Modern Living & Proceduralism

“By procedural literacy I mean the ability to read and write processes, to engage procedural representation and aesthetics, to understand the interplay between the culturally-embedded practice of human meaning-making and technically-mediated processes.”

-Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost

“If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity. To these qualities that Mr. Glendenning ascribed to the code I would respectfully add one more: boredom. Opacity. User-unfriendliness.”

-The Pale King, David Foster Wallace

“Training videogames become educational when they stop enforcing a process as a set of arbitrary rules in the service of the organization and begin presenting a procedural rhetoric for the business model that the employee has been asked to work under. Once the worker has a perspective on this business model, he can interrogate it as a value system rather than an arbitrary condition of employment.”

-Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost

“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air [...]  find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. [...] It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

- The Pale King, David Foster Wallace

digital goods

Originally, I was planning to take a short break from writing about games and talk about some books I've been reading. That attempt was frustrated when my Kindle informed me the notes I have been taking were too numerous, and thus I could not have easy access to my notes. So, feel free to look up these locations yourself and draw your own fucking conclusions.


Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 5067-69 | Added on Friday, November 04, 2011, 04:44 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 5517-18 | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 04:38 PM


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- Highlight Loc. 6677-79 | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 05:15 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 7075 | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 05:46 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 9048 | Added on Thursday, November 17, 2011, 04:51 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 11896-97 | Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 05:45 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Note Loc. 11897 | Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 05:45 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 13878 | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 05:23 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 25170-71 | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 04:32 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 18030-31 | Added on Monday, December 19, 2011, 09:51 AM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 18093-94 | Added on Monday, December 19, 2011, 09:55 AM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 19467-68 | Added on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 05:06 PM

fakepoastering

Have I ever told you about my senior year of college?

I was bored. I had essentially finished my degree, and I was sick of school. Me and my buddy Jake decided we needed a project. For our last semester, we took turns coming up with fake posters and putting them around campus.

I opened with:

Jake deftly responded with:

I decided I would match his proposal with a threat:

Jake took this populism to the extreme:

I responded to his broad, inclusive club with a very narrow lens:

Our posters didn't stay up for very long, but a few of them lasted the entire semester in some fairly high-profile locations.

Braid Podcast w/ Critical Distance

So Eric Swain generously allowed me to discuss one of my favorite games in a podcast for Critical Distance. It can be found here:

http://www.critical-distance.com/2012/01/19/episode-9-a-braid-companion/

Eric always does a great job editing, and everyone was a great speaker, so it's quite easy to listen to.

I really enjoyed the format (and the other guests!). I sometimes struggle to fit everything I think about a game into a neat little monologue, so being able to hear other people's opinions immediately after I said something was very valuable. If you don't have the entire hour, I put out my entire thesis at 24:53 and then Maggie jumps in with an incredibly clear explanation of her opposing view. It was really, really good. I think if we had this conversation via blogposts, it would have been a lot less helpful. Blogging sometimes can get a bit digressive and insulated, and it's hard for other people to keep track when discussions spin out into comments, Twitter, other blogs... It's just nice to have instant feedback from wonderful people.

Towards the end of the podcast, I mention David Hellman as the incredible artist for Braid. I specifically reference one of my favorite comics he did for A Lesson Is Learned, which can be found at:

http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=15

His explanation of the art underneath the comic was one of the things that really blew my mind when I first read it.

That's all.

Reasons I Have Quit RPGs

I have 6 or 7 unfinished RPGs in my collection right now. RPGs are one of my favorite genres, but they also can be some of the most tedious and frustrating games to play. I’ve been fooling around with the idea of constructing some sort of “best practices” rulebook for RPGs; this list would inform part of that rulebook. Not the parts that are obviously my idiosyncratic opinions, though.

Reasons I Have Stopped Playing Your RPG

1) Your save system sucks. I can load up inFamous or Prototype or any number of amazing open-world games and be sure that when I start up, I will be placed right into the game world. If I die, I might lose some progress in a quest, but I’ll keep all my equipment, experience and skill allocations. If the game crashes, I know the autosave has my back. Last Remnant on the PC autosaves every time you change location and after every battle you’ve won. That’s brilliant! I’m not playing a file management minigame, I am playing a “kill shit and get loot” game.

So, other jRPGs, why do you still insist on manual saves and only at save points? Why doesn’t every game do what Baiten Kaitos did and give the option to restart the fight I just lost? Because I am telling you right now that I will quit your game if I die and lose progress.

2) Your first hour sucks. Let’s not talk about all the RPGs I have sampled for less than an hour and then abandoned. If in the first hour, I sit through a long cutscene with an elaborate backstory, I will quit. It’s all nonsense to me at this stage. If in the first hour I don’t experience any combat (aka “gameplay” aka the reason I am playing your game), then I will quit.

Throw me into a battle and let me experiment with the system to see what works and what is effective. Give me a level or a new item so I see how those systems work, too. If your characters have character, let me see a little bit of that. Give me structure so I can understand how combat, items, equipment and towns interact with each other in a controlled way, but don’t get bogged down in a bunch of details. If your combat is so complicated that it needs a tutorial, sure! But let me skip it if I feel I got the basics, and only give me what I need to know for the first hour. Advanced tutorials should be optional, but always available.

Incidentally, I’ve played a shitload of RPGs. If I can figure out your combat system completely and totally in under 30 seconds, I’m done.

3) Your text speed sucks. I’m an extremely fast reader. Extremely. Some people are extremely slow readers, too. They need time to get through things, but I need to blow through your bullshit exposition as fast as humanly possible. I turn on subtitles and read them before people finish speaking their lines. If I have to sit through your text ticking out at one word a second, and I can’t skip to the next line? I will quit. If I can’t skip spoken dialogue? I will quit. As a player, it’s really up to me to decide what is important and what isn’t.

4) Your game speed sucks. I love the Spiderweb Software games. I really, really do. However, there comes a point where I have to revisit an area I’ve been to before, and I have an objective that’s on the far side of a map. So I scroll there, I click, and I wait for my characters to walk there. And wait. And wait. Maps are big in this game. I’m sitting here, staring at the walking animation for twenty or thirty seconds. Then I talk to the complete the objective and walk back. And I wait another thirty seconds. Hey, congratulations, I just spent a minute twiddling my thumbs!  Let me go fast - and if I can’t, at least give me a button to mash endlessly while I am pressing “up”. I’m one of those people who rolls or dashes everywhere, if I have the option.

The same goes for battle animations. Look, on my twentieth encounter with a group of three skeletons, I think I know what I’m doing. If your battle animations take ten seconds each, then after twenty battles, I’ve therefore wasted three minutes just watching the screen and doing nothing.

5) Your equipment screen sucks. I love The World Ends With You. I really, truly do. It’s a game with a unique setting, a fun character-based plot, and an interesting, unique, challenging battle system. Yet as I play the game, I have to keep a notebook next to me with my current equipment stats written down. When shopping for new equipment, the game doesn’t tell you what your current equipment does. Tactics Ogre has the same problem: look at your current stats screen, memorize your stats, and then go into the store and try and purchase things that are better than the arbitrary numbers you keep in your head.

Your store screen needs to show me the number of items I already own, the exact change in stats that occurs if I equip a character with the selected equipment, and ideally some sort of icon to indicate general goodness or badness. Otherwise, I have to start writing shit down and doing calculations in my head. You know what’s good at the arbitrary calculation of numbers? Computers! You know what I’m holding in my hands? A fucking computer!

Incidentally, an explanation of what each statistic means should also be readily available.

6) Your levelling curve sucks. A good RPG gives large, discrete stepwise power shifts. A bad RPG kills you with minor +1s and +2s here and there. If I buy new equipment, I need to feel how powerful it is next time I take it into battle. If I get a new spell, I need to understand how much more effective it is than the old spell I’ve been using. This is what keeps me coming back to your game! The dungeon/town/explore cycle doesn’t work if I don’t care about what I just bought in town, and if I don’t care about what I buy in town, then your game is just a dungeon crawler with bad distractions in between.

7) Give me shit to do. Speaking of dungeon/town/explore cycles, I don’t want to just go into combat after combat. If I wanted to mindlessly murder mobs, I would probably be playing a shooter. Crafting games are great, because they give me something to focus on besides gold and experience grinding. Skill systems like FFT or Lost Odyssey are great because they give me other objectives to focus on in combat besides getting to the next quest point. Side quests or mini-objectives or optional combat modifiers like chaining mobs all let me do more than one thing at once, which keeps my mind off the tedium of combat and always makes me feel like I’m progressing.

8) Bizarre difficulty spikes. This is admittedly amorphous and hard to pin down. Long story short, I shouldn’t hit impenetrable walls. This could be something like two boss fights back to back with no save in between (Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep), or a massive scale-up in battle that I need to grind indefinitely in order to overcome (Last Remnant). If you can’t nail down difficulty, at least make it obvious to me how hard something should be with a challenge rating based on my level versus the enemy’s level. Give me the information I need to understand if something is too powerful for me, and let me know what I need to do in order to correct the imbalance.

Progress bars & load screens

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! has a new installment up at Gamasutra. As always it's pretty great! I agree with a lot of the criticisms made. However, there is one in particular that caught my eye:

Giant Internet Explorer's little circle goes 'round and 'round, telling me nothing. Yet the tiny, free xScope browser for my Android phone includes a progress bar that shows me how much of the page has loaded. It's invaluable.

[...]Put in a progress bar that fills up, once, until the load process is complete. It doesn't have to be perfect; if you load 2 files and one of them is 10KB and one is 10MB, but you allocate half the bar to the first one and half the bar to the second, that's tolerable. We don't really care as long as we can see movement.

The "donut" of the spinning progress circle gets a lot of shit. I just feel compelled to mount a brief defense of it, since the justification makes sense to me. If I were designing a loading screen, I wouldn't want to draw ire for making an entirely justifiable decision.

First, let's look at IE vs xScope to understand how a donut and a progress bar serve slightly different uses. Internet Explorer is normally on a desktop machine, whereas xScope is a mobile browser. It's safe to say that in the author's case Internet Explorer is more likely to be hooked up to a high-speed internet connection, while  xScope is most likely on a 3G mobile connection. The differences between the two are important. If IE listed out every single element on a webpage and calculated how long each would load, it would probably spend more time on those calculations than actually acquiring the data through its fat pipe connection. On a mobile device, however, two things are important: You send out a mobile useragent, which often gets you a simplified version of webpages, and you have a laggy, slow, fairly unreliable connection. Less elements + higher chance something will hang = better reason to do the calculations to show what's left in the loading process.

Now let's look at the suggestion to fake progress bars with the naive approach of grouping files into buckets and just showing rough estimates progress. In this example, the two files differ by four [Three? - ed.] orders of magnitude. Let's be unrealistic for a second to illustrate a point and assume that it takes 1 second to load a 10KB file. So, you sit at the loading screen, and after 1 second of watching an empty progress bar it goes up by half. Very nice!

Now, let's take our naive loading algorithm and assume that it is linear with regards to file size. 1 second for a 10KB file means to load a 10MB file would take... Oh.

(1 second / 10 kb) * (1000 kb / 1 mb ) * (10 mb) = 1,000 seconds.

After waiting for 1 second to see the progress bar move, you are now waiting 16 minutes to see it move again, according to our naive algorithm. The point is not "this would take 16 minutes to load", the point is that files can easily differ by orders of magnitude, so tying progress to file size means your progress bar will have gaps with orders of magnitude. An experience with large time gaps calls the conclusion ("we can see movement") into question, since the majority of time the progress bar is not moving.

Furthermore, there is user research  on the subject of progress bars - ever watch something hit 99% complete and sit there for a while? It's annoying. Much more annoying than, say, waiting for something to go from 0% to 1%. If you want to do loading "right", you need a non-trivial algorithm to display this information to the user.

So now we have two pieces of data from our thought experiment. One is that a naive approach to progress bars is ineffective and doesn't always give the user an assurance that their box hasn't crashed. The other is that users prefer certain algorithms to displaying progress. This is becoming a complicated issue! If you look at documentation, even the MSDN page for progress bars is full of caveats about usage.

Sims2: Pets loading screen. Progress bar with caption:
"Scolding Splines for Reticulating" [Source]

The reason for the spinning donut is simple. It doesn't give the user information to guess a time to completion, so the user can't be frustrated by that last 1% on a loading bar or a fake progress bar that has no relationship to actual completion. Progress bars, in the context of a game, don't really provide useful information to the user. Showing files and categories loaded might be interesting to some, but The Sims shows complete nonsense to the user and no one I'm aware of has ever complained that "reticulating splines" or "Dividing by zero" is misleading - so how useful can accurate information be? The user, as No Twinkie! cedes, is only interested in making sure their console hasn't crashed. So what additional benefit does a progress bar provide over a spinning donut?

My point isn't that progress bars are always bad. My point is that for progress bars to be effective, they need to be carefully considered in context and implementation. It's not just a matter of hacking together the first thing you think of. It's possible to implement load bars properly, but it takes time and effort and risks aggravating your load times even further. All that time and effort spent will need to be revisited when assets are added or removed. Why not just show a spinning donut instead? Users are always going to be frustrated by load times. A donut is not "accurate", but your loading bar isn't going to be accurate either. If you're working on a game, wouldn't you like to fix 5 or 6 more bugs instead of hyper-optimizing something for no benefit?

Edited to correct minor typos, including "an assurance that their box has not crashed" and an off by one on the orders of magnitude involved. Oops.

Mega Man Generations

This video explaining why Mega Man X is actually a great sequel was making the rounds (warning: is a YouTube video about video games--jump to 12:11- 15:45 for the relevant bit), but one claim in particular stood out to me. The author says, “Mega Man X is about growing stronger,” and he cites evidence from the game-play and the scripted sequences. It’s true! The Mega Man series has a lot of hidden depth that tends to get ignored. The games are separated into sub-series, each of which takes place about 100 years apart. While the games evolved to keep up with (or even define) modern conventions, the progression of the Mega Man games when examined together also tracks the optimistic rise of a new technology, the unforseen side effects, the struggle to control and contain technology, and the rejuvenation that comes at the end, starting another cycle.

Mega Man, Dr Light and Rush stand on a ruined highway beneath a clear, blue sky as Dr Wily taunts them with his magnificent mustache.

Source [ign.com]

Mega Man 7 - 20XXAD. Mega Man 7 was the first Mega Man game that took plot as something more than a few words on an interstitial screen. In this game, Mega Man is a bright character in bright world, and the game even starts with a bit of slapstick as Mega Man dons a met hat instead of his helmet. Oh, and let’s not forget the wince-inducing naming schema of Rockman, Roll, Blues, Bass and Treble. The sky is pure blue even with the temporary devastation of yet another Dr. Wily jailbreak. Mega Man is a new creation, a new technology, fighting against those who use the same technology for evil. The comically-evil bad guy always goes to jail at the end, even if he breaks out in the next game.

X leaps above a torpedo shot from a giant flying bee under a dark sky. Some Blade-Runner-lookin skyscrapers rise up in the background. 

Source [ign.com]


Mega Man X - 21XX AD. The X series was a major tonal shift. It was on the same hardware as MM7, but the palette is completely different. No mention is made of the world previous to this one, except for Dr. Light’s ghostly hologram. X is a bright character in dark world. He literally glows with energy, and his armor upgrades turn him towards pure white, even as the highway collapses in ruins under his feet.

According to the plot, X is lost technology rediscovered by Dr. Cain. Cain clones the technology he finds from X to revolutionize industries across the world. However, the Sigma virus rewrites this poorly understood technology and destroys the earth just as the new automation has finished building it. The future is grim. X sees a future with constant warfare and wonders at the futility of his goal. Does he have to fight forever? 

Zero sits in the rain, alone. A ruined city is in the background

Zero chills out in an underground ruin while a giant robot hand grabs Ciel.

Source Gallery [ign.com]

Mega Man Zero - ~22XX AD? The Zero series starts with a dark character in dark world. The techno-utopian Neo-Arcadia (literally: a new place where people are believed to live peacefully) sentences dissident robots to death while the city’s humans remain mysteriously out of view. Technology is wielded by the entrenched hierarchs of Neo-Arcadia, who use their endless supply of Pantheons to maintain power through complete control, in this case, of energy supplies.
The shining optimism of new technology present in Mega Man is gone. The struggle to control existing technology in the X series has been lost. Zero is from the past, and he is the only one who can dismantle the tight control of production maintained by Neo-Arcadia.

The game emphasizes Zero’s brutality. Unlike X, he gets up close with his sword for the kill (rewarded in boss fights with a shot of your enemy split neatly in half, revealing their inner circuits before they explode). The Zero games have a scoring system which emphasizes Zero’s remorseless killing--levels where you finish under a par time, kill lots of enemies and don’t take any damage get you higher ranks. This leads to a guerilla-like approach to combat: move quickly, exploit terrain to your advantage, only engage when necessary.

Zero’s mobility is reinforced by the nomadic nature of his allies, who travel in caravans and attack remote bases in the desert. They are outcasts, struggling for survival and hoping Zero’s ancient technology can lead them to victory.

ZX (look, I don't name 'em, ok?) is chilling in a verdant forest fighting a snake-monster thing. The trees in the background have faint traces of wiring sticking through. Well, except that one tree, which has a big-ass wire wrapped around it. 

Source [gamespy.com]

Mega Man ZX - ~24XX AD? The ZX series got weird. It was the shortest series and probably the most reviled*. It was about technology regenerated, as the palettes started shifting back towards bright. Z and X have become “biometals”, merged with a human, and their collective angst has been toned down.
You explore cities and wilderness meshed together in an open world. It illustrated the tension between this happy safe world of technology but also the wilderness of unchecked Reploids.
However, the game is also about the influence of the past. You collect the remnants of the last series’ Big Bads, and their ghosts guide you. Technology has been tamed again, but will the ghosts of years past let it sleep peacefully? Where will this world be in another 100 years?

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*Well okay anything past X4 or X5 is really the most reviled since the whole thing with Keiji Inafune having his creative authority overridden by Capcom’s insatiable desire for sequels really got out of control after X5 (the series went up to X8, unfortunately), but there were only two ZX games, and they were largely hampered by an inscrutable map screen and a blandly designed, forgettable world.