I hope you’ll forgive me if I talk a bit about current events. I used to live in and around Baltimore, so seeing places I know and used to hang out at in the news is somewhat poignant. No pictures today, there is little I want to do less than look for context-appropriate images for this post.

I really, really wish Baltimore had been a surprise. I think the only uncertain thing is the specific location. The messaging has been around for, at the very least, about a year, since Ferguson, and it’s painfully apparent that lessons have not been learned. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and evaluating my feelings on the series of situations, and honestly my takeaway is that they’re complicated. This isn’t a shock to me– it’s a whole bunch of people and people are complicated.

What bothers me is that the conversations that are bubbling up are following the same trends as before. They make an attempt to simplify the situation into a word, a phrase, a tweet, or a one-liner, paired with a single, still image if possible. We have evolved a communications culture that values pithy lines and simple, straightforward messages delivered precisely and at high speed, and in that we struggle with issues that aren’t so easily boiled down.

I’m also put in mind of this article, which I thought was excellent. In essence, it points out that we conflate “happy” with “good”, such that if something makes us happy, it must follow that that thing is good, and if something makes us unhappy, it must not be good.

Games put this in stark relief, even the most cursory look at games forums will make that apparent, but games have no monopoly on the concept. People like to think of *themselves* as good, and therefore if they’re happy, things must be good, because if things weren’t good, then they wouldn’t be happy. If someone else is unhappy, they must be doing something incorrectly. This filters down to every level. I’ve heard myself wondering what I’m doing wrong so as not to be happy, and becoming uncertain about my own life choices — my own “goodness” — as a result. When I’m happy, and someone points out that things are wrong, my immediate instinct is to rationalize them– I’m happy, so things must be okay, somehow. My mind will flail at any thread to find that rationalization. Similarly, if I’m not happy, but my situation is objectively “good”, I find myself trying to rationalize to myself why I should be happy. Happy = good, and it’s really deeply ingrained.

We see both things in Baltimore. The quick, not-whole-picture snippets that make for one-liners and tweets and one-word descriptions of feelings reduce the situation into rationalizable chunks. I’ve seen a lot of people post the same pictures, latching onto one image or another as support for their viewpoint. Others try to take a middle ground between the two. The reality is that there is a lot going on, and that there are human beings involved at every point. Human beings are incredibly complicated; there’s not some line of Good People and Evil People, or even Mostly Good or Mostly Evil. We like to think of ourselves as good, but we all do or contribute to terrible things… but the terrible things we do don’t wipe away the good we do, either.

Further complicating things is that we all have different worldviews– often not just a little bit, either. I think of couples where one person likes, say, nachos and the other doesn’t, and the delicate struggles and occasional arguments that arise from just that one little difference in worldview. At the point at which one person looks at a thing and fears for their life, and another person does not, that gap is immense, but importantly, those two vastly different worldviews are no less valid. It’s cliché at this point (but no less true) to say that everyone involved is a human being, but more importantly, I think, is understanding that different people see the world in often extremely different ways, with sometimes no overlap.

We understand that at some level when we think about people far away from us– “it’s so different there, of course they’d see the world differently”, but it’s a lot harder when they’re walking the same streets and going into the same stores and living apparently very similar lives to ours. I’ve been trying to clearly understand my own worldview, understand how and why I think and feel things the way I do, and try not to take it all for granted. I think that if I can manage to grok my own perspective and recognize it as my own personal one and not the default, I’ll be better equipped to understand other people’s, including ones that are totally different from mine.

Maybe once I can do that I can get closer to figuring out how we can collectively stop clashes like Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Gamergate.

This weekend I played in my first tournament in my new local scene, which was awesome and a great way to ring in the new edition of Infinity.

I’ve had some strong opinions about ITS listbuilding in the past (even wrote a tactica on it), as well as which factions/sectorials are competitive in the format. For my first ITS 2015 tournament, I wanted to intentionally break a number of my own rules, as well as bringing a sectorial that I’ve had some unkind things to say about in the past as far as ITS viability. New city, new season, new sectorial.

The tournament scenarios were Annihilation, Lifeblood, and Transmission Matrix, and I brought the Imperial Service. In N2, I felt like cheap, easy Kuang Shi wasn’t worth the lack of good specialists, expensive playmaking troops, and overall jankiness in listbuilding– vanilla YJ was more versatile and there was little reason to go for ISS. I also insisted on using models that I’d particularly disliked in N2, some of which are noticably different in N3– the Pheasant, the Crane, the Bao, and the Wu Ming.

Without further ado, my lists:

Imperial Service

Group 110 0 2

WÚ MÍNG HMG / Pistol, Knife. (2 | 39)

WÚ MÍNG Combi Rifle, Light Rocket Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (1 | 37)

WÚ MÍNG (Forward Observer) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (31)

WÚ MÍNG (Forward Observer) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (31)

WÚ MÍNG Boarding Shotgun + 1 TinBot B (Deflector L2) / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 33)

SUN TZE Lieutenant (Advanced Command) MULTI Rifle, 2 Nanopulsers, Flash Pulse / Pistol, Knife. (65)

KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (5)

KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (5)

NINJA Hacker (Assault Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Shock CCW, Knife. (0.5 | 40)

CELESTIAL GUARD (Kuang Shi Control Device) Combi Rifle + Light Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 |13)

Imperial Service

──────────────────────────────────────────────────

Group 110 0 1

IMPERIAL AGENT (Chain of Command, X Visor) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Monofilament CCW. (35)

CELESTIAL GUARD Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (13)

CELESTIAL GUARD (Kuang Shi Control Device) Combi Rifle + Light Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 |13)

KUANG SHI Chain Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (5)

SOPHOTECT Combi Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (31)

YUDBOT Electric Pulse. (3)

HSIEN Lieutenant HMG, Nanopulser / Pistol, AP CCW. (2 | 61)

IMPERIAL AGENT Hacker (Assault Hacking Device) MULTI Rifle, 2 Nanopulsers / Pistol, DA CCW. (0.5 | 51)

BÀO TROOP MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 30)

BÀO TROOP MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 30)

BÀO TROOP (X Visor) Boarding Shotgun, Contender / Pistol, Knife. (28)

6 SWC | 300 Points

Open with Army 5

Bao, Crane, Pheasant, it’s everything I expected not to like. The Hsien HMG Lt was there because I tend to play very defensive, hidden Lts and I wanted to force myself to play something a bit more aggressive.

Neither list is more than 10 orders, and I was very light on the Kuang Shi. Both lists are focused on bringing things that only ISS can bring. Here’s how it went.

Game 1: Annihilation

My opponent was JSA, something that concerned me somewhat right away. I put a lot of stock in JSA as a competitive ITS faction, and a Keisotsu link can seriously threaten anything I had.

Furthermore, the table was a (fantastically gorgeous) cityscape, with multiple highly accessible levels and catwalks everywhere connecting things.

I pulled Telemetry (succeed at a Forward Observer roll) and Data Scan (use a Hacker to tag an enemy model) as my classified objectives, opt into the Wu Ming/Sun Tze list, and won the initiative roll, choosing to take first turn. My opponent took a slightly more advantageous side of the table with better sight lines and I deployed first.

I placed the Wu Ming link front and center, putting half the team on the bottom level and the LRL and one of the Observers up top, prone. Sun Tze went way off to one side, away from the bulk of my forces, with a Kuang Shi nearby to watch the approaches to him. The Celestial Guard went prone on top of a building, blocked by a much taller building, leaving plenty of space for her to drop smoke. I held back one of the Kuang Shi and my Ninja.

He deployed a full Keisotsu link on a rooftop, mostly prone, with a Missile Launcher pointed directly at my Wu Ming — problematic. He also dropped multiple extra Keisotsu, making it easy to refresh that link. More problematic. He also dropped a trio of Karakuri– unlinked but easily linkable. An engineer, sensor bot, EVO Repeater, and cheap repeaterbot all drop next, in hugely inaccessible locations. Rounding everything out was a Smart Missile bot. All told, it looked roughly like this:

Japanese Sectorial Army

Group 19 0 0

KEISOTSU Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (9)

KEISOTSU Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (9)

KEISOTSU (Forward Observer) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (10)

KEISOTSU (Forward Observer) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (10)

KEISOTSU Missile Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 14)

KEISOTSU Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (9)

KARAKURI Combi Rifle, Chain Rifle, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (35)

KARAKURI Mk12, Chain Rifle, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (40)

KARAKURI Heavy Shotgun, Chain Rifle, D.E.P. / Pistol, Knife. (35)

Group 26 0 0

KEISOTSU Hacker (Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 17)

TOKUSETSU KOHEI Engineer Combi Rifle, D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (14)

CHAĪYÌ Yaókòng Flash Pulse, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (8)

WÈIBĪNG Yaókòng Combi Rifle, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (16)

SON-BAE Yaókòng Smart Missile Launcher / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 18)

PANGGULING (EVO Repeater) Electric Pulse. (0.5 | 13)

Imperial Service

Group 19 0 0

CELESTIAL GUARD MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 21)

CELESTIAL GUARD Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (12)

CELESTIAL GUARD Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (12)

CELESTIAL GUARD Hacker (Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 21)

CELESTIAL GUARD (Kuang Shi Control Device) Combi Rifle + Light Smoke Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 |13)

LÙ DUĀN Mk12, Heavy Flamethrower / Electric Pulse. (22)

RUI SHI Spitfire / Electric Pulse. (1 | 21)

SUN TZE Lieutenant (Advanced Command) MULTI Rifle, 2 Nanopulsers, Flash Pulse / Pistol, Knife. (65)

CELESTIAL GUARD Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (12)

Morat Aggression Force

──────────────────────────────────────────────────

Group 19 1 5

MORAT Hacker (EI Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 22)

DĀTURAZI Combi Rifle + Smoke Light Grenade Launcher / Pistol, Shock CCW. (0.5 | 21)

DĀTURAZI Chain Rifle, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (14)

DĀTURAZI Chain Rifle, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (14)

DĀTURAZI Chain Rifle, Grenades, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, AP CCW. (14)

ZERAT Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)

ZERAT Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)

T-DRONE Smart Missile Launcher / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 18)

GAKI AP CCW. (4)

RASYAT (Martial Arts L3) Boarding Shotgun, D-Charges, Zero-V Smoke Grenades / Pistol, DA CCW. (28)

Group 25 0 0

MORAT Hacker (EI Hacking Device) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 22)

RODOK HMG / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 27)

RODOK HMG / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 27)

RODOK Paramedic (MediKit) Boarding Shotgun, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)

RODOK Lieutenant Combi Rifle, 2 Light Shotguns / Pistol, Knife. (26)

6 SWC | 300 Points

Open with Army 5

I don’t really know Morats very well, so I see two potential links, the Daturazi starting in a link, and a pretty widely divided order pool.

I deploy very carefully, securing one antenna with the two Celestial Guard and putting the Sophotect in position to claim the other. The Hsien and Crane are carefully positioned in the thin strip between the two hacking areas of the antennae. There’s a huge wall as part of a building along the halfway point, with the antenna just inside. My plan is to get my troops to contest that middle one, hold my two, and keep things clear.

Round 1:

My opponent’s Gaki moves up, as one does, and he moves his Daturazi forward to get better positioning. I can see one with a Bao sniper, so shoot and drop it through the dodge. Next, he swaps the link to the Rodoks and jumps one up to get into an HMG battle with my Bao link. The Bao stay frosty and drop the Rodok with a well-placed shot. The Rodok paramedic starts jumping, however, to revive the fallen Rodok, succeeds on the second try, and a second sniper-vs-HMG battle ensues. This time, the Bao hits twice and puts one of the Rodok HMGs down for good, straight to dead.

A Zerat moves forward to threaten the Sophotect, and I completely miss that I have a shot at her with the Bao sniper through a window. However, as she opens fire with the Zerat, the Sophotect manages to answer with a crit on an 8, dropping the Zerat quite effectively. My opponent goes to move in with the second Zerat, but this time I’m paying attention and he can’t safely move forward without taking sniper fire, so he hangs tight. A number of models reposition, but I can’t see any of them. He reforms the link with the Daturazi.

On my turn, the Kuang Shi moves forward, then a coordinated order with the Crane, Hsien, and Sophotect puts them all further up the board, with the Sophotect contesting an antenna. I’m not careful enough with the Hsien, and he gets immobilized. I carefully scoot the Crane up to get in range to Data Scan a Rodok through the wall and manage to succeed. He then moves to within 4″ of the antenna and is promptly hacked and immobilized. I swing around with the Kuang Shi and start chain rifling Rodoks. A few dodges are attempted, but I’m able to drop the combi Rodok, leaving the center antenna uncontested. I score two points in the first round..

Round 2:

My opponent swings the Gaki around towards the Kuang Shi, and I chain rifle it on the way in. It dodges, but the HMG Rodok is caught in the blast and goes down. The Paramedic Rodok brings up the Combi Rodok. At this point, the Rasyat drops in right behind the Sophotect. He can’t get to her without being seen by the sniper, so he drops Zero-V Smoke, but can’t put it in a position where he can threaten the Sophotect without getting shot at by a Bao or CG, so he hangs tight, repositioning to a corner where he can get cover. The Gaki melees the Kuang Shi, who manages to successfully dodge out of melee. He repositions to ensure antenna coverage. He also Spotlights my Crane and drops smart missiles on it, leaving it unconscious, and drops a mine with a Rodok.

On my turn, I get squirrelly. The Kuang Shi has to move towards the Gaki, triggering the mine, but this is okay, and he manages to chain rifle the Gaki and HMG Rodok along the way.The HMG Rodok finally dies for real, but the Gaki is okay. I bring a Bao with a boarding shotgun around to threaten the Rasyat, using a boarding shotgun and getting outsmoked. I take a long shot with the CG and put my own smoke down, blocking sight to a building entirely on my opponent’s half of the board. I then go nuts with my Sophotect, moving forward and shooting the Gaki, who explodes but catches no one. While moving along with her Yudbot, the Sophotect manages to reach the building, place and detonate a D-Charge, and get back, healing the Crane along the way and retaining cover against the Rasyat. The Hsien, no longer immobilized, moves up to within 4″ of the antennae and declares Reset to avoid being Hacked, but fails and is Immobilized again. At the end of my turn, I control three antennae to my opponent’s two, and score two more points.

Round 3:

My opponent brings both Rodok forward to contest the antenna, one of whom shoots the Sophotect, causing a wound. Having made a save, she fails Guts and hops the wall, keeping cover from the Rodoks but not the Rasyat. The Rasyat shoots her. Alas. Hackers Spotlight my BSG Bao, succeeding on the second try and dropping smart missiles on him until he is severely dead, breaking my link.

On my turn, I pull the Pheasant out and spend my entire order pool bringing him around to shoot the Rasyat in the back with a boarding shotgun, then moving forward to contest the antenna. Nothing else matters here, I just needed that last one. I’ll pause here to point out that this was a textbook case in which the Pheasant could actually have used his monofilament CCW, and I STILL DIDN’T because the shotgun was a better option.

With two 55+ point HI contesting the center antenna, the Rodoks can’t compete, and I take 3 antenna in the final turn, for a maximum score of 10.

Results and Thoughts:

ISS performed really well. I was running 10-order lists with bare minimum specialists– three in one list and effectively two in the second (the CoC Pheasant doesn’t really count, since he’s tied down by the Bao).

Bao are damn good. They serve little purpose other than a sniper link, but on the right table that’s all you need; they provide deadly AROs while the rest of your list does work. I don’t know what I would drop to get to a full, scary 5-man link, but I don’t think it’s that necessary. I wish there were more Bao profiles, though.

The Crane is a serious workhorse, as is the Sophotect. I already knew that about the Sophie, but the Crane is surprisingly badass, despite getting ignominiously blown away by a Celestial Guard.

Wu Ming give opponents fits. They can’t get close, because boarding shotguns, but I also have HMGs to scare you with. I don’t know if I think the LRL is worthwhile, but I definitely feel like the Tinbot isn’t. Breaker ammo just doesn’t impress.

Overall, I had a great time, taking away first place with a total score of 26 OPs and several really good games.

Failure isn’t adequately addressed in games. The reality of failure, the immediacy and the high probability of failure in the real world is not well expressed in the games we play. We fail at a task and we have to return to a point earlier in time, from before our failure, and we have to then try to execute “properly”, avoiding the failure. It’s very artificial, we just hand-wave it away like a story whose details you can’t remember (literally this, in the case of a few games).

To some extent, I think this is why Dark Souls and Bloodborne have taken root in the collective “hardcore” gamer psyche. Failure is inevitable, frequent, and harsh, and for a lot of people I suspect it fills the void created by success without the threat of failure. There’s an interesting duality there: it is far more satisfying to succeed at a thing you thought impossible, and far more demoralizing to fail at something you know you’re capable of.

There’s a certain school of thought that latches onto this, and says that games should always be played at the highest difficulty setting, with the underlying though focusing on maximizing the former and minimizing the latter. I don’t ascribe to this particular point of view, because I don’t think that every game necessarily has “difficulty” as a relevant part of the experience, but I also don’t ascribe the opposing view that playing games on the highest difficulty is exclusively an expression of ego and machismo, a paean of the “hardcore”, as it were.

Failure is healthy for the psyche, much like change. We fear it, and avoid it, but it is in our failures that we learn and grow, and it is in continual assured victories that we stop progressing and stabilize. There are advantages to the latter; I had originally typed “stagnate” and “regress”, but I think that’s an overly harsh evaluation– there is value in stability and headlong, unceasing progression leaves little time for self-evaluation. Too much of anything is unhealthy, but especially with games it’s easy to fall into a state where you simply consume content without investment, accruing victory after victory without context.

Unfortunately, I don’t think games as a medium address failure well. Failure isn’t fun. This isn’t just a function of failure; failure can be incredibly fun, it just needs to be designed that way. I don’t think we’ve found a magic bullet for it, and we’ve created a paradigm in which even the slightest failure leads to an instantly reloaded save game.

I remember the old Hitman series, with limited saves (or no saves) on each level, forcing you to either play through a lengthy level from the start or to live with your mistakes. It’s that latter that I want to see more of. Games don’t let us live with our mistakes and attempt to right them; we either fail and GAME OVER or we fail and the game reminds us of it, but we cannot ever make things right.

Interestingly, I think the place where failure is best expressed is in the MMO space, where you can’t reload to a previous save but you can go back and right your mistakes. There’s a certain reality to that fantasy space that’s compelling to me, and I think why I spend so much time in MMOs compared to other games.

This month is my month for the Aggrochat GOTM, and I’m having some difficulty deciding on a game for everyone to play.

I really want a game that sparks discussion, particularly in our approaches. We’ve had games where we talk about our different takes on the experiences we had (Citizens of Earth, Trine 2), but we haven’t yet had a game where our approaches to playing it differ dramatically. I feel like that demands an RPG of some kind, but one that’s relatively consumable in the month allotted.

I’ve also waffled back and forth on whether I want to select a game that I’ve already played and know is good (to recommend to the rest of the group) or a game I haven’t played or have barely touched, so my experience is as fresh as everyone else’s.

There’s a tie here to an issue I have that comes up frequently when I deal with other people– I very much want to offer the best experience I can to other people, regardless of my own personal interests. It comes up a lot in certain social situations: I’m very reticent to introduce myself to someone I don’t know, because I generally feel like people don’t need to be bothered by me coming to take up their time and space. This extends to even my close friends– if I’m choosing the thing we do, I want to make sure it’s an enjoyable experience for everyone, no matter what my own personal interests are.

I have a game I would pick if I only cared about myself, and I’ve already eliminated it from the running because I know two other people wouldn’t really enjoy it, even though I think it would be a fascinating game for us all to play and share notes on. It’s just a game I crave spoiler-heavy discussion on, because I’ve had very little of it.

It’s an interesting conundrum, because I’m trying to be more aware of the underlying reasons behind the decisions I make. Do I choose something *I* really want to play, or do I try to pick something that I like less and that is less interesting for me to talk about because I think it’ll be more interesting for everyone else? Which of the two is a more arrogant decision, thinking I can get inside my friends’ heads or steamrolling their desires in order to get my way?

Difficult. I suppose tune in to Aggrochat this Sunday to find out what happened.

Last night, in FFXIV, we failed at winning our raid.

It was some of the most fun we’ve had raiding in a while. We were laughing and joking and while we didn’t win, we made progress. It was a stark difference from the last time we were in there, a few weeks ago. There’s been some various shakeups, what with people’s schedules being scattered, moving, etc, and so we haven’t had the team together to hit Turn 9 since the end of March. We’ve still raided every week, but haven’t quite gotten back to Turn 9.

The last time we were in there, the team was burned out. We pushed, and I think we more effectively reached later stages of the fight, but we shut down. We were more focused on perfect executions of various phases and we had irritation (though never outbursts– the team is way too good for that) at minor mistakes that led to us falling behind. The huge amount of adaptability that I think of when I think of our raid crew had given way to a steely focus on perfect execution, because we’d been working on execution for the last several weeks prior to that. Last night, by comparison, we were less focused on execution and more focused on just making it to the next phase. It’s the first significant progress we’ve made in the last 5-6 nights of fighting that boss.

(not my group, just a good picture)

I got to see the same in thing in action over this past weekend, in a much more rapid-fire scenario. The goal was to get 11 people up and over a 15-foot wall, and each of the 11 people could only help (read: make any physical contact with) a climber twice over the entire run. An “assist” was consumed only when a climber made it over the wall, but one assist was consumed for every person who helped. Some people get “bonus” assists based on height and weight, the concept being that those two factors affect how useful an assist might be– a very tall person with a lot of mass can boost someone up rather high, whereas a very short, light person isn’t going to be quite as effective at that.

On the surface, it looks like an optimization problem wherein you practice getting people up with a minimum number of assists– ideally no more than 2 per person. It’s tempting to work on this execution, trying to get people up and over the wall with fewer and fewer assists until you hit that optimum number. It’s a trap that (we were told) a lot of groups fall into, and indeed, caused some minor issues for the other group running in parallel with us (the morning team; we were the afternoon team).

Our group managed the wall in one run, simply by going and working out the details as we went. It was obvious to everyone that each person needed to go up with a minumum of assists, but it was equally obvious that fatigue was going to be a real factor. Given enough time and practice, a person might be able to get up over the wall with one or two assists, but by the time that was achieved that person might be exhausted, as will everyone else helping them. Better to use the assists when necessary and minimize fatigue, rather than becoming paralyzed trying to plan in advance and being inflexible, resetting when the “proper” execution isn’t achieved.

It’s left me considering making an executive decision for the raid, something I very rarely ever do: no more than two consecutive weeks focusing on a single boss– too much time on the same encounter and we shift from adapability and focus to tunnelvision and frustration, because we’re thinking about it too much. Rather than trying to perfect execution (a focus that led us to wipe for an entire night on the same transition of Turn 9), I want to keep us on our toes and flexible, used to working together and handling situations rather than trying to perfect a particular step-by-step process.

I’d rather get to 37% and wipe on a messy attempt than get to 47% perfectly and wipe repeatedly on the same transition because we can’t *quite* get our execution right.

It might wind up being an unpopular decision, and I can already think of a few people in the raid who are going to be tight-lipped at me about even the suggestion, we’ll see. What I know is that the last time we were in Turn 9 I was wondering when we would finish so I could do something fun, and this time I didn’t realize we were on our last attempt of the night until someone went “whoa, there’s only 11 minutes left”.

If I have any job as a team leader in a video game, it’s to do everything in my power to make every night like that latter, rather than the former.

Short post today, as it’s currently painful to type. I managed to mess up my shoulder over the weekend, climbing up suspended logs.

Injury aside, it was a pretty incredible weekend and offered a lot of really interesting hands-on insights into how teams form and leaders emerge, and what those terms even mean. I really wish it were feasible to bring the guild/raid through a course like this, I think it would be really awesome.

Short post today, before I head out to go dangle by ropes and hope that I’ve overcome my fear of heights in a week. I’ll leave you over the weekend with a question that’s been bouncing around in my head:

What experience do you most regret, and how did you improve afterwards? Would you change the experience and give up the improvement, if you could?

I realize this title sounds like my previous entry. I draw a really distinct line between “games I don’t like” and “games that aren’t fun”, and a conversation I had recently really put a stark light on that. First, though, I want to talk about fun.

Fun is absolutely subjective. It’s also the job of every game designer to “find the fun”. This is, as you might imagine, faintly maddening. I’ve mentioned this before, but part of the job of a game designer is to figure out what you don’t know you want, and build it. A game designer has to be able to know what you think is fun before you realize it’s fun. This is why the second game in a trilogy (if properly funded/given enough time) is often so good. The first game is gently prodding, seeing what people respond to, the second game tends to go nuts, showing off all of the bits that everyone loved, and by the third people are a bit tired and ready to move on. If you look at game series that have huge hits for their third or fourth entries, look for the ones that radically change parts of the game while sticking to a recognizable formula.

Anyway. Fun is subjective, and games try to find fun for as many people as possible, knowing full well that a lot of people will not find the fun in the game.

At this point, it’s really important to note that a “fun game” and a “good game” are not the same thing. There are plenty of good games that I don’t find fun (Halo, EvE Online) or that I used to find fun but don’t anymore (World of Warcraft), and there are plenty of bad games that I find fun (not naming games here).

There are a few important notes that I feel like people often forget here:

TAM’S RULES FOR FUN GAMES

1. A game can be good even if you don’t find it fun. You can find a bad game fun. THIS IS OKAY.
2. Your opinion can change. You can find a game fun and later not find it fun, and vice-versa. THIS IS OKAY.
3. Fun can surprise you, but it’s hard to force.

The first of these is the bane of forumgoers everywhere. It’s why I don’t self-identify as a “gamer” anymore. The reality of being a “gamer” is that you like and play games, which I’m fine with. The implication that comes up is that you are a connoisseur of them, which is where things get murky. By extension, this suggests that “better” gamers are more discerning and like (or perhaps only play) “good” games, often with a little rider of “more complex” games. This is why there are so many people gushing over Bloodborne, a game targeting a very niche audience. It’s an excellently crafted game that is very likely not fun for the majority of the game-playing audience. It is a good game that many won’t find fun. I’ve seen a depressing number of comments from people that boil down to, essentially, “if you like video games, play Bloodborne”. Not just forumgoers, not trolls, people I know personally who often have excellent taste in games, but have trouble separating “fun” and “good”.

When I was working as a game designer, I spend a lot of time playing good games as a learning experience, even if I didn’t find them fun. It’s not a practice I recommend to anyone who isn’t researching games to a specific end. I think a lot of the vitriol that gets thrown at Anita Sarkeesian is a result of her talking clinically about games, separating “good” and “fun”, and not really talking about fun at all. She’s not engaging on the “fun” axis, but because so many people conflate “good” and “fun”, her criticism feels like an attack, when it isn’t that at all.

The second rule (which is connected to the third) is another one that is hard to internalize, and took me a long time. For years, I loved World of Warcraft. I played a LOT of it, accomplished a ton of stuff, did every piece of content I could, and was incredibly heavily invested, to the point where some of my closest friends are people I met in that game. I would gush about how much fun it was to anyone who would listen, and got a lot of people playing who might not ever have touched it.

Over time, things changed for me. The game moved in a direction I didn’t enjoy as much, but I still had a lot of friends there and people around me who wanted to play, so I stuck with it. At this point, I probably gushed MORE about how much fun I was having, because I wasn’t having as much of it but wanted to keep up that image. “Person who has fun playing WoW” had become a part of my identity, and so admitting that I wasn’t having as much fun was uncomfortable.

Years passed, and the game continued to shift. My descriptions of the fun I was having became vehement, while I played less and less, talking more about the game I wasn’t playing than actually playing it. My comments took a distinct tone of “what I would change” and “how to make the game better”, a quasi-hopeful wishlist for the fun I wanted to be having.

Eventually, I realized I had come to hate the game. Not through any fault of the game, though I had difficulty articulating that at the time, but because I had tried to force fun out of something I wasn’t having fun with, and eventually burned out. It’s a good game that I simply wasn’t having fun with, and trying to force it made me bitter.

As a counter-example, when we all first started playing FFXIV, I dove hugely into it, played a ton of it, and started to get burned out. The grind I needed to do to keep up wasn’t fun for me, but I couldn’t progress further in the game without devoting myself to it. It stopped being fun, and after my WoW experience, I recognized it and stopped playing. I left the game feeling okay about it, but not wanting to play it. Flash forward several months and several patches, and I found myself back in the game and enjoying myself hugely. When I’ve started feeling burned out, I’ve put less playtime in, and I’ve intentionally avoided the grinds that would drive me to quit again. This means I miss out on some stuff, but that drive to squeeze every bit of juice out means I’m likely to be left with a dry, empty husk. I play a bit less until I’m excited to play again, then I delve back in.

I know a number of people who are like this in WoW, who only return for a little while for major expansions or patches, then leave again. Most of these people are happy with their WoW experience, and find the game fun still, versus the many I know who log in daily but are listless, not having fun but still playing.

You can’t force fun. If you aren’t having fun with something, a game in which you’re presumably investing your free time in order to get enjoyment, stop playing it. Give it a break, free yourself from the feeling that you NEED to jump in and play. When you no longer have to log in, you’ll get to see if you really miss it or not, and once you’ve realized that you’ll be in a better position to gauge whether it’s fun again. Your opinion can wax and wane, and that’s okay.

As for me, right now I’m not playing very much. I’m ensuring I don’t get burned out on Final Fantasy before the expansion, and I’m reading a bunch of books. I played through Persona 4 recently because it was fun, but I have Final Fantasy Type-0 and Pillars of Eternity that I haven’t gotten much into, but I will, eventually.

When they’re fun for me.

Here’s my guild, in FFXIV:

Some numerical statistics: Of the 135 members, 89 have been active within the last two weeks, and 63 have been online within the last 24 hours (stats taken on a Monday night). We’re also, this week, the 3rd highest ranked guild on the server.

I haven’t led a group this big since World of Warcraft, when I was co-leading LNR. I took the same stats for LNR at its peak at one point, while I was playing with various organizational addons. At its peak, LNR had about 85 active members, 65 of which had been on within two weeks of me checking, and usually about 50 of which had been on in the last 24 hours (though this varied heavily based on the day of the week). For a significant amount of time, LNR was competing for a slot in the 3rd-5th place for most advanced raiding group on the server.

FFXIV measures guild rank a bit differently. It’s not about how far you’ve progressed, it’s about how active you are. Almost any activity you do nets you guild credits (which can be spent on guildwide buffs), and ranking is by credits, weighted slightly. A guild where people only log in to hit the next progression raid is going to be ranked well below a guild that’s online, doing various things at all tiers of content. For us, our sub-level 20 players who are just puttering around doing quests are often contributing as much or more to the overall guild ranking than our top-level players who might just be sitting around chatting at the guild house.

At any given time, I can log in to about 10-15 people online. On weekends it’s rather more than that, and at severely off-hours (like 5AM Pacific), it’s less than that. It’s been weeks since I’ve been able to log in at a time when no other people are logged in, because in addition to having 135 members, we have a lot of international players.

the face of your guild leader.

As the guild leader, this is stressful for me. I’m ostensibly responsible for the happiness and well-being of more than a hundred people scattered across the globe, who want things to be organized and who want to be included in activities. As a point of comparison, the maximum group size for organized raid content is 8. For the most part, those 8-man raids are the things that people really want to be a part of.

Note the above stats: 63 people have been on within the last 24 hours. Managing to break down those members of the 63 people into discrete groups of 8, who have compatible schedules and who have the right gear/classes/etc to properly tackle the content in question is a nightmare.

In LNR, I handled this badly. What I did there was assume that nothing would get done without my involvement and spent a lot of time ensuring that things were working smoothly and that people were happy, or as happy as I could get them. I was studiously involved with layers upon layers of contingencies to make sure that everyone was getting a fair shot and that everything was as equitable as possible, down to spending hours poring over loot tables to ensure that things were distributed in a limited-but-reasonable way.

Now I take a different approach. After getting severely burned out and developing an interest in how to lead groups of people effectively without destroying myself, I’ve worked out a philosophy that’s served me fairly well thus far:

The highest aspiration of any leader should be to make themselves obsolete.

A well-run organization full of competent people will know what needs to be done and make those things happen. A leader’s role is to get people to that point, and then stop interfering. I make a few assumptions, that I hold to be true for all of my members until an individual proves otherwise to me:

1. My group members are competent.
2. My group members are trying to improve to a point where they are happy, and others around them are happy with them.
3. My group members are capable of identifying obstacles in their way and will attempt to overcome them.
4. My group members will come to me if they run into an obstacle they can’t overcome.

Pretty much everything I do as a guild leader (and as a leader in general) focuses on ensuring that the above four things are true, and if they aren’t, making changes until they are true. I only interfere when I need to course-correct, but otherwise I sit and watch to make sure the clock is ticking correctly without me manually moving the hand every second (because that’s exhausting and error-prone).

It’s a much healthier and much more effective means of leading a group than I had before, partly because it’s less busywork and more analysis on my part, and partly because I’m not micromanaging (and thus irritating) people. I lead one of the raid groups within the guild, and we’ve grown enough that a second one is spinning up. I have been keeping a close eye on it and making sure it has the resources it needs to form, but I’ve otherwise been hands-off. Another guild member has stepped up and is organizing and leading it, and other guild members are chipping in to help out. The clock is ticking nicely, and now that it’s rolling, I am not necessary to the process.

In Greysky Armada, I am largely obsolete, and the guild ticks along quite well. In there, at least, I think I’m succeeding as a leader.

The following happens to myself and people I know constantly: I have a game I want to play with people, that I think they’d enjoy, but they’ve never played it before. They need to learn how the game is played, from scratch. This is not easy to do.

Recently, I had a friend try to teach me a game he loves. It’s not a simple game by any stretch of the imagination, with relatively complex mechanics and even more complex strategy. It seems like an interesting game, but after 30 minutes of explanation, I couldn’t tell you how it’s played. Rather than criticizing, however, I want to try to lay out a basic plan for teaching games.

I’m going to use Infinity as my example. Here’s how to play Infinity, and what I’m doing with each step. You should be able to follow along with the images and the bolded sentences to get a picture of how to play Infinity.

STEP 1: THE PREMISE

We’ll start with the absolute basics. Infinity is a minis game about futuristic black ops, with agents and counter-agents trying to achieve objectives and shooting each other. Full stop. One sentence. Before I go any further, I want to communicate a really high-level picture of the game that’s concise and complete. Note that I didn’t stop at “futuristic minis game”, because that isn’t evocative. There are a lot of minis games, and they’re all different. Infinity isn’t a massed wargame, it’s got very small model counts and is extremely tactical– but I don’t need to say any of that explicitly right away.

It’s played on a dense table where you’re moving around and through a lot of scenery, hiding and taking cover. The tagline a lot of people use is “it’s always your turn”. Two more sentences, both communicate the REST of what I need to evoke– the kind of play you can expect. This is all of the big-picture stuff I need to say, but it should be enough to suggest to people whether it’s the kind of game they might like or not. A lot of people, particularly experienced ones, go into really detailed high-level strategy to talk about why the game is interesting. I think this is a mistake– it’s where you lose people, or get them thinking it’s “too complicated”. You want imaginations running wild, not an analysis of specific interactions. As an example of Doing It Wrong: “In Infinity, you can have your guy with smoke bombs make a screen so that your other guy who can see through the smoke can shoot at people who can’t– it’s brutal and awesome!” I’ve heard this sentence used to describe the game and I’ve watched as the listener starts tuning out. You should never talk about high-level strategy when teaching a game for the first time, particularly not when you’ve yet to set up a board and actually play.

STEP 2: FOUNDATIONS

At this point, you can go into the rules, in the simplest possible way. There is a concept in game design referred to as the “core gameplay loop”, which is the very basic way in which you interact with the game. It’s the actions you take in order to resolve uncertainty– where “uncertainty” is anything you do that isn’t guaranteed. If you say “I shoot this guy” and then roll some dice, that’s the core gameplay loop. It’s closely tied in with another concept called “resolution”– which is the actual set of dice you roll/cards you play/buttons you push and how they work. To go back to Infinity:

Infinity uses d20s, and a “blackjack” style of rolling, where you want to roll as high as you can without going over a target number. Higher numbers cancel lower numbers. It also uses “orders”, which are like action points, that you can spend to make models do things.

Super simple, super straightforward. I still haven’t needed to show off any game pieces yet, and you should be able to imagine both how the game feels conceptually as well as a vague sense of how it resolves mechanically. Next, we want to talk about how turns work.

Whenever it’s your turn, you get a number of orders equal to the number of models you have on the table that are still alive and functioning. You can spend orders as you like, on any model you have on the table. There is no limit to the number of orders that can be spent on a single model.

When you spend an order, you get two actions, like a turn in D&D. You get, essentially, a simple skill and a complex skill. Moving, looking around, climbing, those are all simple skills. Shooting, dodging, taking an objective, those are complex skills. You can downgrade a complex skill to a simple skill if you want to, say, move twice in one order, but you can’t go the other way and shoot twice in one order.

If it’s not your turn, your models don’t just stand there and get shot. Whenever your opponent spends an order on a model, and that model winds up in the line of sight of one of your models, you can react. This is called an ARO, or “automatic reactive order”. They’re free, and you can take one complex action in response. If your opponent shoots you, you can shoot back! AROs are declared after the first part of the active player’s order, before the second part is declared. There are downsides, but we’ll get to them later.

We’re drilling down slowly into details. We’ve covered a high level explanation, the core combat loop, and how turns and actions work.

The next step here, the next block in the foundation, is to provide context:

This is a unit. It’s got a bunch of stats and it’s got some equipment and weapons. I’ll go through it in order:

• MOV is short for “movement”: It’s how far the model can move, in inches, when it spends an Order. There are two numbers there, one for each “part” of an order, but I’ll get to that later. The specifics here aren’t relevant right now, and I want to stay focused on providing context to the stats. It’s tempting to completely cover every detail as it comes up, but you lose focus when you do.
• CC is short for “close combat”. It’s your base target number for hitting someone in melee.
• BS is short for “ballistic skill”. It’s your base target number for hitting someone with a ranged weapon.
• PH is short for “physical”. It’s used for dodging, how hard you hit in melee, and most things relating to your body.
• WIP is short for “willpower”. It’s used for taking objectives, hacking, being courageous, and most things relating to your mind.
• ARM is short for “armor”. It’s your level of protection against being shot or stabbed.
• BTS is short for “biotechnological shield”. It’s a complex name that really just means your level of protection against special attacks. I’m simplifying a nonintuitive game term here for ease of understanding.
• W is short for “wounds”. It’s how many hit points you have before you go unconscious. If you take a wound while unconscious, you’re dead. A little extra detail here, but an important one.
• S is short for “silhouette”. It’s a way of telling how big a unit is without relying on just the mini.
• AVA is short for “availability”. It’s how many you can take in your list, and “total” means there’s no limit.

Below the stats, you can see a line showing the name of the unit, what weapons it has, and an “SWC” and “C”– these are costs used for building a list.

On the left, near the unit icon, you can see a little green arrow. Most troops have that arrow, and it just means they’re “Regular”. It’s not important now, just remember that not every troop is Regular.

That is the simplest rundown of everything in a unit stat block. There’s one other bit of context:

You’ve seen a unit statline, here’s a weapon statline:

This is a combi rifle, what that Fusilier up there has.

• The colored bar is in increments of 8 or 16 inches, and shows the bonuses or penalties you get to your BS when shooting at those ranges. 
• Damage is the base damage of the weapon, it is reduced by the ARM of whatever it hits, and is the one weird roll in Infinity. When you get hit, you have to make an ARM roll. Reduce the damage of the weapon by your ARM, and then you have to roll ABOVE the resulting number. This is a little piece of resolution that we skipped before, but is complete now that we have all of the context. It’s also a weird roll in the game, and worth calling out specifically.
• B stands for “burst”, and it’s how many shots you take each time you shoot if it’s your turn. In ARO, your B drops to 1. The active player tends to have an advantage, here. A little bit of commentary here, just enough to paint a more complete picture of things.
• Ammunition has a variety of types, N stands for “normal”. If people ask, I’ll talk about the other types here, but otherwise I’ll keep going.
• Traits are special things about the weapon, we’re not going to worry about them for now. Keep it simple, because of what’s coming next.

STEP 3: AN EXAMPLE

We’ve covered some basics as well as providing context. We can now talk about an example.

My Fusilier is behind this building and wants to shoot yours. It’s my turn, I spend an order and use my first action to step around the corner, where we can see each other. You decide to ARO, and declare that you’re going shoot me. I wanted to shoot you anyway, so I declare that for the second part of my order I’m going to shoot you as well. Now we roll off.

We measure the distance between us, let’s say it’s 12 inches. That’s in the +3 range of our combi rifles, so we both add +3 to our BS when shooting. I’m the active player, so I use my full Burst (which is 3), and you have Burst 1. I’ll roll 3d20, looking for 15 or less, against your 1d20, also looking for 15 or less. This is called a face-to-face roll.

I roll a 17, a 12, and a 3. You roll a 10, which is a hit. My 17 misses, and my 12 and 3 hit. However, your 10 is higher than my 3, so it cancels the 3. My 12 cancels your 10. The net result is that I hit you once. Now you make an ARM roll. The combi rifle is Damage 13, and you have ARM 1, so you roll again, trying to get better than (13-1) 12. You rolled a 14, so you’re safe.

You might have survived being shot at, but anyone will flinch at a bullet pinging off of their armor, so you have to make what’s called a Guts check. You roll your WIP to see if you can stand your ground. Your WIP is 12, and you rolled a 16, so you have to duck into cover.

Now the order is done, and we’re onto the next order on my turn. I’ve covered a basic, straightforward example here, and now I’m going to slowly layer complexity onto that example.

I’m not happy with that outcome, so I’ll spend an order and declare that I’m shooting you again. You declare the same, feeling good about being in cover. I realize that you’re in cover and I’m not, so I’ll use the second part of my order to move back into cover myself. Everything in an order resolves at the same time, so when you shoot me, you’ll be shooting me while I’m out of cover. At the end of this order, I’ll be in cover, though, just like you. Layered complexity, and now we see how it affects things.

Once again, I have Burst 3 to your Burst 1. Like before, you’re shooting me and looking for a 15 or less– 12 BS plus 3 for range. However, now you’re in cover, which gives me a -3 penalty to shoot at you, and gives you +3 ARM. I get plus 3 for range but minus 3 for cover, so I’m just at my base 12 BS. 

I roll a 13, an 10, and a 9. You roll a 5. My 13 misses, and your 5 is lower than both my 10 and 9. You get hit twice, and have to make two ARM rolls. However, you’re in cover, so you get a +3 bonus to your ARM. Now, instead of rolling higher than 12, you only need to be higher than 9. You rolled a 10 and a 14, so once again, you’re fine. 

Because you successfully made an ARM save, you need to make another Guts roll. If you want, you can choose to automatically fail it instead of rolling, to get totally behind cover where I can’t shoot at you, but you’re feeling lucky, having survived three hits. You roll an 8 and stay in place.

It’s still my turn, and I have one more order. Now it’s personal. I spend my last order on my Fusilier, now in cover, and shoot you once more. You declare Shoot as your ARO as well, and now I can pick my second action. I don’t want to move and forfeit cover, so I’m just going to stay where I am. Now, you’re at a 12 to hit along with me, since we’re both in cover. Third example, reinforcing the basic loop and layering one additional bit of complexity.

I roll an 11, a 10, and a 3. Three hits! You roll a 12. Not only is your 12 better than my three shots, it’s also right on your target number. If you roll the exact number you need, that’s a critical hit. A crit cancels any non-crit rolls, even if they’re higher. It also means I take a wound automatically, without getting to make an ARM save. Fusiliers only have one Wound, so down he goes.

My Fusilier falls down, unconscious, and yours holds position.

An extended example in text, but this takes about two minutes to describe in person. When teaching the game, I often just lay out the dice in the numbers that illustrate my point the best, rather than rolling them. Actual randomness is likely to distract from what I’m trying to communicate.

Now, we’re onto the last step.

STEP 4: STOP. PLAY.

Here’s a quick game. You and I each have three Fusiliers, and there’s a computer in the middle of the board that we need to activate. Remember, it’s a WIP roll to activate it, at which point it’s under your control. Whoever controls it at the end of the fourth turn wins.

We have, at this point, covered enough of the rules of the game in order to play it. It will be a very simple game, with the most basic of rules, but the point here is that we’re giving the foundation time to set. Adding complexity here is a MISTAKE, and will only confuse people.

Yes, you’re going to be playing an extremely simple version of the game, but that’s why you’re teaching. There’s enough in just what I described to make the game playable, and it’ll be short and reasonably interesting. Experienced players will be able to pick up on more complexity more quickly, and you can ramp them up with the rest of the rules once you’ve got the foundation set, but until then you’re trying to get the core gameplay loop and basic resolution down.

You’ve also, at this point, invested about five minutes of exposition. Hands-on examples are really, really important at this point, or nothing will stick. Different games will require that you use different simplifications– make sure you boil things down to the core gameplay loop and establish a simple, understandable win condition.

It’s not important that the game be played perfectly accurately when you’re teaching it, those are rough edges that you can smooth out later. The important part is that the game is understood, at which point you can then build on the foundation you’ve created.

Very wordy post today, but I hope it was interesting and helpful. Did I do a good job teaching Infinity? Let me know!