The idea has always been lurking, but I've recently been bombarded by it actively, so let's talk about the idea of games as things other than entertainment.
I hear a lot of people saying things like "learning should be a game!" I use learning arbitrarily - there's loads of other things people also think should be a game, such as working, finance reform, engineering, watching TV... anything and everything is a fair target for the "should be a game!" folks.
STOP!
"Game" is a hopelessly vague term that carries an awful lot of baggage. When someone says "learning should be a game!", what they actually mean could be any number of things.
It could be "learning should be fun!" or "students would learn faster with a progression of tasks and rewards" or "learning would benefit from a strong set of social interactions with other students such that students are exposed to many possible view points while they learn" or "this is an algorithm which can be represented in a computer program, and the students can learn it by simply making the inputs and outputs clear."
These are all great ideas, and I'm sure there are loads more. However, these are not games. When someone says "game", they often end up meaning "something that teaches so I don't have to". And that's not something you normally want to mean.
Games use a wide variety of techniques to entrain players in many different ways. What techniques are used vary from game to game. Some techniques are great ideas nearly all of the time, others have significant drawbacks. Simply saying "game" is vague enough that it isn't very helpful, especially since when people think of a "game" they usually think of something that includes techniques that aren't suitable for most non-game purposes.
For example, most games have a feedback system that trains players to become good at the game. Good at the game, not at what the game is trying to teach. This is so common it rears its head in non-games, and we call it "gaming the system". How easy will the system be to game when it is a game?
It is possible to design a game that keeps players carefully on task, but this has many drawbacks. For starters, it's normally a deadly dull game.
Instead of saying that "such-and-such should be a game!", think about it a bit more. Which techniques do you actually want to use? Make sure you understand the potential drawbacks. Once you understand what you want, just do that. There's no need to make a real "game" out of it: just take what you need, drop the baggage you don't need. Call it a game if you like, but don't take the baggage that normally comes with the title.
Let's say you want to teach children math. But children are notoriously uninterested in math, so you want it to be a game! Well, what you actually want is for the children to want to learn math. "Game" is irrelevant.
What common game-related techniques would be useful to you? Well, that depends on the age bracket. If these are young children, they might benefit from simple aesthetic rewards, such as being told the problems and results in a fun way, or given balloons or stars for getting right answers.
Sound familiar? Yeah, these techniques are common. Because we're not idiots: we already use a lot of these techniques commonly, without calling them "games".
But we can learn from games in more advanced cases. For example, if you're teaching algebra to high school students, giving out stars and talking in a squeaky voice is going to do the opposite of make them want to learn.
Fortunately, games have figured out some good formulas for appealing to high schoolers. It's somewhat difficult to create a challenge/reward progression, since it's difficult to find rewards that will be even vaguely universally appealing. Time off, passes on homework, and fragments of upcoming tests are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head, but they might be especially good if you allow students to trade or upgrade them.
Getting the students to work together and teach each other can be extremely valuable if you can get them to do it right. Game techniques can be used here - techniques pioneered by multi-player games since time began use a combination of competition and cooperation (often only meta-game cooperation) to drive both the teaching of gameplay and the pioneering of new gameplay. This same technique could theoretically be replicated by mixed teams of two or three where the members are periodically required to do individual tasks that affect the grade of the group. Alternately, "gating" such that advanced students have to bring up the grade of a weaker student before they can get a particularly nice reward.
Obviously, there are a lot of logistical problems, but that's one of the reasons you don't just say "game". "Game" brings with it a bunch of solutions to completely different logistical problems. Such as the logistical problem of not having a teacher.
One thing you can inherit, if you choose to, is the way that games often have a variety of tasks types and understand that any given player will only be interested in a few of them. While this may be difficult to do in a structured classroom environment, I did mention that "learning" was an arbitrary choice. Having many interactive threads that appeal to many different kinds of people will allow a wide variety of people to participate together in their own way.
Scheduling is another factor you can steal from games. Games use a variety of reward scheduling tactics that are suitable for many situations, although you need to be careful not to seem arbitrary or erratic if you're an actual person handing out rewards. One key is having multiple concurrent threads for each person, such that they can receive a reward for an accomplishment in one thread while they continue to work on another thread. This eases the long gaps between rewards in any particular thread. However, you need to keep the threads carefully interlocked, or the participant may simply speed ahead on one particular thread while leaving the boring or less easy ones behind. Again, a kind of "gating" is a fine solution. Something like "you can't work on the next task in this thread until everyone in the group has accomplished that other task in that thread". Classic CRPG stuff.
Creative play can be rewarded in the same style that open market games such as SecondLife or 3D chatrooms use. Creating fun expressions of whatever you're working on and sharing it with the rest of the players is rewarding, fun, and leads to a lot more involvement from everyone involved. Structuring this can be quite difficult since it is so context-dependent and you need to make sure nobody feels afraid to submit creations. But, done carefully, you can easily find the players forging ahead far past where you expected any of them to go.
What I'm trying to say is that talk like this, regardless of how thorough or slapdash, is hugely more effective and useful than saying "should be a game". Take the parts of games that seem to work for you and drop the rest.
Because it shouldn't be a game: it should be whatever it is, but better.
This make any sense?
Showing posts with label random crap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label random crap. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
More on Omnipresent Anonymity
You may remember I wrote this essay on a scifi setting. Since then I haven't been able to get it out of my head, so I'm going to write more on it in a less sci-fi sense.
We publish loads and loads of information to the internet. Common practice is to shake your finger at anyone who posts personal information to the internet.
But it's just impossible to not post personal information to the internet and still participate. There is a fragile layer of anonymity between your anonymous accounts and you. This gets even more fragile if your anonymous accounts are used to communicate with real-life friends, such as a facebook user who calls himself a random string of characters. You don't even have to know the communications: you just have to know that they happen.
Most geeks promote privacy awareness. Go into the options, set everything to private. Hide hide hide!
There are three problems with this. 1) It only takes a few "open" nodes to de-anonymize ("dean") an entire network, and given the lack of incentive, people are likely to remain open. 2) Going "quiet" and hiding away your info cripples the functionality of a social network. 3) It's becoming ever easier to mine even tiny leaks of data. Whether a friend accidentally mentions your name, or someone backtracks your IP address, your anonymity is not guaranteed no matter how "hidden" you try to be.
As our social use of the internet grows ever denser, it will become almost impossible to live your life without posting photos and video of yourself to the internet in the same way that we use email today. It's theoretically possible that some of that might be private, but if even a fraction of it is public, a huge portion of those connected can be deaned (de-anonymized). It's going to get worse and worse as our real social networks become increasingly reflected in our software social networks.
In my opinion, privacy advocates are really grasping at the last fragments of How Things Were. Right now, it's basically possible to keep hiding. I don't know for sure that all of my friends have various anonymous accounts, but they almost certainly do. I know I do. Right now, that's fine: there are very few programs automatically trawling the internet trying to make these connections. There aren't very many things actively trying to dean the internet.
But it's getting easier and easier, both in terms of available data to analyze and in terms of algorithms to do the analysis. It's important that privacy advocates realize that the idea of promoting anonymity from the user side is going to be basically impossible.
So, the problem needs to be turned on its head. The problem isn't "how do you keep users from posting private data", the problem is "how do you keep private data from being abused".
An analogy I liked is the one about public meatspaces. If you and a friend are chatting in public, you might talk about his medical condition. If a stranger then rushed up to try to sell him homeopathic lies targeted at his medical condition, nobody would ever think your friend was the one who was weird: it would be the spy that was weird. If he did it a lot, the police would take him in for being a public nuisance.
So if I'm talking to you on the internet and we mention your medical condition, Google offers us homeopathic lies instantly and automatically, and probably logs that targeted ad for reuse later. Your medical insurer two years from now, if they find that conversation somehow, might deny you coverage based on the fact that you had a "pre-existing condition". There are already rumors of insurers canceling treatment based on social media - such as the depressed person whose treatment was discontinued because she was seen smiling in a picture on one of her friend's social network pages.
Even if it was possible, it's inhuman and dangerous to make us responsible for staying absolutely silent, absolutely hidden. Humans are social beings, the internet is a social medium. Being abused by corporations and repressed by governments is nothing new. We don't generally say, "well, you shouldn't have said that you disagreed with the government!" We generally say, "hey, the government shouldn't be persecuting you just because you said something!"
This is the same situation. Obviously, being force-fed stupifyingly bad ads is not the same thing as being rounded up and blacklisted in McCarthy's Big Red Book, but both stem from the same problem of people outside a conversation listening in and taking action based on what they hear. Conversations that were never intended to include them and certainly were never intended to be definitive, permanent, public statements.
So, there are two basic responses to this.
One is to revamp the underlying architecture to make everything incredibly privacy-aware by default. I think this is a good idea, but I also think it's pretty much impossible, since a social network is inclusive by nature. As social networking becomes the primary use of the internet, it seems unlikely that we're going to create a new network that specifically damages that function. Still, we could do better than we're doing right now.
The other option is to do what we always do: legislate it.
It can be legislated from two sides. One side, probably the easier side, is to restrict contact between entities and use of data gathered on-line. You are allowed to gather data. You can dean the network, find that XRSOXGAL8727 is Jenny Smith. But you aren't allowed to use that information for anything. No targeted ads. No redirecting links. Only when a user explicitly allows this sort of thing is it allowed. Steep fines if you break that rule.
There are a few problems with this. One is that spam is basically impossible to track down. Every day I get spammed with fairly well-targeted spam: my interests are pretty transparent, so spammers target me pretty specifically. A lot of this spam comes from anonymous sources, people I could never track down, people the government would have to spend a fair amount of time tracking down. Still, that's okay, because I'm not trying to stop anonymous spammers. I'm trying to stop Google.
Another problem is that it might be difficult to draw the line between someone who is actually trying to socially contact you and a spammer. For example, if you post about squids and I send you a link to an interesting squid article, I'm not trying to spam you, I honestly think you'll find it interesting. I think that line can be drawn fairly easily - number of entreaties per day per organization or somesuch - but it is an issue that has to be kept in mind.
Also, there is the problem of UNTARGETED spam. When I visit a science site, there are sciency ads. This is not because they know who I am, it's because it's a science site. However, I can forsee a lot of cases going to court that stumble over this distinction. Personally, I would prefer to make it illegal for them to spam me without my permission, targeted or not. But I understand that's an extreme view.
Anyhow, we also have another kind of legislative option: to make it illegal to dean data. To make it illegal to trawl the internet gathering data, tying it together, figuring out who is where, doing what. To make it illegal to watch you as you travel.
Now, this second option is the one I chose for my sci-fi setting, so I sat down to think. In my sci-fi setting, you can tell someone has deaned data because data has a structure, and high-context (non-anonymous) data has a very specific structure, even if it has been reduced to nothing but lists of foreign keys. Because the backbone has largely been replaced by a mesh network of freely available personal wireless routers, a lot of private individuals scan passing traffic for this pattern and report it to the cops if found. This can net them a tidy profit.
If a corporation is suspected of using illegally deaned data, they can also be investigated using a similar pattern-finding tool. This leaves their data private: the feds never see the actual data. This has led to a (so-far fruitless) search for a way to store high-context data without the signature pattern.
That future is a bit dystopian under the covers, and I don't think that method would work in reality. But then I got to thinking:
The problem is caused because there is so much easily-searchable information. However, searching the information causes more easily-searched information.
While the corporations are busily deaning your data, using your private messages to sell you useless crap, you could be busily deaning their data.
This isn't very possible on the current brand of internet. But what if the "next, more privacy-conscious" iteration of things actually tracks patterns of requests instead of simply tracking user connectivity? What if, by fundamental design, it was The Completely Transparent Thing? Instead of privacy, it has anti-privacy. Well, within any given persona: you could still have your anonymous account.
Now, if your anonymous account and your real account are both pinged, you'll know. You can track down the ping-er. Which may also be an anonymous account. It will be immediately obvious if it was chance, or if it was an auto-deaner, or if it was your would-be boss trying to find out if you have a juicy personal life. By attempting to dean you, they effectively dean themselves.
This is not really a good solution, because that level of monitoring reveals way more than you want to have revealed. The time you visited a link blind and found yourself staring at something horrible. The fact that you checked so-and-so's page 80 times in one hour. And, of course, the muddy propagation problems where the SocialReader9 bot visits your page, reads the details, and then gives it to others without you knowing.
I don't think there is a solution, really. Not with current technologies. But I was tickled by the "balance of power" option, where someone attempting to gather information on you incidentally exposes more information about themselves.
I wonder if it could be made to work somehow...
Anyhow, it's a problem that can't be addressed by simply telling people not to put their personal information on-line.
We publish loads and loads of information to the internet. Common practice is to shake your finger at anyone who posts personal information to the internet.
But it's just impossible to not post personal information to the internet and still participate. There is a fragile layer of anonymity between your anonymous accounts and you. This gets even more fragile if your anonymous accounts are used to communicate with real-life friends, such as a facebook user who calls himself a random string of characters. You don't even have to know the communications: you just have to know that they happen.
Most geeks promote privacy awareness. Go into the options, set everything to private. Hide hide hide!
There are three problems with this. 1) It only takes a few "open" nodes to de-anonymize ("dean") an entire network, and given the lack of incentive, people are likely to remain open. 2) Going "quiet" and hiding away your info cripples the functionality of a social network. 3) It's becoming ever easier to mine even tiny leaks of data. Whether a friend accidentally mentions your name, or someone backtracks your IP address, your anonymity is not guaranteed no matter how "hidden" you try to be.
As our social use of the internet grows ever denser, it will become almost impossible to live your life without posting photos and video of yourself to the internet in the same way that we use email today. It's theoretically possible that some of that might be private, but if even a fraction of it is public, a huge portion of those connected can be deaned (de-anonymized). It's going to get worse and worse as our real social networks become increasingly reflected in our software social networks.
In my opinion, privacy advocates are really grasping at the last fragments of How Things Were. Right now, it's basically possible to keep hiding. I don't know for sure that all of my friends have various anonymous accounts, but they almost certainly do. I know I do. Right now, that's fine: there are very few programs automatically trawling the internet trying to make these connections. There aren't very many things actively trying to dean the internet.
But it's getting easier and easier, both in terms of available data to analyze and in terms of algorithms to do the analysis. It's important that privacy advocates realize that the idea of promoting anonymity from the user side is going to be basically impossible.
So, the problem needs to be turned on its head. The problem isn't "how do you keep users from posting private data", the problem is "how do you keep private data from being abused".
An analogy I liked is the one about public meatspaces. If you and a friend are chatting in public, you might talk about his medical condition. If a stranger then rushed up to try to sell him homeopathic lies targeted at his medical condition, nobody would ever think your friend was the one who was weird: it would be the spy that was weird. If he did it a lot, the police would take him in for being a public nuisance.
So if I'm talking to you on the internet and we mention your medical condition, Google offers us homeopathic lies instantly and automatically, and probably logs that targeted ad for reuse later. Your medical insurer two years from now, if they find that conversation somehow, might deny you coverage based on the fact that you had a "pre-existing condition". There are already rumors of insurers canceling treatment based on social media - such as the depressed person whose treatment was discontinued because she was seen smiling in a picture on one of her friend's social network pages.
Even if it was possible, it's inhuman and dangerous to make us responsible for staying absolutely silent, absolutely hidden. Humans are social beings, the internet is a social medium. Being abused by corporations and repressed by governments is nothing new. We don't generally say, "well, you shouldn't have said that you disagreed with the government!" We generally say, "hey, the government shouldn't be persecuting you just because you said something!"
This is the same situation. Obviously, being force-fed stupifyingly bad ads is not the same thing as being rounded up and blacklisted in McCarthy's Big Red Book, but both stem from the same problem of people outside a conversation listening in and taking action based on what they hear. Conversations that were never intended to include them and certainly were never intended to be definitive, permanent, public statements.
So, there are two basic responses to this.
One is to revamp the underlying architecture to make everything incredibly privacy-aware by default. I think this is a good idea, but I also think it's pretty much impossible, since a social network is inclusive by nature. As social networking becomes the primary use of the internet, it seems unlikely that we're going to create a new network that specifically damages that function. Still, we could do better than we're doing right now.
The other option is to do what we always do: legislate it.
It can be legislated from two sides. One side, probably the easier side, is to restrict contact between entities and use of data gathered on-line. You are allowed to gather data. You can dean the network, find that XRSOXGAL8727 is Jenny Smith. But you aren't allowed to use that information for anything. No targeted ads. No redirecting links. Only when a user explicitly allows this sort of thing is it allowed. Steep fines if you break that rule.
There are a few problems with this. One is that spam is basically impossible to track down. Every day I get spammed with fairly well-targeted spam: my interests are pretty transparent, so spammers target me pretty specifically. A lot of this spam comes from anonymous sources, people I could never track down, people the government would have to spend a fair amount of time tracking down. Still, that's okay, because I'm not trying to stop anonymous spammers. I'm trying to stop Google.
Another problem is that it might be difficult to draw the line between someone who is actually trying to socially contact you and a spammer. For example, if you post about squids and I send you a link to an interesting squid article, I'm not trying to spam you, I honestly think you'll find it interesting. I think that line can be drawn fairly easily - number of entreaties per day per organization or somesuch - but it is an issue that has to be kept in mind.
Also, there is the problem of UNTARGETED spam. When I visit a science site, there are sciency ads. This is not because they know who I am, it's because it's a science site. However, I can forsee a lot of cases going to court that stumble over this distinction. Personally, I would prefer to make it illegal for them to spam me without my permission, targeted or not. But I understand that's an extreme view.
Anyhow, we also have another kind of legislative option: to make it illegal to dean data. To make it illegal to trawl the internet gathering data, tying it together, figuring out who is where, doing what. To make it illegal to watch you as you travel.
Now, this second option is the one I chose for my sci-fi setting, so I sat down to think. In my sci-fi setting, you can tell someone has deaned data because data has a structure, and high-context (non-anonymous) data has a very specific structure, even if it has been reduced to nothing but lists of foreign keys. Because the backbone has largely been replaced by a mesh network of freely available personal wireless routers, a lot of private individuals scan passing traffic for this pattern and report it to the cops if found. This can net them a tidy profit.
If a corporation is suspected of using illegally deaned data, they can also be investigated using a similar pattern-finding tool. This leaves their data private: the feds never see the actual data. This has led to a (so-far fruitless) search for a way to store high-context data without the signature pattern.
That future is a bit dystopian under the covers, and I don't think that method would work in reality. But then I got to thinking:
The problem is caused because there is so much easily-searchable information. However, searching the information causes more easily-searched information.
While the corporations are busily deaning your data, using your private messages to sell you useless crap, you could be busily deaning their data.
This isn't very possible on the current brand of internet. But what if the "next, more privacy-conscious" iteration of things actually tracks patterns of requests instead of simply tracking user connectivity? What if, by fundamental design, it was The Completely Transparent Thing? Instead of privacy, it has anti-privacy. Well, within any given persona: you could still have your anonymous account.
Now, if your anonymous account and your real account are both pinged, you'll know. You can track down the ping-er. Which may also be an anonymous account. It will be immediately obvious if it was chance, or if it was an auto-deaner, or if it was your would-be boss trying to find out if you have a juicy personal life. By attempting to dean you, they effectively dean themselves.
This is not really a good solution, because that level of monitoring reveals way more than you want to have revealed. The time you visited a link blind and found yourself staring at something horrible. The fact that you checked so-and-so's page 80 times in one hour. And, of course, the muddy propagation problems where the SocialReader9 bot visits your page, reads the details, and then gives it to others without you knowing.
I don't think there is a solution, really. Not with current technologies. But I was tickled by the "balance of power" option, where someone attempting to gather information on you incidentally exposes more information about themselves.
I wonder if it could be made to work somehow...
Anyhow, it's a problem that can't be addressed by simply telling people not to put their personal information on-line.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Gambling and Colored Spinny Things
Well, I wrote a big long post on enemy design, and the only thing anyone noticed was that I lumped skill-based challenges and luck-based challenges into a single challenge type. Caught some flak for that, so I figured I'd explain in more detail why I did that.
Not too long ago, I had them separated - luck and skill, that is. It's patently obvious that they are completely distinct, after all. One is luck, one is skill. You can get better at skill, but you can't get better at luck. So on so on so on.
The problem is that what is patently obvious isn't patently correct, and over time I shifted towards the opinion I hold now, which is that skill and luck are largely interchangeable from a game design standpoint. I don't expect to convince anyone, because it's a patently absurd statement. But I'll give it a shot.
First, to be a little more precise, I don't mean skill in general. I mean physical skill. Precision, reaction speed, spatial awareness. Skills such as tactical analysis, pattern recognition, and math are not really the same category. Those are "information challenges", or whatever term you prefer.
With that in mind, when I design, in my head things move. And they move in specific ways. So if I design a game, I see the fundamental mechanics and imagery boiling or spinning or changing colors as they bounce into each other and lock together. So the framework of a game has a distinct set of characteristics. By paying attention, I can usually produce what seems like more fun play, deeper immersion. Of course, being that I'm just toying around and prototyping, it could also just be wishful thinking.
Either way, the pieces "plunk" together in particular ways. The dynamics of a game, how it moves and spins and changes, is defined by how these pieces fit together. So I think in terms of what each piece of the design adds to the whole.
What I've come to realize is that a mechanic based on luck and a mechanic based on skill both serve the same purpose in this final framework. They both act as a "scattering" agent: they push the player in somewhat unexpected vectors, allowing them to explore the gameplay "terrain" with a quick and interesting feedback loop.
This sets them apart from information challenges, which are a far slower and more deliberate piece that usually forms the "backbone" of the game. The heuristics and thought you use in information dynamics can be very deep and interesting, but they move differently and don't contribute in the same way. The player will tend to "pool" in the valleys of an information challenge, but the velocity he gets from a gamble will often take him up and over various ridges, to new vistas.
They are certainly different from puzzle challenges, which are like little gems in the framework that unfold when you touch them.
The point is that, from a design standpoint, luck and skill serve the same driving role in a game's overall structure. They cause the player to interact with the game's framework in a very similar way. Just because one spins a bit differently from the other is no reason to call them different kinds of things: a penguin is still a bird, even though it can't fly.
They do serve slightly different purposes. Skill challenges can be stacked like a long chain of revolving gears, but doing that with strong luck mechanics will end up grinding itself to pieces. So, in order to use luck mechanics, you need to make sure there's padding between them and the next set of luck interactions, or you lose all agency. That's not as necessary with physical skill, which has a more orderly and agency-filled outgoing vector cloud.
But there's that much deviation within the other kinds of mechanics as well. Mental skill challenges include a variety of types that are just as distinct: memory challenges versus analysis challenges versus spatial challenges versus heuristic challenges... they also have somewhat distinct effects on the game. However, they are all fundamentally the same kind of thing.
That's where I'm coming from: the structure of the game, NOT the player's conscious experience.
Not too long ago, I had them separated - luck and skill, that is. It's patently obvious that they are completely distinct, after all. One is luck, one is skill. You can get better at skill, but you can't get better at luck. So on so on so on.
The problem is that what is patently obvious isn't patently correct, and over time I shifted towards the opinion I hold now, which is that skill and luck are largely interchangeable from a game design standpoint. I don't expect to convince anyone, because it's a patently absurd statement. But I'll give it a shot.
First, to be a little more precise, I don't mean skill in general. I mean physical skill. Precision, reaction speed, spatial awareness. Skills such as tactical analysis, pattern recognition, and math are not really the same category. Those are "information challenges", or whatever term you prefer.
With that in mind, when I design, in my head things move. And they move in specific ways. So if I design a game, I see the fundamental mechanics and imagery boiling or spinning or changing colors as they bounce into each other and lock together. So the framework of a game has a distinct set of characteristics. By paying attention, I can usually produce what seems like more fun play, deeper immersion. Of course, being that I'm just toying around and prototyping, it could also just be wishful thinking.
Either way, the pieces "plunk" together in particular ways. The dynamics of a game, how it moves and spins and changes, is defined by how these pieces fit together. So I think in terms of what each piece of the design adds to the whole.
What I've come to realize is that a mechanic based on luck and a mechanic based on skill both serve the same purpose in this final framework. They both act as a "scattering" agent: they push the player in somewhat unexpected vectors, allowing them to explore the gameplay "terrain" with a quick and interesting feedback loop.
This sets them apart from information challenges, which are a far slower and more deliberate piece that usually forms the "backbone" of the game. The heuristics and thought you use in information dynamics can be very deep and interesting, but they move differently and don't contribute in the same way. The player will tend to "pool" in the valleys of an information challenge, but the velocity he gets from a gamble will often take him up and over various ridges, to new vistas.
They are certainly different from puzzle challenges, which are like little gems in the framework that unfold when you touch them.
The point is that, from a design standpoint, luck and skill serve the same driving role in a game's overall structure. They cause the player to interact with the game's framework in a very similar way. Just because one spins a bit differently from the other is no reason to call them different kinds of things: a penguin is still a bird, even though it can't fly.
They do serve slightly different purposes. Skill challenges can be stacked like a long chain of revolving gears, but doing that with strong luck mechanics will end up grinding itself to pieces. So, in order to use luck mechanics, you need to make sure there's padding between them and the next set of luck interactions, or you lose all agency. That's not as necessary with physical skill, which has a more orderly and agency-filled outgoing vector cloud.
But there's that much deviation within the other kinds of mechanics as well. Mental skill challenges include a variety of types that are just as distinct: memory challenges versus analysis challenges versus spatial challenges versus heuristic challenges... they also have somewhat distinct effects on the game. However, they are all fundamentally the same kind of thing.
That's where I'm coming from: the structure of the game, NOT the player's conscious experience.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Moulin Rogue
I thought I was done with Batman, but last night I had a big dream where Moulin Rouge was completely redone with Batman's "Rogue's Gallery". Here's a sampling, the Roxanne melody, redone by various villains. Wheeee!
Crane:
[Treatment]
Will drive you
MAAAAAAAD!
Two-face:
BATMAN!
Maybe I'll rob two banks tonight!
I don't rob them for money,
The coin says if its wrong or if it is right.
BAAAATMAN! Maybe I'll rob two banks tonight!
BATMAN! You'll have to wear your cape throughout the night!
Joker:
My eyes upon your corpse
My hands upon your neck
My lips stretched in a grin
It's more than I can stand! (vicious giggling)
Joker & Two-face:
BAAAAATMAN!
Freeze:
Why did my wiiiiife die?
Frozen eyes caaaan't cry!
Rest, take it easy,
I'll save you as "Freezy",
And please believe me when I say
I love you!
(Psychiatric talk bridge and scattered repeating)
Crane:
[Treatment]
Will drive you
MAAAAAAAD!
Two-face:
BATMAN!
Maybe I'll rob two banks tonight!
I don't rob them for money,
The coin says if its wrong or if it is right.
BAAAATMAN! Maybe I'll rob two banks tonight!
BATMAN! You'll have to wear your cape throughout the night!
Joker:
My eyes upon your corpse
My hands upon your neck
My lips stretched in a grin
It's more than I can stand! (vicious giggling)
Joker & Two-face:
BAAAAATMAN!
Freeze:
Why did my wiiiiife die?
Frozen eyes caaaan't cry!
Rest, take it easy,
I'll save you as "Freezy",
And please believe me when I say
I love you!
(Psychiatric talk bridge and scattered repeating)
Monday, April 28, 2008
Music
I've written a lot of on-topic essays and thrown them all away. Here's an interesting but random, pointless one. Edit: It has been pointed out that this post might be total crap. Lemme know what you think!
Something about me you might not know: I really love music. I'm one of the people who gets a physical reaction to music - certain songs make my skin prickle, and not in a figurative sense. I always associate it with good music, and it only happens when I'm focusing on the music. The more prickling, the more I like the music. I couldn't really tell what caused it, all I knew is that it always starts somewhere a chunk before or after the middle of the songs in question.
The point is golden proportions in music.
Yeah, a little investigation. It turns out that almost every song on my hard drive that makes me prickle has its central shift at 62% of the way into the song, or at 38% of the way, plus or minus a bit. I don't think this is just chance, because many of the songs that don't cause me to prickle don't time this right, and the more off they are, the less I prickle.
For example, Chrono Cross: Time's Scar. A game I didn't even like, but man, I love this song. It fires up proper at 57 seconds in, out of 149 seconds. 149 * 0.382 = 57. Kwoon's "I lived on the moon" - the only song of his that I really like - is 272 seconds long. It switches gears at 105 seconds. 272 * 0.382 = 104.
It's not just weird songs. Even good rock songs...
"Heavy Fuel", by Dire Straits, is a song I love, but it doesn't make me tingle. It's 301 seconds long. That gives 114 seconds in, or 186 seconds in. There is a shift, but it's nearly ten seconds late and not the big shift in the song.
"Sultans of Swing" is a song that does make me tingle, but only a little bit. It's 350 seconds long, which means we should have a big shift at either 134 (2:17) or 216 (3:36). The solo starts at 3:30, which is a significant error even in a song this long, which would theoretically explain the smaller reaction. :D
"Footloose", a song I'm not proud tingle to, is 229 seconds long. It should shift at 87 (1:27) or 142 (2:22). Yeah, the song shift is at precisely 2:22. Like Sultans of Swing, it's not a big reaction, but since the song shift culminates fifteen seconds later, I would probably consider that to be what "should have been" at 2:22.
Cake. I hate Cake, but I can't help listening to them. The Distance is 3 minutes even, 180 seconds. 69 seconds or 111 seconds. There's a major shift at 67 seconds, and another at 110 seconds. Actually, the last two seconds of the song are silence, so it's an even better fit. That cannot have been on accident...
White Rabbit doesn't make me tingle, but I love it. It's 153 seconds long, so 58 seconds or 95 seconds is the theory, but since it doesn't make me tingle... the shift is at 85 seconds, very early. The peak is at 105 seconds, very late...
It's definitely true that I have a much stronger reaction to songs that peak at the late ratio (0.618) rather than the early ratio (0.382). I haven't included many examples here, because they're mostly game music or really obscure music. I wonder why?
Interesting, at any rate. It's a strong correlation: I think I have a strong reaction to the golden ratio! I bet there are miniature examples, too, like golden ratios within a progression or golden ratios of frequency... it's interesting.
How about you?
(Warning: If you're going to check timing yourself, VLC gets the time marker wrong if you jump to a position in the song... or, at least, it gives a different time reading than if you play from the start.)
Something about me you might not know: I really love music. I'm one of the people who gets a physical reaction to music - certain songs make my skin prickle, and not in a figurative sense. I always associate it with good music, and it only happens when I'm focusing on the music. The more prickling, the more I like the music. I couldn't really tell what caused it, all I knew is that it always starts somewhere a chunk before or after the middle of the songs in question.
The point is golden proportions in music.
Yeah, a little investigation. It turns out that almost every song on my hard drive that makes me prickle has its central shift at 62% of the way into the song, or at 38% of the way, plus or minus a bit. I don't think this is just chance, because many of the songs that don't cause me to prickle don't time this right, and the more off they are, the less I prickle.
For example, Chrono Cross: Time's Scar. A game I didn't even like, but man, I love this song. It fires up proper at 57 seconds in, out of 149 seconds. 149 * 0.382 = 57. Kwoon's "I lived on the moon" - the only song of his that I really like - is 272 seconds long. It switches gears at 105 seconds. 272 * 0.382 = 104.
It's not just weird songs. Even good rock songs...
"Heavy Fuel", by Dire Straits, is a song I love, but it doesn't make me tingle. It's 301 seconds long. That gives 114 seconds in, or 186 seconds in. There is a shift, but it's nearly ten seconds late and not the big shift in the song.
"Sultans of Swing" is a song that does make me tingle, but only a little bit. It's 350 seconds long, which means we should have a big shift at either 134 (2:17) or 216 (3:36). The solo starts at 3:30, which is a significant error even in a song this long, which would theoretically explain the smaller reaction. :D
"Footloose", a song I'm not proud tingle to, is 229 seconds long. It should shift at 87 (1:27) or 142 (2:22). Yeah, the song shift is at precisely 2:22. Like Sultans of Swing, it's not a big reaction, but since the song shift culminates fifteen seconds later, I would probably consider that to be what "should have been" at 2:22.
Cake. I hate Cake, but I can't help listening to them. The Distance is 3 minutes even, 180 seconds. 69 seconds or 111 seconds. There's a major shift at 67 seconds, and another at 110 seconds. Actually, the last two seconds of the song are silence, so it's an even better fit. That cannot have been on accident...
White Rabbit doesn't make me tingle, but I love it. It's 153 seconds long, so 58 seconds or 95 seconds is the theory, but since it doesn't make me tingle... the shift is at 85 seconds, very early. The peak is at 105 seconds, very late...
It's definitely true that I have a much stronger reaction to songs that peak at the late ratio (0.618) rather than the early ratio (0.382). I haven't included many examples here, because they're mostly game music or really obscure music. I wonder why?
Interesting, at any rate. It's a strong correlation: I think I have a strong reaction to the golden ratio! I bet there are miniature examples, too, like golden ratios within a progression or golden ratios of frequency... it's interesting.
How about you?
(Warning: If you're going to check timing yourself, VLC gets the time marker wrong if you jump to a position in the song... or, at least, it gives a different time reading than if you play from the start.)
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Future Shock
When I have too much time on my hands, I start researching. This essay is on technology, not game design. Sort of.
There is a lot of noise being made by futurists of all shapes and sizes. Predictions on what kind of technologies will come when, extrapolated from the idea of an exponential curve. It certainly seems possible, plausible. You have to admit that vastly more futurists' predictions have come true than any prophet or precog in the history of mankind. They have a hit rate of between 10% and 25%, and they are predicting very specific things. There are no wishy-washy could-be-this, could-be-that predictions. When you say "there will be software to translate text into sound so the blind can use computers", there's not a whole lot of wiggle room. You're either right or you're wrong.
The thing about an exponential curve is that the damn things kind of sneak up on you. Things seem to be fine, then a bit unstable, a bit wonky, maybe... suddenly everything goes vertical and the whole world is fundamentally different.
What's worst is that the kids don't even notice...
For example, cell phones. Half the world's population uses cell phones. Not half the world has cell phones, but in many cases, those without cell phones will frequently use someone else's cell phone. Third-world villages might only have one cell phone... but, damn, I mean, that's a village with no running water (no source of water in the village at all). That's a village with no utilities... and they've got a cell phone?
That's science fiction, that's what it is. Every time I picture it, I get a little shock. A little bit of, "well then, that went vertical while I wasn't looking..."
There are a lot of other technologies that are about to go vertical. How long do we have? Five years? Ten? Maybe twenty, if the government bans them?
How do you think you'll feel when you buy your ten-year-old one of those science kits for Christmas... but when he completes it, he's re-engineered your front lawn to glow safety orange at night?
How about when your printer breaks down, so your eight-year-old goes into the basement and makes you a new one? He's not even a geek, any more than a teenager with a cell phone is a geek. It's simply that the technology is in their blood. In many cases, literally.
To me, everything smacks of future shock. I don't think about "oh, with this technology we could do such-and-such". That's easily predictable. In twenty years, it will cost about as much to buy an outfit as to buy a 3D printer that can print you that outfit. It's not science fiction. It's not a guess.
The question is, what kind of shock waves will it cause?
The idea of science going asymptotic is fun for me. But we already see the stretch marks from our current slow advance. Not just in the form of panicking religions, but in every aspect of our society.
Even with something as easy as email... a lot of otherwise bright middle-aged professionals have a really hard time with email. Oh, they'll use it... but they sound like nine year olds. They can't write emails. There's just some kind of short-circuit in their head.
Cell phones, yeah. I'm feeling it. I went to buy the cheapest model of cell I could find, and it comes with a camera. I couldn't find one that didn't come with one. Future shock!
I want to use the camera, but... it doesn't click. It doesn't register in my brain, somehow. Even though every teenage girl in America can do it second nature. I mean, yeah, if I think of it, I can take a picture... maybe I could figure out how to send it to something other than my phone? But I never think of it. It just doesn't exist to me, even though I've always wanted a camera.
Sure, This sort of thing is clearest with certain nutjobs who refuse to believe in evolution. Somehow, the idea just... slips by their brain. They can't grasp it, so they deny it. Some days, I feel like denying that my cell phone has a camera. In decades past, I would just not use the camera, live my life, and die without ever using it. Regardless of what I believed, or whether I argued against it, the next generation could get on with it without me.
But the pace of science is outstripping the roll of generations. It will only get worse. A child born today and a child born five years from now will be growing up in two radically different worlds, as odd as that sounds. When each child is ten, they will have very different holiday wish lists.
The one born today will have his birthday in 2018. He will want a VR-XBox 9000. You know, the one that simulates every cell of the enemy exploding simultaneously and shares it with your friends worldwide?
The child born five years from now, his tenth birthday will be in 2023. He will want a construction AI to build him custom game machines with adaptable capacities for each game individually.
Those are guesses.
But they're probably good ones.
It's easy to say stuff like that. I mean, you can think, "yeah, that sounds cool, if I understand what you're talking about..."
Have you stopped to consider what it actually means? This isn't you getting a cool new technology. This is a child being shaped by a cool new technology.
You can already see it. These are people whose lives incorporate Flickr on a fundamental level. They are young people who grow up understanding that they post photos of every goddamn thing in the universe for all their friends to see. It's part of their brain. It's the same way that I fundamentally understand that computers are The Thing. To them, computers aren't The Thing. Computers are a medium. Computers are a default. Sharing information is The Thing. Friends can stay in touch every second of their shallow little lives, even if they are far away!
Ten years from now, sharing information won't be The Thing. Sharing information will be the medium. Sharing information will be the default.
What kind of weird, wholly ungoverned society will evolve out of that? What is The Thing on top of sharing information? Five years later, that thing will be the default... what will be built on top of it?
This cannot really be slowed down much.
All I can think is that our current method - our consumer/industrial society - it can't really last very long. It isn't built to withstand the ability to build open-source cars in your basement, or to manufacture your own prom dress based on a photo of your favorite actress. It isn't built to adapt to a hundred million children all working in amorphous synchronicity. It certainly isn't built to work in a world with no third world.
What kind of future is there? How bad will the future shock be? Will there be violence to try to stop it?
Those questions are infinitely more interesting than the relatively simple ones of "what technology comes next".
What is your opinion?
There is a lot of noise being made by futurists of all shapes and sizes. Predictions on what kind of technologies will come when, extrapolated from the idea of an exponential curve. It certainly seems possible, plausible. You have to admit that vastly more futurists' predictions have come true than any prophet or precog in the history of mankind. They have a hit rate of between 10% and 25%, and they are predicting very specific things. There are no wishy-washy could-be-this, could-be-that predictions. When you say "there will be software to translate text into sound so the blind can use computers", there's not a whole lot of wiggle room. You're either right or you're wrong.
The thing about an exponential curve is that the damn things kind of sneak up on you. Things seem to be fine, then a bit unstable, a bit wonky, maybe... suddenly everything goes vertical and the whole world is fundamentally different.
What's worst is that the kids don't even notice...
For example, cell phones. Half the world's population uses cell phones. Not half the world has cell phones, but in many cases, those without cell phones will frequently use someone else's cell phone. Third-world villages might only have one cell phone... but, damn, I mean, that's a village with no running water (no source of water in the village at all). That's a village with no utilities... and they've got a cell phone?
That's science fiction, that's what it is. Every time I picture it, I get a little shock. A little bit of, "well then, that went vertical while I wasn't looking..."
There are a lot of other technologies that are about to go vertical. How long do we have? Five years? Ten? Maybe twenty, if the government bans them?
How do you think you'll feel when you buy your ten-year-old one of those science kits for Christmas... but when he completes it, he's re-engineered your front lawn to glow safety orange at night?
How about when your printer breaks down, so your eight-year-old goes into the basement and makes you a new one? He's not even a geek, any more than a teenager with a cell phone is a geek. It's simply that the technology is in their blood. In many cases, literally.
To me, everything smacks of future shock. I don't think about "oh, with this technology we could do such-and-such". That's easily predictable. In twenty years, it will cost about as much to buy an outfit as to buy a 3D printer that can print you that outfit. It's not science fiction. It's not a guess.
The question is, what kind of shock waves will it cause?
The idea of science going asymptotic is fun for me. But we already see the stretch marks from our current slow advance. Not just in the form of panicking religions, but in every aspect of our society.
Even with something as easy as email... a lot of otherwise bright middle-aged professionals have a really hard time with email. Oh, they'll use it... but they sound like nine year olds. They can't write emails. There's just some kind of short-circuit in their head.
Cell phones, yeah. I'm feeling it. I went to buy the cheapest model of cell I could find, and it comes with a camera. I couldn't find one that didn't come with one. Future shock!
I want to use the camera, but... it doesn't click. It doesn't register in my brain, somehow. Even though every teenage girl in America can do it second nature. I mean, yeah, if I think of it, I can take a picture... maybe I could figure out how to send it to something other than my phone? But I never think of it. It just doesn't exist to me, even though I've always wanted a camera.
Sure, This sort of thing is clearest with certain nutjobs who refuse to believe in evolution. Somehow, the idea just... slips by their brain. They can't grasp it, so they deny it. Some days, I feel like denying that my cell phone has a camera. In decades past, I would just not use the camera, live my life, and die without ever using it. Regardless of what I believed, or whether I argued against it, the next generation could get on with it without me.
But the pace of science is outstripping the roll of generations. It will only get worse. A child born today and a child born five years from now will be growing up in two radically different worlds, as odd as that sounds. When each child is ten, they will have very different holiday wish lists.
The one born today will have his birthday in 2018. He will want a VR-XBox 9000. You know, the one that simulates every cell of the enemy exploding simultaneously and shares it with your friends worldwide?
The child born five years from now, his tenth birthday will be in 2023. He will want a construction AI to build him custom game machines with adaptable capacities for each game individually.
Those are guesses.
But they're probably good ones.
It's easy to say stuff like that. I mean, you can think, "yeah, that sounds cool, if I understand what you're talking about..."
Have you stopped to consider what it actually means? This isn't you getting a cool new technology. This is a child being shaped by a cool new technology.
You can already see it. These are people whose lives incorporate Flickr on a fundamental level. They are young people who grow up understanding that they post photos of every goddamn thing in the universe for all their friends to see. It's part of their brain. It's the same way that I fundamentally understand that computers are The Thing. To them, computers aren't The Thing. Computers are a medium. Computers are a default. Sharing information is The Thing. Friends can stay in touch every second of their shallow little lives, even if they are far away!
Ten years from now, sharing information won't be The Thing. Sharing information will be the medium. Sharing information will be the default.
What kind of weird, wholly ungoverned society will evolve out of that? What is The Thing on top of sharing information? Five years later, that thing will be the default... what will be built on top of it?
This cannot really be slowed down much.
All I can think is that our current method - our consumer/industrial society - it can't really last very long. It isn't built to withstand the ability to build open-source cars in your basement, or to manufacture your own prom dress based on a photo of your favorite actress. It isn't built to adapt to a hundred million children all working in amorphous synchronicity. It certainly isn't built to work in a world with no third world.
What kind of future is there? How bad will the future shock be? Will there be violence to try to stop it?
Those questions are infinitely more interesting than the relatively simple ones of "what technology comes next".
What is your opinion?
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Netflix
Edit: Nevermind, you can disregard this whole thing.
I downloaded the data, but it comes in 17770 separate files. Eighteen THOUSAND separate files. I have no particular interest in hacking together a macro to turn those files into something useful.
Of course, if someone else already HAS, I'd be very willing to download their already-compiled list...
Call me lazy, but it would take me hours and hours just to recombine these files.
I'm downloading the data set for the Netflix prize. It will be the largest data set I've ever tried to run my user preference algorithm on.
I don't think I'll win the prize - ever - for a few reasons. First, it's not a "fire and forget" thing. They'll keep mumbling along for FIVE YEARS before passing out the prize, and I'm not willing to work gratis for quite that long.
Second, their data is bunged.
They did it to keep people from using the data to "make certain inferences about Netflix customers". Hrrrrmmmm... what, exactly, are we supposed to use the data for, then?
They say that the missing data doesn't affect THEIR algorithm's accuracy. But, you know, they just admitted their algorithm's accuracy is 8.5%.
:P
Anyhow, we'll see whether I can do anything with it. The biggest problem, at the moment, is that I don't actually have a database program installed on this computer. Ha! I'll have to get one.
I downloaded the data, but it comes in 17770 separate files. Eighteen THOUSAND separate files. I have no particular interest in hacking together a macro to turn those files into something useful.
Of course, if someone else already HAS, I'd be very willing to download their already-compiled list...
Call me lazy, but it would take me hours and hours just to recombine these files.
I'm downloading the data set for the Netflix prize. It will be the largest data set I've ever tried to run my user preference algorithm on.
I don't think I'll win the prize - ever - for a few reasons. First, it's not a "fire and forget" thing. They'll keep mumbling along for FIVE YEARS before passing out the prize, and I'm not willing to work gratis for quite that long.
Second, their data is bunged.
They did it to keep people from using the data to "make certain inferences about Netflix customers". Hrrrrmmmm... what, exactly, are we supposed to use the data for, then?
They say that the missing data doesn't affect THEIR algorithm's accuracy. But, you know, they just admitted their algorithm's accuracy is 8.5%.
:P
Anyhow, we'll see whether I can do anything with it. The biggest problem, at the moment, is that I don't actually have a database program installed on this computer. Ha! I'll have to get one.
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