Friday has become a weird blogging day for me lately. My habit is generally to write out a post the night before, as the last thing I do before going to bed. Having tried writing posts at different times of day, however, I’ve noticed that the thoughts I have and the kinds of things I write about are very different depending on when I write the post.

As part of this, I started working on trying to seed in posts at different times, so that I’m putting a post up every day, but not always at the exact same time every day (and, more importantly, not writing them at the same time every day). Given that I’ve missed a few Fridays because Friday apparently is a busy-ish day for me most weeks, this hasn’t worked out so well.

On the other hand, writing at 2:30pm rather than 1am means that my mind is on different things. Right now I’m thinking about how difficult it is to find trustworthy reviews of places. I need to get my oil changed, and according to yelp there are about 40 places within a reasonable distance I could go to do this. Yelp reviews have fallen into the problem of public reviews in general– pretty much no one ever gives something an accurate number of stars– it either gets 5 stars (if it was a good experience) or 0/1 (if it wasn’t), and figuring out what kind of place I’m going to based on a bunch of random people’s one-sided reports isn’t terribly useful now that everyone uses Yelp.

The same is true of apartment hunting, restaurants, glassdoor company reviews… everything. Everything is three to three-and-a-half stars, and often reading into a particularly bad review suggests that the fault miiiiiight not lie with the company in question, although sometimes it does.

What I’ve been mulling over is the idea of a yelp-style concept that plugs into existing social media (yelp may already do this, but it’s poorly advertised), so that what you get is your friends’ and acquaintances’ reviews of things. I feel like, properly done, it would drive more casual and more helpful reviews while also encouraging people to both review more often and at a higher quality. Instead of a star system, it could just say “friends have posted from this location X times in the last Y days” and show you what they’ve had to say over time (and you’re more likely to actually care, because it’s your friends).

Food for thought. Time to make some key lime pie.

I really hate random results. It’s one of the reasons why Magic: the Gathering gets under my skin– even a perfectly constructed deck has a significant chance of losing you the game because you get a series of bad draws.

In most games with random elements, the goal of skilled play is to reduce the effects of the random element as much as possible. The more you can do this, the better. It’s what makes Infinity a tactically compelling game and other minis wargames starkly less so. Skilled play involves maneuvering and planning (two things that don’t involve a random element) in order to maximize your odds of success when you do inevitably have to turn to the RNG to determine your fate. Skilled play revolves around reducing this value as much as possible, and in Infinity you can reduce it quite a bit, through good planning and proper application of tools. In MMOs, you reduce randomness by planning strategies around random occurrences– if the boss has a nasty attack that randomly targets two people, part of your strategy involves everyone knowing what to do if it’s them that gets targeted.

Some element of randomness is important in games, however. A lot of games require that you do the same thing over and over again, and some unpredictability in results keeps things interesting. It’s often a relatively narrow band, but it’s what makes critical hits so fun (and critical failures so interesting). As a DM and game designer, I keep this very much in mind, because it affects enjoyment a lot.

Consider the following: The critical item you need to succeed drops slightly less than one percent of the time. Success is doing that thing over and over again and fishing for that less-than-one-percent chance. That is miserable. Comparatively: If you score a critical hit, you get to perform a cool, class-defining attack. You have a critical hit rate of about 50%. This is a lot more fun, because it’s not predictable, but your odds of endless repetition for the slim hope of success is really unlikely.

Here’s the thing. As soon as something is possible in a game, it gets fed into a risk/reward analysis. People like to dismiss this as “theorycraft” or “mathhammer” or “crunch”, but the reality is that it’s true for every player. If you get a new ability, you’re going to experiment with it to see what it’s good for, or how cool it looks, or what-have-you. Alternately, you’re going to go to someone else who’s already done that experiment. Even if you’re just using said ability “because I like it”, you’ve still made a risk/reward analysis. Something with a random chance of occurring (say, a weapon proc or drop) is either not good enough to be worth pursuing or good enough that you absolutely must pursue it at any cost. This is why people spent months trying to get Thunderfury in Vanilla WoW, despite the pathetically low drop rate.

For an extreme example, think of an ability that, one percent of the time (or less!) allowed you to use a cool class ability. Let’s say that, one percent of the time you cast a fireball, that fireball would be an AoE for full damage on all targets. You’d never use it, and you’d probably hate the ability. You’d barely notice when it triggered, you’d be mildly happy when it triggered when you wanted it to, and you’d remember every single time it triggered when you were trying to be really precise about your targeting and it screwed something up. It would be frustrating and maddening to use.

The key is that, in order to be fun, random effects need to be a few things:

1. Not punitive.
2. Frequent enough to be noticeable.
3. Controllable to some extent.
4. Not crucially tied to basic, moment-to-moment functionality.

This is why the Machinist in FFXIV is so frustrating for many people to play. Your basic attack combo has an element of randomness to it. It’s worth noting that the class gives you a method with which to control that randomness to some extent, which is kind of a big deal. It’s what makes the Astrologian fun– you get a random card draw, but you have options with what to do with that card. Infinity’s range bands and shooting odds are controllable. Well designed raid bosses don’t kill you randomly with mechanics (and the ones that do are viciously disliked).

Like many things, it’s a matter of moderation. Randomness is important or you can decide games before they’re played– it’s a very easy way to avoid your game being reliably “solved”. Tic-tac-toe is a solved game, but if the game randomly selected a square that you COULDN’T play in every turn, it would quickly not be solved (though it probably wouldn’t be much more fun).

There’s an elegance to games that are not at all random but are still not necessarily predictable or easy to win. Go is a good example, as is pretty much every bullet hell shooter. Similarly, some wildly random games are still fun– while I personally dislike Magic, a very large number of people play it and its randomness is a very good way to muddle minor skill disparities (which is what it was designed for to begin with) while still allowing large skill disparities to stay noticeable.

It’s probably apparent by now that I don’t gamble. C’est la vie.

I spent about four hours today studying Japanese, and working on my process for teaching myself. A few people asked me what resources I was using, so I figured I’d talk a bit about those as well as how I’m structuring my study.

My first step was the free “level 1” Rosetta Stone program, which I got for iOS. It lets you ‘sample’ various languages, in the form of a roughly two hour course, broken out into chunks. It’s a very high-immersion piece of software, using exclusively audio input/output, images, and kana (written Japanese) to teach. It doesn’t really hold your hand as far as explaining how to use it goes, so I had a number of missteps while I figured out what each type of exercise wanted me to actually do.

What I like about the Rosetta Stone software is that it teaches by showing rather than telling. It doesn’t explain how the grammatical structure works or what the words it uses mean, it leaves you to intuit what it’s saying through context. While this sounds very frustrating, it’s structured in such a way that you can pick up a lot of tangential lessons while doing the exercises it provides, and it mixes up the ways it demonstrates these. As an example, in one exercise it might have you match pictures with statements like “the boy drinks juice” or “the woman drinks water”. You’ll have learned “juice” and “water” prior to this exercise, and are basically now hearing them in sentences to get a sense of how they’re used. The last section of the exercise will then say “the man drinks tea”, introducing you to a word you haven’t seen before, but that you can guess at because the other options you have are “juice” and “water”, so the remaining new word must be “tea”.

What I don’t like about Rosetta Stone is that, first and foremost, it’s extremely expensive. The software costs hundreds of dollars, and while I think it’s a good piece of software to get an early handle on the language, it’s not going to work for everyone and the depth to which it can reach is relatively shallow. It’s essentially a very expensive way to get a solid handle on a very small piece of the language, though its focus on audio puts it decently ahead of most learning tools shy of a tutor or study group; the latter may not be easily available and the former is going to cost rather more than Rosetta Stone in the long run (though cover a lot more material).

I can neither afford a tutor nor Rosetta Stone, so once I’d completed the free trial lessons, I went looking elsewhere for material. The next tool I started using was another iOS app: iKana, which is essentially a set of flash cards for all of the Japanese syllabaries. As a minor aside, it’s important to note that Japanese doesn’t use an alphabet the way we understand it in English. Each symbol in Hiragana and Katakana corresponds to a particular syllabic sound, which is either a vowel (e) or a consonant-vowel combination (ke). Because each symbol has a single sound (unlike English, which has anywhere from two to five sounds for a given letter), there are a LOT more kana than letters in the alphabet.

My approach as a raw beginner was to tackle this bit of memorization first. It requires very little structure and it’s going to be the foundation of me being able to read or speak the language. I spent about a week doing nothing but studying Hiragana for an hour each night, using iKana’s flash cards, stroke order practice, and built-in memory tests. The app comes in a package with iKanji, which is a similar app for learning Kanji (Japanese symbols for words/concepts, rather than syllables), though I haven’t yet used it much. The overall cost of the pair of apps was ten dollars, and I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of just iKana, without even touching iKanji. The convenience of being able to practice anywhere I have my phone is great, and it’s become a nightly ritual for me.

What I *don’t* like about iKana is that its tests aren’t extremely robust. Speed recognition tests give you a syllable or a kana and have you match it with its pair, letting you select from four. This is fine and good early on, but it’s a lot easier to score highly on a multiple choice test than it would be for me to simply write all of the Hiragana on a piece of paper. Essentially, iKana can get me a leg up, but I’m going to need to spend some time with something else (read: a pencil and paper, honestly) to get the rest of the way. I can’t speak much about iKanji, because I’ve opened the app all of once thus far. I’ll get to it later.

With a pretty okay basis for Hiragana, I felt like I was ready to tackle a textbook. The last purchase I made was the Genki textbook and workbook, for about $70 on Amazon. It’s by far the most highly recommended Japanese learning tool, though it comes with the caveat that it doesn’t hold your hand when teaching you. The textbook moves quickly and comes with some audio CDs for both textbook and workbook. What I like about it is that it provides Japanese text without visible romaji (English alphabet letters) so that I’m forced to actually read Hiragana rather than reading romaji and glancing at the actual Japanese text.

What I don’t like about Genki is that it really wants to be taught by a teacher that’s got a lot of other study work paired with each lesson, and it’s structured for use in a classroom. There are a number of exercises that ask you to talk with classmates, for example. Obviously an entirely self-taught language is going to be nearly impossible, but still.

The structure I’m putting together for my study looks something like this:

1. Kana recognition, to the point where I can read kana by looking at it. I don’t need to be fast at this, I just need to be able to do it.
   • This is basically to lay a foundation for everything else. If I can read or hear sounds, I can put them together and work out what I’m hearing, but until then I’m going to be floundering.
2. Basic grammar and phrases, enough to say some basic things and ask simple questions, and start to get a handle on constructing sentences of my own.
   • This is to get a grasp of sentence structure and start to get a feel for how to both speak in and listen to the language. I’m less concerned with grammatical perfection here than I am the basics.
3. Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary, both in kana and in kanji.
   • Sort of self-explanatory, and it’s honestly going to be a part of every step of the process, but here is where I’m going to start trying to express more complex thoughts, and I’m going to need the vocabulary to do so.
4. Advanced grammar and sentence structure; how to say complicated things.
   • A lot of language learning programs will try to get you saying the complex English things you’re used to early on, which I find frustrating because I can’t break it down the way I do in English. When I tried to learn Spanish, I had a bad tendency to try to directly translate whatever I would have said in English straight to Spanish, and got frustrated because my (large) English vocabulary didn’t map neatly to my (small) Spanish one. It’s a trap I fell into previously and one I’m trying to avoid here. My hope is that I can afford a tutor by this point.
5. Eloquence, more vocabulary, specialized communications.
   • I have no idea if I’m going to get here. I doubt I will unless I wind up spending some significant amount of time in Japan for whatever reason, or wind up with friends who’ll speak the language around and with me. If I can speak the language well enough to communicate for business purposes, that’ll be great, but that’s another thing I’m going to need specialized training in.

We’ll see how well this structure holds up to me actually trying to learn!

I used to be a bleeding-edge-of-content type. At various points in my MMO-playing career, I’ve pushed hard against the wall of the most advanced content in various games at various times, and I’ve reached a point where I no longer feel the need to chase that. That having been said, I still love the sense of accomplishment of beating something legitimately difficult, even if I’m not doing it the fastest, or the hardest possible way.

Last night, we beat Turn 13, finishing out the Binding Coil of Bahamut in its entirety. Even at the expansion power level, the final boss isn’t a trivial encounter, and took us more tries to beat than the first section of Alexander (expansion raid content, which we did immediately after T13). Part of this has to do with how shallow the power curve is in FFXIV– we’re not looking at orders of magnitude of power increases for the most part. The other part is that the mechanics of the fight are very, very nasty. Even on “easy”, it will happily wreck you if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What I like about this pace of content is that it keeps everything fun. Sure, we’re not going to be the first to beat everything, but we can and will beat it all, and we’ll do it without burning ourselves out. The only time I’ve been fatigued with the regular raid we run has been when we were bashing our heads against Turn 9, and even that was much less nasty than the severe burnout I was feeling doing Naxx40 in Vanilla WoW, or some of the plane raids as they came out in EQ, or hardmode Soa in SWTOR.

this picture is titled “swtor-soa-bug-fix” which should tell you a lot about the frustrations with that awful, awful fight.

I think a big part of it is that I feel like I’m getting a reward that’s more than an item or a title or an achievement for beating a boss. I’m getting a solid, notable chunk of story. The cutscene following the defeat of Arthas in Wrath of the Lich King is basically par for the course for FFXIV raids; every Coil ends with a cutscene like that, and there are also a goodly number of equally significant ones scattered throughout the progression. I’m getting a big chunk of interesting story that means a lot more to me than a fancy new sword or a piece of armor that will be outdated with the next release.

Indeed, at no point while we were raiding Coil were any of the drops going to be relevant for us. They look cool, and that’s about it; we were never going to see upgrades out of there. I think it helped things, and made our experience a lot smoother and more fun. We did each thing as often as we wanted to, rather than grinding them repeatedly just to get drops to gear up for the next one.

As for myself, I got a little burned out getting my gear level up high enough to take on Alexander, grinding Law tomestones to get upgrades. I haven’t had the desire to log in and grind more dungeons, and I’ve been holding off on raiding Alexander on my own until I can see all the pieces of it with my team. I’m looking forward to new dungeons and new story quests to keep moving things forward, but in the meantime I’m branching out into a few other games. I may make a return to Archeage and muck about with that, although as mentioned before I’ve been fairly deep in SAO: Hollow Fragment.

After a fairly long period of being a bit uninterested in the games I had available to me, it’s exciting to have things I want to play again.

I’m continuing to work on teaching myself Japanese, which has been a fascinating process. It’s been described to me as an extremely difficult language to learn, and as I familiarize myself with it, I’m starting to understand why.

Japanese is, in a lot of ways, a very straightforward, regular language, with very few exceptions to its rules and a surprisingly comprehensible set of grammatical rules. It’s difficult because almost none of these things map to English. I used to wonder how older (and some recent) translations of games and shows could be so incredibly bad, and I’m discovering that it’s because there’s really no direct translation. As I start to parse sentences, it feels a bit like one of the old Magic Eye pictures, where you have to look at it indirectly to allow your brain to see the hidden picture, and if you try to focus on it too much you lose it.

I can’t translate what I want to say in English directly to Japanese; I have to turn the sentence into an abstract thought, and communicate that. It’s made me a lot more aware of how I construct sentences in English, and I’ve started trying to think of English sentences as abstract thoughts to get a better handle on how to better express myself. In English, it’s easy for me to construct elaborate walls of words, adding complexity and waxing poetic to make a very simple thought seem like something a lot more ornate than it actually is. It’s a tendency that’s made it very difficult for me to learn languages in the past. I’ve made attempts at Spanish, and while I can understand it very well, I don’t have the breadth of vocabulary or understanding of complex forms to translate what I want to say from English into Spanish. Faced with Japanese, a language where I can’t make that translation, I’m finding that relying on my intuition to pick up meaning from sentences is really effective.

It makes me think a lot about games and the comfort zones we play in. I had a discussion with a guildmate recently who was intensely frustrated by Summoner, because (as he put it) “you’re always guessing at what you should do next so it’s a constant panic”. He loves rotation-based classes, where he can plan his next moves multiple steps ahead, and couldn’t understand why I, someone who has the same love for planning, liked the class so much. For me it’s because the Summoner playstyle is an abstraction of what a rotation is trying to accomplish– having all of the right things happening at the right times. I’m never guessing at what I need to do next on my Summoner, because I’ve developed a feel for how things should go. I’m not thinking in terms of “this ability, then this one, then this one”, it’s more like “right now feels like the right time to use this”.

Similarly, I watched someone pick up a controller for the first time this past week. He’d been playing games on the PC for twenty years, but had never owned a console. I could see the frustration as he played a game he knew well (FFXIV) via a control scheme he wasn’t familiar with. He knew what he wanted to do, but couldn’t make the buttons respond quite the right way. His intuition about how to control the game was thrown completely off.

Both things map to language learning for me. Speaking a new language is like trying to play a game through an unfamiliar control scheme, and understanding it is like making sense of a game by feel. I could, if I wanted, break down when to use every Summoner ability with a clock during a fight, so that you could work out a ‘rotation’ that mapped to when everything needed to be used. It would be like trying to translate through English for every sentence in Japanese– doable, but you lose a lot and you’ll never be as quick as if you can internalize the abstraction and just maneuver by feel.

Different people find different things difficult. I have two friends nearby, both from China. One of them speaks English with almost no accent, but sticks to relatively simply constructed sentences and misses a lot of nuance in other people’s speech. The other has a very heavy accent, but a much broader use of vocabulary and sentence construction, but struggles with making her actual words understandable. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with both of them via text over the internet, and their speech patterns are starkly different– both are very eloquent and have a firm grasp of the language. They’re both playing a game with a control scheme they aren’t yet used to, but taking different approaches.

In the meantime, I’ve reached the point in about two weeks of study where I can almost read hiragana and I can hear the shape of sentences– I can’t understand them, but I know enough to pick up pieces and figure out what the subject, topic, verb, etc all are even if I don’t know what they mean. It’s going to be a long time, if ever, before I can hold myself to the same standard in Japanese as I do in English, but the process is giving me a lot of insight into how I speak in English, and how I can improve.

I hate dailies. My tolerance for the extends exactly as far as is required for me to access whatever content I’d like to get into and basically no further. It’s the fastest way for me to burn out on a game. The obligation to log in every day and do [whatever] loses me instantly.

At the same time, I understand the need to pace out progression in some sane way. FFXIV has a great system in its daily leve allowances, and I wish that would extend to other things. Let me run a week’s worth of expert roulette on Saturday, rather than needing to log in every single day to max out my currency income.

I haven’t logged in much to FFXIV this week because I’d been grinding every day to reach i170 on my Summoner. I know I can get higher than that, but it’s just not enticing to me. I’ve come to lack the overriding desire to make all of my numbers as high as possible, I’m more than happy with “high enough”, because there’s other stuff I want to do. I appreciate how lightweight the Law grind was in FF, especially right after the levelling process, but I’m not terribly motivated to jump right back into it to chase the gear treadmill a little further, especially because I know my current state is sufficient for what I’m doing and, furthermore, the investment required to move forward to the current “best” tier will drop here relatively shortly. I’ve chased the cutting edge of content before, and I don’t have the interest in doing it again that would motivate me to grind dungeons until I achieve the absolute best [numbers] I possibly can.

What motivates me is interesting new stuff to do. I am, at my core, an Explorer-type, though I don’t fall into the category of Explorer that people tend to think of. Wandering around geography isn’t interesting to me; I want to explore the story and the gameworld and see how everything plays out. I don’t care about finding the secret hidden treasure chest in a cave on a mountainside, but I will jump through nearly any hoops to get all of the possible endings to something. I’ve only played one Kingdom Hearts game, but I did get the ‘true’ ending for it, and I played through enough Chrono Trigger to see every way that game ends (it’s a lot).

Exploration for its own sake doesn’t interest me– I want something to find. In the same vein, progression for its own sake rarely excites me: I want to be progressing in order to see something I haven’t previously seen. It’s something I miss from older MMOs– current games want to make sure you don’t miss anything, so there’s rarely anything to find by wandering off the beaten path. You might get some cool screenshots or something (which other people really love, and I appreciate, but don’t care to chase after for myself), but by and large you’re not going to find anything meaningful at the top of that mountain if the game didn’t expressly tell you to go there.

It was my biggest disappointment with Wildstar– for all it claimed to encourage exploration, I still felt like it was taking me on hikes along well-trodden paths, not rewarding me for forging across the wilderness. The coolest part of the Explorer subclass was finding hidden quest areas that weren’t apparent to other people, but they felt thin; I didn’t really find exciting stuff in there, just a challenge and maybe a single quick quest. It wasn’t the life-changing revolution that was expected.

That being said, I continue to feel like we’re on the cusp of a big sea change in MMOs, but of the various directions it could go, I’m not sure yet which one I think is likely. I hope we get away from games and back towards experiences that feel like worlds. I find I miss the sense of being a denizen of a vast digital world, versus a player in a multiplayer game. The difference is, as always, progression. In worlds, you can make progress in a variety of ways and they’ll all benefit you. In games, if you’re not spending your time progressing in one of a relatively set number of ways, you’re kind of wasting your time. I miss feeling like I could spend my time doing whatever and still be productive.

Good translation makes a huge difference. Honestly, it can make or break the experience, and it’s genuinely hard to do.

I picked up Hollow Fragment a few months back on the Vita. It was a really, really interesting game mechanically set in a world that I find really compelling. I can’t talk much about the story because if you haven’t seen any of SAO it drops enormous spoilers within the first five minutes or so of the game, but the game’s concept is a sort of extended “what-if” sequence, which is really interesting and something I haven’t seen in game tie-ins.

I put a solid 15-20 hours into the game before quitting– as much as I loved the gameplay, the translation for the Vita version was atrocious, so much so that I didn’t really have a clear picture as to what I was doing wrong in particular sections nor did I have any idea what was happening in the story. I was fighting exceptionally difficult enemies and dying frequently, and didn’t have a lot of intelligible feedback on what I could do to improve. At the same time, the dialogue was garbled to the point of being incomprehensible, so I could get a vague emotional tone but very little else. It made it difficult to figure out where to go and what to do.

Don’t do this.

Loading up the new (retranslated) PS4 version was stark. I had a clear picture of what was going on almost immediately, and I suddenly understood how a bunch of game mechanics worked before even leaving the tutorial. One of the big things that the retranslated version did was clarify how the game is structured. There are two separate areas that you can progress through, and it wasn’t clear to me which the right one was. On the Vita, I had this helpful hint:

“For ready players, advance through floors of Aincrad. If still collecting loot and exp, try the Hollow Area.”

Based on that, I jumped into the Hollow Area straightaway. Why not collect loot and exp until I feel “ready”? The PS4 version translates that line a little differently:

“If you’re still getting used to the game, try some of the early floors of Aincrad. If you’re an advanced player and want to test your skill and get rewarded with loot and lots of exp, try the Hollow Area.”

SLIGHTLY different. It explained why I was getting pummeled in my entire Vita playthrough– I was basically trying to advance through the special advanced bonus dungeon right from the start. This playthrough, I started playing through the ‘appropriate’ sections first, and wound up basically crushing my way through the first few sections, largely thanks to the skills I’d honed fighting things way out of my weight class on the Vita.

What I’ve discovered is that the game is much, much more nuanced than I’d realized, mechanically. I can’t talk much about the story, but it does a really good job of interspersing the ensemble cast and keeping all of the characters at the forefront (which the show didn’t do quite as much) and keeping the story relevant– there are a ton of events that occur in between going out and beating up monsters, but you can spend quite a bit of time just doing that if you like, and you have a ton of characters you can level up.

Because the game drops you in the middle of the action, you start at a pretty advanced level with quite a few skills and resources– it’s a little odd to start a game at level 97, but it works pretty well in this context. You’ve got enough abilities to start to make things interesting and you can slowly explore them, but because you’re so overleveled for the starting point (a thematic staple of the series), you can ease into things. It also doesn’t waste any time with introducing things you’ve already covered in the series– the only catch-up it does is letting you know how the game diverges. This probably isn’t great for anyone who hasn’t seen the series, but it’s kind of an obscure title to pick up if you haven’t watched Sword Art Online. Cutting to the chase as far as establishing story and characters lets them get detailed and personal with interactions very quickly, as well as occasionally very silly.

Overall, I’m having a lot of fun with it, especially with a translation that lets me make sense of the story. Because the game’s story diverges hugely from a major plot point in the series, I’m interested to see where they go with things. I like the idea of the game building out into conceptual space rather than simply retreading the ground covered by the series, and I’d like to see more of that in game tie-ins. It makes me think of KOTOR, which created a whole new space for Star Wars that’s proven to be incredibly fertile ground.

If something provides value, it’s worth paying for. I’ve talked before about follow-the-money problems, and one of the key things to remember is that nothing is free to create. If you’re not paying any money for something, there’s a reason. If something costs more than you think it should, it’s worth looking into why that is. Sometimes there’s a very good reason.

Possibly it’s cynical, but TANSTAAFL is one of those resonant concepts for me. It stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”, and comes from Heinlein, as a sci-fi slang word. If you’re getting something for free, it’s because the cost is being taken from somewhere other than your wallet. Sometimes it’s some other obligation you have (buying lunch next time), sometimes it’s some other inconvenience (sitting through ads), sometimes it’s coming out of someone else’s wallet. The one that always gets me is “free to play” games. Yep, you can absolutely install and play in some capacity for free. Pretty much every monetization effectiveness study out there shows that players who do actually pay money wind up paying rather more on average in a free-to-play game than in an equivalent game that uses a box sale, or a subscription, or what have you.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are a ton of creators who sell their goods for a pittance, way less than they’re worth, and that skews the system rather badly. The rise of predatory free-to-play games came from the slew of early indie game devs who gave their work out for free just for “exposure”, and you can see the same kind of thing in other creative industries. By undercharging for a good or service, the overall availability and quality of that good or service drops– people who paint minis for a dollar or two per model work out to usually less than a dollar an hour of work, making professional services that charge a more reasonable amount (even at a minimum wage of $7.50/hour, an individual mini can take 2-5 hours of work; $15-30/mini is entirely reasonable, cost-wise) look outrageous by comparison.

I’d actually be interested in chasing down studies on how the hobbyist market that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years impacts traditional economics models– I suspect it’s incredibly disruptive to the usual models and throws everything off. It’s certainly the case with a lot of creative industries where independent creators can get a foothold– the increased volatility and wildly changing pricing schemes for video games showcases that quite nicely, even as hobbyist shop centers like Etsy put items on the market that probably wouldn’t have existed before.

We’ve shifted from a society where value is dictated by the seller to one where value is negotiable, like the barter systems of old. It creates a situation where value is a moving target, and different people put different values on things. At the same time, we’re so accustomed to the idea of “fairness” that the idea of different people being charged differently based on how much they value the good or service is anathema. The idea that one person might play a video game for five dollars while someone else pays a hundred to play it at the same time would make a lot of people angry, but it’s a reality of the negotiable value proposition. The only difference is we’re very good at masking it– we look at games that are “free”, but behind the scenes people are looking at the ‘whales’ and seeing how best to keep them around. Who is willing to pay more for something and how are they convinced to stick around?

We can’t have it both ways, though. If you’re willing to accept that you can talk a price down when commissioning an artist, you have to be willing to accept that a chef might talk your meal price up for your favorite dish. In the meantime, if you’ve gotten some fun out of a game that you didn’t pay for, kick a few bucks to the developers. Try to pay what something is worth to you, not just the cheapest amount you can get away with. It’ll make the stuff you’re able to get that much better in the long run.

We talked about Astebreed over the weekend on the podcast, but as per usual I wanted to put a few more thoughts here.

I’m awful at memorizing things, which I’ve talked about a bit before. It’s kept me out of a lot of bullet hell shooters, because those are entire games around memorizing patterns and executing the right evasive maneuvers to match the patterns. I don’t really have the patience or interest to play the same level tens or hundreds of times just to get the pattern down. I like Astebreed because, for the most part, it lets me come up with my own solutions for each boss pattern without forcing me to memorize a specific set of “the right” moves.

Playing Astebreed, however, got me thinking about raid bosses in MMOs. They’re often pattern-driven, and almost always require that I memorize the associated attacks and the appropriate (highly specific) reactions to them. I like them, though, whereas I tend not to like the memorization-heavy bullet hell genre. The conceptual gap there bothered me, and I’ve spent a few days mulling over why I like one but not the other.

The two obvious answers are that MMOs involve other people and that they also are much less demanding and punitive than bullet hell shooters. Both of these lessen the impact, but don’t change the core concept. That being said, there are a lot of things where I don’t like the ‘pure’ version but dearly love the dilutions– the JRPG is a really good example of this. Similarly, I never really liked Forza, but I enjoy both Burnout and Mariokart, both pretty heavy dilutions of the racing mechanic. Having other people playing along with me also makes the experience more fun, because I’m both able to help out my friends and get help from their cues– it isn’t always a binary fail state, and the experience itself is shared.

Another angle I looked at it from is my own approach to the game vis a vis classes. Avoiding deadly attack patterns is only half the boss fight; the other half is actually fighting the boss. I tend to play healers and specific types of damage classes. In the former case, there’s no set rotation; I’m reacting to the fight on the fly and (ideally) proactively inserting abilities as the situation changes. In the latter case, I tend to avoid rotation-based classes in favor of ones that focus more on reacting to the situation. A lot of my favorite classes have been ones that lean on situational adaptation (often priority systems) rather than straight rotations.

Astebreed also separates itself from other shooters I’ve played by focusing a lot more on offense than evasion. I’ve played a number of games where evasion is the key (Touhou, Ikaruga, etc) and where actually attacking enemies is something you kind of do on the side in between avoiding shots. In some cases, the primary attack is simply always on, further emphasizing how incidental actually attacking is. It’s not something I like a lot, even in the other bullet hell shooter I’ve played recently– Sine Mora. Sine Mora is a Vita title that gives you a slow time effect, letting you slow everything down while moving at the same rate. It’s great for getting out of tight places or figuring out how to evade, and let me get away with less memorization throughout the game (probably why I beat it), but it didn’t really let me focus on offense over defense the way I like.

I’ll admit I’m tempted to pick up Astebreed on PS4 despite playing it already– a lot of my frustration with the game (as you likely heard or will hear in the podcast) was from a feeling that I was fighting the controls. Without that, I probably would have done a lot better, and there’s likely a whole rant about intuitive control schemes with the PC version of Astebreed as a catalyst, but that’s not for today.

Hope you enjoyed the podcast! At some point today the PS4 release of Sword Art Online: RE: Hollow Fragment is dropping, which I’m really excited about. I talked about it a bit before, as I played the Vita version, but honestly the retranslation is a huge draw for me. We’ll see!

I love good craftsmanship. I have a deep appreciation for things that are made well, with skill and attention and care by their creators. It can be anything, from games to carpentry to drinks. I particularly like it when I can see the craft at work, and appreciate it in progress.

I don’t drink beer, and only occasionally drink wine. I know there’s often a lot of craftsmanship that goes into both, but I don’t get to *see* it. What I like are cocktails, where I can watch the bartender put them together and where each one, even if I’ve ordered the same thing, has a different twist based on who’s made it and with what. For me it’s not even about the liquor, it’s the huge spectrum of interesting flavors and mixes that really make the experience for me. If there existed a place I could go and get interesting mixed drinks sans alcohol, I’d go there all the time.

This weekend was the last weekend my favorite bartender at a local bar will be around, and I’m going to miss him quite a lot. In more than six months, I never had the same drink twice from him, and he would consistently come up with interesting, creative drinks that both perfectly hit my favorite tastes and pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. I have an appreciation for flavors I couldn’t even name previously, and each drink would come with a history and a story– this is a drink that was popular in the ’40s, this drink was originally made in this place in the late ’90s, this drink can only be made this specific way, this drink used to be made with this liquor but it’s changed since then… all kinds of interesting tidbits. The craft wasn’t just in the drinks, but in the presentation and the delivery. I would rather pay $12 for a drink that I remember than $4 each for three forgettable alcohol-and-sodas. If it takes ages to make (like a Ramos Gin Fizz, don’t ever order one of these from a bartender who you aren’t 100% sure likes you), I’m happy to wait, because it means I’m going to get something finely crafted.

In a lot of ways, the same is true for games for me. I’ve spent enough time building them myself to have a sense for when the developer is ghosting alongside me while I play, grinning and pointing at the next cool thing around the corner. The really well-crafted games are excited to show you the next thing around the corner, and when there’s a pause in the pacing or a period where I’m waiting, I know that it’s because really finely made things take time. I’ve played games that lack this spark, where slow pacing or a drawn-out wait are an obvious way of extending a game that’s rationing out its cool stuff. It’s easy to dismiss a carefully-paced-but-slow segment as an intentional time-waster, but you can tell the differences.

Take KOTOR. Knights of the Old Republic is one of the best RPGs out there, particularly for its time, and was a fantastically well-loved Star Wars game. It deserves a lot of the credit for rekindling the franchise during a lull. It starts with what many people have criticized as an overly long, drawn-out planet sequence, before you get to “the good stuff”, flying around from planet to planet lightsabering people. What I think is easy to miss is how absolutely chock-full of content that first planet is. Taris is a busy place, with a lot of stuff going on, and that time you spend on the ground, getting a feel for the characters and the “normal” game makes it all the sweeter when you’re not grounded and have the awesome Jedi powers that (spoilers) you get to have later on. “Just wait,” KOTOR says, “we’re setting up some awesome stuff for you but you’ve got to see this to really get it.”

FFXIV is very much the same for me. Sure, I have to wait between content patches, and a lot of what there is to do in the interim is slowly work on getting incrementally better gear, but the next content they’re going to drop is almost certainly going to be amazing, and well worth the wait. It’s a game where I can take it slowly and enjoy myself OR push the line and grind out the best of the best, and in either case get to enjoy the really great content that’s coming up next. It will all still be around, and it will all still be relevant. Heavensward would have had nowhere near the impact if I hadn’t played through all of the main story content, and while some people have raged against the need to play through the main story to access Heavensward content, the game would be poorer for skipping you past that considered, crafted wait.

I feel like in FFXIV, as in KOTOR, there’s a designer ghosting alongside me, excited to show me the next cool thing as soon as it’s ready. It’s like a really great bartender, flitting around the bar and pulling liquors and bitters and mixes out, grinning to himself and nodding as he takes tastes of what he’s making for you, then setting it down in front of you, assured that good work has been done and that it’s there for you to enjoy.

I love the effort and the craftsmanship, and I don’t think I’d want to rush it. The wait makes the experience really sing, and gives me pause to appreciate the work.