavy game is Streets of Rage.

A rare option is the "dodge". This option basically makes you invulnerable for a short time and maybe moves you somewhere else on the screen. In some ways, this is the purest method, as it doesn't magically solve your tactical problem. It just lets you try again once the wave has passed.

Dodging is extremely rare, probably due to the chaotic nature of beat-em-up screens and the fast wind-up of the attacks. The only two that spring to mind are God Hand and Astro Boy.

...

Most beat-em-ups implement one of those methods well, and one shittily.

For example, the Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups did spells pretty well, but they also implemented blocking, which is a type of dodge. However, the blocking is shitty.

As another example, Streets of Rage implemented dodging really well. However, they also implemented a 'spell' - the SWAT team backup. Unfortunately, the SWAT team ended up being mostly pointless: the only use it has is to use against the bosses to knock off a bar and a half of their radically over-inflated health bars. Using it during the level is rarely a good option.

Plenty of bad beat-em-ups do two of them, both poorly. This may or may not be what makes them bad, but the correlation is high. Golden Axe implemented both magic and grappling, but implemented both in a very limited fashion. Whether you think it is a good game or not, you will admit it is a rough play.

So, how can you avoid implementing them poorly?

...

To implement spells correctly, variation is good, but not critical. The most critical thing to remember is that it shouldn't have a dominant use.

For example, in Streets of Rage, the only real use for SWAT backup is to soften up bosses. They are so useful for that purpose that wasting them on killing off dudes is considered really crappy form.

While the bosses are also good targets for spells in the D&D beat-em-ups, many spells are only useful in other situations, which spreads the pain around. To be honest, I feel that even these games are too boss-centric. These old games built their bosses to eat quarters rather than be interesting challenges, so obviously your resources will be at least partly reserved for fighting the sure-to-kill bosses.

To do throwing well, you need to have very few enemies (if any) that are actually immune to throwing. In most Streets of Rage games, literally every enemy can be thrown, including bosses. If you make immune enemies, you are sealing away a core move. It's the equivalent of an enemy that magically makes you drop your assault rifle in a first person shooter.

This is somewhat difficult if you want to do a fantasy beat-em-up, because it means the player would have to be able to grab small enemies and large enemies, ground enemies and flying enemies... so fantasy beat-em-ups usually play down grappling.

It should be noted that there's a difference in opinion as to how throws should affect multiple enemies. In classic Streets of Rage, if you grabbed an enemy in a pack of enemies, your grappling attacks would affect all the enemies. The actual throw might not, but the pre-throw head-smashing would.

However, in the remake, you will let go of whoever you're grappling after a single pre-throw attack, and I don't think you can throw them at all when you're grappling in a crowd. This has seriously weakened throwing, and moved my old favorite character (a throw-heavy character) to the bottom tier.

Personally, I feel this is a bad move, because I tend to marshal the enemies into a pack and then crush them with throwing. So, it totally blocks me.

As to dodges, I'm not sure about them. It's rare to see examples so there's not a lot to draw from. It seems like dodge-based beat-em-ups are very different. They're less about a complex tactical topology, and more about timing.

There, a technical post about beat-em-ups.

Wrightlike

I've had Phoenix Wright on the mind on and off. I was really sick yesterday, and built a Phoenix Wright engine. It's certainly not something perfect, but it made me think that maybe I should explain some of the details about what makes Phoenix Wright games Wrightlike.

It's easy to say "the writing", but that's a copout. Let's go over some of the facets that give these games their particular feel.

The most important aspect is that these games are relentlessly linear. There is one specific route forward, no deviations, no branches, no nothing. While there is space to explore, it's 90% color. Because the game is so linear, all the writing effort can be spent on the scenes that will definitely happen, knowing full well the exact path the player took to get here.

This is quite a limitation, but like all limitations, accepting it can open up new vistas of possibility. In this case, the super-rich environments and characters are possible only because of this limitation, and the way each case ticks over into the next with a strong continuity is also because of this.

Nearly all the writing and gameplay elements stem from this relentless linearity.

For example, the pacing of a Phoenix Wright game is a simple but unusual factor. I think of any part of the game as having a pacing which is the risk divided by the exploration capability.

In "exploration" mode, the only real risk is that the player will quit. And there's lots of places to explore. So it's a low-paced part of the game.

In "court" mode, there is some well-defined risk of losing health if you do specific things, but there's also a fair amount of riskless exploration in pushing and listening. So this is a kind of medium-paced part of the game.

In "lockbreak" mode, every move you make is a health risk. There is absolutely nothing to explore. This laser-like focus makes this the most pushingly-paced part of the game.

In actuality, I split these three up into five, because exploration mode has three grades: "wander" mode in early midgame where you get to explore loads of places, "investigate" mode where the number of places is reduced and the amount of interplay between objects increases, and "inspect" mode, where there are only a few places you can go/people you can talk to (for example, if you're locked in a basement).

These pacing tricks can be extrapolated out into a wider variety of games - the amount of risky exploration/choice vs the amount of risk-free exploration. Through this lens, you can see a lot of games taking the same kind of approach. However, there are also games where you have risk-free zones that have no real exploration - hubs, basically. These hubs are very useful to a not-so-relentlessly-linear game where you might have the option to customize things or take different approaches.

Another factor to the Wrightlike games is their puzzles. The puzzle quality varies - it isn't rare to fall out of synch with the script writers and end up either stuck or trying desperately to solve a puzzle that isn't what they want you to solve.

However, setting aside the quality, the puzzles have a slightly unusual timbre to them. The puzzles are relentlessly linear, as mentioned. Unlike normal adventure game puzzles, there's not a world where several puzzles lie in wait. The puzzle coming down the line in a Wrightlike game is the only puzzle, at least at the moment. Other puzzles may be tied to it, but they cannot be dealt with at the present time.

This means that all the inventory stuff, color text, and hints you give out are focused like a laser on the next puzzle. This is a distinctively different feel than you get from an adventure game where there might be four puzzles itching at the back of your mind while you collect stuff.

I think this gives the Wrightlike games an unusually tight, fluid flow to them. Of course, it also gives them a clogged-drain-style flow when the player can't solve a puzzle, which is a downside. Being forced to replay a mission after losing too much health is also unusually onerous, since you have to go through things in precisely the same order again.

Anyway, I'm not normally a fan of linear games. However, to paraphrase Ebert, I may disapprove of a game for going too linear, and yet have a sneaky regard for a game that goes much, much more linear than merely too linear. Embracing this linearity is, I think, what makes Wrightlike games so unique and enjoyable.

The Old College Try

One of my friends has gotten involved in the age-old "what's college worth" debate. My point of view is pretty unusual, so I thought I might as well spell it out.

In the broad strokes, I agree with the stranger he's trying to rebut. Not only is college overpriced, it provides very, very little actual advantage. To be honest, just the opportunity cost of attending college is higher than the reward of a diploma. IE, even if the education was free, college would still be overpriced.

There is, however, something very useful about college. If you know how to get the most out of college, it can be worth your time and money. Unfortunately, I think most people aren't ready to get the most out of college until they're in their mid-twenties - after having graduated and worked in the rat race for a little while.

Everyone will tell you to learn all you can at college, but in truth the things you learn either aren't very important or will be picked up even without classes. Classes aren't taught very efficiently, anyway. With the possible exception of things like doctors, you can learn everything in a quarter of the time by reading it on-line and doing projects. Sure, there's some pressure to work hard at learning while in college, but you could get that same pressure by hiring a random person to badger you about it four times a day, and I bet you can get that service for significantly less than $30,000 a year.

(New start-up idea: badgerMe. Have someone you don't know call you up several times a day (videoconferencing extra) to ask what you've accomplished towards your goal, and to bitch at you if you slacked... I'm taking investors!)

The real way college can benefit you is that it offers an almost unique combination of free time and companions with diverse but compatible interests (who also have free time).

Nobody really stresses this properly. Frat houses might stress the interpersonal relationships, and how they can help you get jobs and so on, but that's old fashioned. Not obsolete, per se, but only a tiny part of what can be accomplished.

These days, it is completely possible to publish a book, paint beautiful murals, write a game, create a social network, innovate a new kind of cuisine... all of these things can be done rather easily by a small group of people stuck in the same place with a lot of free time. Even if the final product sucks, you have gained a lot of really, really valuable experience. And, if you do it over and over, eventually the final product doesn't suck, and things can take off.

Unfortunately, most college students are right out of high school. A few may intellectually understand that they can do these sorts of things, but inertia pushes them to do the same things they did in high school. Even if they were honors students, it's unlikely they ever really tried to create something for the world. It's a different mindset, a very unscholastic mindset. One that can really only be learned by trying and failing to do so in the real world, first.

After college ends, it is much more difficult to start up projects with other people. You have less free time, and there are fewer people nearby, and the people nearby have less free time. We have very few of these "pressure cooker" situations where people can get together and create something over weeks and months. College is one of those situations, and instead we tell people either A) it's worthless, or B) you need to focus on learning.

You don't need to focus on learning. That's the mindset that makes it worthless.

In my mind, the ideal college setup would be:

Freshman: Spend a year working shit part-time jobs and desperately trying to make your hobbies into a business.

Softmore: Come and live on campus. Take a few classes, but more importantly, join a review/testing team for an industry that interests you, and take small roles in random projects.

Junior: Team up with other students to do lots of small, cool, shitty projects. Learn to promote your stuff as well as create it. Begin to pick up best practices and advanced theory from classes and random other students who need you to know it.

Senior: With a fat resume of shitty projects, turn your attention to somewhat larger, more polished projects. Cement your team of trusted allies. Take pseudo-classes to keep up to date with recent advances and shore up your weaknesses, but focus mostly on getting your projects out there.

Graduation: Does there need to be one?

Amazon's New Service

Like everyone else, today I saw Amazon was starting up a new cloud music system. It's like iTunes, except your songs never actually get to your machine!

I hate this cloud shit. But maybe not for the reasons you might expect.

My problem isn't with "cloud" systems, believe it or not. My problem is with the systems Amazon and Google and Microsoft call "cloud" systems, which really aren't cloud systems at all.

A cloud is fundamentally a giant misty whatever of nebulous structure. "Cloud" meaning "web-accessible centralized server" doesn't make any goddamn sense. I know this is a lost battle, but I'll tell you what a cloud is:

YouTube is a cloud.

A barely-structured riot of always-available videos. YouTube is what "cloud" should mean.

Sure, there are users. Sure, people have favorites and can privately share things. But the structure is not rigid. Users can and will do almost anything: most of the structure is built by users, not by YouTube.

I'm not saying YouTube is perfect. I'm saying that YouTube is a cloud.

Amazon's music service is not a cloud. If it was a cloud, it would allow you to upload and listen to whatever music without thinking about payment. Instead, the "cloud" service Amazon is offering carves up the cloud into tiny little chunks and says "this square inch is your part of the cloud."

Really? That doesn't seem very cloud-like to me. That seems like a web-based rental store.

The numbers say music piracy is in decline. This is because the numbers don't bother to actually track what's going on.

It's true that people are torrenting less music. But they are still getting their music for free. From clouds like YouTube, pseudo-clouds like Facebook, and clear-sky streaming from places like Grooveshark.

This was inevitable. Torrents are not, fundamentally, very good for exploring music. The only reason they were so prevalent was because there was nothing better around. Now there's a bunch of good solutions for free and nearly-free music.

... But what about Amazon's toy? Why am I so pro-cloud and anti-web-rental-store?

The strength of the cloud is that its users self-organize. When I'm on YouTube, I can find pretty much anything. The threads linking various videos and songs together are surprising and sometimes unusually insightful. They contain a lot of metadata, it's always a rich experience. Especially if you turn off all downvoted comments.

YouTube is a living organism in the proper sense of the term. Millions of users constantly swapping videos and metadata like cells swapping chemicals and proteins. Interacting with a proper cloud is always different, always changing, and always full of interesting little insights. Also, it is resilient against imposed order: even with YouTube's sometimes crooked policies and vote-bot abuse, all the videos you want to see are still there, somewhere. Like a living creature, it cannot be truly controlled, just made vaguely presentable in front of guests.

On the other hand, a web-based store is not a living creature, nor is it a cloud. It's a store.

It might be a vigorous and interesting store, but interacting with a store carries none of the cultural weight and freedom of interacting with a life form given free rein. Anything you can find in Amazon's music store, you can find that or better on YouTube, with all the added interconnective metadata that makes it even richer.

That's why I hate these pathetic kinds of "services". They exist specifically to bend the user over backwards and gut them, all the while telling you how lucky you are that you can be screwed over personally, no matter where on the planet you are!

Try offering a service that does more for the users rather than less. Maybe then I won't be so angry!