A couple of things.

This post doesn’t really have a subject. Or at least it could not be said to have one subject. We’ll see what spouts forth from the recesses of my mind, but at the moment I’m more focused on the things that have been running around in the forefront.

Many people keep blogs these days and why wouldn’t they? They provide an outlet for feelings, thoughts, ideas, ideals, considerations, positions and plenty of synonyms to go with these. But (and I have no data to back this up, so I may be wrong) from personal experience the personal blogs I see tend to be about the negative aspects of a persons life. Certainly some people post the positives as well, but negativity is a cloud that appears to hang over the blagosphere. There might be some truth to the “Internet emo-kid” hiding away from everything and only talking about stuff on their blog but I cannot possibly believe that everyone who does this follows that trend. After all, livejournal is still active so those kids are all on there.

I suppose what interests me is this decision to tell the Internet about your feelings. Not because of the potentially enormous amount of people from the faceless masses of Internet browsers that might see it, but because of the few people who actually know the blog poster. Those few people in real life who know this person and have, through some means or another, gained access to this person’s thoughts and feelings as expressed by their blog. More importantly, they have a context in which to place these postings because they know the person.

The reactions I’ve seen to such blog posts tend to be varied and it is, obviously, based on the context of reader and author and the relationship between the two. It can range from comforting someone after something terrible has happened all the way to hostility and anything in between, but there is one form of response that I have found to be quite irritating. Let’s call it gossiping, for lack of a more appropriate moniker.

Most people are guilty of this. They will have read some acquaintance of theirs blog and considered what it has to say, then one day they will be talking about the person with someone else and the topic of the blog will come up. It may be a reference to a specific post or it may be speaking about the blog as a whole but what is most likely in these gossip situations appears to be the use of the blog as a weapon against the author. Now this sort of hostility has happened plenty; open debate due to what someone posts online is common but we’re not talking about open debate here. We’re talking high school level backstabbing. The sort of behind-the-back bitching that teenagers appear to be oh so fond of.

This leads me to wonder why such a person would read the author’s blog. In most cases, it’s not outright enmity that fuels these acts, so the reader clearly has some other interest in the author than to just put them down at the next meeting of the gossip girls (Note from legal: Gossip Girls is just as likely to include other genders). For that matter, why do people complain when someone posts about how bad their day was to a blog where noone else can see it?

I can understand the irritation of people who see authors post their feelings on forced networking sites. Facebook is not the place to be posting your innermost feelings, at least not unless you want to have people calling you an attention seeker. Even things like tumblr semi-force a person who’s connected with you to engage, at least on some level, with what you’re posting. These are the sorts of things that should be up to the end reader to decide. Maybe I don’t want to know how bad your day was. Maybe I don’t want to deal with vaguely depressing posts that only hint at a deeper cause. I may just reblog you though, because that sad-quote-on-a-wintery-forest picture really applies to my life right now, you know?

Forer and Barnum were right.

Also yes I’m aware of the hypocrisy of my wordpress automatically updating my facebook whenever I make a new post. I’ll justify it by saying that my blog is generally not for these sorts of postings.

Other stuff. Hmm.

Have you ever noticed how naïve and hypocritical some people are? It boggles my mind sometimes but there are also some individuals that just take the cake. A recent personal experience would be a person who created and manipulated a situation through their own actions, then externalises blame for the outcome. “It might seem like we could be good for an hour”. Hmm, perhaps you might be able to increase that from “an hour” to <insert period of time here> if you were actually willing to spend more than an hour working on it. Or perhaps concerns about how “the things that were my problems may not have changed” could be allayed if you would actually, you know, do something about your problems.

Perhaps instead of outright saying “things will be too difficult” you should actually try them out instead of passing judgement from within your safe little zone, automatically assuming that nothing will work, running from comfort to comfort because you’re too scared and weak to actually fight.

Perhaps you should be willing to fight for what you want. I’m not talking something like a new of sheets that you want because you saw them and they looked nice. I’m talking about how you want something so badly that you keep coming back to it. Over and over, even when you’re not in the same location. Something you want so bad that you’ll risk ruining your safe zone not once, not twice but three times, only to claim that “it would be too difficult/scary to properly try”. Maybe this isn’t being hypocritical or naïve. Maybe it’s trying to juggle having the best of every world instead of having to work on the one you want. The thing with juggling is that it requires skill and even when you end up tossing only one ball into the air, if you don’t care about that ball you’re just going to end up dropping it.

The ball is a metaphor by the way.

Then again, maybe your ball should grow some balls and actually do what it was planning on doing. But then again, some balls just like to roll around in the crazy.

Statistics time, I suppose.

On a more personal note…

This blog is wonderful. I get to write big articles about esoteric topics that hopefully generate thought within my readership (all 4 of you). However, there are times I would like to put up something random, something that happened, just vent or share something interesting I found or thought about. For that reason, we now have In Space, a new tumblr I’ve opened for the posting of all things outlined above.

So, wonderful readers, feel free to keep coming here for the sporadic updates and if you’d like to know a little more about me or see some weird pictures, go to In Space.

Classical Conditioning and Game Design, or “How not to make a challenging game”

I like a challenge in my video games. I was one of the people who was bashing their heads over and over against Vaelastraz, Nefarion, C’thun and the like until durability was a whisper on the wind, then dropped a repair bot and did it all again. I play pokemon Nuzlocke, I use unorthodox builds in RPG’s and I’ll play with just plasma pistols on Legendary Halo. Whether a game is challenging by itself or can be made challenging, it doesn’t matter so long as the challenge is there. Sadly, developers these days seem to have misinterpreted the concept of “challenging” as “brutally hard”.

It may seem that the two are similar, or that this is just complaining. After all, what is more challenging than giving an enemy five times the health and triple damage? Unfortunately that is not creating a challenge. That is simply increasing the difficulty level. You see, most games created in these times come with variable difficulty levels, which is understandable considering the need to target an ever growing population of casual gamers. However, the challenges present in older games aren’t finding their way into the newer titles and what we are seeing is an endless slew of titles whereby the only challenge is to put several more bullets into something before it dies.

A game does not have to be brutally difficult to be challenging. Consider Ultima Online, for example. Whilst the game was not easy it was not brutally difficult either, but death had serious consequences. This meant that whilst you could navigate the game fairly simply, it was required that you knew what you were doing and that you were careful. Combined with encounters that forced a player to deal with a substantial risk to their lives for the best rewards, you were given a challenge without the need to mindlessly raise health and damage levels of enemies. Trine is another good example of a game that provides a challenge, in that it required equal elements of puzzle platforming and simple combat, which meshed together to provide the challenge. On the higher difficulty levels it wasn’t necessarily more enemies, but enemies in new, more difficult places or the removal of certain terrain or an increase in the cost of abilities that generated a more challenging gaming environment.

Now, I haven’t played much in the way of Demon’s Souls, but from what I have played and having done some reading it appears clear to me that this is an example of what NOT to do when you want to challenge your player base. Challenges are something that, with appropriate skill, awareness and knowledge can be beaten the first time around. It may take a few more tries, but the point is that it CAN be done. For example, consider solo dungeons in DDO: Stormreach. As a rogue, with careful movement, positioning and timing you would attempt to navigate an intricate environment of traps and enemies and by keeping a watchful eye out as well as being able to read the movements of your enemies, you could disable the traps, slay only the enemies you needed to and complete your goal. With Demon’s Souls, you run out and you die; not because you didn’t possess the necessary skill or awareness but because the game is designed like that. It is an exercise in repetition, forcing a player to redo a particular section many times. That isn’t challenging, that’s rote learning. If you were to give players information about the task ahead instead, such as telling them vaguely the sorts of dangers they will face, the player is then armed with some level of ability to defend themselves on their first try. Another possibility is to make certain events more obvious or slower, so that it isn’t a case of “step here, instantly die, respawn and retry”. A game following that design philosophy would make even Pavlov wince.

Halo is guilty of this sort of thing too. I would ask how many Spartans had fallen to sniper fire when rounding a corner but I’d only receive the collective moaning of thousands of gusts of wind through the holes of so many Mjolnir helmets. This is not good challenge design. You want to know what would be good challenge design there? A simple, one line piece of dialogue that warns the player of snipers. Heck it needn’t even be done visually, you could have the player be guided toward a marine hiding behind some form of cover and as the marine goes to warn the player, his head explodes in a puff of red mist because of a high energy plasma discharge. The player is now aware that snipers are a challenge in the next section and additionally has some information as to where the first sniper fired from. They can now take steps to deal with them, instead of the typical situation that is “walk around corner, oh I’m dead, frigging snipers, let’s try that again”.

The essence of a good challenge is to provide the player with an obstacle that is surmountable the first time with proper care, skill, awareness and knowledge. To blindly kill the player repeatedly in order to make a game seem more difficult is not challenging, it is artificial challenge increase through the use of Pavlovian methods; “Die, learn, repeat until you don’t die anymore”. In regards to good challenges, I have to say that Blizzard holds the title with one key problem; those players who first encounter a new fight must follow the Pavlovian Method, to die and to learn through death. This is why websites with tactical information to defeat the challenges in World of Warcraft are so popular. Players can gather the knowledge required to defeat the challenges ahead of time and can put that knowledge into practice on their first attempt, providing the key to any good challenge; surmountability. It is just unfortunate that to get there, we must step over the bones of those slain by the Pavlovian Method.