Wait, what?

Incidentally, I find it moderately strange that I can go to a bookstore and pick up Real Books by Real Authors, then go and read their blog posts about Froot Loops, or society design for colony ships.

I find it entirely strange that I can make my own blog posts that contain links to theirs.

Tea, Earl Grey. Hot. Look at that, I did it again! Amazing.

I guess... I grew up with books just being things that were created in some parallel reality, entirely separated from mine except for like a hole for books to travel through. Authors, much like teachers, weren't really real people, with their own lives just like mine. Well okay, not just like mine because obviously they didn't have to spend all their time doing homework, jeez.

But now some of my friends are teachers, and they're just my friends, you know? We hang out and they complain about their coworkers and talk about their hopes and dreams. I guess it isn't a surprise that authors are real people too; maybe it's just the realization of "hey neat these guys have blogs. Wait a minute... I have a blog too!"

The Perils of Quality Literature

The problem with books is that I read too darn fast.

I picked up The Revolution Business by Charles Stross and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi on Sunday at around 10 AM. It's now 10:30 PM on Tuesday, and I've finished both.

I liked both! But if I made reading my full-time hobby, I'd need a LOT of books.

Given an infinite supply of enjoyable books, I blow through the average 300-400 page novel in roughly 4-5 hours. It just feels... inefficient, somehow. I mean, I'm paying $15 a month for my WoW subscription, and (at least until my work hours changed recently) I'll easily get 12 hours of raids a week out of that. I bought the Orange Box for $60 a year ago, and I'm still playing TF2 several hours a week. Compare to the books I bought, which were $8 for the paperback and $25 for the hardcover, and lasted three days between them.

It's not about the money; Code Monkey am paid decently, and if reading ever got to be too expensive I'd just visit one of them "library" thingies that old folks talk about. And if time per dollar was really the unit I used to quantify entertainment, well... I'd have more important things to worry about.

Still, it's kind of... "wow, that was good. Now what?"

Game Design: Difficulty

I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins recently, and it's been really frustrating me. So I sat back and thought about what it is that's causing the problem, and how other games avoid it. I've also been playing Borderlands lately, and have been enjoying the gameplay there much more (although Borderlands has horrible, horrible UI), so I think it'll be a good comparison. There will be minor spoilers about certain encounter details, but none about plot.

Difficulty Curve

Borderlands introduces you to new game concepts one at a time, and runs you through a mini-tutorial each time, sometimes in the form of a quest. So it starts with "here is a guy to shoot" and works up to advanced concepts "don't run over enemies with 'Burster' in their name, they explode and do lots of damage to your car". Eventually you're dealing with lots of concepts all at once, and although it's challenging and sometimes you'll die a lot, it feels good because you generally know what you need to do and it always feels like it's possible to succeed. It's a little tedious going through the early areas the second, third, fourth time you do it (because like all Diablo-style games, making an alt of every class is encouraged just so you have a way of using all the cool loot you get), but on the whole it works pretty well.

Dragon Age's difficulty comes from fights that will kill you dead, without any warning that it's going to be a tougher fight than normal. The intro is actually pretty good about this; at one point there's a tower that you fight your way to the top of, and there's a big boss guy at the top who hits pretty hard. Challenging, but expected.

However, once you get into the free-exploring part of the game, the difficulty jumps around wildly and unpredictably. You get a choice of four towns to go to, and apparently I picked the wrong one the first time. I then spent three hours repeatedly dying while trying to defend villagers from a zombie horde, because the game assumed I would have a healer in my party by this point. There wasn't any meaning or lesson I was supposed to learn from this fight being so hard, other than maybe "villagers are suckers and you should let them die". I ended up loading an old save and heading to another town first, which was much much easier, a lot of fun, and gave me a very capable healer.

More recently, there was a coliseum-style fight. Five rounds, of which the first three were one-on-one and pretty trivial. The fourth round was 2v2, and I was allowed to pick one of a couple of plot NPCs, or one of my normal party members. I picked a plot NPC and we wiped the floor with them, even though I couldn't issue him commands.

So the fifth fight is versus four guys. I had the option to bring my entire normal party (total of 4 people including healer) or both the plot NPCs (total of 3 people including myself, the rogue). What have I been taught so far by the arena?

1. The fights are not hard, even with uncontrollable plot NPCs instead of normal party members.
   
2. Bringing plot NPCs is better, because of added plot.

So I picked the two NPCs and of course we died horribly. This wasn't challenge with a purpose, it wasn't interesting or fun or teaching me more about the game mechanics. It was just artificially difficult, and I quit in frustration because of.....

Death Penalty

The second thing Borderlands teaches you (after "this is what the four things on HUD mean") about is save points. These are represented by big antenna-looking things with a glowing red light on top that you can see from a distance. When you get close to one, it flashes an icon on your HUD to show that you're saving, and the light changes to green. Some also act as fast-travel hubs, although you learn about that later.

Any time you die in Borderlands, you get sent back to the last save point you passed, at full health and with all the loot you had. Most enemies that you killed will still be dead (although some trash does respawn), but by the time you get back to wherever you were, anything you didn't kill will have regenerated back to full. The cost of death comes down to the time to hike back, ammo you spent on enemies that regenerated, plus a nominal cash fee. Lesson: try to avoid death, but if you get in over your head, you can always hike back to town and restock on health kits before trying again.

When you die in Dragon Age, it's the standard ominous GAME OVER screen, and then a choice between "load last save", "load a specific save" and "quit". (Hint: if you provide your players an easy way to quit at the exact moment when they're frustrated because they died, they will frequently use it.) The main problem here is that, although there is an autosave feature, it isn't activated nearly often enough. In the case of the arena fight I mentioned above, the last autosave was when I zoned in to the arena antechamber, half an hour before I did the first fight, because there was a bunch of talking to the various fighters to do. Cost of death: 45 minutes of wasted time since the save, plus 15 minutes of tediously re-doing all the stuff again (since it's faster the second time). In this case I was actually lucky, because I'd manually saved just before the first fight, but I still decided to quit instead of reloading.

Please, designers: if you have an autosave feature, USE IT BEFORE HARD FIGHTS. One of the least enjoyable things you can do as a player is repeat easy content because you died on hard content.

Through THIS ARM!!

I discovered The Last Days of FOXHOUND today. It's about a rag-tag band of misfits who wander through their assignments and, almost by coincidence, set themselves up to be the Robot Masters rogue special ops team that Solid Snake takes down in Metal Gear Solid.

Watching the pieces come together (the helicopter! the tank! the shirt!) is great if you can still remember how the game played out at this point, and it's a fun story on top of that.

It's also complete, for which I'm glad. Looks like it ran 100 comics a year for five years, and although it was fine at the reading-through-the-archives pace, I think it would have been too slow-moving for me at a twice-weekly update schedule.

Catching up with SF - Alternate Histories

So I was reading this post on Charlie Stross' blog today. He mentioned a lot of interesting things, but I'm going to run with one that wasn't at all the point of the article:

The near future is a particularly dangerous time to write about, if you're an SF writer: if you get it wrong, people will mock you mercilessly when you get there.

I've never really seen it that way. Near-future SF (or really, any fiction set in the future) assumes a possible future and then tells a story there. If reality catches up with the date of the story, all that means is that what was once a story of a possible future is now a story of an alternate history.

The book 1984 is set in a 1984 where the UK had fallen into a totalitarian regime. We're 25 years past that now; is the book deserving of mockery because the events didn't happen? Of course not; today you can read it as an alternate history that branched off from reality in 1949 when the book was published.

Similarly, we're closing in on 2015, the year in which Back to the Future II was set. It's looking pretty unlikely that we'll have hoverboards and flying cars by then, but there have been great advances in other areas of tech that didn't appear in the movie. (Future McFly got unceremoniously fired via fax; in the real 2015 it would probably be by email.) Should we mock the movie? Well, yes, but not because it didn't correctly predict which research fields would be successful.

S4 League

Discovered S4 League tonight. It's a fast-moving online brawler; you start with a sword and dual pistols, and you run around beating other players up.

It's a good time! We'll see what happens tomorrow when my free starter stuff vanishes. I, uh, spent all my prize winnings on clothes. >_> I'm not too worried though, there are a bunch of weapons to choose from, and if you go through the training to get the cert for using a weapon, they give you a 5-hour free version of it. So maybe tomorrow I'll be using the sniper rifle or cannon or something.

Beyond Good & Evil - $5 on Steam

So here I am, getting updates for Steam so I can play Team Fortress 2, and one of the update notices is that Beyond Good & Evil is half price this weekend: only $5 USD.

Now, I already own a copy of this game, so I'm not going to go buy it again, but BG&E is up there in my personal top 5 games of all time. (Ico still holds #1, but I'm undecided whether Secret of Mana is above or below BG&E). So! I highly recommend that you pick it up and give it a play, and since it's on Steam, the activation energy should be pretty low for most of y'all.