This is a thought problem. I go round and round in circles about this, and the only depressing conclusion I end up spiraling around to is that people don't give a fuck about each other.
Here's what I don't get.
This exists online or offline, by the way. There's this person. Let's call them person A. Person A acts in a completely clueless manner.
An onlooker is watching them. Let's call onlooker Person B. You're normally this onlooker, defining the abovementioned behavior as completely clueless.
You know this because you're a bit more sumberged than the other person in the subset of society in question. Where things simply -aren't- done that way. It doesn't make sense (to you, anyhow.) Because you've internalised the 'rules.' Sometimes you can laugh at Person A's behavior, because it's so radically ignorant in a harmless sort of way. Many times, this is often an opportunity to bitch, and whinge and complain to Person C - a third party, who is probably just as submerged into the society subset as Person B, that person A is not behaving in the correct, expected manner.
Presumably this has some useful evolutionary roots - person B and C become more of an in-group, by value of labeling and leaving person A in an out-group.
What boggles me is that many people, and I count myself within them, go no further than this.
Why is it that we do not bother to extend a hand to person A and teach them this correct, expected manner? Even if we do not want to call them out nicely, we could comment or remark on it, or find out why they are doing that.
My first reaction is that I couldn't give a damn about person A. This is on an emotional level of not caring. They're them, I'm me, whatever. They are not within my circle of things I care about, yeah, big effing deal. Automatic blinders come down. A sort of defence mechanism.
If I push a little within the subconscious, sometimes, a fear of rejection lurks. Whatever we say is probably not going to be welcomed by person A because they must have their own internal web of reasons for why they behave in a certain manner. I may not like it, certainly. I may think that this societal subset doesn't like it - assuming I'm even correct about my judgement of the societal subset. But person A will probably not like the commentary, and may push back defensively, or argue, or become violent, or or or... and basically, person A will refuse to change. Which then begs the question why even bother to say anything because you cannot change another person externally anyhow, only they themselves can decide to change?
The third level, and this is an intellectual sort of Zen-y/secular Taoist argument, if not exactly Buddhist, shaken and stirred with a side of jadedness and cynicism. I don't really -want- to care about their behavior. My self-image is not contingent on how other people act in my presence. I do not see myself as one of the mainstream "brainwashers" who inculcate others to live in a "proper" zombie-like zomboid fashion. I do not wish to judge others, because I find the instinctual urge to judge others selfish and closeminded, leading to xenophobia, elitism and a whole brand of nasty negative behaviours. Live and let live. All power to them how they wish to behave, everyone is different. Insofar as it doesn't hurt or harm me or other people (their right to misbehave ends where someone else right to live life begins.)
The last qualifier leads to a lot of fun arguments on the semantics and definition of hurt/harm, of course.
I'm also convinced many others don't think as deeply and pretty much leave it at the first or at most, second level of "not giving a darnness about Person A."
It makes me wonder why we even put up with each other sometimes.
Qualifier: Teaching children is somehow okay. Scaffolding understanding is okay. They are somehow fresher and more innocent and more receptive... they may not be blank slates, but there is more open receptivity and appreciation.
People, as in adults, though. *shudders* Brain not malleable enough.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Patience Game
It's odd, but I seem to be delving into experiments with the long-form emotion (here's another random blog that was also inspired by RPS to think about it) lately. I say it's odd, because I've never really been an exceedingly patient person, (beyond zen moments where that is the whole point, calmly ignoring the queue that exists solely so that I can practice being zen.)
Especially in games. Especially in games that are specifically designed with arbitrary barriers of fake-challenge and pseudo-obstacle where you simply a) wait for a pre-set amount of time b) click a button a certain number of times (or other mindless repeats of an activity) and/or c) have the computer roll a percentage die to determine success or failure.
Wait, one might say. Don't all games consist of a mixture of the above options? Well... I think, and this is me stretching to grasp at a potential revelation, that good games mix in d) meaningful decision points which potentially lead to different consequences/results and possibly e) some form of narrative. I'll save it for another discussion.
Back to ABC. I've been playing Dragonvale. A freemium / F2P / microtransaction (I dunno, I can't keep up with the terms anymore, I use 'em all interchangeably, suffice to say it's free to start playing and at some point, they use various means to encourage you to give them some money) social media genre game that looks like it waltzed right out of the brightly-coloured cartoony Farmville family of loosely defined "games" aka time-wasters.
Mostly out of curiosity to explore the genre. And because it seemed like a game I could actually tolerate playing up to the point I hit my limit. It's got dragons in it, y'see. Even if they are cartoony ones. Growing virtual vegetables doesn't begin to compare.
More specifically, I'm interested in those "various means" developers use to persuade people to part with real cash with the potential range of pocket change to princess' ransom.
Dragonvale first came to my attention when idly surfing the local top charts for iPad apps on the store. It was ranked among the top 1-10 free apps by download, yet when clicking on it for more info, I could see that people had paid (rated either by frequency of purchase or maybe top grossing like Steam)
1) Pile of Gems $1.99
2) Sack of Gems $4.99
3) Pile of Cash $0.99
4) Sack of Cash $1.99
5) Bag of Gems $9.99
This is today's info. Hell, the day I looked at it, someone had bought $99.99 worth of Gems or Cash or something.
Dragonvale was also consistently in the top 3 of top grossing apps. What the heck was going on?
Overwhelming curiosity killeth the cat. I downloaded the app - it was free, after all, what did I stand to lose besides some time, if I firmly resolved never to pay a cent (without fully evaluating it first anyway?)
Brief summary: You have an island. It's got rocks and trees and lots of junk on it and an itty bitty clear space to work with at the beginning. You have a dragon nursery which hatches dragon eggs over a set period of time. You can build dragon habitats which house dragons who earn gold/cash with a set gold per minute rate. You can build farms which grow a food resource to feed dragons in order to level them up, causing them to look more prestigious as a visual progress indicator and also increases their gold earning per minute rate.
There's more unlockable options along the way as your player rank levels up. Decorations, aka gold sinks, offer limited customisation of looks of your island park. Most of the buildings are upgradable with cash, increasing the scale of the things you can do. More dragon elements unlock. And you can breed dragons to form rarer combinations.
There is a kind of a purity, a simplicity about the unhidden fact that everything in Dragonvale boils down to time.
To grow dragon food in your farms takes time. One clicks (er, touches) the farm. A basic farm allows you to:
pay 50 gold to grow 5 food in 30 seconds,
pay 250 gold to grow 20 food in 5 minutes,
pay 1000 gold to grow 75 food in 30 minutes.
Note the sneaky reduction in efficiency as you go up in scale.
To hatch dragon eggs in your nursery takes time. Different elements may take 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 8 hours, 14 hours to hatch. Also, only one egg fits in the nursery at a time. You can logjam (er, eggjam? kaya?) the nursery quite easily. There is an option to upgrade the nursery, but since it costs Gems (the RMT currency token), I haven't the faintest clue what it does, nor do I really want to find out for fear of temptation.
To breed dragons again takes time. Sneakily, the devs allow you to skip this. All time waits, in fact. With a Gem. An hour of time constraint, skippable with 1 Gem. 14 hours? 14 Gems. One Gem, by the way, is roughly equivalent to 4 cents. $1.99 gets you 50 Gems and the bulk discount only improves from there (unlike the dragon food scaling).
Objectively, 4 cents for an hour is cheap. It is nothing.
Where I critically find an ethical (and logical) problem is that the time limits are set by the developers in an arbitrary manner. Hi, we decided we will make you wait 5 hours for this. We ALSO decided that you can pay us 20 cents, and then you won't have to wait at all. Um... Do customers really fall for this?
Is the MMO culture of WoW so ingrained that players must speed everywhere? Race to the end? Be better than your neighbors by getting it faster? Wanting it nao, and willing to pay for the privilege (even if the it is virtual pixels?)
Ostensibly, there is some kind of social media aspect of this game. You get 3 free gifts to 'gift' to your Gamecenter friends every day. I don't know what the gifts actually contain. Maybe freebie Gems so as to tempt you into buying juust 3 more, or 5 more or the teeny tiny amount you need. I wouldn't know. I'm too lazy to game the social media environment by finding 'friends' or rather game allies whose only interest is mutual gain.
(I think I've already made some level of progress in reaching the conclusion that these stupid social media companies follow lousy ethical / privacy practices - therefore I owe them nothing resembling honesty - and thus if I'm just curious as hell about a particular game residing on the network, I'll leave behind a swathe of fake accounts sporting real sounding pseudo-info with spare spam-channeling emails attached.)
For all that stinks about Dragonvale though, I am still curiously playing it. For now.
What do I find so captivating about it?
For better or for worse, I'm not sure if it's by chance or by design - but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say by design, there is some semblance of GAME in Dragonvale.
A plant habitat costs 100 gold, holds 2 dragons, for a maximum of 250 earnable gold. An earth habitat costs 100 gold, holds 1 dragon, for a maximum of 5000 gold. Plant dragons earn 17gold/min, earth dragons 8 gold/min. (You can also upgrade the habitats, and level up the dragons to improve their holding capacities for dragons and max cash and gold earning rates, but let's not confuse the issue yet.)
The very first basic habitats offer meaningful decision points. Plant dragons are unabashedly the better faster earners. Their maximum cash reservoir fills up quickly though. If I'm willing to stare at the glorified screensaver of a game (or leave it running) and tap the screen every time it fills up to shovel the gold into my inventory, I can get a small amount of gold fairly quickly.
Conversely, earth dragons earn stuff slowly, but I can leave the game unattended for much longer. Staring at an earth dragon earning money would have me chewing drywall and tapping the "buy gold" store options pretty quickly (at least, presumably that's what the developers hope little kiddies with their parent's credit card details will do). Or I could just give a few orders in the morning on my way to work, then shut the iPad off and come back to it at the end of the day to find 10,000 gold sitting in my upgraded earth habitat.
(The game works off connecting to an internet server or some such. Good thing too. Leaving the iPad running just to accumulate cash would be sucky for battery life.)
Bottom line, there is a teeny tiny optimizable metagame in Dragonvale. Strategically managing your resources and choosing the right habitats/dragons to suit your playstyle allow you to play the game free, solo, without too much agony at all. Make the "wrong" inefficient decision though, and you're faced with the dire temptation of buying your way out with real money.
Again, ethically, I have a small dilemma with this. This is a game that is targeted at kids. Bright, cheerful, colors, cartoony dragons and wizards. Do we really think that many will sit and calculate the optimal math, or are they just going to choose the dragons they like the look of the most, their favorite colors, whatever - they'll play it as a decorate-your-theme-park sims kind of customisable game. And the penalty for doing so, is that they'll spend a long time waiting and wishing they could buy stuff with real money to 'skip' the bad bits. Besides being a parental plague, it's probably teaching them all the wrong lessons.
For adults that play it though, they at least have a choice. If they want to be lazy, play it for amusement, and not think, yeah, go ahead, throw money at it, a fool and his wallet and so on. I couldn't care less. Probably also why Dragonvale is such a top grossing game.
I do appreciate though that they have made it possible for patient adults to get a weird kind of mini-achiever kick out of it. It reminds me of a really kiddie, basic version of ATITD. Faced with an initial maximum of 2, then 3, then 4 and 5 habitats, I could have just made one of each. Time spent in the virtual desert has taught me the return of investing initial resources in order to double, triple, quadruple output later with more machines. Also, a boring wait of a span of time to click one item becomes radically less boring and more game-y if you're juggling/managing 2, 3, 4 of those things at the same time.
I chose to slowly build up FOUR plant habitats. Yes, they could only hold a maximum of 250 gold each. But they earned them fast. Especially when I patiently hatched plant dragon eggs over the incubation time of 5 minutes each, and chucked 2-3 in each habitat. This created a fast, small money chain for the free periods I could invest just idly tapping the screen when the icons popped up. One doesn't need a lot of concentration to multitask that and watching the F1 race on TV, fer example. Engaging gameplay was self-created, you could say.
This left a few habitats left over for the big reservoirs accumulating slowly over time. Over 12 hour time intervals of neglect, one of those reservoirs earns significantly more than the teensy plant habitats that max out too quickly. Sure, there's waste on the plant habitat side of the picture, it's not maximally 'efficient' - but to be at a game's beck and call every 5 or 30 minute intervals is ridiculous. The big reservoir cash stash more than makes up for that.
And it's curiously satisfying. Every time I check back in, I collect a huge amount of moolah one way or another. If I have 5-10 minutes spare time, I can 'grind' tap the plant habitats and know that was the most efficient means of earning gold. And each time I don't use a Gem because I got by just abandoning the game for hours is a perverse satisfying victory of a reward.
Weird but true. I can see this working out for Eve Online's offline skill training because the monthly subscription is still going. I'm not sure about Dragonvale though.
Especially in games. Especially in games that are specifically designed with arbitrary barriers of fake-challenge and pseudo-obstacle where you simply a) wait for a pre-set amount of time b) click a button a certain number of times (or other mindless repeats of an activity) and/or c) have the computer roll a percentage die to determine success or failure.
Wait, one might say. Don't all games consist of a mixture of the above options? Well... I think, and this is me stretching to grasp at a potential revelation, that good games mix in d) meaningful decision points which potentially lead to different consequences/results and possibly e) some form of narrative. I'll save it for another discussion.
Back to ABC. I've been playing Dragonvale. A freemium / F2P / microtransaction (I dunno, I can't keep up with the terms anymore, I use 'em all interchangeably, suffice to say it's free to start playing and at some point, they use various means to encourage you to give them some money) social media genre game that looks like it waltzed right out of the brightly-coloured cartoony Farmville family of loosely defined "games" aka time-wasters.
Mostly out of curiosity to explore the genre. And because it seemed like a game I could actually tolerate playing up to the point I hit my limit. It's got dragons in it, y'see. Even if they are cartoony ones. Growing virtual vegetables doesn't begin to compare.
More specifically, I'm interested in those "various means" developers use to persuade people to part with real cash with the potential range of pocket change to princess' ransom.
Dragonvale first came to my attention when idly surfing the local top charts for iPad apps on the store. It was ranked among the top 1-10 free apps by download, yet when clicking on it for more info, I could see that people had paid (rated either by frequency of purchase or maybe top grossing like Steam)
1) Pile of Gems $1.99
2) Sack of Gems $4.99
3) Pile of Cash $0.99
4) Sack of Cash $1.99
5) Bag of Gems $9.99
This is today's info. Hell, the day I looked at it, someone had bought $99.99 worth of Gems or Cash or something.
Dragonvale was also consistently in the top 3 of top grossing apps. What the heck was going on?
Overwhelming curiosity killeth the cat. I downloaded the app - it was free, after all, what did I stand to lose besides some time, if I firmly resolved never to pay a cent (without fully evaluating it first anyway?)
Brief summary: You have an island. It's got rocks and trees and lots of junk on it and an itty bitty clear space to work with at the beginning. You have a dragon nursery which hatches dragon eggs over a set period of time. You can build dragon habitats which house dragons who earn gold/cash with a set gold per minute rate. You can build farms which grow a food resource to feed dragons in order to level them up, causing them to look more prestigious as a visual progress indicator and also increases their gold earning per minute rate.
There's more unlockable options along the way as your player rank levels up. Decorations, aka gold sinks, offer limited customisation of looks of your island park. Most of the buildings are upgradable with cash, increasing the scale of the things you can do. More dragon elements unlock. And you can breed dragons to form rarer combinations.
There is a kind of a purity, a simplicity about the unhidden fact that everything in Dragonvale boils down to time.
To grow dragon food in your farms takes time. One clicks (er, touches) the farm. A basic farm allows you to:
pay 50 gold to grow 5 food in 30 seconds,
pay 250 gold to grow 20 food in 5 minutes,
pay 1000 gold to grow 75 food in 30 minutes.
Note the sneaky reduction in efficiency as you go up in scale.
To hatch dragon eggs in your nursery takes time. Different elements may take 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 8 hours, 14 hours to hatch. Also, only one egg fits in the nursery at a time. You can logjam (er, eggjam? kaya?) the nursery quite easily. There is an option to upgrade the nursery, but since it costs Gems (the RMT currency token), I haven't the faintest clue what it does, nor do I really want to find out for fear of temptation.
To breed dragons again takes time. Sneakily, the devs allow you to skip this. All time waits, in fact. With a Gem. An hour of time constraint, skippable with 1 Gem. 14 hours? 14 Gems. One Gem, by the way, is roughly equivalent to 4 cents. $1.99 gets you 50 Gems and the bulk discount only improves from there (unlike the dragon food scaling).
Objectively, 4 cents for an hour is cheap. It is nothing.
Where I critically find an ethical (and logical) problem is that the time limits are set by the developers in an arbitrary manner. Hi, we decided we will make you wait 5 hours for this. We ALSO decided that you can pay us 20 cents, and then you won't have to wait at all. Um... Do customers really fall for this?
Is the MMO culture of WoW so ingrained that players must speed everywhere? Race to the end? Be better than your neighbors by getting it faster? Wanting it nao, and willing to pay for the privilege (even if the it is virtual pixels?)
Ostensibly, there is some kind of social media aspect of this game. You get 3 free gifts to 'gift' to your Gamecenter friends every day. I don't know what the gifts actually contain. Maybe freebie Gems so as to tempt you into buying juust 3 more, or 5 more or the teeny tiny amount you need. I wouldn't know. I'm too lazy to game the social media environment by finding 'friends' or rather game allies whose only interest is mutual gain.
(I think I've already made some level of progress in reaching the conclusion that these stupid social media companies follow lousy ethical / privacy practices - therefore I owe them nothing resembling honesty - and thus if I'm just curious as hell about a particular game residing on the network, I'll leave behind a swathe of fake accounts sporting real sounding pseudo-info with spare spam-channeling emails attached.)
For all that stinks about Dragonvale though, I am still curiously playing it. For now.
What do I find so captivating about it?
For better or for worse, I'm not sure if it's by chance or by design - but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say by design, there is some semblance of GAME in Dragonvale.
A plant habitat costs 100 gold, holds 2 dragons, for a maximum of 250 earnable gold. An earth habitat costs 100 gold, holds 1 dragon, for a maximum of 5000 gold. Plant dragons earn 17gold/min, earth dragons 8 gold/min. (You can also upgrade the habitats, and level up the dragons to improve their holding capacities for dragons and max cash and gold earning rates, but let's not confuse the issue yet.)
The very first basic habitats offer meaningful decision points. Plant dragons are unabashedly the better faster earners. Their maximum cash reservoir fills up quickly though. If I'm willing to stare at the glorified screensaver of a game (or leave it running) and tap the screen every time it fills up to shovel the gold into my inventory, I can get a small amount of gold fairly quickly.
Conversely, earth dragons earn stuff slowly, but I can leave the game unattended for much longer. Staring at an earth dragon earning money would have me chewing drywall and tapping the "buy gold" store options pretty quickly (at least, presumably that's what the developers hope little kiddies with their parent's credit card details will do). Or I could just give a few orders in the morning on my way to work, then shut the iPad off and come back to it at the end of the day to find 10,000 gold sitting in my upgraded earth habitat.
(The game works off connecting to an internet server or some such. Good thing too. Leaving the iPad running just to accumulate cash would be sucky for battery life.)
Bottom line, there is a teeny tiny optimizable metagame in Dragonvale. Strategically managing your resources and choosing the right habitats/dragons to suit your playstyle allow you to play the game free, solo, without too much agony at all. Make the "wrong" inefficient decision though, and you're faced with the dire temptation of buying your way out with real money.
Again, ethically, I have a small dilemma with this. This is a game that is targeted at kids. Bright, cheerful, colors, cartoony dragons and wizards. Do we really think that many will sit and calculate the optimal math, or are they just going to choose the dragons they like the look of the most, their favorite colors, whatever - they'll play it as a decorate-your-theme-park sims kind of customisable game. And the penalty for doing so, is that they'll spend a long time waiting and wishing they could buy stuff with real money to 'skip' the bad bits. Besides being a parental plague, it's probably teaching them all the wrong lessons.
For adults that play it though, they at least have a choice. If they want to be lazy, play it for amusement, and not think, yeah, go ahead, throw money at it, a fool and his wallet and so on. I couldn't care less. Probably also why Dragonvale is such a top grossing game.
I do appreciate though that they have made it possible for patient adults to get a weird kind of mini-achiever kick out of it. It reminds me of a really kiddie, basic version of ATITD. Faced with an initial maximum of 2, then 3, then 4 and 5 habitats, I could have just made one of each. Time spent in the virtual desert has taught me the return of investing initial resources in order to double, triple, quadruple output later with more machines. Also, a boring wait of a span of time to click one item becomes radically less boring and more game-y if you're juggling/managing 2, 3, 4 of those things at the same time.
I chose to slowly build up FOUR plant habitats. Yes, they could only hold a maximum of 250 gold each. But they earned them fast. Especially when I patiently hatched plant dragon eggs over the incubation time of 5 minutes each, and chucked 2-3 in each habitat. This created a fast, small money chain for the free periods I could invest just idly tapping the screen when the icons popped up. One doesn't need a lot of concentration to multitask that and watching the F1 race on TV, fer example. Engaging gameplay was self-created, you could say.
This left a few habitats left over for the big reservoirs accumulating slowly over time. Over 12 hour time intervals of neglect, one of those reservoirs earns significantly more than the teensy plant habitats that max out too quickly. Sure, there's waste on the plant habitat side of the picture, it's not maximally 'efficient' - but to be at a game's beck and call every 5 or 30 minute intervals is ridiculous. The big reservoir cash stash more than makes up for that.
And it's curiously satisfying. Every time I check back in, I collect a huge amount of moolah one way or another. If I have 5-10 minutes spare time, I can 'grind' tap the plant habitats and know that was the most efficient means of earning gold. And each time I don't use a Gem because I got by just abandoning the game for hours is a perverse satisfying victory of a reward.
Weird but true. I can see this working out for Eve Online's offline skill training because the monthly subscription is still going. I'm not sure about Dragonvale though.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Long-Awaited Parrcel of Charr
Yarr.
Charrlie's harr. (I mean, here.)
Took Vpost a while, but they finally delivered. He might have been held up in Customs, cos I ordered two Penny Arcade comics collections at the same time. Mebbe they were having a free read of the two books - or ahem, "checking for anti-government seditious material."
And I haven't decided whether I should keep calling him Charrlie, or give him another name.
On his part, he's probably considering a "Return to Sender" right now.
Charrlie's harr. (I mean, here.)
Took Vpost a while, but they finally delivered. He might have been held up in Customs, cos I ordered two Penny Arcade comics collections at the same time. Mebbe they were having a free read of the two books - or ahem, "checking for anti-government seditious material."
And I haven't decided whether I should keep calling him Charrlie, or give him another name.
On his part, he's probably considering a "Return to Sender" right now.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Fallout 3, I mean First Ward
Here is the compound where the Fallout...er I mean First Ward survivors live.
There is a vortex in the skies....
There are magical pathways in town that you can travel through.
Apocalypse now! Overgrown bushes, ruined buildings, ...
Empire State b-- er Westman building. You can walk up the tentacle.
Mother Mayhem's hospital...
Where the seed of Hamidon fell.
Daytime
There is a vortex in the skies....
There are magical pathways in town that you can travel through.
Apocalypse now! Overgrown bushes, ruined buildings, ...
Empire State b-- er Westman building. You can walk up the tentacle.
Mother Mayhem's hospital...
Where the seed of Hamidon fell.
Daytime
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
MMO Hobos
Here's a guy that has hit upon a more useful way to differentiate the "casual" and "hardcore" divide in MMOs.
He calls them Transients vs Extended.
I have been exploring these two aspects in a roundabout fashion while in a distinctly transient phase.
Mostly, my exploration of the Extended gameplay style consists of reading ancient Rock, Paper, Shotgun articles about long term strategy games, often involving multiple players that know each other. Phil Cameron calls the resulting experience "The Long-Form Emotion."
I've enjoyed their sagas about Neptune's Pride, Solium Infernum and yes, even an old Blood Bowl RPS League.
I read about it, mostly because I lack the patience, the time, and the friend relationships to pull it off.
(Lacking the time is a lie. I spend lots of hours gaming. Rather, I lack the impetus to follow a set schedule as an unrepentant Transient.)
It holds a sort of elusive fascination for me, the concept of this emotion. On the one hand, I can't imagine why anyone would want to put themselves through all the pain and distraction of something so deeply consuming that it threatens real life relationships if a chance backstabbing happens in-game.
(Maybe because after 4 years of Extended lifestyle in RoD, I feel I've learned enough from that to know it's not healthy for me personally. I get too caught up, too addicted, and care too much to the point it's damn difficult to let go. So I have to not care so deeply in the first place.)
And competitive PvP urges don't drive me as strongly. Maybe it's a gender thing. Maybe it's just personality. So as interesting as Solium Infernum sounds, the allure of biffing multiple people up to be FFA king of the hill is not a strong motivator.
Yet there's something attractive about the long-form emotion when you combine it with socialness and immersion in an RP sense. I watch TotalBiscuit play Magicka with Simon and Lewis, and Terraria with Jesse. I watch the simulated half-pretend, half-reality of the Yogscast - Simon and Lewis pretending to be Honeydew the Dwarf and Xephos the Spaceman in the Shadow of Israphel.
The episodic nature of it calls to mind the old D&D adventures we used to have. I miss that sense of a "campaign." Hell, I've been watching Tripod vs the Dragon (Tripod's version of D&D: The Opera) religiously every night since the DVD arrived from Australia. The finale song "Bard" is a tribute to those simpler, geeky times. It makes me want to shut down in November and just Nanowrimo...
In actual gameplay, the closest I've gotten to Extended gaming is via Fallen London and the Night Circus, which I've just started up after somehow forgetting about it since May. It won't last, I know. My hobo nature will get the better of me a few months from now.
---
And why shouldn't I?
Transients distinctly outnumber Extended players. Age and the other committments that stem from it makes Transients out of a good number of us.
Lots of games have learnt to cater to the Transient playstyle. From Flash games to bite-size gaming chunks. Dungeon finders, PUG makers, and FPS lobbies. Just queue up and badabing, you're in a game on demand. Quit when you're done with your play sessions. No hard feelings, no obligations.
Transient transitioning gives my mind novelty to chew on. Why sit through time-consuming grind if another game shows off the same mechanisms and mechanics in a far shorter time? Why play one game to death when there are so many new games to learn the rules to? I don't do Grandmastery, I'm a Jack of all Trades.
MMOs have started getting into the act with the advent of more and more subscription games transitioning to F2P. None of it is really free, of course. But subscription games demand Extended committment. F2P says to Transients "pay us while you're still interested in the game, we're ok if you play three months and then move on."
Individual Transients may not stay long. But the combined itinerant playerbase helps to shore up critical mass of a server population far better than an aging subscription-only server. (A Tale in the Desert visually proves this as the population dwindles from 1400 characters in the early days of a Telling, down to 800-900 in the draggy midgame. And I hear it's getting worse.)
The latest news is that DCUO is going F2P. And it pleases me because I will probably go and give it another shot. I loved the graphics, hated the console-focused UI and bugginess of the chat in beta. I wasn't prepared to spend box price for it, and then a monthly subscription. But if offered the client free, and asked to contribute $5-$15 for additional content after I've played enough to think the game is good - I think that's reasonable.
That's the price I'm used to spending on singleplayer games and F2P games on Steam. They last me a month or three. And it's cheap entertainment compared to movie nights.
Finally, the last update is that I just tried out a Transient game that's been out for a year, and it is indeed pretty good. Should have got off my arse a little sooner. Desktop Dungeons, it's called. The roguelike that's playable and winnable in 10-15 minutes. Probably the FIRST roguelike I've ever won. Rather than died horribly leaving beautiful graves.
He calls them Transients vs Extended.
I have been exploring these two aspects in a roundabout fashion while in a distinctly transient phase.
Mostly, my exploration of the Extended gameplay style consists of reading ancient Rock, Paper, Shotgun articles about long term strategy games, often involving multiple players that know each other. Phil Cameron calls the resulting experience "The Long-Form Emotion."
I've enjoyed their sagas about Neptune's Pride, Solium Infernum and yes, even an old Blood Bowl RPS League.
I read about it, mostly because I lack the patience, the time, and the friend relationships to pull it off.
(Lacking the time is a lie. I spend lots of hours gaming. Rather, I lack the impetus to follow a set schedule as an unrepentant Transient.)
It holds a sort of elusive fascination for me, the concept of this emotion. On the one hand, I can't imagine why anyone would want to put themselves through all the pain and distraction of something so deeply consuming that it threatens real life relationships if a chance backstabbing happens in-game.
(Maybe because after 4 years of Extended lifestyle in RoD, I feel I've learned enough from that to know it's not healthy for me personally. I get too caught up, too addicted, and care too much to the point it's damn difficult to let go. So I have to not care so deeply in the first place.)
And competitive PvP urges don't drive me as strongly. Maybe it's a gender thing. Maybe it's just personality. So as interesting as Solium Infernum sounds, the allure of biffing multiple people up to be FFA king of the hill is not a strong motivator.
Yet there's something attractive about the long-form emotion when you combine it with socialness and immersion in an RP sense. I watch TotalBiscuit play Magicka with Simon and Lewis, and Terraria with Jesse. I watch the simulated half-pretend, half-reality of the Yogscast - Simon and Lewis pretending to be Honeydew the Dwarf and Xephos the Spaceman in the Shadow of Israphel.
The episodic nature of it calls to mind the old D&D adventures we used to have. I miss that sense of a "campaign." Hell, I've been watching Tripod vs the Dragon (Tripod's version of D&D: The Opera) religiously every night since the DVD arrived from Australia. The finale song "Bard" is a tribute to those simpler, geeky times. It makes me want to shut down in November and just Nanowrimo...
In actual gameplay, the closest I've gotten to Extended gaming is via Fallen London and the Night Circus, which I've just started up after somehow forgetting about it since May. It won't last, I know. My hobo nature will get the better of me a few months from now.
---
And why shouldn't I?
Transients distinctly outnumber Extended players. Age and the other committments that stem from it makes Transients out of a good number of us.
Lots of games have learnt to cater to the Transient playstyle. From Flash games to bite-size gaming chunks. Dungeon finders, PUG makers, and FPS lobbies. Just queue up and badabing, you're in a game on demand. Quit when you're done with your play sessions. No hard feelings, no obligations.
Transient transitioning gives my mind novelty to chew on. Why sit through time-consuming grind if another game shows off the same mechanisms and mechanics in a far shorter time? Why play one game to death when there are so many new games to learn the rules to? I don't do Grandmastery, I'm a Jack of all Trades.
MMOs have started getting into the act with the advent of more and more subscription games transitioning to F2P. None of it is really free, of course. But subscription games demand Extended committment. F2P says to Transients "pay us while you're still interested in the game, we're ok if you play three months and then move on."
Individual Transients may not stay long. But the combined itinerant playerbase helps to shore up critical mass of a server population far better than an aging subscription-only server. (A Tale in the Desert visually proves this as the population dwindles from 1400 characters in the early days of a Telling, down to 800-900 in the draggy midgame. And I hear it's getting worse.)
The latest news is that DCUO is going F2P. And it pleases me because I will probably go and give it another shot. I loved the graphics, hated the console-focused UI and bugginess of the chat in beta. I wasn't prepared to spend box price for it, and then a monthly subscription. But if offered the client free, and asked to contribute $5-$15 for additional content after I've played enough to think the game is good - I think that's reasonable.
That's the price I'm used to spending on singleplayer games and F2P games on Steam. They last me a month or three. And it's cheap entertainment compared to movie nights.
Finally, the last update is that I just tried out a Transient game that's been out for a year, and it is indeed pretty good. Should have got off my arse a little sooner. Desktop Dungeons, it's called. The roguelike that's playable and winnable in 10-15 minutes. Probably the FIRST roguelike I've ever won. Rather than died horribly leaving beautiful graves.
Friday, September 09, 2011
The Seductive Problem of Levels
This is not a new issue. It's older than dirt, and I ran headfirst into it yet again in the midst of happily playing Space Marine on launch week itself.
I was having a altogether cheerful and cinermatic time playing the singleplayer campaign, up to about Part 2 Chapter 7, one chapter away from the finale of the act before it segued into part 3. There are five parts, so I'm moving from buildup to rising action at this stage. It also heralds an understandable rise in difficulty. Prideful gamer that I am, I refuse to play on easy and went on Normal, but seeing as I don't play action fighting games very often, I am no master of combat, especially with ranged and melee mix confusing the issue. I hit stuff when I should be rolling away, attempt to close in when I should shoot from afar, and miss my shots as the enemy charges in to mix it up in a big ol' WAAARGH.
So I die quite a bit the last few chapters, and reloading from checkpoints only goes so far before the movie illusion cracks and you stop feeling so heroically invincible.
I pop in on online play during one of these off moments, to discover that multiplayer is set up in somewhat Call of Duty leveling style, I believe the term is. The more you play, kill and complete objectives, the more experience you get. The better play performance, the more experience. You level up and this unlocks shiny new perks like fancier looking costumes, and sadly, more abilities or weapons sometimes.
Why sadly? There is an obvious vicious cycle in effect. The better you are, the faster you level, the more fun stuff you have unlocked. Higher level weapons often have more power. If not, there is still a significant advantage to versatility. Veterans have the benefit of experience with the controls, the map, the quirks of the game, and then the added icing on the cake of level unlocks. Even if you just play it for a long time, you will get some experience. This essentially means you can never compete on the same even playing field as someone who comes in on launch day, plays first, plays for long hours, and hits level 35 when everyone else is wandering around at level 1-5.
That's an awful lot of free kills.
The defence on the FPS' part is, I suppose, the following:
If designed well, the fast pace of matches means the freekill-gankmenow stage doesn't last very long. Ideally, a good game should allow a newbie to still viably kill a max level player. Space Marine is not designed -that- well, and I endured about 3 levels of colossal suck from level 1-3 while facing off 2 level 35s on the other team. Their team balancing algorithm also leaves a bit to be desired - no way to control this. On the bright side, I finally unlocked a viable weapon around level 6 or so when I got the equivalent of a sniper rifle, with the benefit of range and careful stalking and distraction from more rambunctious teammates, I was able to obtain a kill:death ratio higher than one, which is a nice way of saying you've killed more people than you died to others, you're finally slightly presentable.
The level imbalance is also not as steep as in typical MMOs where a level 50's sneeze would footstomp a level 1 into nothingness. After I got the sniper rifle, which appears the weapon I'm most comfortable with, ironically, I've scored a couple kills on the high level 35s and 36s. (Max is 41 for now.) Not as easily as on level 1-3 equivalents, but still, I did killeth them. Before they respawned and ate me for lunch again, that is.
Space Marine also offers a revenge kill mechanic that I wasn't aware of until later. Much later. If you get killed by anyone, you can copy their exact weapon loadout for one life. So if you get killed by some level 35 bleep! wielding the uber-powered nuke of doom (ok, more like a meltagun or lascannon or thunder hammer or what have you), you also get to use it, no matter what your level is, for the next respawn. Preferably to go back and melt the other guy's face off. Assuming you have the skill (and ping) to pull it off, that is.
This would have been good to know while I was getting ganked to the point of feeling hopelessly gimped and limited at levels 1-3. How's a newbie to freaking know, though?
One thing's for sure. The levels keep you playing. Sometimes past the point of reasonableness. Just to get the next unlock. I'm not sure ir that's a good or bad thing. On one hand, it keeps people interested and your potential playmate pool larger. On the other hand, once the external rewards dry up, so will enjoyment of the actual gameplay eventually.
I was having a altogether cheerful and cinermatic time playing the singleplayer campaign, up to about Part 2 Chapter 7, one chapter away from the finale of the act before it segued into part 3. There are five parts, so I'm moving from buildup to rising action at this stage. It also heralds an understandable rise in difficulty. Prideful gamer that I am, I refuse to play on easy and went on Normal, but seeing as I don't play action fighting games very often, I am no master of combat, especially with ranged and melee mix confusing the issue. I hit stuff when I should be rolling away, attempt to close in when I should shoot from afar, and miss my shots as the enemy charges in to mix it up in a big ol' WAAARGH.
So I die quite a bit the last few chapters, and reloading from checkpoints only goes so far before the movie illusion cracks and you stop feeling so heroically invincible.
I pop in on online play during one of these off moments, to discover that multiplayer is set up in somewhat Call of Duty leveling style, I believe the term is. The more you play, kill and complete objectives, the more experience you get. The better play performance, the more experience. You level up and this unlocks shiny new perks like fancier looking costumes, and sadly, more abilities or weapons sometimes.
Why sadly? There is an obvious vicious cycle in effect. The better you are, the faster you level, the more fun stuff you have unlocked. Higher level weapons often have more power. If not, there is still a significant advantage to versatility. Veterans have the benefit of experience with the controls, the map, the quirks of the game, and then the added icing on the cake of level unlocks. Even if you just play it for a long time, you will get some experience. This essentially means you can never compete on the same even playing field as someone who comes in on launch day, plays first, plays for long hours, and hits level 35 when everyone else is wandering around at level 1-5.
That's an awful lot of free kills.
The defence on the FPS' part is, I suppose, the following:
If designed well, the fast pace of matches means the freekill-gankmenow stage doesn't last very long. Ideally, a good game should allow a newbie to still viably kill a max level player. Space Marine is not designed -that- well, and I endured about 3 levels of colossal suck from level 1-3 while facing off 2 level 35s on the other team. Their team balancing algorithm also leaves a bit to be desired - no way to control this. On the bright side, I finally unlocked a viable weapon around level 6 or so when I got the equivalent of a sniper rifle, with the benefit of range and careful stalking and distraction from more rambunctious teammates, I was able to obtain a kill:death ratio higher than one, which is a nice way of saying you've killed more people than you died to others, you're finally slightly presentable.
The level imbalance is also not as steep as in typical MMOs where a level 50's sneeze would footstomp a level 1 into nothingness. After I got the sniper rifle, which appears the weapon I'm most comfortable with, ironically, I've scored a couple kills on the high level 35s and 36s. (Max is 41 for now.) Not as easily as on level 1-3 equivalents, but still, I did killeth them. Before they respawned and ate me for lunch again, that is.
Space Marine also offers a revenge kill mechanic that I wasn't aware of until later. Much later. If you get killed by anyone, you can copy their exact weapon loadout for one life. So if you get killed by some level 35 bleep! wielding the uber-powered nuke of doom (ok, more like a meltagun or lascannon or thunder hammer or what have you), you also get to use it, no matter what your level is, for the next respawn. Preferably to go back and melt the other guy's face off. Assuming you have the skill (and ping) to pull it off, that is.
This would have been good to know while I was getting ganked to the point of feeling hopelessly gimped and limited at levels 1-3. How's a newbie to freaking know, though?
One thing's for sure. The levels keep you playing. Sometimes past the point of reasonableness. Just to get the next unlock. I'm not sure ir that's a good or bad thing. On one hand, it keeps people interested and your potential playmate pool larger. On the other hand, once the external rewards dry up, so will enjoyment of the actual gameplay eventually.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Dark Side
Strange mood yesterday. Sorta bleakly depressed. Scoured the bookshelves trying to find a good book that would reflect the dark futile fey emotion that was upon me, and couldn't find any. (Warhammer 40k books were excluded because I was altogether too familiar with them.) I'm sure there must be some buried away somewhere but none of the ones within reach enabled any wallowing in dark, grim, awfulness.
The internet came to the rescue as random Googling slowly ascertained that I was in the mood for some darkfic, though I could have done without the fanfiction aspect. Unfortunately, the published authors in my collection weren't being cooperative - I'm sure some have written dark things, but they've buried it away in short stories and scary books which I do not display in the front of my shelves.
Fortunately, all the tvtropes contributors came to the rescue as they cheerfully (oxymoron?) suggested examples of darkfic. Random browsing revealed two oldies, but goodies.
The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing
Sometimes fantastic things emerge from even the most unlikely places. Apparently conceived in 2007 on the Something Awful forums (go figure), this turned from a joke attempt at making fun of Animal Crossing's idiosyncracies into a dramatic tale of twisted horror. It quite satisfied my craving for something dark and awful.
The Sacred and the Profane
A Good Omens fanfic, it explores the plot twist of "What if the demon was the angel and the angel was the demon?" while still maintaining the core characterisation and recognizability of the two major characters in question. I think I've read it before, once upon a time, but it's still pretty good.
Good fiction is cathartic. I'm better today. So much better in fact that my main dilemma of the day (besides being forced to go back to work on a freakin' Sunday because VIPs were here) was whether I wanted to pay full price for Warhammer: Space Marine and play it in two days' time as it launches.
On the one hand, it is a THQ game. THQ is solidly reliable for slashing its prices very quickly as time wears down on a game, lowering the barrier to trying out their games to near freaking zero. (Dawn of War and all its collections for 5 bucks or so? Completely possible in a THQ bundle during summer and winter sales.) I am positive, can guarantee, in fact, that Space Marine will be selling at 50% off at some point during the Steam Christmas sale. If I can wait a year or two more, it will go down even further.
Except because it is a THQ game, with Warhammer 40k to boot, it seems inconceivable to wait till even Christmas.
I waited it out with the expansion for Dawn of War 2: Retribution since I wasn't done with the first expansion yet. But Space Marine? They launched a demo that was technically excellent and gleefully visceral and lore faithful in all the right ways. I may not be as rabidly a fan as TotalBiscuit is (but then he's a Brit and Games Workshop is a UK company that has spent a while brainwashing its converts there) but then I was mad enough to order the Ultramarines movie and like it, and by golly, the demo demonstrated that being an insane choppy choppy Space Marine is a lot of fun.
So yeah, after 12 hours of arguing back and forth with myself (gotta have something to think about while answering numerous queries on where the toilet is, y'know), I have caved in and bought it, full price.
Ah well. A good company deserves larger profits. And it is a rare game that I am desperately craving to play at launch. (Even Deus Ex: Human Revolution I can wait for to come down in price.)
On the bright side, they offer a free copy of Darksiders. Ostensibly worth $20, a Steam watcher like myself can confirm irregular sales of it at around 5 bucks.
On the other hand, I already own it, thanks to one of those said sales. Haven't played it yet, but heck, it's a THQ action game with good scores on Metacritic, how bad could it be?
Being that THQ is nice (and fiendishly cunning) though, they have allowed gifting of the extra copy. After all, they must figure, all our games are good games that can stand on their own merits. We will build fans in the long term if we release our older games at cut rate prices, to the point where they start to rabidly anticipate our new games and buy them full price.
So uh yeah, free copy of Darksiders.
The internet came to the rescue as random Googling slowly ascertained that I was in the mood for some darkfic, though I could have done without the fanfiction aspect. Unfortunately, the published authors in my collection weren't being cooperative - I'm sure some have written dark things, but they've buried it away in short stories and scary books which I do not display in the front of my shelves.
Fortunately, all the tvtropes contributors came to the rescue as they cheerfully (oxymoron?) suggested examples of darkfic. Random browsing revealed two oldies, but goodies.
The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing
Sometimes fantastic things emerge from even the most unlikely places. Apparently conceived in 2007 on the Something Awful forums (go figure), this turned from a joke attempt at making fun of Animal Crossing's idiosyncracies into a dramatic tale of twisted horror. It quite satisfied my craving for something dark and awful.
The Sacred and the Profane
A Good Omens fanfic, it explores the plot twist of "What if the demon was the angel and the angel was the demon?" while still maintaining the core characterisation and recognizability of the two major characters in question. I think I've read it before, once upon a time, but it's still pretty good.
Good fiction is cathartic. I'm better today. So much better in fact that my main dilemma of the day (besides being forced to go back to work on a freakin' Sunday because VIPs were here) was whether I wanted to pay full price for Warhammer: Space Marine and play it in two days' time as it launches.
On the one hand, it is a THQ game. THQ is solidly reliable for slashing its prices very quickly as time wears down on a game, lowering the barrier to trying out their games to near freaking zero. (Dawn of War and all its collections for 5 bucks or so? Completely possible in a THQ bundle during summer and winter sales.) I am positive, can guarantee, in fact, that Space Marine will be selling at 50% off at some point during the Steam Christmas sale. If I can wait a year or two more, it will go down even further.
Except because it is a THQ game, with Warhammer 40k to boot, it seems inconceivable to wait till even Christmas.
I waited it out with the expansion for Dawn of War 2: Retribution since I wasn't done with the first expansion yet. But Space Marine? They launched a demo that was technically excellent and gleefully visceral and lore faithful in all the right ways. I may not be as rabidly a fan as TotalBiscuit is (but then he's a Brit and Games Workshop is a UK company that has spent a while brainwashing its converts there) but then I was mad enough to order the Ultramarines movie and like it, and by golly, the demo demonstrated that being an insane choppy choppy Space Marine is a lot of fun.
So yeah, after 12 hours of arguing back and forth with myself (gotta have something to think about while answering numerous queries on where the toilet is, y'know), I have caved in and bought it, full price.
Ah well. A good company deserves larger profits. And it is a rare game that I am desperately craving to play at launch. (Even Deus Ex: Human Revolution I can wait for to come down in price.)
On the bright side, they offer a free copy of Darksiders. Ostensibly worth $20, a Steam watcher like myself can confirm irregular sales of it at around 5 bucks.
On the other hand, I already own it, thanks to one of those said sales. Haven't played it yet, but heck, it's a THQ action game with good scores on Metacritic, how bad could it be?
Being that THQ is nice (and fiendishly cunning) though, they have allowed gifting of the extra copy. After all, they must figure, all our games are good games that can stand on their own merits. We will build fans in the long term if we release our older games at cut rate prices, to the point where they start to rabidly anticipate our new games and buy them full price.
So uh yeah, free copy of Darksiders.