I talked about Julie yesterday. I never heard from her after her e-mails, but she left me with a bit more than lasting impressions. I kept playing EverQuest, and I was later approached by someone who knew Julie: a guild leader whose raid group was short a healer and who’d heard good things about me from her. He wanted someone unassuming who could take orders and not cause drama; I fit the bill pretty well.

I got plunged headlong into the world of raiding in EQ. I’d reached max level and had, up to that point, spent most of my time camping rare spawns for items and gearing up alts. My druid wasn’t my most powerful character; my Enchanter was, but this group needed a healer, not a chanter, so Druid it was. Anyone who raided in EQ is probably cringing at the idea of replacing an established raiding cleric with a relatively newly max-level healing druid. Let me add onto that that I played EQ for years on an iffy dial-up connection, so I lagged out constantly and would often have my connection stall without it actually kicking me from the game. From the perspective of anyone watching, I was just standing around, doing nothing.

I was horrible. Absolutely, appallingly bad. The other healers in the group carried my weight for me (with a smile, because they all missed Julie), but it was painfully apparent to me that I was contributing next to nothing. Occasionally, someone would speak up about how terrible I was, and a chorus of people would shout them down. It was extremely uncomfortable, doubly so because I knew that most of them were thinking of me as a memory of Julie; she’d apparently talked about me a lot.

Prior to this, I played aggressively casually. I really wasn’t very good at the game, and had gotten to high levels mostly through sheer stubbornness rather than any actual skill. I very, very quickly started picking up skill at the game, reading what few guides existed online and discreetly talking to some of the other healers about how to improve. It was the first big lesson of working in a team for me– I learned very quickly that the chorus of people shouting down the naysayers couldn’t give me useful advice; I got a lot of “no, you’re fine, don’t worry about it” saving-my-feelings kind of responses. Instead I started asking the outspoken critics– okay, so I’m terrible, what do you want me doing better? Most backed down when confronted, but a few gave me tips, and I started using those to improve.

This was really enlightening for me. I couldn’t get useful help from the people who were ostensibly on my side, but I could from my critics. I hadn’t heard the term “echo chamber” before, but it would have resonated with me (ha!) if I had. It changed the way I started working on mods for games like Morrowind and Oblivion in my free time– rather than listening to the people who said only good things, I got a lot from the people who criticized me. I started to crave brutal criticism, and it wouldn’t be until later that I realized the value of positive feedback. At the time, I felt like I didn’t deserve positive feedback– that was for people who were actually good at things, whereas I was demonstrably not. I reserved my praise for other people who I thought were more skilled than I was (read: everyone) and retained the criticism for myself.

I also started intentionally subbing out for other healers. It would be easy to say that it hurt my pride to do so, but it really didn’t– I was a pretty insecure teenager at the time and I wanted the group to succeed, so I’d show up on time but then opt out for someone who I thought was better (read: everyone). On the rare times I played at a friend’s house who had DSL, my performance was dramatically better, enough that people commented on it. I took this as a sign that I shouldn’t continue holding the group back. I eventually said I couldn’t play anymore, making up some nonsense story about me using too much internet time, and while the group was sad, they told me I should come back if I could get playtime. I thought that was unlikely, but I agreed, and figured they’d forget about this terrible player and move on. For me, it was a relief, because I was still hyper-insecure about my skill and thought it would be better if I wasn’t dragging down the group.

A little while later, we got a satellite internet connection at home. It was laggy, largely terrible for games, but perfectly functional for MMO speed and, more importantly, STABLE. I hopped on EQ and immediately had tells waiting for me– want to hop in a raid? I couldn’t imagine why, but it turned out they needed a healer badly enough that I’d make or break their ability to go. I didn’t like it, but I figured I’d do my best and see.

I had already had terrible ping from my out-in-the-boonies dialup connection, so I was used to that, but the stability of satellite meant I could actually predict what might happen. I had things down cold, and it felt like it was easy to see what was going to happen and prepare for it. It was obvious to everyone who was paying attention that I was much, much better, and it was at this point where I got to see my first massive leadership failure.

The raid leader was thrilled that I was back and now actually *good*, and wanted to give me a permanent spot on the raid. This annoyed a number of people, particularly those who had criticized me before but now didn’t have a leg to stand on because I was legitimately skilled. It was seen as the leadership playing obvious favorites, and it absolutely was. I watched as I became the reason why this raid group and guild imploded. In retrospect, the problems were there and I had just been a catalyst for everything, but at the time it felt like I was the problem, why this otherwise perfectly functional and successful group was now failing.

I couldn’t take it, and after the guild shattered, I quit EverQuest for good. I hated the drama, and hated myself for causing it, but it did leave me with a little seed that became really important later: I could be good at these games. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about for myself before– I liked games but wasn’t very good at them– but now I was thinking it. Not just “good”, but “better than other players”. It got me eyeing a new sort of game, one where I could prove that I was better than other players. I got into DAoC shortly thereafter, where I did a number of things I’m not proud of and tried to atone for them, though that’s a story for later.

My experience with Julie’s guild left me looking at organizations though, especially online ones where it’s easy to miscommunicate, and thinking about how it could be done better. It would be a little while before that took root, but that’s where the seed was planted. I thought a lot about how groups functioned after that, spending my time in the next few games I played looking at how things were going. It eventually drove me to start my own guild– also a story for later.

Advance warning: some feels in here. I haven’t told this story in a while.

I spent much of the weekend watching Sword Art Online with Kodra– as of this writing, we’ve watched everything that was available on Netflix, so the first two seasons. The central premise of the show focuses on the concept of a relationship borne of a game and a relationship borne of a real-life meeting. Specifically, the show’s underlying message is that while most people have a hard time understanding it, the relationships forged digitally are every bit as ‘real’ as ones forged in ‘real life’.

I’m in a not-so-unique position to comment on this. Of my closest friends, nearly all of them are people I interact with digitally above all else. I have friends that I’m physically close to that I interact with more online than I do in real life. I’ve heard this described as ‘sad’, and I find that sort of dismissiveness irritating.

Let me tell you a story, of the first online friend I made. I was in high school, playing Everquest shortly after its launch. I had just hit level 29 on my Druid, which was an important level for that class as it unlocked a bunch of potent spells and let me travel and hunt like I hadn’t been able to previously. It was a big deal, and so I very quickly started using my new spells and got myself killed while soloing. Everquest had experience loss on death, so I was looking at a level drop to 28, locking me out of my new spells and setting me back days of progress. I was out in the middle of nowhere, on an island in one of the ocean zones, but I thought it was worth shouting for help, seeing if anyone could assist me. A reasonably-high level cleric could resurrect me, restoring enough XP to return my level to me. I didn’t really expect anything, and I told myself I’d wait an hour to see if anyone might come.

Forty minutes in, I’d gotten ten or so private messages asking for my location, and each one had said “too far, sorry” when they found out how out-of-the-way I was. When I got a response that was simply “omw!” I was genuinely surprised. It took nearly an hour for the cleric to make it out to where I was– I was THAT far out of the way (anyone remember trying to navigate those EQ ocean zones, particularly the islands the boats DON’T go to?), and we chatted all the while. I kept half expecting to hear “ugh, this is ridiculous, sorry man” but it never came. Instead we joked about the boats, the sharks, how I died, how exciting level 29 was for Druids, etc.

When she got to me, he was pretty battered. She’d had a run-in with some wildlife (who largely didn’t bother me, a perk of being a Druid that I’d forgotten about) but was still okay. It took her a while to recover and then resurrect me, and bam, I had my level back. I could get us both out of there, and cheerfully did– using the (level 29!) Druid ports to get us to safety, near a major city. I went to tip the cleric, per the standard etiquette, only to find that he was trying to tip *me* for the port. We laughed about it, I expected we’d part ways, and got a last PM for the day: “oh hey, friend me? lemme know if you need a rez, if you don’t mind porting me sometimes :)”.

We were never close in level (he was much higher level than I was, and he was gone by the time I got up in level), but we talked a lot, almost exclusively about game stuff. For the better part of a year, one of us would bug the other for a rez or a port and we’d come running to help out, often from the other side of the world, and we’d chat about whatever while we did so. I knew nothing about him in reality, but it didn’t matter– we were fast friends and the context of the game world gave us plenty to bond over. Instead of having lunch together and sharing the food experience, we’d chat while waiting on boats and bond over (lack of) inventory space.

Near the end of the year, I got a message from him: “hey, I’m probably gonna have to stop playing soon but I wanted to say thanks for hanging out with me. i know it’s rude to ask, but can i have your e-mail address? i want to send you something.”

Players left EQ on occasion; this was not a new concept for me. I was sad that he was leaving, but didn’t think much of it. This was the first time anyone who’d left had tried to make a connection after the fact, though, and I hesitated. Bridging that gap between game and ‘real life’ was sort of taboo– that was how all of the “abuses” and “scary people” on The World Wide Web got to you, to use the scare quotes of the late ’90s/early ’00s. This was my cleric friend, though, and if he’d been hiding his true self for a year, he’d done a really good job of it. With as much as we’d talked, it would’ve been very hard to hide anything, or so I told myself. I gave him my e-mail, not sure what to expect.

The next morning, I woke up to an e-mail in my inbox from a “Julie”, which I didn’t expect, with a character name, class, set of items, and a bunch of other identifying information to prove that it was, in fact, from my cleric friend. At the bottom was a link “to some pictures, nothing bad, I promise” and a note “thanks for everything, I wanted to show you the real me”. Having spent a lot of time on the internet up to this point, I was leery of clicking any links I didn’t recognize, but it was a livejournal link (yep, one of those) so I figured it was safe.

The LJ page was someone named Julie, the cleric I’d spent a year hanging out with. She was wheelchair-bound and a cancer patient– every picture from the last year was of her in the hospital. The post I’d been linked to read simply: “To my druid friend Tam: Hi.” and included a bunch of pictures and links to old posts. I wound up reading her livejournal back entries, finding out about this girl’s struggle with cancer and the ways she took her mind off it, and started to realize that all of the references to “my best friend” were me.

We never spoke after that– when she left EQ she also dropped off the internet, and her LJ stopped updating. It was updated one more time, six months later, by her brother, with a “rest in peace, thanks for reading” message. At the very bottom of the post, there was a picture of her, happy, in her hospital bed. Next to it was a laminated picture, clearly a computer printout, taped up on the wall. It was a shot from Everquest, of a druid and cleric.

There’s nothing less real about online friendships than ones in physical space. RIP, Julie.

from http://www.dex-rpg.com/index_en.php

I started playing Dex tonight, a 2D cyberpunk sidescrolling RPG. As a bit of forewarning, I’ve only gotten a couple of hours into it, so this will not be a complete review. Expect more once I get more playtime in. Throughout this, there will be very mild spoilers, so be forewarned. I’m going to try to keep it light, but I can’t really critique a game without talking about what happens in it.

In Dex, you play as the girl on the left in the above picture. The game opens up very directly, with a short tutorial of you escaping some unknown assailants and being led to safety by a mysterious benefactor. It’s very The Matrix. I spent a little while unsure of what was going on because the initial tutorial doesn’t make it clear what I need to click on vs move through, and which of the three different interaction buttons was the appropriate one to use.

In general, I feel like the tutorial doesn’t adequately explain how to play competently, but this isn’t terribly important as the first segment of the game is extremely easy. I’m basically shunted into a quick dungeon run, as I work my way to safety through that ever so convenient escape route: the sewers. Thus far, I’ve met a grizzled old veteran who works a bar, a teenager-like hacker, and a mysterious, cryptic benefactor who everyone else reveres.

If this sounds a little cliché, you’re hearing my biggest criticism of the game thus far. It’s great that the dialogue is all voiced, but several of the characters feel like caricatures thus far, and the writing feels somewhat forced. There’s a lot of dialogue, but the quality is all over the place. Some is great, some is iffy at best. It feels like the game is trying to sell me on a dark, gritty, hedonistic future and is getting way too heavy handed with it. I’ve picked up three different items that suffice as the game’s “trash loot” that you sell to vendors for money that are all types of porn. Of the five vendors I’ve found in the game, three sell condoms for some reason. It isn’t quite enough to turn me off of the game quite yet, but the details feel very sophomoric.

That being said, the overall plot arc (such that I’ve seen) is interesting, and I want to find out what happens next. The characterizations are effective– I may dislike some of the characters but they’re better than vanilla, robotic dialogue. The biggest problem I have is that I feel like I can see the entire arc of the game within the first hour of playing it. I may be wrong, and I’m hoping I am. Expect more on that once I’ve played it a bit more.

On the other hand, the art is FANTASTIC. I’ll let it speak for itself, here’s the trailer:

The environments are evocative and stylish, the characters are varied and interesting, and the animations hit that old-school 2D platformer sweet spot– it all looks really good, and messages surprisingly well minus some of the details. I want to wander around the streets of this cyberpunk city, and that appears to be the point of the game, which is great.

The controls feel fairly tight and responsive. Movement feels fairly good, but I feel needs some more interesting options. I may be able to unlock those with time. My biggest issue is that enemies with melee weapons outrange my fists, causing me to awkwardly chase them around, but I also haven’t unlocked various weapons or anything, and the enemy variety is interesting and messaged well already, within the first hour of play. Combat is simple: attack, block, dodge-roll, with new options opening up as you level up. You can also get guns, though I haven’t figure out how to use the one I just got yet.

One of the other big gameplay features is the hacking game, which is a fairly full-featured minigame that’s akin to a scaled-down Geometry Wars. It might be interesting, but I haven’t seen enough of its features yet to make a judgement call. Currently it’s a bit underwhelming but I suspect it will scale up quickly– I haven’t done much with it yet.

As you play, you level up, and can put points into a variety of skills. These seem to have either noticeable flat bonuses (like more health) or new combos or special abilities. There are also a set of “special” skills, things like lockpicking, charisma, etc, that appear to be used to unlock additional options, whether that’s getting into a locked door or charming your way past someone. Me being me, my first two levels’ worth of skill points went into charisma and lockpicking. Thus far, I’ve already seen significant returns on these points. Multiple characters have had “charisma” dialogue options, and lockpicking has come up enough times that I’m glad I took it.

Right now, it’s a game I’m looking forward to putting more time into. It’s got some rough edges, and some questionable content choices, but none of it is enough to turn me off completely. I’ll be back with more once I’ve had more time to play it.

I watched The Wind Rises again last night. It’s a movie I really enjoy, though I’ve heard criticism (and heard it again last night) that the ending is weak. It reminds me of another conversation I had about the endings of long-running shows, and which ‘delivered’ and which didn’t.

It got me thinking about endings in general, for any kind of media. I think I’ve come to prefer the endings that acknowledge that time goes on after the events you’re watching have run their course, rather than the kind that tie everything up neatly and leave nothing left to worry about, until the Next Big Thing occurs (read: sequel).

It’s hard to put words to this preference. I can sense the shape of it, but it’s hard for me to define. It would be easy and simple to say that “time goes on” endings are more ‘realistic’, but that’s not really it. Nor is it accurate to say that I feel some kind of rebellious urge against the concept of “happily ever after”, though that’s not entirely wrong either.

I think it’s because I relate with things that don’t clean up nicely, but that you have to move on from anyway. I read a blog recently written by someone who had been blogging her weight loss over something like two hundred pounds. Her goal was to be in the 120-130 range from being over 300, and as of the writing of the post I read, she’d accomplished it. Rather than a victory cry, though, the post read as a profound statement of loss and uncertainty. For months or years she had blogged about weight loss, working ever closer to a goal that seemed impossible, and when she accomplished it, she realized that it doesn’t end. She couldn’t just relax, or she’d backslide. It wasn’t an ending.

When I was growing up, I used to come up with games for my friends and I to play (it’s honestly shocking that I never played D&D growing up), and when I started seriously pursuing work in the games industry, my drive was to make a big game– one people had heard of and that all of my friends would play. It was my dream, and one that seemed impossibly far off.

Last year, I did it, and the question arose: what now? I accomplished my dream, I proved to myself I could do it. I could keep doing it, but I wasn’t sure if that was what I really wanted to do. When I took a moment to relax and really think, I realized that I’d put many, many things on hold for that dream and it wasn’t like credits rolled and everyone went home afterwards. Time went on, and there are other things I want to do. I developed skills working in games that I want to build on and explore, that I didn’t realize I had, and weren’t really an important part of the job I was doing.

It’s not a story I talk about often, because I don’t feel like telling it in a nice, compact way is really accurate. There’s no real ending, and it doesn’t tie itself up cleanly. It’s an experience I value too much to reduce to a one-and-done story.

I think I like my stories that way as well. I value the experience more when I feel like there’s more to it that I’m not seeing, that comes after the end. My favorite games have extended epilogues that suggest that more happens that I don’t see, but can imagine.

I like that. Time goes on.

Organizing people is hard. No matter the number of people, organization is the place where many otherwise noble endeavours fall down. I’ve had the privilege of being a part of and sometimes helping form and lead a goodly number of organizations of varying types, ranging from professional teams of 5-10 people all the way up to massive disconnected virtual teams of up to 100. They’ve all had their strengths and weaknesses, and some have fallen apart while others have come together to accomplish something awesome. Having an organization fall apart can be painful, and it’s worse when everyone involved (particularly those in charge) are trying to hold everything together. A group that works well can stay close for years or decades, and a group where everyone is invested but still winds up shredded can linger for a long time.

I’d like to talk a little bit about what I’ve learned while trying to bring people together to accomplish various goals. I’ve been reading a lot of management books as part of my studies, and they often talk about what it takes to be a successful leader. While I think that’s important, I think that the organization itself is more important than its leader, because if it can’t function without its leader it wasn’t a very solid organization to begin with.

In the various things I’ve read, there’s been a few recurring concepts that are touted as important things for a leader to develop. I think they make a good set of pillars for an organization as well, but I also think they’re double-edged swords. Everything requires moderation, and these ‘swords’ can help your organization cut through obstacles in its path or they can shred your group to pieces.

Here are the ‘swords’ that need to be wielded by successful organizations:

Communication

This is the first, most important thing. Everyone in the group needs to be able to communicate. The more open the communication, the better, to a point. Organizations with insufficient communication see drama, siloing, and inefficiencies borne of a lack of spread knowledge. We live in a world where a quick chat with someone should be a couple of keystrokes away, but we often fall into patterns of noncommunication for various reasons.

A healthy organization needs to be able to communicate, which is more than just status reports. Praise and criticism need to be available, and the most successful groups I’ve worked with are able to handle both. This isn’t something a leader can accomplish on their own; it requires that the group develop an atmosphere where speaking one’s mind, whether that’s to praise someone, provide constructive criticism, or ask for help is not just allowed but encouraged. Sometimes, this communication may need to be private or anonymous, but the the very best groups it doesn’t need to be, and either way it should exist.

Communication has a downside, though. There is a time to talk and a time to act, and any organization needs to know the difference. Planning is very important, but it’s vital not to get bogged down. One of my rules as a raid leader is that any explanation of any boss fight can last no longer than thirty seconds. I’ve (frequently) made exceptions to this, and they’ve always been mistakes. Often we face encounters that require more than thirty seconds of explanation, but this doesn’t change the rule. I’ll explain everything I can in thirty seconds, we’ll take a crack at it, fail, and move forward with another thirty seconds of explanation. More than that and people lose interest.

As the stakes get higher (in, say, a professional environment with money on the line), that threshold increases, but there’s still a limit to how much talking can occur before most people tune out. Agile development operates on a similar concept, with “sprints” being a small subset of a larger picture and covering that attention threshold. In the raid, we explain a bit, pull, wipe, then course correct. In Agile development, you plan a bit, execute for a few weeks, then come back, see what worked, then course correct. Same strategy, broader application.

Direction

This is almost as important as communication, and is kind of a “well, duh” concept. A group needs a task, a goal that it’s working towards. This can be as specific as “complete this assignment” or “defeat this boss” or it can be as vague as “make a place to call home” or “support each other through hard times”. A really solid group can be pointed in a direction and go, getting everything necessary done along the way.

An idea that I’ve found difficult to internalize is that a lot of times, simply telling people what to do is extremely effective. I’ve been a part of and even led a lot of groups that have fallen apart because the directing force is too weak. Sometimes it’s trying too hard to accommodate everyone’s schedules, or it’s overly worried about what everyone in the group wants to do, and winds up doing nothing. I personally spend a lot of time trying to work out what everyone in my groups wants if I’m leading them, and sometimes I just need to tell people what’s going on and let them figure out the details for themselves. The key to this is to respect and appreciate the people on your team, understanding that they’re often trying to make things work. A secret I’ve found out about myself, and that I suspect is true of others, is that when I’m told where to be, what to do, and when, and I have to change my plans to make that work, I’m a lot more invested in what happens, so I’m more into it.

The dark side of this is twofold. When direction is wielded as a weapon, it leads to micromanagement or closed communication. People in the organization should be capable of knowing what needs to be done and doing it without needing excessive oversight– if this isn’t the case, that’s what training is for. If direction is used to excessively shut out avenues of communication or topics raised, it closes communication lines. Obviously some suggestions, comments, and ideas won’t work or aren’t appropriate, but there’s a line between staying focused and clamping down that shouldn’t be crossed.

Motivation

Motivation is the last ‘sword’, and it’s the trickiest one. It’s important that everyone in the group is motivated, but it’s also important that the motivation is genuine and not forced. When I posted a few weeks ago about limiting my raid’s focus on a given encounter to two weeks at a time and no more (there’s that direction thing again), it was the result of a vibe I was getting that mirrored my own feelings. We weren’t making progress because we were all bored of the same thing, but we wanted to raid together and so were all forcing the motivation.

In the past few weeks, we’ve hit other targets, and beaten every single one. We’ve progressed through a ton of bosses that we’d never seen before, and when we returned to the original boss we’d been fighting, we instantly made progress into a portion of the fight we’d never really cracked open. I’m confident that we’ll have the boss down soon, just from the break and the breather we’ve had.

My motivation for the “two weeks” rule was partly selfish. I was getting bored of the same boss week after week, and at the time I wondered if I was misreading the vibe I was getting– projecting my lack of motivation onto everyone else. As the group’s leader, I’m not sure there’s a difference. Motivation in a group often trickles down from the leadership, and I think it’s significantly more important as a leader to motivate yourself than try to motivate your team when you aren’t fully invested yourself.

This can backfire on you– you need to be empathetic to your group’s needs and desires beyond your own– this much is obvious. Trying to force motivation is the more insidious trap, though. Every group needs to be motivated, but trying to force it feels shallow and will quickly make your team bitter, which undermines both your communication and your direction. Motivating people is often about being motivated yourself and letting that energy flow outwards, rather than trying to create it from nothing. In a good group, however, this can often become a positive feedback loop, which is ideal.

This is just scratching the surface of my take on managing an organization, but hopefully it was interesting for someone.

Some of the best games I’ve played recently have been recommended to me by other people. I know my tastes, and I’m pretty proactive about finding games I know I’ll like, and as a result I tend not to listen to the games people suggest for me. A few things slip by, usually stuff that isn’t in my usual wheelhouse, and I usually get them from other people or the occasional errant thing I read on the web.

I’d like to add a feature where I suggest games I’ve played that I think are worth looking into for one reason or another. These will be “Tam Suggests” games, and I’ll be following up with another feature called “Tam Tries” which will be more of a standard review, done my way.

I’ll lead these off with a disclaimer: The game I suggest here are worth playing. This doesn’t necessarily make them good, and I don’t necessarily think everyone will like them. I’ll talk about why I think they’re worth playing, but don’t expect a lot of hard criteria-checking. In a review, I’ll be looking at the game holistically. For the Suggests series, I’m going to be focused on a small number of reasons that, despite its flaws, the game is worth your time.

Let’s start with one that’s been lodged in my brain for a few years now. Here we go.

Kentucky Route Zero is a weird game. Aggressively, intensely weird. So weird it’s able to drive the casual observer far away.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of the best examples of art in videogames I’ve ever seen.

The premise is very, very simple. You are a deliveryman, driving through Kentucky and trying to get to your last stop of the night, and you’re fairly far away. On your way, you find yourself taking a supernatural shortcut, a mysterious route called Route Zero, or just “the Zero” by those in the know.

It’s played like an old-style point-and-click adventure game, and you move around solving puzzles and exploring, seeing the sights and pushing ever onwards towards your goal. You meet interesting people who’re going the same way you are, and sometimes make friends. The whole thing is done in an almost impressionistic art style, shadow play and simple shapes hinting at what’s there, rather than showing you outright. Here’s the trailer, see for yourself:

Things get weird pretty fast. Then they get really weird, even faster. I have a pretty high threshold for strange, so it didn’t really faze me, but I’ve spoken to people who’ve tried the game and couldn’t handle how strange it gets. I don’t think it’s nonsensical, it’s just a little bit sideways, and the logic of Route Zero is more Through The Looking-Glass than you might expect, complete with weird, non-Euclidean geometries.

It’s worth playing for the art alone, but the sound design deserves a mention (in fact, its sound design has won awards). It flits between the dreamlike and the ominous, but keeps the running theme of “it’s late and it’s lonely out here on the road” going strong. I’ve commented before that there’s no alone like 5am, and KRZ captures that feeling very well.

It’s got great visuals and music, though that’s not why I think it’s worth playing. It’s worth playing because it does some very creative things with game narratives that only games can do. A lot of games, even very beloved ones, imitate movies for their storytelling; one-sided projections of the story to the audience. Kentucky Route Zero appears to do that until the first time you talk with an NPC. It shows you what to prepare for by introducing your dog.

It’s a simple, apparently meaningless choice. When you pick a name for the dog, a short blurb about the dog’s personality follows, and for the rest of the game, that’s the dog’s name and personality. Later, it comes up again, only you already know the dog’s name and whether or not the dog is friendly towards other people you meet is no longer your choice.

It’s a really simple concept as shown here, but it slowly gets deeper. When talking to NPCs, I can pick which conversation options tell which parts of the story I want to tell. It gets more complicated when I’m getting to choose what both sides of the conversation are saying, or even what multiple people in my slowly growing party have to say and when. Who interrupts whom, and who’s quiet while the others talk?

Eventually people will ask about your motivations, and this can lead into entire varied asides and different sorts of paths and conversations based on what you choose to say. At one point, I was helping set up a TV for someone, and at a certain point I could reminisce in a couple different ways about my parents and how they felt about TVs, or I could brusquely say “I know how to set up a TV”. I chose the latter, favoring action and displays of competence, and I was able to set up the TV without help. Later, a similar conversation came up and I opted to comment about my background as a mechanic and fix what needed fixing, rather than talking about it. The min-maxer in me enjoyed being able to just be good at whatever I wanted to say I was good at.

Some time later, two of the characters talked about how standoffish and aloof I’d been as Conway, and that control over the conversation came up again. I could have them argue, or mutually decide they didn’t like Conway, or show compassion.

As the game unfolds, you see more and more of the surrounding story– the colour gets filled in, if you will, but which colours you see vary based on your choices. It tells a very complex, winding story, but does so in a way that lets you explore it– not just the physical space, but the relationships with the characters.

It’s not for everyone, and it takes some excruciatingly weird turns, but the way in which it’s presented is really interesting, and I find myself looking forward to new chapters so that I can see where the story goes –where I can take it– next. It’s an experience I can’t really have outside games, and it shows off what the medium is capable of.

It may not be your cup of tea, but I think it’s worth a look.

Games journalism. It’s not really about ethics. It’s about money. Shocker, I know.

You can get to the heart of almost any organization’s strengths, weaknesses, issues, and successes by following the money. If you’re looking for motivation of almost any business, follow the money. Specifically, figure out where the money is coming from and where it’s going. If there’s something happening that you don’t like, it’s probably because you are not the part of the group that’s the primary contributor of money to the organization in question.

If you’re looking at a company that’s doing things that you don’t like, things that fundamentally don’t align with your interests, it’s pretty likely that you’re not the target audience (and thus not giving them any money) or you’re not the customer, you’re the product. You can rail against this, but no matter how loud you get, it’s not going to change unless the flow of money changes.

The common saying is that money is the root of all evil, which I honestly find to be something of a cop-out. Everyone needs to pay the bills, keep the lights on, keep food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads. These aren’t easy things to do. If you’re looking at a professional games journalism site, something that posts multiple times a day (every other hour? more?) and that you can rely upon for coverage of a large number of events, you’re looking at someone, usually quite a few someones, who need to make enough money to essentially spend all day posting. Odds are good you don’t pay a dime to any games site– most don’t even give you the option. So, you’re looking at something you consume for free, that takes up someone’s entire workday, who needs to pay the bills somehow. Follow the money.

If you’re not paying, someone is, or no one would be writing. So, who would want to give someone money to write about games? First, advertisers, though too many ads and you, the reader, won’t read the site anymore, so getting all your money from ads isn’t likely. Second, game publishers, who want people to know about their games and know that games sites are a good marketing platform. Both of these groups have money and motivation. This is all pretty obvious, but it’s where the whole “ethics” question gets thrown into the mix.

Is there a conflict of interest when it comes to accepting money directly from the people you are reporting on? Certainly. Pretty much every type of enthusiast press deals with this. Why? Well, what’s the alternative? Gotta keep the lights on somehow, gotta keep food on the table. The relationship pretty much has to run this way because otherwise you don’t have the money to keep the site up. Does this absolve the enthusiast press of the conflict of interest? No, but “real journalism” is going to take a backseat to “paying the bills” any day of the week. Because it’s enthusiast press and not life-and-death reporting, there’s no value in martyring yourself to report on “big issues” because this is entertainment media; “big issues” pretty much don’t exist.

There’s an alternative model that’s been suggested for games reporting sites: Webcartoonists. The vast majority of webcartoonists don’t sustain themselves on their comic alone; it’s a very rare few who can focus exclusively on their work, and they’re almost all solo endeavours. They also post, at most, once a day, usually less often than that. Not counting sponsored posts and reposts, Kotaku posted ten times today (Sunday, May 10). Destructoid posted 11 times. MassivelyOP, a niche site, posted 9 times today. BlizzardWatch, an even more niche site than Massively, posted 7 times. It’s not a coincidence that those numbers are all really close to one another. While a webcomic can update once a day or less to remain relevant, a games site needs to update multiple times a day– in some cases upwards of ten(!) to stay relevant– that’s where the market equilibrium is happening. The model doesn’t seem to work.

I originally planned on making a graph to show this off, comparing today’s pageviews to the number of posts made. Pageviews are relevant because that’s what gets people to see the advertisements and the marketing that funds the site. Your eyes looking at these sites is the traffic that drives revenue (you are the product). However, the divide between games sites is pretty stark. The readership of sites with 10 or more posts versus the readership of sites with less than 10 posts in a given day is STARK. We’re talking orders of magnitude here, it makes for a silly looking graph. I don’t have a complete picture of the data to support this, but I strongly suspect that if a site updated, say, 15 times a day, they wouldn’t see a significant increase past about 10 or so posts. I do have some supporting data, however.

IGN.com updated 32 times this past Sunday. Here’s their Alexa rank:

IGN.com, Alexa ranking

For comparison, here’s Kotaku, with less than a third of their post count:

kotaku.com, Alexa ranking

As a final point, here’s the Escapist, with 4 posts:

escapistmagazine.com, Alexa ranking

These are all pan-media outlets with a focus on gaming. They all have relatively similar curves, with a spike of readers in the last quarter of 2014 and then some levelling off, and all taking a dive in April (as news hits the doldrums). The Escapist is notably even more pan-media than Kotaku, but Kotaku is right in the 500-700 rank, whereas the Escapist is between 4000 and 5000; an order of magnitude. IGN only gains 300 or so rank over Kotaku, a fairly meager gain in absolute terms, particularly for triple the output. I’m not suggesting that post count is the only (or even necessarily the most important) factor in readership, but there’s definitely a correlation, and all of these sites are posting FAR more than once a day or a few times a week.

The difficulty is finding a model that supports the interests of the audience while providing enough income to support the sites themselves. It seems unlikely that readers are going to be willing to pay for access to games news sites– the current games news sites are the old game magazines, which almost wholly died out with the advent of the internet. The audience was more than happy to become the product in return for getting content for free.

Cory Doctorow in his hot air balloon

The other model I’ve seen is the very egalitarian, very grassroots “bloggers can be the new games journalists”, suggesting that the content created by bloggers, in aggregate, can cover the news and be honest and reader-oriented about it because there’s no real money in it for them. It’s the same concept that drives the idea of twitter-as-international news. I’m not sure if it can work; the idea of crowdsourced reporting is still really young and I suspect there will be barriers to entry put in place by both existing games sites (who want exclusive coverage) and game publishers themselves (who want to be able to control what people say about them). It’s definitely a problem with the Youtube scene by most reports– people either allow themselves to be bought or are shut out.

I’m not sure what the future of games reporting is going to look like, but I think the first place to look to see where it’s headed is the flow of money. You can boil a lot of things down to a follow-the-money problem, and if you figure out how that flow is working, you can get a picture of how it’s likely to change and what would need to be different to get what you’re looking for.

I suspect that a site with no advertising, that charged a $10/month subscription fee and managed to get a critical mass of readers would deliver some really top-notch reporting, but I also doubt there are enough people willing to pay for that.

Luck is believing you are lucky.

It’s a pithy quote, but one that’s resonated with me, and I think is deeper than it first appears. I have been described as lucky, and from a cosmic standpoint, I am. I won the character creation die roll at birth and have been gifted with a great deal of opportunity throughout my life.

At the same time, I’ve known a great many people who have had the same opportunities and gifts as I have and have failed to do much with them. Often, this is a result of a cascade of events that leaves them rather worse off than they started– a “string of bad luck”. I joke with friends about bad luck (I’ve commented about how my luck in games is awful unless I stand a chance of harming someone else’s experience through a random string of good luck, at which point it happens a lot), but the reality is I don’t actually believe in bad luck.

Luck, for me, is something you can only see in hindsight. After something has happened, you can look back on it and say “wow, that was lucky”. Much of the good fortune I’ve had in my life I can look back and say “oh, huh, that was lucky” in hindsight. Luck isn’t a safety net; you can’t live expecting things to go well for you because when they inevitably don’t, everything will fall apart because it’s easy to get into a cascade failure if you’ve left things to chance and have no real safety nets.

image from the new york times

I use luck as a way to appreciate good things that have happened to me that I wasn’t a direct part of, and to clear my mind about the bad things that have occurred that I’ve had no control over. It lets me better understand what I should take credit or responsibility for and what I shouldn’t. It helps me keep my cool and keep a clear head in a crisis.

To use a recent, low-impact example: In the Infinity tournament I played recently, I suffered what some might call a string of bad luck in the second round, losing more than half my force in my opponent’s first turn, to a single model that cut a bloody swathe through my lines, and then getting heavily locked down. My opponent commented later that he was intimidated by how calm I was as I lost almost every single one of my critical pieces. The reality was that I was rapidly trying to figure out what to do next as I lost die roll after die roll, but I was confident that my choices had been correct ones and my dice failing me wasn’t something I could control. Instead, I focused on my turn, and what actions I was going to take in response. It gave me a clarity of purpose that was entirely separate from the die rolls I was losing.

photo courtesy of Toadchild and the Card Kingdom Facebook page

By the end of my second turn, I’d won the round, despite suffering crippling losses and barely scratching the paint on my opponent’s force– I think he lost perhaps a single model in the entire round. I could have easily gotten caught up in how bad my luck had been (and falling into the trap of assuming it would continue), or started taking reckless chances with low odds of success (something I’ve seen a lot of people do when put in tight spots). Rather than blaming my poor luck or trying to use luck as a safety net, though, I was able to win by doubling down on the choices I’d previously made that I thought were good, not using luck as a proof that my choices were bad and not worth following through on and not breaking from the plan. I had fewer tools to work with, but the plan was still intact.

In the previous turn, I’d set up a number of objectives for myself, playing very aggressively and securing a strong lead. I was still in the lead as my opponent ended his turn, just not quite as far ahead. Rather than trying to retaliate against my opponent, I simply continued the plan I’d started with, finishing off the objectives I’d set up. I had one model who could accomplish that goal, but he was able to do it before getting knocked out at the end of my turn. Looking back, I was lucky that my rolls worked out as well as I would’ve liked, but the reality was that my choices in my previous turn had given me what I needed to secure victory, even put very far behind in my opponent’s turn.

photo by joe philipson

Despite appearances, I’m actually extremely risk-averse. I take a lot of chances that seem risky, but I’ve often done a lot to mitigate or negate the penalties for failure. I’ll take long-shot chances if the risks are low, but I’ll rarely take even good chances if the stakes are very high. As a result, from the outside, it looks like I’m taking a lot of chances and somehow making most of them work, but the reality is that I’m only taking chances that don’t harm me overmuch if I fail.

From the outside, this looks like luck. On the inside, I believe in my ability to assess and mitigate risk, and the choices I make as a result.

Luck is believing you are lucky.

I’ve talked before about the joys of unsophisticated play. The low-to-mid tier of play has a lot of joys that are often left out in the mad scramble many make for the top, competitive tiers of play. Whether that’s missing out on the fun of playing suboptimally and organically discovering strategies or remembering to read the story as you work your way to max level, there are a lot of things you miss if you don’t stop and smell the roses.

On the other hand, the experience of playing a game both competently and competitively is an experience and a joy all its own, and is worth pursuing even if you don’t consider yourself a competitive player. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who look at games or parts of games that seem “too hard”, and I know they’re able to do them– I’ve seen them exercise the necessary skills. Our (first) raid in FFXIV was extremely skittish about going into Coil, because coil was “really hard” and we weren’t sure of ourselves. We crushed everything up to Turn 5, and once we passed Turn 5 we slammed through most of Second Coil all the way to Turn 9. This week, we took our break from Turn 9 attempts to fight some new primals, taking down Titan EX for some folks who hadn’t gotten it, and also dropping Odin and Leviathan EX.

We had avoided Good King Moggle Mog Extreme for months, because of its reputation for being super rough, and once we stepped foot inside we won within three attempts, and can more or less trivially farm that boss. The group is very skilled and very capable, we just need to remind ourselves of that on occasion.

I want to take a little break to talk a bit about fun. Stealing a page from Raph Koster’s book, fun is what happens when your brain is exercising. You see patterns and enjoy watching them recur, and causing them to recur in the game. When you’ve mastered the patterns, the game becomes boring. You become frustrated when the game presents you with what looks like noise. When that noise resolves itself into a pattern, or when you can start to see how the chaos becomes something sensible, that’s when your brain is having fun.

Everyone is at a different level when it comes to this sort of thing. Players playing at unsophisticated levels of play are having fun because they’re resolving the noise into patterns still. Highly skilled players playing at that level will be bored, because they’ve mastered those patterns and want to move to higher tiers.

You can keep a game fun for a lot longer than you might expect by raising the difficulty– either literally or by trying more and more difficult things, keeping yourself at that level where you haven’t mastered the patterns but you’re not just looking at noise. The worst that happens is you fail, no different from an accidental misclick or a lost ‘net connection, or just jumping off a platform to see if you can.

I mentioned above that there’s enjoyment to be had in watching patterns recur– this is why we see very similar movies and similar themes in TV shows, why a particular type of entertainment is popular for a while and you feel inundated with the type. If you’re looking at the available offerings and feel like they’re all the same and uninteresting, you’re either looking at a pattern and just seeing noise, or you’ve mastered the pattern and gotten bored with it. It’s why game publishers run franchises into the ground and why WoW gets a spike of people with each expansion and loses them more and more quickly each time.

For myself, I don’t play fighting games or most board games at a terribly sophisticated level. If I play either one at all, I play it once or twice and move on to something new, a different experience. In the case of fighting games, I understand the patterns conceptually but in practice they’re all just noise to me. I have a low threshold for memorization, and tend to avoid games where skill is about memorizing or keeping long strings of data in my head.

On the other hand, when the new Thief came out, I played it start to finish not just on the highest difficulty setting, but with about 80% of the additional “even harder” options active. I played through Dishonored on my first playthrough at the highest difficulty setting and went for the wholly-pacifist “Clean Hands” ending. I love those types of games, and I’m used to the patterns enough that I want the additional challenge or the game is boring for me.

In a similar vein, I have rarely played the same Infinity list twice, and have never brought the same list to two different tournaments. Constantly changing my lists keeps me seeing new patterns and keeps the game fresh for me.

The trick is to find a balance between trivial, assured victory and frustrating, predictable defeat. Don’t be afraid to lose or fail, because doing both of those things is how your brain realizes something is exciting and a potential test of its abilities.

I haven’t been playing a lot recently. I’ve hopped on for FFXIV raids which have been a blast as always, but I haven’t been on much other than that to work on my character. A lot of that is I’m throttling back in preparation for Heavensward, which I plan to greedily consume as soon as it’s out. Normally, I play other games in the interim, but nothing is jumping out at me.

This probably has a lot to do with what I call “the pendulum”. I like a really wide swathe of genre fiction, from high fantasy to hard sci-fi and everything in between. My interests tend to swing back and forth– for a while I’ll be really, REALLY into swords and sorcery, and later on I’ll find fantasy boring and want to delve deep into cyberpunk or spaceflight. The pendulum is slow, and the right thing can keep me somewhere or another for months or more.

When a game comes out at “the wrong time” for me, it’s often because the pendulum hasn’t swung the right way yet. As of this writing, I’m fairly deep into a sci-fi arc. I want cyberpunk games, fancy technology, and exciting futures in my entertainment. I spent several minutes this evening holding the most recent expansion pack for Android: Netrunner, despite knowing that no one I know plays it and I don’t even love it myself, just because it scratched that cyberpunk itch. I’ve been doing a lot of work with my Infinity stuff lately, rebasing an entire faction and fiddling with colour schemes in photoshop to see what I like.

This part of the pendulum swing has lasted for a while. I started playing Elite: Dangerous in January, played all the way through Deus Ex: Human Revolution in February, have played around a lot with Dreamfall, and all the while have been hip deep in Infinity. In the meantime, I’ve tried multiple times to get into Pillars of Eternity, Warmachine Tactics, and my second playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition, all without much luck.

Last year, I was playing a ton of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Shadows of Mordor, Assassin’s Creed IV, and even some Divinity: Original Sin (when Ash and I remembered to sync up schedules). Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel dropped at a point where I really wanted to swing swords around and be a wizard, and it kind of passed me by.

There’s a bunch of stuff that sits neatly in the middle of the pendulum, though, and I can usually get into it no matter how I’m feeling. The biggest one of these is Star Wars, which blends sci-fi and fantasy well enough that I can be interested no matter how I feel. Loading up KOTOR is something I’ll do frequently, though I’ve been a little starved for good Star Wars games lately. Final Fantasy is often another that fits the bill, leaning a little more on the fantasy side but still pretty techy and satisfying. Even further towards fantasy are steampunk games like Arcanum or Dishonored or Thief. Modern Supernatural settings (Vampire: the Masquerade, The Secret World) are on the other side of middle, and Shadowrun is a little closer to sci-fi but still has that touch of fantasy (I’m convinced it’s the only reason I can talk some of the people I know into playing it).

What happens with me is that I’ll need to complete the swing, get all the way to one side of the spectrum before coming back. Right now, I really, REALLY want to play something in a nice chrome-and-holographics world and I’m frustrated by my inability to find anything. I could fly spaceships if I wanted, but I really want, essentially, Cloud Atlas the game. Fantasy is a lot easier for me– I can hop into Diablo or Guild Wars 2 or anything LOTR to get my fantasy fix, but sci-fi is a lot harder.

I’m still trawling for something that might give me the sci-fi fix I’m looking for, or, failing that, get the pendulum swinging back towards something else. In the meantime, time to reroll my Shadowrun: Dragonfall character for the tenth time or so.