Sorry about the lack of updates this week; I’ve been sick, and the oppressive heat in my apartment hasn’t helped my energy levels.

In this photo taken on February 11, 2015, the sun scorches an already cracked earth on a farm in the Australian agricultural town of Walgett, 650 kilometres (404 miles) northwest of Sydney. The Australian agricultural town — which takes its name from the Aboriginal word meaning the meeting of two rivers — is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, with disillusioned farmers battling to stay afloat. AFP PHOTO / Peter PARKS

I’ve never lived in a place that lacks AC despite it being required until now. There’s a pretty strong myth in the Pacific Northwest that air conditioning isn’t necessary or even worthwhile. My 92-degree apartment would strongly disagree. In Maryland, the prevailing wisdom went something like this: “Sure, you might have summers where you don’t need AC at all, but when you need it, it’s important, and sometimes you’ll have months at a time where you need it.”

It’s a mentality I’ve taken for granted, listening to people tell me, even in 90+ degree weather with interiors even higher, that AC is an unnecessary luxury. It very likely is, for someone used to a few sweltering weeks or months out of the year. For myself, I’ve always viewed my home as a place of refuge from whatever’s going on outside, whether that’s people, events, or the weather, and having that taken away makes me realize how much I value it. It’s caused me to think of other things that I take for granted, and evaluate what they mean to me.

One of my classes this quarter is focused around generating creative ideas. I refuse to use the word “ideating” here, though it’s the technically correct one. The first couple of sessions of the class were mind-numbing for me, focusing on building self-confidence in the ideas each person comes up with, and trying to get these ideas to flow. Having worked for years in a creative industry, where I’ve literally had to come up with ten or fifteen original ideas in a twenty-minute meeting, this sort of activity is something I find almost laughably easy. I’ve been surrounded for most of my professional career by people who have a similar skillset, who can generate ideas creatively quickly and on the fly, so it’s something that’s never seemed terribly strange to me.

I spoke to one of the other people in the class the other day. She’s a very no-nonsense kind of person from what I’ve seen, with a hyper-practical response to everything and (what seems like) little time for frivolity. I expected her to share my snide reaction to the class, and I was surprised when she didn’t. She explained to me that she had never been good at coming up with ideas, particularly creative ones, and that she was really excited about the class and, even two sessions in, felt like she’d learned a lot and was getting a lot of value. By the end, she was even repeating some of the affirmation-style comments the class had taught, self-referential apophthegms that I found somewhat childish but that she clearly was getting value from.

this is so I don’t get crap from people later. it’s pronounced AP-oh-them, short e.

It struck me that my own creativity is something I take for granted. It’s easy for me, and because it’s not something I necessarily consider a skill that I’ve honed, it’s something I generally believe that other people can do just as easily as I can. I generally don’t describe myself as a creative person, and despite contributing to the creation of art, I staunchly refuse to consider myself an artist. I leave that title for the people I feel have earned it; people who have honed a very visible skill and practice it until they excel. It had never occurred to me that I might be doing both artists and (for lack of a better term) non-creatives a disservice by drawing the line the way I have. Art isn’t necessarily a function of a singular visible skill, and to deny that I’m a creative person must be frustrating for someone who can see me coming up with ideas easily.

I recently put together a lightly-photoshopped picture for my mom for her birthday. She’d forgotten to take a picture of my sister and I when we were both around for Christmas, and since we now live on opposite sides of the country, the opportunity wasn’t likely to come up again soon. I had my sister take a picture of herself with her city’s skyline behind her, and I took a similar one with my own, and I merged them together, a fairly quick and easy photoshop job with a basic color mask to balance things out and a little bit of translation to make everything line up right. All in all, it took about 20 minutes of retouching, and I was almost ashamed to send it to her, because to me it felt like a hack job. A “real artist”, in my mind, would have done something much more impressive.

some amateur work

When I described the process to a friend who rather liked the picture, I commented that I’d just sort of “fiddled with things until it looked right”, which is pretty much perfectly accurate. I didn’t have a good idea of how to make a proper mask, nor did I know what translations and cropping would work best, I just played around until I got something functional. His response was “yeah, that sounds like the kind of creative solution I’d expect from you”.

I hope everyone has a good weekend, particularly those of you who have long weekends. I’m going to work on resting and shaking this illness, so I can go back to taking another thing for granted: my health. Cheers!

If you have ever interacted with me, odds are really good (nearing 100%) that for some period of time, I was hiding behind a mask. The mask is a symbol that resonates with me, it’s a slight alteration to what you perceive that makes you think that I am something that I might not be. It’s absolutely a learned behavior for me, and it’s served me very well for a long time. I can put on a mask and operate convincingly enough to get by until I no longer need the mask and can stop putting it on.

I’m still on the fence about how inauthentic this makes me. I was asked recently if I felt like wearing masks around people made my interactions with them any less genuine, and I found myself concerned by the implication. It’s probably something to do with the amount of time I’ve spent interacting through avatars online, and aliases, and other, similar constructs. The interactions I have through the mask, whatever form that may take, are no less genuine. If they were, the mask wouldn’t be any good, and I take a lot of pride in my masks.

A good mask is a (hand)crafted thing, it takes effort and focus to make, and it’s molded to some degree to the wearer. An ill-fitting mask is obvious, and isn’t going to fool anyone. A much better analogy is cosmetics, the makeup that many people put on every day. Good makeup is nearly invisible– I’ve heard people laugh about comments that “they look so good without their makeup”, when they’re actually wearing the precise amount to make it look like they aren’t wearing any and are just naturally amazing looking. It’s another sort of mask, but it’s one that reflects the self.

Modern high school entrance

The mask was my tool for surviving high school– I had a wide network of acquaintances and was known, albeit not well known, by a lot of people in my high school, most of whom had wildly varying ideas about what I was like, based on their limited interactions with me. I could easily slip from mask to mask, putting a different, subtle spin on how I presented myself to fit in best with whoever I was dealing with at the time. These were all facets of me; it was just a matter of what I was showing. The mask simply made it look like that was the complete picture, and put people at ease. I had a small group of very close friends who never saw the masks, because they’d known me from before I started using them, and I’ve found myself always cultivating that close group of friends who I can go maskless around.

It wasn’t until later that I started carefully crafting masks for other things. After a breakup that I regretted, I wondered about what I might have done better, and tried to imagine what the person who didn’t make the mistakes I had would be like. Those ideas went into a new mask, one that I didn’t quite fit into, but that I wanted to. It took years of work to grow into that mask, to learn to communicate and appreciate and reciprocate. I got a lot of credit in that time for being things I knew I wasn’t– the mask was those things, and I was learning to become those things, but it was still an effort rather than a natural thing.

I grew into raid leading in a similar way, observing and researching and carefully constructing a mask that I could wear that looked like what I wanted to be, and slowly growing into it. I’ve always learned by doing, and preparing safe situations where I can try something until I’m confident in my abilities with it has always been a favorite tactic of mine.

I’ve reached the point now where I’ve grown into a lot of the masks I’ve constructed, to the point where I realize how incomplete they really were as I’ve grown past them. Rather than constructing ever more elaborate ones, however, I’ve lately been trying to see what it’s like to not wear any at all. That itself is a kind of mask, the sort of confident person who ironically doesn’t need a mask. It’s forced me to think of myself not as a collection of masks, but more like a die, with various faces that I present appropriately. I still think it’s valuable to present myself differently based on who I’m talking to or what situation I’m in; I feel like that’s just de rigeur for social interactions, but I think making that my default for interacting with people keeps them further away than I’d like.

A lot of this is that I’ve moved from a place that felt really hostile to my personality and interests to one that feels a lot more welcoming and safe. The concept of “safe spaces” is a really important one that isn’t well communicated, I don’t think, especially considering how much of a difference it makes. You don’t need to have suffered trauma or be dealing with fear to benefit from a safe space– you can be perfectly functional and learn to grow further in one.

Safe spaces make me think of Bel. It’s not how he would describe his approach to people, but what he does is create safe spaces for people to relax, be themselves, and grow in. The recurring #BelEffect joke revolves around “Bel’s candy van”, but in reality it’s more like an exclusive club where everyone is nice to one another and the bouncers are huge and strict, but also know you by name. A cruise ship is perhaps also an apt metaphor, especially for a group like Greysky (our FFXIV group). I might be the captain, but Bel is the cruise director, and he creates the safe space while I steer the ship.

It’s a role I don’t even have to put on a mask to do– the behind-the-scenes facilitator. It’s a comfortable role for me, and one that suits my capabilities and preferences. I’ve always been better at the man-behind-the-curtain role.

Aggrochat’s Game of the Month was There Came An Echo, and it’s worth listening to the podcast about it if you’re interested in it at all.

The title of this post probably gives away what I think of the game, but it’s something I want to delve into a bit more deeply. I am a great big fan of games that are, essentially, proof-of-concept demonstrations. They’re some of the best things to come out of the indie space, proving out various concepts that might otherwise never see the light of day. There Came An Echo is one of those games with a fascinating technical premise– your voice as the primary input– put into an actual, functional game.

I love these sorts of things because they’re lightweight and spark the imagination. I left There Came An Echo thinking excitedly about all of the possibilities. As I mentioned in the podcast, I think the game itself is a solid B, but the potential and the kinds of things it hints at are worth an A.

It puts me in mind of the multiplayer features of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, specifically the spies vs mercs gameplay mode. Voicechat was built into the game, but it was audible not just to your teammates, but to anyone close enough to you location in-game to hear you. It put a twist on the usual types of voice communication, because if you wanted to be really stealthy, you had to go silent and keep both your enemies and your teammates in the dark.

It’s a little detail, a point of friction, but it makes things feel immersive. A number of people I know hate the word “immersion” as relates to video games; it’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, usually part of the “this breaks my immersion” phrase, and it’s often extremely ill-defined. I think of immersion as a sort of friction– a difficulty that the game presents that makes the experience feel more authentic. It manifests in various ways, but when properly done, it provides the sense that the game will act in the ways you expect, particularly when the game is simulating something, which most games are. If you have trouble controlling the game, or if the interface is needlessly obtuse, you’ll be pulled out of the experience; similarly, if things are too easy and you feel like you’re breezing through things that should be difficult or that the game tells you are difficult with ease, that will also pull you out of the experience.

The concept of communicating what needs to be done to a team is a really interesting one, and in a lot of cases there’s an existing friction inherent in getting that message out– either through the complexities of voicechat and ensuring your background noise isn’t affecting things or typing in a text box on the fly. As that technology becomes more and more ubiquitous, such as when it’s integrated into every Xbox Live and PSN game such that your existing communications hardware (that comes with the console!) is a part of every game, you can start to come up with interesting implementations.

The sort of friction you get from more immersive experiences allows you to make encounters less complex and more varied. If I had a game where my team had to navigate a dark space with flashlights and could only hear each other while within range, that would create a scenario in which even a simple enemy encounter would be very intense and very exciting, when it might be boring or run-of-the-mill in a well-lit space with omnipresent communications.

I’m really interested in the idea of nonstandard features making experiences more interesting. A lot of games, particularly MMOs, have to continually ratchet up the complexity and lower the margin of error in order to provide challenging experiences, because they have relatively few axes on which to create challenges. If they could introduce more interesting, more varied encounters through environmental effects or other limitations, there’s a lot of potential for interesting gameplay without creating what feels like an impossible complexity wall, both easing the burden on scripting as well as allowing players to come up with more varied solutions than the single path many high-end encounters demand you follow.

There Came An Echo is a really interesting demonstration of a different way to look at controlling a game. I think the next step is a game where you’re giving voice commands to AI-controlled teammates while playing a direct role in the game yourself (as opposed to the eye-in-the-sky role), but that’s the sort of thing that needs a lot of support and potentially a triple-A budget to pull off appropriately. It’s why proof-of-concept tech demos like There Came An Echo are so important and so interesting, because they’re the things that pave the way for the bigger, slower-moving games who are necessarily more risk averse, but are always looking for a strong new concept.

It’s a pretty great day today, if you’re into human rights and equality. If you’re not, I think it’s a very good opportunity to evaluate for yourself why that is. There may be any number of reasons, but it’s worth understanding them for yourself and being consistent in your behavior. Rather than hiding behind a wall of rhetoric, it’s worth considering why today’s events make you happy, angry, or whatever else.

I used to find it frustrating when people didn’t like media that I loved. It’s easy to associate your emotions regarding a particular thing with your sense of self, and then view any criticism of that thing as a criticism of yourself. I love Thief– I think it’s a brilliant game that changes the dynamic of so many video games and focuses on movement and exploration instead of violence– outright punishing use of force in a way that other games don’t. It’s important, though, that I don’t take the extra step and say that because Thief is a nonviolent game, that it’s somehow better in some absolute (moral/philosophical/whatever) way than other games that aren’t nonviolent. It’s easy to take that step into pushing that view onto others– trying to portray something as objectively good rather that subjectively good imposes that viewpoint on the people hearing you, which I think is problematic.

We seek to validate our opinions, and one of the things that’s come from the Information Age is a shift from validating our opinions through the acceptance of those around us to achieving validation from “facts”. We’ve become masters of rhetoric and debate in the last decade, with an endless wealth of information and education at our fingertips. We can justify any opinion with some piece of information that cements our validity. Sometimes this is worthwhile– certain particularly complicated things are worth researching and developing opinions on based on fact. However, note the timing there– the opinion is based on fact, not supported by them. When we then take these opinions and push them on others, we’re forcing our knee-jerk reactions on people and trying to mask that in some way.

A lot of times, we get some kind of input and have an immediate reaction to it, deep in our hindbrain, before it reaches our consciousness and becomes subject to rational thought. When we’ve already had our reaction, it’s easy to use our (powerful, effective) rational thought processes to justify, rather than evaluate. Frankly, we’re wired to do so– doing differently is difficult for us. The complexity and nuance of our world has grown faster than our brains’ ability to process it as effectively as it could. I think that we can often gain insights into ourselves and a better appreciation for our own opinions when we try to break that cycle and honestly evaluate why we hold the opinions we hold, rather than justifying them. Our opinions may or may not change, but we’ll understand them better and (I think) be more secure in them.

I like Thief. Externally, I like that it represents a nonviolent approach to games through a lens that’s normally violent, and I applaud the creativity there, but that’s not why I like it. I like Thief because I have spent much of my life not believing myself physically competent enough to handle a conflict, should one arise. My mind has always been my refuge, and any advantages I gain and any problems I solve are done with my mind rather than my body. Thief lets me express that– it’s a game about being smarter and more observant than your foes, who are all stronger and hardier than you are. It’s a space in which it’s okay to be smaller than those around you (I am) and rewards planning and observation (which I’m good at) rather than necessarily requiring quick-thinking and twitchy reflexes (which I lack). It’s a game that makes me feel okay about being the kind of person I am, rather than creating a person wholly unlike me that I can use as an escape for a while before inevitably returning to the real world, in which I lack the qualities of the protagonist I just finished experiencing.

I dislike The Witcher. It’s a game that makes me uncomfortable with its setting and characters, and while I recognize its quality, I don’t have much of a desire to spend time in that world doing the things that exist in that space. There are a lot of things I could say about the Witcher– how it treats women, how it exacerbates certain societal issues, but the reality is that those are justifications– I don’t like the game because, regardless of its quality, it makes me uncomfortable to play.

I don’t need to justify my opinions on Thief or The Witcher with some kind of moral or statistical high ground– I’m not trying to tell people they should or shouldn’t like either game. I often recommend against people playing Thief, because it’s a game that doesn’t appeal to a lot of people, and in a similar vein, I’ve suggested The Witcher to people despite personally disliking it.

Sitting down and evaluating why I like or dislike something often makes me realize things about myself, helps me better decide what new things I want to try, or simply makes me feel secure in my opinions. On occasion, I will run across something that is genuinely important, something bigger than my opinions, and that needs evaluation with data and facts… or that barely affects me in any way, and requires that I just step back and let the people who have a genuine stake in the issue weigh in.

I love Thief, but it would be unreasonable for me to demand that everyone love it. I dislike the Witcher, but my opinions on it shouldn’t impact the enjoyment of people who love that game for entirely legitimate reasons. I am largely unaffected by gay marriage at a personal level, and my opinions on it are best summed up as “it’s a good thing, because it makes people happy and more free in a way that doesn’t significantly affect others”. I’m in favor of increased happiness and freedom, and I’m in favor of people playing the games they like.

Today is a good day for issues that are bigger than just opinion, and it’s a good day to play a game you love.

One of these days, Kodra is going to tell me to shut the hell up about comparative media and culture. He’s probably not going to be wrong about it. Lately I’ve been fascinated at the kinds of things we don’t realize we’ve internalized. Sometimes we can see things, or the shape of them, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of really focused thought on things that we take for granted.

I’ve answered this question differently many, many times in the past, but right now I think that if I could have a superpower, it would be perfect fluency in every language. I’d love to delve into stories as told by other cultures, and see where they differ from what I’m used to. I’d love to see how the unceasing spread of globalization has caused some cultural concepts to bleed through to other places and which are the ‘core’ of a given society and resist that sort of change. I’d love to really understand what makes right and wrong in a culture entirely unlike mine.

I think it would probably make me insane. Trying to find space to process that many differing viewpoints on some very core philosophies would be next to impossible. We compartmentalize and create our own fences around whatever we consider our defining philosophies. I have a feeling this kind of behavior isn’t universally representative to the human condition, but I’m too close to the issue to be able to tell.

For something a little less abstract, in a conversation recently Kodra pointed out to me that he’s never seen an anime wherein the characters interact with the legal system– you don’t see people going to court and there’s no interaction: people are sent to the system and (it is assumed) are handled appropriately. To me, it’s a stark contrast to the American view of things, where there’s an inherent distrust in the system and a need to see justice served, sometimes (often) bypassing the legal system entirely and creating justifications after the fact. That inherent distrust of the system runs really deep– I can’t think of very many people I know who look at the system and say “yeah, it works”, and the few people I know who do are often ridiculed for being overly naive. I can’t help but wonder what the feeling is like elsewhere– what cultures implicitly trust their systems and which don’t?

I used to guiltily feel like I didn’t care much about other cultures, because I never found myself interested in cultural festivals or shows or music. I’ve been finding that that’s not true, that I’m fascinated by other places and people, but that I want to know about the philosophy and how it influences day-to-day lives. I occasionally like to say that I’m interested in finding out about other cultures by seeing what they do for fun, because how people have fun is such a good window into how they view and interact with the world. It’s a big part of why I like games– as a cultural medium, they have so much to say and I really enjoy seeing the kinds of systems people create to interact with for fun.

I’ve been making an effort lately to try to be more aware of the things that influence my opinions and reactions to things, and try to figure out both why I like the things I like and why I dislike the things I don’t like. There’s a whole subset of TV shows that I’m going to flippantly call “professionals being unprofessional” that rub me the wrong way– a lot of dramas and comedies revolving around a particular career tend to frustrate me because it bothers me to see the unprofessional, under-disciplined characters come out on top. It’s possible it’s gotten better, but a lot of early shows in that vein fit the bill of “brilliant X who knows better ignores the rules and turns out to have been right all along”. I have a hard time enjoying that sort of thing.

On the other hand, I recognize the need for conflict and difficulty in a professional drama– I’ve had Law and Order recommended to me a number of times as a seminal work that doesn’t portray trained professionals being unprofessional, and I suppose I’ll have to give it a go at some point.

haruhi disapproves of my babbling.

My thought process right now is all over the place; I’m making connections and analyzing the kinds of things I like. I just caught myself thinking about why I like cooking shows that pit chefs against one another in a fair competition but deeply dislike the ones that add on uneven variables– I adore the original Iron Chef but don’t really like what I’ve seen of Chopped. I feel like there’s a thread there, some link between why I have those opinions about cooking shows and why “professionals being unprofessional” shows bother me, but right now it’s eluding me.

I’m watching some really weird anime lately. It’s absolutely hilarious and cannot possibly be summarized in a way that makes any sense to most of the people I know.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who lives in Hong Kong a few months back. He’s staying in the States for a while and wanted to know if I could recommend any TV shows– whatever’s highly rated lately. I don’t really watch a lot of TV, so I passed on recommendations to him from what I know other people watch. True Detective, Daredevil, Game of Thrones, Orange Is The New Black, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Parks and Recreation, Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead– the kind of stuff I hear about even as someone who doesn’t watch pretty much any TV. I’ve probably forgotten someone’s favorite, but it’s a pretty wide smattering of things that are all highly recommended by a lot of people, and on a variety of topics.

I spoke to him yesterday. He’d watched at least three episodes of everything I recommended, and his take on them was fascinating to me. He found all of them extremely violent, far, far more violent than anything he was used to seeing. At the same time, he thought it was interesting that the romances were (as he put it) so underdeveloped, even in the ones he watched all the way through. He had a number of other comments, and I found his perspective really eye-opening. At first, I had a hard time relating with some of the things he described, and he had a hard time articulating his point of view, not because he isn’t well-spoken, but because it’s difficult to put words to a concept like “this is violent at a very deep level, even when violence isn’t actively happening on screen”.

He described, for example, True Detective as an extremely violent show, not just in the actual acts of violence that are depicted, but in the ways the character move and talk to one another. He said he found the tension extreme, where there was the chance of everything coming to blows at any given moment. I actually have watched True Detective, and I didn’t find it stressful in the same way. He referred me to a number of stories he particularly liked, and while I haven’t had time to watch/read them, I found the references interesting.

I mentioned I’ve been watching some “really weird” anime lately. After talking to my friend, I’m not sure if it’s that the anime is weird or if I just have a skewed perspective. Certainly I can’t in good conscience recommend Scott Pilgrim vs The World to someone who has never played a video game in their life, because an entire cultural subtext is missing that makes the movie charming rather than disjointed and random. I’ve tried to watch Bollywood musicals (they’re all musicals) in the past, and they haven’t clicked, but I see how excited some of my friends get about them and I have to imagine that what’s missing there is the cultural context that makes them click.

I’ve started making an effort to expand my entertainment horizons and try things that aren’t in my usual American framework. The easiest thus far has been anime, just because I already had a foot in that door and it’s easier to get into it here in the States, but I’ve been looking for other things as well. I’ve felt my tastes slowly shifting– I have a continuing disagreement with a friend about the ending of The Wind Rises (I think it’s cathartic and amazing; he thinks it’s disjointed and unsatisfying) and I’ve found myself more seriously evaluating why I like the things I do, and what it is about how I think that makes some things resonate with me and some things not.

That same friend made a comment that really stuck with me, while I was talking about finding ways of enjoying as many different things as possible, finding ways to forge those neural pathways that make certain things resonate with you. He brought up that ever-so-apt adage: “You can’t please everyone”. He’s absolutely right, no single thing will please everyone; it’s more or less impossible.

I don’t think it’s possible for something to please everyone. I do think, however, that it’s possible to become the kind of someone who is pleased by almost everything. I haven’t decided if I think that’s better, or even a worthy goal, but it’s certainly an interesting thought. You would, at least, have a lot of entertainment to choose from.

I talked a bit yesterday about FFXIV and how it’s set up like a TV series, with distinct arcs that are broadly akin to seasons, playing out over months until the next one starts up. The first season is the 1-50 game, and like many first seasons, it takes a while to find its feet and, in some cases, loses a lot of people along the way.

The second season has been much stronger, and it ends on a powerful cliffhanger that left me extremely excited about the expansion (the “third season”). I want to talk a little bit about the setup for this, because it’s important to put things in context. If you’re worried about pre-expansion spoilers (and the first few hours of the expansion), here’s a spoiler tag for you, just scroll past to the kitty:

I mentioned previously that you’re a pretty much unstoppable powerhouse by the end of the first couple of major story arcs. It’s something that the game reinforces over and over again– you’re often accompanying diplomats because the people they’re talking to are more likely to listen if they have the world’s most notable badass at their side. In at least one situation, you’re tasked with making a delivery on foot specifically because previous couriers have been ambushed and killed and you’re known to be able to stand up to pretty much anyone. You predictably get ambushed, even your attackers freak out a bit at who they just attacked, and you dispatch them all with contemputous ease, able to identify the assailants for further investigation.

You’re well known, and eventually have a significant reputation. Right at the end of the second arc, just before the expansion, this is all turned on its head. Your reputation is used to put you in a position where you can be framed for a very public crime, and your associates are targeted as accomplices. It’s set up extremely delicately, with the game not telling you what’s going on until it’s too late. For emphasis: the game doesn’t tell you what’s going on until it’s too late. It’s meant to leave you stunned and angry, and it accomplishes this brilliantly. A heinous crime is pinned on you and things go bad quickly, forcing you and your remaining associates to flee. You’re essentially a criminal… except that, as previously mentioned, you’re the most powerful individual anyone knows, and the guards in most cities are terrified of having to face you; they KNOW what you’re capable of, and their masters know their grip on things is tenuous at best, so you’re left to your own devices, just without your organization’s headquarters or resources.

It’s a very effective situation, especially because you can’t protect your associates, and the expansion opens with you fleeing to another country. It’s a brilliant setup, giving you the perfect justification for rebuilding in a new place without robbing you of your previous accomplishments. Some people here know you, most don’t, and you can carve out a reputation here once more, all while taking the occasional trip back to your homelands to work on fixing what you lost.

There are a lot of things that the game could have strung you along with– there are plenty of loose ends left just prior to the expansion, but the story does a good job of tying them up without making you wait. Each one has a build, and there’s an overall arc to things– it doesn’t feel like you do your time in the expansion and then get the payoff at the end, nor is everything neatly wrapped up leaving you to explore this strange new world for unknown reasons.

I think we’re good on the spoilers I need; here’s the kitty:

Heavensward could easily have ignored everything that came before it; that old content doesn’t matter, you don’t need to bother with it, feel free to move onto the new cool stuff and forget the old. It’s been the WoW expansion model for a decade now, with very, very little that players do actually carrying over from one expansion to the next. If you’re lucky, an NPC or two will “remember you from somewhere”, but if you opted to, say, do dungeons from 1-80 and then pick up the 80-90 game, odds are good the story starting at level 80 and carrying you to 90 will make perfect sense.

The message in FFXIV is that you are powerful, and you take part in a lot of interesting things, but you’re still only one person, and it’s very difficult to change the entire world as just one person. It’s a narrative that suits the overall feel of the game, when there are hundreds or thousands of other players around you. There isn’t a sense that you’re a unique snowflake– you’re clearly special, but there are many people in the world who are special. It keeps the MMO conceit functional without making you feel irrelevant.

Archeage got me thinking down this path. In Archeage, your part in things is special, but you’re one special person out of many, and in some cases not even necessarily that significant. It suits the open-world sandbox game style, where maybe you strike out and become an adventurer or maybe you settle down on a farm and raise chickens. It’s a big world with a lot of moving parts that you are not the center of, and as a result it’s much more believable as a world. More specifically, it’s a world you can be a part of, not necessarily a game you can play and beat.

FFXIV doesn’t do the sandbox thing, but it does a lot of work and pays a lot of attention to the little details that make it feel more like a world. The narrative outright tells you that while you’re an important player in the world, you’re not the center of the universe and things are happening that you aren’t necessarily a part of, and in some cases can’t contribute meaningfully to. Some of the best moments are ones where you, despite your unstoppable badassery, can’t actually DO anything, because you aren’t in a position to talk politics, or move vast sums of money, or conjure food from nothingness for ten thousand hungry people.

The game lets you gently sway from feeling powerful to feeling powerless, and so the moments in the story where a target appears– where you can flex your muscles and punch/stab/blast faces– are extremely satisfying. This… THIS is a problem you can solve, and you are the best in the world at it. It’s a form of friction, only in the narrative rather than the gameplay. You don’t always have control, so you appreciate the times when you can seize control for yourself.

I talk a lot about how important friction is to games. Too much and players get frustrated, too little and they get bored. The very best storytelling, like the very best games, strike a balance where you’re not just being fed victory after victory on a silver platter and are hailed as a Big Damn Hero everywhere you go, nor are you forever stymied as a fourth-string player in a production you’re barely even noticed in. FFXIV straddles the line magnificently, providing genuine but believable frustration and moments of catharsis. There may be ten thousand starving people, but there’s also an invading army at their doorstep. I can’t feed them, but I can sure as hell go fight an army. I’m aware that there are problems I can’t fix, so I appreciate the ones I can, and it makes the world feel more real.

The player doesn’t need to constantly be the hero, the center of the universe. It’s an ego trip that works in a shorter-form game, but in a longer game, one that lasts months or years, that center-of-the-universe schtick wears thin.

Right, okay, Heavensward. It thoroughly consumed my weekend; I have not played that much of a game at once in years. I’ve spend a lot of the weekend trying to articulate what I like about it so much, but it’s difficult. It’s easier to point at the things that frustrate me (flight, see recent podcast) and the things I find interesting (new class abilities, new mechanics, etc), but those aren’t the heart and soul of Heavensward for me.

I can finally articulate what’s going on with Final Fantasy XIV and its expansion that is so compelling, and perhaps ironically, I needed Archeage to put it into perspective. Let me take a few steps back.

Two years ago, I was looking into FF14 for the second time. I’d jumped into the beta of the original release and it was frankly awful– so bad I gave it less than my usual ten-hour chance and bailed. I put it firmly out of my mind and moved on. When the re-release came out, I was intrigued. This was a fatally doomed game that had had a legendarily bad release, and Square-Enix, in the throes of what I felt like were some immensely disappointing entries into its flagship series, had decided beyond reason to pour more money into this sinking ship. It felt like throwing good money after bad in the worst way, and I wanted to see what was up.

I know a number of people who jumped into the beta at the same time I did, many of whom had starkly poorer experiences with it than I did. I was able to get to level 13 or 14, not quite high enough to see the first instance, but enough to see some class mechanics and some storytelling. The game was, essentially, World of Warcraft. Same “go here, click this” quests, same “kill things here” quests, and a few semi-interesting new mechanics from other games. FATEs were public quests from Warhammer Online, which are now ubiquitous, there were a few other little details (like the Hunt Log and the class system) that I thought were interesting additions, but all in all it was pretty standard fare. A good many people I know picked up the beta or even the live game, gave it a week or so, and left, not seeing what the fuss was about.

I didn’t leave the game with a sense that I was about to play The Next Big Thing– certainly what I experienced wasn’t that, not initially. Instead, what captured me was the potential. I saw standard MMO quests, sure, but delivered with astoundingly thorough attention to detail. Animations were crisp and satisfying, the music was amazing, effects screamed Final Fantasy; down to the very smallest details the game felt like a Final Fantasy game– the exact Final Fantasy game I’d been missing for years. I’ve said on a number of occasions that the MMO is the evolution of the JRPG in a lot of ways, and FFXIV felt like a confirmation of that belief.

MMOs are hard to judge. They’re slow burns, not quick flashes. I’m immediately suspicious of any MMO that shows me flash and bang and fancy things in the first few hours of gameplay. They ultimately tend to disappoint me. FFXIV is a slow starter– you’re doing frankly menial work and have little sense of where you fit into the world, and while you have a couple of interesting encounters, the whole thing feels very small, like you don’t really matter much in the scheme of things. Sure, maybe you helped this miner out, but you aren’t a hero, at least not for more than a day.

Flash forward thirty levels. You’ve done some notable things, fought powerful beings and have a more solid place in the world, as part of a secretive organization dedicated to dealing with the aforementioned powerful beings. You’ve built this up over thirty levels; you’re still not a fantastic hero, but you have the respect of a few, and you’ve got a valuable role. The burn continues, slowly. At about this point, you’re resolving your class story, the mini-arc that encompasses the class you chose to play, versus the overarching story of the game. A new “job” story picks up, bringing you a new story to go with your expanded power. These are bigger, and feel more important than what you were doing before. You’re still not a hero, but you can start to see the path.

Flash forward to level 50. You are an accomplished powerful-being-hunter and have almost singlehandedly put an end to a major, nation-threatening event. You are a Big Damn Hero, and the credits roll, and you continue going off to do Big Damn Hero things that no one else would even consider. At some point, the main storyline picks back up, and I want to break here for emphasis.

You are an immensely powerful individual, you have seen the credits roll, and when you come back for more story, the game absolutely respects that and moves forward with it. The only people who ask you to do menial tasks are people who have no idea who you are, and they’re often horrified when they find out. Alternately, some people who DO know who you are ask you for menial things, but apologize for taking up your valuable time. It’s a small detail, but it keeps those sidequests functional without insulting you.

However, that main storyline. The story is good up until 50. There are some funny points, some highs and lows, some cool moments, and a neat Final Fantasy third-act twist that feels right but doesn’t go too far. After that arc, though, is when the game’s storytelling flexes its wings and flies. There are HOURS of main storyline following the “end” of the game, the final level-50 credit roll. There is, in fact, more post-50 content than pre-50 content in the main story. In every single one of these quests, you are respected as the powerful individual that you are, but you’re still given problems that are compelling and interesting to untangle. It’s accomplished through that first 50 levels of story, the politics and world that you’ve been slowly introduced to over your levelling career. You meet characters and stick with them, and learn about places and relationships and politics that affect what you’re doing. Mostly these things aren’t at the forefront of your mind– you’re doing some stuff for this guy who hates these other rich guys and something something yeah. What the story’s doing is leaving little hooks for you, little things that it’ll tug on 40 levels later. You’ll seen an NPC and the story will give you just enough information to remind you of who they are, enough to trigger that “Oh YEAH! THAT GUY!”

MMOs are a slow burn, but so many of them try to tell you flash-in-the-pan stories. You get a start, a brief arc, and a resolution all in one play session, then move onto the next thing. You move through space and the game moves with you– don’t bother with that old zone, it’s not important anymore, that’s Old News. Play this new zone, the one appropriate to your level, because those are the stories that matter. FFXIV doesn’t do this. It cheerfully sends you back to old zones, to do things that are appropriate to those areas. It does a lot of instanced story encounters or simply encounters that are spawned as you enter an area, appropriate to your level even if the zone itself isn’t. You revisit places and they stick in your mind, they aren’t zones you pass through and forget. By the time you’ve finished the main storyline, you’ve returned to basically every zone, often multiple times. FFXIV is 100% dedicated to keeping its older content relevant.

I mentioned thorough attention to detail here, and I’d like to point out the sort of thing I mean. In many MMOs, once you’ve outleveled a dungeon you will never see the inside of it again, unless you’re powering through it with low-level friends to get them through. FFXIV gates content behind group dungeons, which many people balk at. What it also does is heavily incentivize players to play through those dungeons multiple times. It has a roulette system, where you get heavily rewarded for signing up for a random dungeon within certain groupings. Its dungeons scale you down to their level, and you play alongside other players of the appropriate level for the dungeon– giving everyone an experience that’s very much the way the dungeon was intended to be run. As a result, the gated content is rarely overly onerous to get past. The lower-level players who need a specific dungeon will queue up for the dungeon they need, and they’ll often be matched with higher level players who are willing to do any random dungeon for rewards. This is compounded by the fact that if you do a dungeon with a player who’s never done it before, you get a huge bonus, and if you queue up in a role that’s in short supply, you get even more rewards. It’s a highly effective bribe that draws experienced players back to help newer players, but it keeps everything relevant. New “hard mode” dungeons continue the story of the previous dungeons, continuing that thread.

All of these little things add up, and the story leans on this. It knows you have to have done certain things to have reached this point, and it happily references them. You’ve built up your reputation over hours of gameplay, and the story respects that. In a lot of ways, the main story pre-50 is a story about becoming a super badass who can, essentially, punch any problem to death. The content post-50 takes a different look at things– sure, you’re an unstoppable badass, but what can you do about income inequality in a major city? Can you feed thousands of hungry people? Can you delicately negotiate a political minefield? Your previous punch-everything approach sealed your reputation, but then the game introduces problems that can’t be solved by punching, and makes you an important part of things. There are still problems that need badassery to solve, and when those come up you are the number one person, but you’re still relevant in a meaningful way… and that reputation isn’t always helpful to you.

By the end of the storyline, the pre-expansion patch that was meant to prepare me for what was coming, I was absolutely, utterly pumped. I wanted to get into the expansion to see where the story was going to go, because it left off with me wanting more. It reminds me of a really great TV show. The first season is the 1-50 arc: good, and a complete story on its own (because who knows if we’ll get a second season), and that’s about it. The second season is the post-50 to expansion arc: this is when the chains get taken off and they know they’re going to have an expansion, so the story really gets rolling, giving me plenty of buildup and several small, satisfying arcs, but always teasing a little bit more, right up until the suckerpunch that is the season finale, right before the expansion.

The expansion is Season 3, with a little bit of everything. They’re comfortable with their model and they’re making it shine, and it shows. I’ll talk about that more tomorrow; I’ve gone on a while here.

No post today; I am Heavenswarding.

Enjoy your weekend! I’ll see you on Monday!

The MMO subscription model is dead, or so they say. So they say despite the two largest MMOs in the world, both of which dwarf their closest competition by 100% or more, being subscription-based games.

$60 is too much to pay for a video game. It’s a catch-22; we demand ever higher quality and ever lower prices, despite games being one of the few entertainment media whose cost doesn’t rise noticeably with inflation. The “standard” was $50, up until the release of the Xbox 360, when new console games more or less centered on $60. That was in 2005. As a point of reference, going to see a movie was, on average in the US, $6.41 in 2005. Now, it averages $8.17 (http://natoonline.org/data/ticket-price/). To be entirely frank, I can’t think of a single theatre in my area that sells tickets for eight bucks– try twelve or more.

But, people still buy games, which means that there’s a particular point at which a game (or, really, any kind of entertainment) is worth spending money on. Barring the reductive philosophy that fuels piracy, the “I wasn’t going to pay money for it anyway so it’s okay if I steal it” flawed premise, there’s a certain amount of logic and evaluation that goes into spending money on a game. Everyone has some kind of system that helps them determine whether they’re going to spend money on entertainment or not.

I think having a system is important; it puts things in perspective and helps avoid buyer’s remorse and helps you evaluate whether the purchases you made were worthwhile. This almost certainly changes over time– nearly everyone I know has changed how they determine when something is worth plunking down cash to buy.

My own system takes into account two things: the money I have to buy games and the time I have to play them. I usually have a lot of one and relatively little of the other. When I have a lot of time to play, I tend to look at entertainment purchases from a cost per hour standpoint. Any purchase I make is based on the dollar value per hour I’m getting out of whatever it is. Movies are pretty bad for this sort of thing: $12+ for two hours of entertainment average six dollars an hour. Going out to a bar is even worse: one drink an hour at $3-12 a drink (plus anything I might eat) puts me above even the six dollar standard. A book is okay– I read at about 150-200 pages an hour, so most books take me about three to four hours to read– at about $8-10 for a book, that’s in the two to three dollar per hour range.

Isolated open book

Games are all over the place. $60 for a game that takes me 8 hours to beat doesn’t feel worth it, running $7.50/hour, but a game that takes me 12 hours is looking a lot better. A game like Skyrim, Dragon Age, or Persona, which suck away 100+ hours look great, at pennies per hour of play. The only games that look better are MMOs, where as long as I play 30 hours in the first month and 6 hours every month thereafter are absolutely worth the initial box price and the $15/month thereafter. Any more time I spend on them (and usually, I spend rather more time on them) just drops the price. This weekend is Heavensward, which I spent $60 on, a cost I’m going to recoup in about three days, possibly less.

On the flip side, when I have more money and less time, I want experiences that don’t take too much time to complete. I don’t have the time to spend a hundred hours playing one game; I’d rather play four shorter games in that same window. I’ll be honest, I haven’t devoted the time to come up with a system for this, because to be entirely frank I haven’t been in a situation where I have more money than time in quite a while. I have, however, seen a lot of friends come up with systems for this, and they tend to look for the highest quality experiences they can get for their limited time. It needs to be good, it needs to be polished, and it needs to work out of the box.

I’ve spent more time in the middle, where I have a decent amount of money and a decent amount of time, but not a ton of either. Perhaps bizarrely, this is when I often find myself buying minis and getting into new minis games. Minis, despite being individually expensive, are surprisingly good from a cost-to-time perspective. It takes me some amount of time for assembly, call it an hour to clean, fit, and glue, and then anywhere from two to six hours to paint. Even at the low end, a single mini ($10) is right in the book range, and that’s before I’ve ever put it on the table to play a game. Games take 1-2 hours, so each one of those I play is making the mini more and more worthwhile. There are minis in my collection that have cost me less than a penny per hour that I’ve played them; I have a group of Infinity minis where the entire faction has cost me about fifty cents per hour of entertainment; a really, really good deal.

All of these things help me evaluate whether some piece of entertainment is worth my time. It’s become a sort of instinct, I can tell when I feel like a game is worth me spending money on and when I don’t. It makes price fluctuations affect me a lot less than they otherwise might– there’s occasionally a game in a Steam Sale that goes down to a point where I’m interested, but that’s exceedingly rare. It’s when this instinct fails me, or when I can’t adequately predict if something is going to be worthwhile that I regret my purchases. I honestly have a hard time thinking of many of these– they’re almost all games i literally couldn’t play for one reason or another, or that I bought on someone else’s recommendation and didn’t end up liking.

What kind of systems do you use to determine if a game is worth buying? Are you a price-per-hour sort, or a quality-per-hour sort? Something else entirely?