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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

haruhi disapproves of my babbling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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