We’re back! Thanks for putting up with my week off; I’m feeling a lot better and more functional now.

I had a discussion with a friend recently about games as a social outlet. She had some trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of a video game being a social event; she viewed them as largely solitary activities. The idea that you might meet someone through the internet and have that feel “real” was confusing, because (as she put it), “In the end, you’re just interacting with your keyboard and computer screen.”

There’s a layer of abstraction that I think we often take for granted and is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t see it. To connect with someone through a game online, you have to view your game avatar as an extension of yourself, and other people’s avatars as themselves– the sprites or pixels you’re seeing on the screen are not only representative of actual people, but the act of moving the mouse or pressing keys is just the background noise for what you’re REALLY doing– interacting with those people.

I used a couple of examples to illustrate the kind of thing I was talking about to my friend. The first was straightforward– a game of catch. I tossed her a frisbee and she, intuitively understanding the game, tossed it back. I asked her why she did that, and how she was thinking about throwing the frisbee. Specifically, I wanted to know what she thought she was interacting with– the frisbee, her own hands, or me. I got a laugh and a “you, obviously”, and pointed out that she didn’t interact with me at all– she used her hands to throw the frisbee at a shape she was looking at that she identified as me. She made the jump pretty quickly about the difference between, essentially, user interface (hands, frisbee) and the game itself (playing catch with me).

From there, everything else is just layers, and it’s a pretty quick jump to a game like Mariokart (where you’re shouting at the people on the couch next to you) to an MMO (where you’re typing in chat or chatting over VoIP). Having gotten the connection, she had a followup question that I found insightful: “How do you know who to play with?”

It’s an interesting question, and one I have a hard time adequately answering for myself. A lot of MMOs have group search functions, like FFXIV’s Duty Finder or WoW’s dungeon queues, but I think it’s hard to make a solid argument that those are necessarily social experiences; you often don’t exchange a single word with the people you’re with, and it’s rare to see them after the run. I have my guild/free company mates, who’ve been slowly (for certain definitions of ‘slowly’) recruited over time and who form the core social circle I operate in. Other than seeking out a guild, however, I don’t know how you find a group like mine. There’s also the friends I know personally, the ones I’ve spent time in realspace with, who might be separated geographically but with whom I can still play games. I can’t always play with them, though, because we’re not always playing the same games or even necessarily caught up with one another if we are in the same game.

In the meantime, I’ve watched a number of my friends get into social mobile games, exchanging currencies and helping each other out in a variety of similar-looking-to-me titles. I heard a story recently about a couple who met playing Ingress, because they happened to keep showing up to the same place to score points or capture the location (I’m not really sure how Ingress is played). It makes me wonder if, done right, mobile games could be the new MMOs, bringing disparate people together who otherwise might not meet.

For me, the real appeal to video games is the social outlet– while I play a decent number of singleplayer games, a lot of my motivation to do so is anchored in wanting to talk to other people about them. One of the fondest memories I have is sitting and playing Chrono Trigger with my sister on the couch next to me, asking me questions about the story and what I was doing, and inserting her own thoughts on the matter. It turned a singleplayer game into a social experience, and I’ve talked about games with my friends ever since (and, indeed, have picked up games I would never have played otherwise because people I knew were playing them and would have stuff to say).

I think that a lot of modern games have pushed the social aspects aside to some extent, going for more convenient play with more temporary connections. I don’t think the desire to connect with people through games is likely to go away, though, and I’m interested to see where the next big social game comes from, that connects people like MMOs in the early-to-mid-2000s did, and the arcades of the 80s and 90s.

Sorry about being AWOL for the last couple of days. I’m coming out of a pretty intense weekend experience and I’m still emotionally unpacking it. This is the first I’ve been able to bring myself to post here, and while I’m feeling better, I’m not going to force things. I’m going to take the rest of this week off to recuperate and will be back Monday.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a sticker I saw on the back of a sign today, that was the right message at the right time for me. Maybe it will be for you too:

No post today, I’m out of town this weekend. See you on Monday!

I really, really hate grinding. It’s one of the quickest ways to get me to stop caring about a game. Some people love it, just turning their brain off and chipping away at something, but it always bugs me.

It stems from my love of finding creative solutions to problems. I’m not a brute force type, and grinding always feels like a brute force method. I’d rather find a complex problem and come up with a functional, creative solution to it than do a bunch of mindless repetitive work. Most of the people I know who either don’t mind or actively enjoy grinding tend to talk about doing “something else” while grinding, usually netflix or something. I get the concept, but it doesn’t work for me.

I like to fully immerse myself in my entertainment. I very rarely mix entertainment media, and when I do one of them is starkly on the back burner, and is barely getting any attention. The only one of these I can think of is FFV, at certain points, where I realize I can grind some levels or AP by setting up an autobattle engine (I’m playing on iOS) and literally not looking at the screen for 20 minutes while I do something else. If it’s taking up more attention than that, I want to be giving it my full attention. I don’t tend to listen to my own music when I’m playing a game, nor do I watch TV while gaming. I’ve talked to people who read a book with the TV or some music on in the background and it’s something I can’t fathom.

As a kind of adjunct to this, I tend to do poorly with games that don’t fully engage me. A great example of this is Diablo, which a lot of people love and I’m fairly ambivalent about. Moment-to-moment combat isn’t quite deep enough to keep me engaged, and there’s nothing in the game EXCEPT combat, so I don’t get the activity variance that I do in, say, MMOs. Similarly, Warhammer tabletop wargames tend to fall under the engagement threshold for me– there isn’t enough gameplay ‘meat’ for me to sink my teeth into, it boils down into “roll a whole bunch of dice” rather than relying on tactics or clever application of special abilities.

Little bit of a ramble today, but it’s something I’m thinking about.

Some thoughts on Fun, because they’re rattling around in my head.

Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun describes fun in terms of how challenged your brain is. Forming new patterns, he says, is fun, provided they’re new and different enough to engage you but not so nonsensical as to frustrate your efforts in finding the patterns. Essentially, “fun” is the point at which you are still learning new things and are neither bored because you already know them or frustrated because they’re beyond your grasp. It’s an angle that people don’t tend to talk about much, for a variety of reasons, and that I’ve heard a lot of people disagree with. For my part, I generally agree with Raph on this one, but it’s one of those how-the-sausage-is-made things that people don’t like to think about.

A lot of people tend to think of fun as an ephemeral concept, a very “know it when you see it” sort of thing, and, flatly, I think they’re wrong. It’s not hard to pinpoint fun, or know what makes certain things fun, but it follows a sort of uncertainty principle. You can either be having fun with something, or know from someone else that something is fun, but very rarely both. It’s why the concept of “overhyping” something exists– enough people tell you that you’ll enjoy it and the odds of you actually enjoying it drop. It’s also why the term “visionary” is thrown around great game designers– they “see” something that no one else does. I’m convinced that the reality is that you simply can’t tell people that what you’re making is fun, because the very act of doing so will diminish their enjoyment of it. Fun is a sort of manipulation, and people hate being manipulated if they know it’s happening. Fun needs to be discovered on a person’s own terms.

I’ve seen this in action while working on various games. Certain parts of the project will be pushed really, really hard, with the message of “this is going to be the fun part”, and it almost never is. Instead, the fun appears elsewhere, in the little projects that people try out in private until they’re functional enough for ‘primetime’. These little projects come as a surprise to a lot of people, who discover them and, in so doing, find themselves having fun.

Discovery is an important part of fun, it’s that part of you that’s learning something new, and sparkling in your brain. Mastery is another part of fun, that part of you that loves the feeling of pulling off something that you figured out previously. These things tug at one another, and it’s really easy to mess up the balance. If you spoil the ending to something for someone, you’ve just short-circuited that discovery, and robbed them of the fun of discovering it on their own. On the other hand, some people don’t mind spoilers and actively seek them out, so that instead of finding fun in discovery, they find fun in mastery.

I think that Raph’s spectrum of challenge is apt, but is missing an important axis. Fun is, I think, a plane along three axes. The first axis is the challenge axis, with unthinking mastery on one end and impenetrable frustration at the other. On one end of this axis, you know something inside and out, and can do it in your sleep. Your brain probably doesn’t even engage, and you’re likely bored if that’s all you’re doing. On the other end, the patterns simply won’t form, they’re out of your grasp, and it’s frustrating because you fail repeatedly without knowing why; there’s no learning occurring because you don’t have any handholds. The second axis is the comfort axis, where at the one extreme end you’re perfectly comfortable with what you’re doing and on the other you’re pushing your limits. This is separate from the challenge axis, because it’s an emotional measure, not an analytic one. It’s about where you feel safe, not necessarily how much you’re learning. The third axis is, of course, fun itself, where the peak of the plane is wherever you’re having the most fun.

To illustrate this a bit, I’ll use myself. I crave the experience of learning new things. I’m fundamentally unsatisfied if whatever I’m doing isn’t driving me to learn something new. If I’m not picking up a new skill, or new knowledge, or some kind of new experience, I’m not having fun. In MMOs, getting new abilities and discovering new stories are far and away the most motivating things– it satisfies my desire to accumulate more things to master and to learn more about the world I’m playing in. Notably, as soon as I’m not learning something new, I’m starting to get bored. I have very low stamina for grinding, even repeatedly doing very difficult content. Difficulty alone doesn’t thrill me, I need the new. On the other axis, however, I err slightly towards the side of comfort. I want to learn lots of new things, but I want to do so at my own pace without other people interfering. It makes me bad at playing in a group, because I lack the time and space to process the new things I’m learning, and it often forces me to push myself more than I feel safe doing.

I have a few friends who lean heavily towards the “mastery” side of things. One friend of mine is similar to me– he likes to amass new knowledge at an incredible rate but does so in a position of total comfort, and is generally unhappy if pushed outside of his comfort zone. Another friend finds a ton of fun in mastery, and wants to consistently challenge himself in that sphere, facing experiences that force him to prove his mastery by pulling him out of his comfort zone. Yet another friend wants to exhibit mastery in a comfortable space; she frequently returns to older games that she’s played and beaten numerous times and knows inside and out. I have another friend who exclusively tries to learn new things well outside of her comfort zone; she’s a thrill-seeker in real life and the kind of person who picks up a game she’s never played before and cranks it up to the highest difficulty before even trying.

These four people all fall in different quadrants, and what’s fun for one of them may not be for another. It’s not simply about the analytical view of challenge and learning, but it’s about the emotional view of comfort and boundary-pushing. What I find interesting is that I’ve rarely run into someone who genuinely only has fun in one quadrant. A lot of people find their quadrant and stick to it, seeking out experiences they already know they’ll like, but for the people who actively move around, I’ve seen a lot of ‘surprise’ fun being had. It isn’t just people pushing their boundaries, either. I’ve seen the hardest of hardcore PvP junkies sit down with Bejeweled, an intensely casual single-player game, and get hooked in the simple, comfortable mastery of a game that neither pulls them out of their comfort zone nor challenges them significantly– despite those two things being their primary source of fun.

The frustrating part for me is that I can’t tell anyone this and have them believe me. It’s that fun uncertainty principle at work again. I know that I have a hard time enjoying anything someone suggests I might like, because I didn’t discover it myself, and my knowledge of psychology and people-management suggests to me that I’m not alone in this. Trying to move someone to a quadrant they aren’t familiar with doesn’t work, and while they might enjoy it if they find it on their own, they almost certainly won’t if pushed there.

My takeaway here is twofold: try new things, pick something you don’t think you’ll enjoy and try it, just in case. Also, let people discover what they like on their own– a lot of fun is in the discovery and you don’t want to rob someone of that fun. I have had more success in getting people to try things (games, shows, whatever) by trying them myself and keeping a neutral, descriptive tone about what I’ve experienced than I ever have by gushing at someone about how much I love something. I’ve gotten avowed PvP-hating players to try Archeage simply by saying “hm, this is interesting and not what I expected”, yet to date I have been able to dive deep into Thief or Hitman with exactly one person, more than a decade ago. Much as you might love to talk about something, that even tone that leaves room for discovery works wonders.

Turn 9 down last night. Finally.

We’ve been dedicatedly plugging away at that fight for a long time. Months, since before I moved to Seattle. Having beaten it, finally, I feel like it’s something I can unpack in my mind. If you’re in my raid, or otherwise looking for an exciting victory post, it’s probably best to stop here. I’m about to not be terribly positive for a while.

It is almost, ALMOST, an exquisitely designed fight. It’s worth noting that it’s a single phase that has given us such trouble for so long– we started regularly getting to the final phase of the fight– which lasts from 46% until the boss is dead– about six months ago, and it was a wall. Prior to that, we could make appreciable if slow progress, and then we reached that final phase and it all fell apart. It’s a high technically demanding section of the fight, and messages appallingly poorly as well. There are raid-wiping mechanics that require you to see a tiny debuff icon within a second or two, targeting a random character, as well as critical mechanics whose only indication is a thin beam of light connecting to a single random character amid a slew of spell effects… at a point at which everyone in the group needs to be stacked up together. In addition to these “die randomly” mechanics, there’s also an abusive amount of damage going into the tank, particle effects amid the mess that require you to react instantly and run to one of two points on the edge of the circular arena (that lacks landmarks to orient yourself), randomly targeted area effects that can kill easily, and the need for the entire group to move together and separate at important moments, and know exactly when these moments are as they change second-to-second.

This is one mechanic of about 15, in that one final phase.

That’s one phase. It takes ten minutes, by itself, to describe, and it comes after four or so other phases, each with their own unique mechanics. There is zero room for error– if you’re standing slightly wrong or don’t react fast enough, either you die, the group dies, or both. We were doing this while heavily overgeared and with a not-insignificant buff– 20% to everything to help us along, and that’s what we’ve been working with for six months. It’s beatable, but requires the kind of technical precision that demands, essentially, rote memorization: just do the fight over and over, frequently enough to sear it into your memory. We raid one night a week, not enough to keep that flame kindled.

As a point of comparison, we cleared every other piece of content we had access to. Extreme primals, other portions of that dungeon, all got smashed before us in (usually) record time. Turn 9 was a wall, thanks to a particular design choice that required a very particular sort of group.

We went back into Turn 9 tonight with a single, slight difference: we were almost all level 60, not level 50, with the full array of expansion abilities at our disposal against a boss tuned for people ten levels lower. It still killed us twice, more a testament to the gentle gear curve of FFXIV than anything else, but still notable. We did down it on the third try, turning our superior power to this boss that’s haunted us for more than half a year. Dropping the boss lacked the usual elation we have on a new boss kill– this one lasted too long and was too personal.

As a game designer and raid leader, it’s something I paid really close attention to. No one objected to us turning on “overpowered mode”; there was no voice of dissension saying “hey, maybe let’s try this the proper way instead of just powering through it”, but when the boss died, there was no cheer of victory. We all, I suspect, just wanted to be done with it, to see something new instead of the same boss and the same arena that we’ve been staring at for months on end. It made for a victory that rung hollow, but it largely didn’t matter– the vibe was that people just wanted OUT. I’m in the same boat; I have been tired of that same boss for months, and the excitement of potentially winning had long given way for me to a desperate hope that we’d win THIS TIME, just so I wouldn’t have to dance this same dance yet again.

I worry that robbing ourselves of a proper victory will hurt the raid’s morale, but I’ve been worried about this boss destroying our raid for months now. It’s the dark side of the high points of raiding. For every glorious victory and sweet celebration, there’s a chance that the next boss will be the one that you stare at for months, unable to beat and unable to progress past, leaving you no choice but to either give up on moving forward or slam your face against until something changes.

Right now, though, I don’t secretly dread Monday Night Raids anymore, and I’m genuinely excited that we can do some new, interesting content. It’ll be hard, and probably kill us repeatedly, but it won’t be Turn 9.

I’ve been level 60 for about a week now, mostly because the Heavensward release synced up with a week off for me, so I could delve completely into it. I’ve technically been level 60 since Sunday of last week, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I really felt like I was “properly” max level.

I’ve mentioned that FFXIV has story arcs, like TV show seasons, that each encapsulate an arc, generally end with a teaser setup for the next arc, and roll credits at the end. Heavensward is no different, and there’s some (damn impressive) finale stuff for you to do upon hitting level 60 before the credits roll. I’d hit level 60, but hadn’t done that part, because I was waiting for a few other people to hit that.

This weekend, I got to run through four new dungeons with mostly new folks, which is probably my favorite possible MMO experience, enough so that it’s worth twiddling my thumbs for a week to get to do it. Going through a new dungeon blind is a fantastic experience, and it’s one of the only reasons I tend to push along the front edge of content. Playing through the new dungeons was a ton of fun, even in pick up groups, where no one had been in there before. When I fell slightly behind the leading curve and people were no longer mostly seeing the dungeons for the first time, I found it a lot less interesting, and I wound up dropping out of a group or two who refused to respect my request not to spoil me on the dungeon by telling me what the bosses did ahead of time.

I will say that, for all of the awesome it brings to the table, Heavensward reinforces two big beliefs that I’ve held for a long time. I’ve talked before about flight-as-GM-move, so I won’t go into it again here, but suffice it to say that having played through the expansion flight, once you have it, is no less a cheat than it is in WoW. It’s done better in FFXIV, but I wouldn’t say done well.

The other thing is this: levels have to go. Every single down moment and every single disappointment I had with the expansion was tied to level. Oh, I’m super enthralled by this story but I can’t play it because of my level. Oh, I want to run this dungeon with my friends but I can’t because we’re not all the right levels. Oh, I found a cool drop for my buddy who… can’t equip it because she’s not the right level. We’ve got people on for a dungeon but we can’t run it because they don’t have the right classes at the right levels. I hate grinding find-the-moogle quests for hours on end but I have to because level.

I get the need for a feeling of progression, but this whole level-locking thing really hurts the experience, especially in an expansion like Heavensward. I’ve focused on one class, because that’s how I play, and as a result I’ve gotten to run all of… one dungeon with Ash, who has dabbled in a few different classes and, despite having played the game plenty since its launch, doesn’t have access to the stuff I’m running, and doubly doesn’t have it on a class that necessarily meshes with a group. Several people went from being able to fill any role a party needs to only being able to fill one, if that, another function of level.

In the meantime, they proved that they can give you a sense of progression without it being tied to levels. To get into the Heavensward content, FFXIV makes you play through all of the story leading up to it. It’s its own “levelling system”, just linked to story progression and not the numbers on your character sheet. It’s rather more meaningful than numbers you don’t look at getting bigger– I highly suspect most people remember which bits of the story they were doing at each level more than how much more their attacks hit for or how much more HP they had each level. My example here is Bel, the staunchest opponent of my “abolish levels” mantra, who mentioned the story at each and every level of his path through Heavensward and did not once mention any cool new abilities or crazy stats without being directly asked about them. I know in my case, as someone very motivated by new abilities that do cool new things, I got hooked by the storytelling that was going on for each one via my class quests.

In the end, though, Heavensward is amazing, so much so that my biggest frustration is that I can’t play more of it with my friends. I feel like that says enough on its own. I’d previously mentioned that I hadn’t been this excited about an MMO expansion since Burning Crusade, which is true. I can now say that I haven’t been this excited about an MMO expansion after “completing” it… ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

some amateur work

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

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

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

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

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

Modern high school entrance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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