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another sight

May 30th, 2022

I was, honestly, feeling a little burned out on games after giving up on Elden Ring; and too many of the games that I’d noted as potential games to play next had enough mechanical overlap with Elden Ring that now in particular wasn’t the time for them. While I was wondering what to do about that, the list of free Xbox Games with Gold for April came out, and a couple of the games listed there looked like potential palate cleansers. I normally try to avoid having my game choices affected by what happens to available for free, but this felt like a time to make an exception, a way of bringing a bit more randomness into my game selection when I could use that.

So I gave Another Sight a try. It seemed to be a two-character platformer with some steampunk going on, where one of the characters has vision problems; hopefully there’s something in that combination, or at least in some of the individual elements?

 

When I first started playing Another Sight, the main things that struck me were negative: the animation wasn’t particularly good, the platforming wasn’t well tuned. But, honestly, maybe that’s a good sign? You can make a case that I spend too much time playing games that are polished in ways that doesn’t correlate with aspects of game design that I care about more; I should break out of that, and, as part of breaking out of that, I should accept that games like that aren’t necessarily going to do well along traditional aspects of game polish.

So I pushed along, hoping that I’d find a spark of soul in the game that would make things click for me. But, unfortunately, that never happened. I didn’t find anything in the game that I thought was actively good; and in most aspects of the game, it was easier to point at something actively bad than actively good.

The character’s vision problems, for example, never gave me the feel of seriously grappling with the experience of navigating a world in low vision. Sure, the world would look a little dark when you controlled that character; but all that that meant was that you’d switch over to controlling the cat, and then you’d get to see what the space looked like. After doing that, you’d switch back to the human and go to where you need to go. Maybe there’s potentially something interesting in her not being able to jump to platforms that she can’t see; except they added a mechanic where she can see them if there’s a noise nearby. Which does give you a game mechanic (get the cat there, have the cat meow, and the girl can jump), and I could imagine a game where that was a meaningful metaphor for getting assistance from others, but Another Sight isn’t that game: instead, the girl more or less just says in cut scenes “my vision has gone bad, I don’t know why, but somehow I can see sound, and I don’t know why that is”, without putting any of this into any larger context.

The game mixes in various historical characters; not uncommon in a steampunk setting? But it doesn’t add anything here, it just feels like the game is trying to pull on unearned cultural capital. (You like Monet, right? How about Tesla?) The game tries to link that with the design of the worlds; this linkage isn’t particularly successful. I think actually the visual design of the worlds is pleasant; but not in a way that gets at anything deep, either on its own or in terms of connection with the story and characters.

Or I mentioned above that the platforming wasn’t great; that could be okay in a platformer that’s more about figuring out puzzles as opposed to one that’s about precise jumping, and indeed Another Sight does lean on the puzzles. So the controls are fine given the task at hand; and the puzzles are fine, but not great. But then the game decides to start working in stealth sections; rarely a good idea, and the stealth sections here are particularly bad, with the rules for how enemies respond to your actions being much more obscure than I would like.

 

So: not a good game. I actually did finish it, because it was so short, and ultimately most of the time the puzzles were okay. And it was at least a change of pace? But not a particularly successful experiment. Or at least not particularly successful in isolation; if we judge the entire portfolio of random short games I was playing at the time, then the portfolio as a whole actually comes out well. So maybe the lesson here is: increase variance, and just deal with the fact that will lead to low points as well as high points.

yoku’s island express

May 29th, 2022

Yoku’s Island Express is a pinball-themed Metroidvania. Which is not a sentence that I ever expected to write, but here it is; and that combination works well? You’re a ball rolling through the game’s environment (well, I guess technically you’re a bug rolling the ball); and periodically you get to parts of the world that looks kind of like a pinball table. And, for those sections, instead of rolling the ball, you switch to controlling flippers.

If you’re looking for an elaborate pinball game, this isn’t it: the pinball is very forgiving (there’s essentially no penalty for losing your ball), and the pinball sections are much smaller than real-world pinball tables. You do have to be able to hit various locations on the screen with your ball, but you can try over and over again; and there’s a little bit of the sort of “light up these five things” challenges that you see on pinball tables. But, really, the pinball is there to put some friction into the world, to give you something to do as you go through it.

Which is fine, even good. After all, if I were playing a traditional Metroidvania, there would be enemies scattered all over the place; and those enemies wouldn’t be serious challenges, they’d just be there to give you something to do as you move around. (Well, that plus to teach you the basic skills you need for the boss battles.) From the point of view of how it affects the rhythm of the game, I think I might actually prefer the slightly larger scope of the pinball challenges compared to constant smaller enemies? And the pinball sections also work in some light puzzle solving, which is pleasant.

 

Since it’s a Metroidvania, you also have upgrades. Not as many in a traditional Metroidvania, and they’re generally not focused on your pinball capabilities. Instead, they’re focused on other aspects of traversal, serving to unlock areas of the environment via your movement capabilities rather than by colored doors that you can shoot with a weapon. Which is fine, even good; I guess one downside of pinball as the theming is that there are fewer ways to tweak that part of the gameplay by additions to the player’s capabilities, whereas a combat-focused game would have more options in that regard? But Yoku doesn’t force that issue: it is what it is, and the gradual unlocking of areas works just fine. (As does the puzzle solving that crops up in various ways.)

And there are some aspects that work surprisingly well. The fast travel system, in particular, is done via a few chains of cannons that shoot your ball from one cannon to the next to the next, and it’s one of the best fast travel systems I’ve ever seen in a game. Most fast travel systems make you feel disconnected from the world and erase the fact of travel; the worst ones have significant load times, but I don’t actually enjoy ones without load times either. But in Yoku, you see yourself moving through the world, through an entirely natural mechanism; and, sure, that means that it takes time when going from one end of the chain to the other, but you also see how much of the world you’re going through, so that time feels like the right amount of time? And you see all sorts of stuff while you’re going through the world, including bits that might tempt you to explore something in the middle of the chain; and that’s fine, you don’t have to go from one end of the line to the other end, you can get off at one of the stations along the way and poke around.

 

I’m not going to say that Yoku’s Island Express is the future of Metroidvanias, or even that it’s the birth of a new sub-genre, I expect this to be a one-off idea. But it’s a pleasant bit of experimentation, that experimentation works, and that experimentation has unexpected strong points. And the game doesn’t overstay its welcome, either: it took me a week to play, so it was probably around 6 hours long, maybe 8?

More stuff like this; a quite pleasant palate cleanser after some of the longer games I’d played before that.

elden ring

May 25th, 2022

(Wow, this ended up a little long; my apologies in advance for that! So odd that a post about Elden Ring turned out to be excessively long, quite idiosyncratic, and reader-hostile…)

 

Back in 2009, there was a fair amount of discussion in video game blogs about Demon’s Souls. More than enough to get me curious, but also, I couldn’t see how the game would fit into my life? No pause button, a long distance between save points; I get my game play time in spurts, and sometimes I’d need to pay attention to a dog (or, back then, a child). So I need games to work with the rest of my life, instead of assuming that I’m going to devote arbitrary blocks of time to them.

That, plus the length of the game and some other user-unfriendly aspects (other players can just come into to your game and kill you?) made me stay away. But I was still curious; it was apparently a game based on difficulty where people who like to think about games and who aren’t any better at action games than I am were finding it worth their while.

And then Dark Souls came out, and the buzz expanded. And its sequels, and Bloodborne. A lot of people I respect really like these games; and I was more or less convinced that, if they fit into my life, I’d probably get something out of them as well. But I still wasn’t sure that they actually would fit into my life: I continued to get the feeling that they were somewhere between player-indifferent and player-hostile.

 

The basic sense that I got was that people felt that FromSoftware’s games were hard but fair, in a way that made them good teachers. You had to put in the time, but if you did put in the time, what seemed like impossible obstacles would become manageable, and they’d be manageable as a result of you becoming more skilled. And the other virtue that I saw mentioned repeatedly was the sense of mystery in the world: it wouldn’t explain itself, and it was up to you to notice things and piece information together. (Or, alternatively, to not do that!)

The negatives were still there, though: it sounded like, ultimately, the games didn’t respect players’ time, in ways that felt gratuitously bad to me. (Though a lot of people seemed to actively like the multiplayer: people can come into your world to help you, not just to hurt you. And you could leave each people messages as well?) And also there was this whole “corpse run” mechanic, where, if you died, you’d lose progress unless you could make it back to the spot where you died; I honestly didn’t have a feel as to whether I would find that mechanic valuable or whether it would feel to me like punishment for the sake of punishment.

 

Then Elden Ring came out. I’d assumed that it would be yet another game generating a huge amount of buzz that I wasn’t going to be playing, but then some of that buzz talked about ways in which the game was more accessible than its predecessors. In particular, this Washington Post article by Gene Park made me think that Elden Ring might be a FromSoftware game that I’d actually enjoy grappling with. Plus, game consoles are good at letting you pause these days, even when games themselves don’t have that functionality built in; the latest Xbox consoles will happily save the full in-memory state of multiple games for you. So I gave it a try.

 

The good news: Elden Ring was indeed accessible enough that I spent a good amount of time with it, maybe 40 hours or so? But, ultimately, it turned out not to be the game for me. I continued to find the game more or less constantly stressful, and I’m not even sure I’d made it even a third of the way through the game, so I didn’t look forward to the thought of spending months more with it. So Elden Ring turned out to be the rare game that I started but didn’t finish.

In terms of the benefits that I’d had in mind: I can see what people mean by them? But I’m not convinced that Elden Ring is doing anything uniquely good along either the teaching or mystery dimensions; I’ll talk more about that below, but, honestly, one of my main takeaways from playing Elden Ring is that Hollow Knight is a very good game. And the drawbacks that I mentioned above were real; I’m not as afraid of them now as I was before, but it’s also the case that there were a couple of ways in which those drawbacks were worse than I expected.

The main thing that I hadn’t really gotten until I played it is what a weird game Elden Ring is. Yes, you can put the game into the action RPG box if you want, but the way the RPG mechanics play out in Elden Ring (and, I believe, in most other FromSoftware games) is very different than in any other RPG that I’ve played. And so, to me, it feels like the deciding factor as to whether or not somebody would like FromSoftware’s games isn’t so much whether you want to learn and don’t mind being challenged in that process; it’s whether or not this one specific genre appeals to you.

 

Concretely, some unusual aspects to its RPG system:

  • Classes are only starting points / suggestions for directions to go in, everybody has access to the same set of potential capabilities.
  • Your level goes much higher than in other RPGs that I’m used to, but all that going up a level does is let you raise one stat of your choice by one point.
  • There are lots of secondary stats (e.g. poison resistance) that derive off of your main stats; the game is pleasantly explicit about what secondary stats will be affected by a stat raise.
  • You don’t get a standard drip of weapons that are slightly better than your previous weapon and that you switch to once you find it: instead, you’ll find an abnormally wide range of weapons (many of which are unique) in any region of the map. But you might not be able to use the better ones when you find them, because of the next point.
  • The ability to use a specific weapon is gated by your stats. (Usually dexterity and strength, but occasionally faith or intelligence.)
  • Weapon strength isn’t (just) a number: each weapon also gets stronger based on some of your stats. (Usually dexterity and strength, but sometimes faith or intelligence.) And some weapons scale more strongly than others.
  • Weapons have a leveling path as well, and leveling them up requires a not-super-frequent type of item.
  • You gain the ability to cast spells (of which there are two broad types) by equipping a specific kind of weapon (again, two types, one for each type of spell); the classes that you would expect to cast spells start with an appropriate weapon, but anybody can use one if you want.
  • You learn spells by finding scrolls for them in the world. (And then paying money, but that’s not a big deal.)
  • You gain spell slots by finding / buying a rare item in the world. But also the in-game controls make it a pain to switch spells if you have too many spell slots, so in practice you probably don’t want to have massive numbers of spells assigned to slots! You can change the assignment of spells at save points.
  • If you die, you lose all your experience/money unless you can make it back to the location where you died.

This all gives the game a somewhat unusual feel, especially in the area of weapon usage. You’ll have access to an unusually large number of weapons; but you won’t be able to use most of them (especially if you’re going in the direction of a magic-based build, as I was). So, when chosing a weapon, you’ll have to think about which weapons you either can currently use or will be able to use by upping your stats a reasonable amount in a direction you would naturally want raise your stats; which weapons scale along whatever attribute are most important to you (e.g. I wanted to look for faith-scaled weapons, which are relatively rare); which weapons have secondary characteristics that you’re interested in (e.g. lots of people like inflicting “bleed” on their opponents, which only some weapons can do by default, though there is a mechanism to add that sort of attribute to other weapons); and which weapons have timing attributes and the like that fit your playstyle (do you want to quickly stab people, or take big slow swings, or do distance attacks with a bow).

And then, as you find weapons that are interesting, you want to level them up. And you won’t be able to level up huge numbers of weapons, and in fact I think I only did any leveling at all on four weapons during the time I spent with the game? (My starter melee and spell weapons, and then replacement melee and spell weapons that I switched to maybe 20 hours later.) I could have leveled up more weapons, and at least when starting out, it’s fine to experiment with weapons with them unleveled up, but my understanding is that, later on in the game, it gets to be pretty important to use leveled up weapons.

 

With that as prologue, how does the game provide these hypothesized learning and mystery benefits? The existence of the above list of characteristics shows one way in which both qualities apply: the game behaves in an unexpected way, and it gives you enough information for you to realize that there’s something unexpected going on, but it’s pretty hard to figure out exactly what is going on.

This is simultaneously a mystery and an invitation to learn. I grappled with these systems, trying to understand how they worked and how I could use them. I came up with hypotheses, and tried them out; sometimes I made progress, other times I felt like I was missing something.

And then I wanted to fill in the gaps. Sometimes, stuff that I’d heard on podcasts or read on Twitter started to make sense, guiding me at least towards good questions to think about and frequently pointing me towards answers. Other times, I’d end up going to the wiki or other articles online; maybe I was looking for explanations of mechanics, or I might be looking for lists of weapons with certain characteristics.

Normally, when a game has me looking at wikis and walkthroughs to understand it, I see that as a sign of the failure of the support of the game for learning: it’s just throwing walls at me. But, for Elden Ring, I don’t feel that way. I (mostly) didn’t go to the wiki because I was banging my head against a wall and wanted somebody to tell me what to do; I went to the wiki because I had a hypothesis about an aspect of the game, and wanted to go deeper into that aspect. Which is really good, pedagogically: sure, there’s something neat about pedagogy where you figure everything out on your own, but you can make it a lot farther a lot more quickly if you first engage with questions enough to have a feel for their contours and a motivation to learn for, and you then get appropriate nudges from people with more expertise than you. And Elden Ring, I think, does well in that vein?

 

That’s the systems of the game, but the game also tries to teach you how fight. FromSoftware’s games get a lot of commentary about the way that they put you up against bosses that initially seem too tough; but, as you fight them over and over again, you learn their patterns and you learn when to step back and not get greedy. And then, eventually, you win.

And that’s true, and I think Elden Ring did a pretty good job with that? With the caveat that, as an open world game, there are side dungeon bosses that you’ll encounter at an unpredictable time, so you really might not be able to deal with them when you first encounter them; that’s fine, and even on those I learned something from trying.

There’s also a more subtle way in which the game forced me to learn. Because there wasn’t a constant drip of new weapons and spells (or at least of new weapons that it made sense for me to use), I had to learn to make do with what I had. And that forced me to go deeper into the initial weapons and systems than I normally would; I can’t think of another game where I’ve gone as long with my initial loadout as I did with Elden Ring. Sure, it got frustrating, but I learned from the effort; and right when that frustration was starting to be too much, I came across a couple of new spells and a new weapon that let me broaden up my approaches and take on enemies that I wouldn’t have been able to defeat before then.

Having said that: if Elden Ring really were focused on teaching you the game’s combat systems, it would have made different choices. I’ll talk about that below, but the short version is that the game is player-hostile in ways that work against player learning.

There’s also the question of how the leveling up system affects the game’s approach to learning. Because if you can just grind to make it pass a tricky bit, then you don’t really have to learn; but also different people learn at different rates and reach different points in their learning, so without some sort of release valve, people might give up when otherwise they could have learned and enjoyed the learning process. I think Elden Ring makes reasonable tradeoffs in that regard, but I’m also not convinced that those tradeoffs are exceptionally good in any way.

 

Turning to mystery; as I said before, I feel like the game does a good job of introducing the mystery of systems. I’m less convinced that it does as good a job of mystery when it comes to mystery of world layout, though.

The plus side is that there are surprises everywhere you go; the down side, though, is that some of those surprises are kind of important. Before I talked about how it’s good to go to a wiki to improve your understanding of a system once you’ve started getting a feel of its importance. What’s less good, though, is going to a wiki to make sure you don’t miss any secrets in a given area because one of those secrets could be a weapon or spell that significantly transforms your play experience.

There’s also the mystery of the world’s lore: who are these mysterious figures you encounter, why are they here, what is their relationship with each other? Honestly, I just did not care about any of that; I bet if I’d made it farther in the game, I would have cared a little more, but not a lot more.

I’m not exactly going to fault the game for that; but the narrative aspect of the game felt to me like what Mass Effect would have been like if it had only had the Codex but not the actual plot? The Mass Effect Codex is impressive in its own way, but I would never say that the game would be more effective in a plot-less Codex-heavy version because somehow that would make me appreciate the mystery more: instead, it would just be a game with a much much worse narrative. And that’s the same way I feel about Elden Ring: if you care about the building of a rich, alive world, then Elden Ring is not the game for you.

 

Earlier, I said that I’d gotten the impression that FromSoftware’s games are player hostile, but that Elden Ring was less problematic in that regard. And it probably is less problematic than its predecessors, but it’s not great.

Right at the start of the game, there’s a combat tutorial. And it’s an important combat tutorial: the mechanics discussed there are both very important for doing well in the game’s combat and very hard to discover on your own.

But the tutorial is, or at least was, also very easy to miss! I missed it on my first time through; I’m enough of a completionist that, a couple of hours later, I decided to go back to the start of the game just to see if there are any hidden items or something that I hadn’t found, and I realized I missed the single most important tutorial in the entire game. FromSoftware did eventually patch the game to make the tutorial much harder to miss, and I suppose it’s possible that the developers dramatically underestimated how easy it to miss the tutorial, or maybe only a very small percentage of players missed it and I was just one of those? But, to me, it felt to me like the developers were making a joke at the expense of the players who most need help with the game; if that is the case, then ouch.

 

Or, for another example, take the lack of the pause button. It turns out that you can pause the game; it’s just that, to do so, you have to press the menu button, then select a menu item, then hit the help button, then select “Menu Explanation”. And in that scenario, unlike (I think?) every other scenario when the menu is open, the game will actually be paused?

Which is ridiculous. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there is a legitimately subtle UX problem here: I think designing your inerface so the game doesn’t let you swap your loadout while it’s paused is defensible. But the ability to pause a game is very important for people whose lives aren’t devoted 100% of the time to whatever game they’re playing; the solution Elden Ring came up with is a bad one.

On that note, remember above where I said “game consoles are good at letting you pause these days, even when games themselves don’t have that functionality built in; the Xbox Series X will happily save the full in-memory state of multiple games for you”. Yes, game consoles are good at that; but Elden Ring won’t let you use any of that functionality, it’ll kick you back to the load screen if you return to the game after putting your console to sleep, and it’ll even present you with a nag message saying that you should have exited the game yourself instead of using the completely standard functionality to put the console to sleep!

I’m pretty sure that this is caused by the developers’ desire to support multiplayer combat; I personally have zero desire to ever engage in those systems, so given a choice between having certain corner cases in them work well versus having my console’s suspend functionality working, I’d choose the latter every time. I’m not saying the multiplayer features shouldn’t exist, but they really aren’t features for me. And there are definitely better ways of balancing these tradeoffs than what Elden Ring chose.

 

Then there’s the corpse run mechanic. I’ve been trying to be on the fence about that one, but ultimately, I haven’t been able to come up with a defense of it that works for me.

It does add a sense of tension to the game; that is true, and when writing about Hollow Knight, I talked about how that leads to some of the same feeling that I get from playing horror games; not something I want to feel in most of the games I play, but good to experience every once in a while?

But it was also the case with Hollow Knight that, as I got used to an area, I had a much more pleasant time navigating through that area. Which, I suppose, is kind of true in Elden Ring, but it didn’t feel that way: if I was going through an area that I was familiar with, I was just fast traveling through it to get back to an area that would inolve challenging combat again. Whereas Hollow Knight had different kinds of puzzles in it, so I’d be trying to make sense of an area in ways that didn’t foreground the loss of progress on death.

So, ultimately, I just felt tense almost all the time I was playing Elden Ring. That’s, honestly, what got me to stop playing the game: I’d spent 40 hours playing the game and feeling tense, and I asked myself if I wanted to spend another 100 hours playing the game and feeling tense? And my gut feeling was no, and I couldn’t come up with anything that I’d expect to get out of the next 100 hours that would make up for that problem.

 

That overemphasis on tenseness is the main issue that I have with corpse runs. But Elden Ring’s corpse runs are also gratuitously punitive in a way that isn’t required by the mechanic. To be specific, if you’re fighting a boss in Elden Ring, then your corpse gets placed inside of a walled-off corpse arena; so, if you want to get it back, you gave to go back to fight the boss again. (Whereas in Hollow Knight, you can always retrieve your corpse without triggering the boss fight.)

My current point of view of that choice is that it brings zero benefits; it’s player-hostile for the sake of player hostility. And it’s a particularly bad choice in an open world game that’s full of dungeons with bosses whose levels might not match your own; I don’t mind bouncing off a challenge that is beyond me right now, but why would I want a game to punish me for taking on that challenge?

That’s especially bad if we look at the game through a learning lens. Because the corpse run encourages a risk-adverse playstyle: every time I feel like there might be a challenge coming up, I have to ask myself whether taking on that challenge is worth the risk of losing progress that I’ve made so far? And Elden Ring, in its corpse run mechanics and in its significant variations in difficulty, pushes you in the direction of not taking on the challenge; but if your goal is to learn, then the other direction is (usually) the right choice.

The upshot is that I’m still open to games with a corpse run mechanic, but I don’t yet see enough active benefits of them to make me think that they’re a particularly good idea; and I do not like the specifics of how Elden Ring implemented that mechanic.

 

Then there’s the experience I had after defeating Godrick. He drops a Great Rune, and you’re that, to use it, you have to activate it at a certain location. And the game points at where the location should be, at the end of a certain bridge.

Great: I’m playing in this open world, I’ll find the bridge, and go along it and find a tower at the end. The problem is that, when I went back out into the world and looked at the bridge, it turned out that the bridge was broken into pieces: so you can’t walk along it. Which isn’t necessarily a problem, maybe there’s a way to climb up the last bridge pillar or something? But no, that didn’t seem to be the case.

So, instead of being a perhaps pleasant puzzle about understanding the environment, the game is asking me to find a magic teleporter somewhere to get to the place I have to be. And that’s a pretty crappy form of puzzle, because the game could literally put the teleporter anywhere in the world.

Having said that, if the game isn’t going to put the teleporter at a random location, maybe it’ll put it at the start of the bridge? So that meant I went back to Godrick’s castle to try to find where the bridge met it.

Which could be a pleasant puzzle, but again, not in Elden Ring. Because the geometry of the castle is such that, at least to me, it was pretty hard to relate what I could see outside the castle to specific locations inside the castle; and the castle is swarming with enemies, so I can’t exactly move from place to place while staring at the environment to try to figure it out. Also, I thought I’d gone through all of the obvious passages except for one that seemed too hard for me; but the castle has lots of random roofs that you can jump down on, so maybe one of those was the magic path to take me to where I wanted to go?

Figuring out whether either of those was the case would have taken me more hours than I wanted to spend on this puzzle, so I looked it up in a walkthrough. And, actually, both answers were correct. The hard path did in fact lead to the teleporter; and I tried it repeatedly, and I failed repeatedly, because it’s the single most unfair combat encounter I experienced in the entire game. There are long-range enemies that attack you from both the front and back; you can’t take out the enemies, but you also can’t jump out of the way when they attack you because it’s impossible to see both of them at the same time. And while I could survive being hit once, I couldn’t survive a second hit.

A different walkthrough pointed me at a path over the roofs; I tried it a few times, but it seemed complicated, and the enemies there happened to be a type that I wasn’t great at. I could have made it through that path, but the walkthrough didn’t make it completely clear whether that would actually lead me to the teleporter without dying, and by this point I’d reached my tolerance for that castle and that puzzle; something to return to later in the game after I’d taken a breather and leveled up more.

I’m not going to say this specific puzzle was anything horrible. But I’m also not going to say that it was a good puzzle, or that it was tough but fair: it was an unispired puzzle even if I hadn’t had trouble with it, and it also felt unfairly tough in a way that the boss fight with Godrick and the path through the castle getting to Godrick didn’t feel to me.

Or at least it was unfairly tough for me; maybe the real lesson there was that I should have been putting more of my upgrades into increasing my hit points, because, for all I know, if I could have survived two of those long distance attacks, I would have made it through that gauntlet relatively easily? I dunno; if so, it points at how the game’s lack of guiderails while leveling up can cause problems.

 

Returning yet another time to the learning and mystery benefits that I hypothesized at the start of this post: yes, they are something that Elden Ring is doing enough to be real benefits of the game. But also, I feel like other games do that better.

For example, I’ve mentioned Hollow Knight a couple of times; and, from my point of view, Hollow Knight does at least as well on those criteria as Elden Ring? It has a similarly mysterious ruined world; you certainly get atmospheric benefits from that, and I imagine that, if you’re the sort of person who likes to piece together lore from clues, you’ll find stuff in that game to sink your teeth into. And, in terms of guiding you along your learning of how to interact with the game’s world and systems, I learned a lot more effectively from Hollow Knight than I learned from Elden Ring. Both games were challenging, but Hollow Knight did a significantly better way of structuring those challenges in a way that helped me learn.

Or, to go in a different direction, after playing Elden Ring, I’m also more impressed with The Witness. Again, similar levels of mystery that I didn’t feel like grappling with. But, in terms of learning, The Witness does an honestly kind of amazing job of presenting you with initially impenetrable puzzles, and taking you though the thought processes necessary to interpret and then solve them. I’m not sure I can think of a game that does a better job of teaching via encounter instruction.

Of course, I’m sure that there are tons of people out there that would bounce off of The Witness quite a bit faster than I bounced off of Elden Ring. Which is kind of my point: I think what’s really distinctive about Elden Ring and about FromSoftware’s games in general is their genre. And if that genre clicks for you, then probably the games are amazing. But if that genre is one that you’re at odds with, then enjoying the games is an uphill battle. The genre isn’t one I’m inherently actively against, I’ve enjoyed enough other action RPGs that I could imagine enjoying this sort of odd variant of it, but that oddity is something of a barrier, and the player hostility is quite a bit more of one.

 

Before I started Elden Ring, I’d been playing Forza Horizon 5. Which is a quite open-ended game, so it’s hard to know when to stop playing it; honestly, at the time, I felt like I would normally probably play it for a week longer, but I felt like jumping into Elden Ring? But when I finished Elden Ring, I didn’t quite know what to do next, so I went back to Forza Horizon 5.

I’d already gone through all of the different races and story events once in Forza Horizon 5. But I felt like I hadn’t spent as much time with the game’s systems as I’d like: to put it bluntly, I just was not very good at making it around tight corners, and that kind of bothered me.

So I decided to spend some time working on that. Concretely, I’d pick a three-lap road race, I’d go through it a few times at a difficulty level that felt comfortably challenging to me so I could get a feel for the lap and to make sure that I could beat it on that level, and then I’d up the difficulty level.

And sometimes I would end up going through the same track at a given difficulty level for two hours and still not be able to beat it. But that didn’t bother me: I was getting more familiar with how the track worked, I’d learn which corners my instincts worked well on, which corners I just was not very good at, and which corners I’d feel like I should be able to do well at but something about them would repeatedly surprise me. And I’d use that to manage my focus through the track, I’d note down what worked well and what didn’t (often saying out loud how I felt about each corner), and I’d try to match up my gut feeling with objective markers (my lap time, or how the distance to the car ahead of me had changed after the corner compared to before it). Occasionally on a really tough corner I’d even rewind over and over again (Forza lets you go back in time if you want to undo a crash or a bad turn or something), trying out different approaches until I came up with something that worked.

 

My experience with Forza sounds exactly like what I’d said above:

The basic sense that I got was that people felt that FromSoftware’s games were hard but fair, in a way that made them good teachers. You had to put in the time, but if you did put in the time, what seemed like impossible obstacles would become manageable, and they’d be manageable as a result of you becoming more skilled.

But Forza does this process significantly better than Elden Ring does. For a given challenge, Forza has better tools for allowing you to isolate and practice individual components of that challenge, and better tools for enabling you to scale the challenge to match (and let you expand) your curent skill threshold. And Forza also, I think, does better in this regard than Hollow Knight, though I think you could make a case that The Witness does a comparably good job to Forza at helping the player learn.

Also, note that some of the tools that Forza Horizon 5 provided to me to help me learn (difficulty levels, the ability to rewind) can be used for other reasons, and in fact can be used for the opposite reason: if you don’t care about learning and just want a pleasant time driving and winning races, then you can bump down the difficulty and rewind whenever you get into a pickle and you’ll be able to sail smoothly through the game.

 

A few weeks back, I ran into a Twitter thread by C Thi Nguyen about a section of a philosophy class that he teaches called “Are Grades Bullshit?”. And, partway down the thread, he talks about the effects of removing grades from his classes, with this result:

Which, I think, is part of what’s going on with Elden Ring? It’s not so much that FromSoftware games do an exceptional job of teaching you to play; it’s more that, like classes with high-stakes grades, FromSoftware games do a decent job of teaching you how to play and then tell you that they won’t let you interact with the game at all unless you do it under their terms. Whereas Forza Horizon 5 takes more of the ungraded class approach: you have access to even more powerful learning tools, but it’s up to the player to choose how to engage with those learning tools; and not seriously engaging at all is one option (and as option that Forza actively supports).

This is actually kind of personal to me, because it’s directly related to one of the reasons why I was quite happy to leave academia. I was teaching intro math classes to groups of students that included large numbers of pre-meds who were only taking the course because of degree requirements. It wasn’t at all clear to me that they needed to learn what I was teaching at all; and, if there was something useful for them in the material, I’m positive that I wasn’t doing the best job of bringing out what would be useful to them and they weren’t doing the best job of approaching the material in that way.

So, from my point of view, it would have been entirely reasonable for most of those students to have chosen not to be in those courses; and, for the people who remained, the nature of the course probably would have changed significantly. But we were all working in a context where that was basically impossible.

And, actually, I think this analogy paints Elden Ring in a somewhat unfair light. Because, ultimately, I could choose whether or not to engage with FromSoftware’s games! Earlier, I chose by not engaging at all, whereas with Elden Ring, I chose by starting to engage, deciding it wasn’t my thing, and then stopping. I still wish the game had been doing something a little different in various ways; but there’s also something to be said for a teacher who says “I’m teaching this specific thing in this specific ways; if that’s what you want, then great, whereas if that’s not what you want, then that’s also great”. It’s just that, if you’re the second kind of teacher, please think hard about what restrictions you are putting in place for what reason.

 

I guess I’ve rambled my way to this conclusion: learning is good, and Elden Ring has some pretty interesting systems to poke at and learn about, if those systems are of interest to you. But also: respecting learners is good, and respecting players is good; Elden Ring definitely has room for improvement on that front. And my current belief is that the main good thing that FromSoftware is doing is that they’re working within an unusual system that’s rich enough to lead to interesting surprises as you interact with it.

exercising during zoom meetings

April 10th, 2022

Back in the pre-pandemic days, I basically had three options as to how to pay attention in meetings. One was to close my laptop, and actively participate. The second was to leave my laptop open, and try to not be distracted by stuff on there too much. And the third was to leave my laptop closed but to look at my phone beneath the table.

The first is, of course, the best option if my goal is to pay attention; but if I wasn’t actively participating, it wasn’t particularly easy. The second didn’t work very well; way too easy to switch over to Slack or email or whatever and then realize that I had no idea what had happened in the meeting for the last five minutes. The third option, honestly, worked better than the second, as long as I was doing something like playing a puzzle game or reviewing Japanese vocabulary. (If I’m reading Twitter, then it’s just as bad as the second option.) I won’t say that the third option is a great choice, and I probably did it too often, but it’s not bad for meetings that are mostly informational but where the information is important enough for me to want to attend the meeting.

 

In Zoom times, though, this changes. Having your laptop closed isn’t really an option: that’s where the Zoom screen is! So it’s way too easy to slip between option 1 and option 2. I try to use turning my camera on as a signal to myself that I’m trying to be following option 1; not sure if that helps or not.

But one surprise to me has been that there’s a fourth option, and it’s actually a good one. Early on in the pandemic, I realized that, if I didn’t move around more, my body would get actively unhappy. One solution to that problem was to get in the habit of going on a walk at some point during the day (and, actually, I can imagine taking Zoom calls on walks working well, I just don’t have experience with that), but another one was to go through the set of Silk Reeling Exercises that I’ve learned in my Tai Chi course. You can think of these as a set of stretches; that’s not really quite accurate, but it’s good enough for purposes of this post, and the details of what they are doesn’t matter.

At any rate, I started doing those exercises during meetings that I really did want to pay attention to but where I wasn’t actively participating enough to make it easy to avoid being distracted. My back was noticeably happier once I started doing them, but also, it had the huge advantage of keeping me physically away from my laptop / iPad.

And it turns out to work really well as a means to help me focus. Yes, I am paying attention to what my body is doing as part of the Silk Reeling Exercises, my body isn’t on complete autopilot there. But I’m not paying a ton of attention to those exercises, and the parts of my brain that are paying attention to my body are different enough from the parts of my brain that are paying attention to the meeting that the latter still work quite well. In particular, the verbal parts of my brain only have one thing to pay attention to; and it probably also helps that I slip fairly easily into a semi-meditative mindset when doing the Silk Reeling Exercises, which helps me focus on whatever is going on, including the meeting that I’m listening to.

 

So: try exercising during meetings! Honestly, part of me thinks I should turn my camera on while I’m doing this, just to normalize it among my coworkers. I’m actually not a big fan of working from home, but this is one part of working from home that works well; it’s a lot harder to surreptitiously exercise during a meeting if you’re in a meeting room with a bunch of other people…

forza horizon 5

April 3rd, 2022

So: Forza Horizon 5. It’s really good? But it’s also really good in a certain sort of very polished way that’s really good in basically the exact same way that Forza Horizon 4 was; and, honestly, when talking about Forza Horizon 5, I don’t have much to add to what I said about its predecessor.

Like, it’s still fun driving all over a really lovely world! (In Mexico, this time.) It seems like there’s a decent amount to sink your teeth into in the racing; I certainly don’t feel like I topped out there. There are pleasant enough hooks to encourage you to explore the various nooks and crannies of the world. There are story-related series of missions; that might have been a little more in depth in the new game than it was in the fourth game, I’m not sure? The radio was good, there were several songs that I was quite happy to listen to. There’s a constant collection buzz, but not in a way that felt oppressive. (I’m not a fan of the slot machine mechanism, but I also never felt at all like I was missing out by not spending money on the game beyond the initial purchase price.)

 

Really, the question for me was when I would stop playing. I decided to call it quits after doing every race in the game once; Elden Ring had just come out and I wanted to see what that game was about. Honestly, though, while I won’t say that I made the wrong choice there, it’s also the case that not only might I stop playing Elden Ring soon, I might actually go back to Forza Horizon 5 and see if I can rank up a tier or two against the AI opponents?

One thing that people talk about as a virtue of FromSoftware games is how they force you to pay attention to how you’re playing and what your enemies are doing and, as a result, enable you to develop your skills in the game. But, the thing is, if skill development is what you want, Forza Horizon 5 is perfectly happy to have you play the same track over and over again, going up against better and better AI opponents, helping you get better and better at navigating the performance envelope of your car. And I think that’s a form of skill that I’m more interested in exploring than the combat skill that Elden Ring wants me to explore; and I also think Forza Horizon’s pedagogy is more to my taste, and quite possibly in some sense strictly better?

 

I dunno; not committing to that one way or the other right now. But, at the very least, I did enjoy the month I spent with Forza Horizon 5.

psychonauts 2

March 27th, 2022

I played the original Psychonauts a few years after it came out, as part of the Vintage Game Club. I honestly didn’t remember much about it, other than a vague memory that I was happy enough to have played it but wasn’t as impressed by it as some people are; I wrote about it at the time, if you want to know more.

But I heard some people saying pretty strongly positive things about Psychonauts 2, enough to get me curious about the sequel. It took me a little while to get around to playing it, but when somebody suggested it for the February VGHVI discussion, I was happy to have an excuse to give it a try.

And it’s really good! My first reaction was just that it’s a very well done 3D platformer, in a way that felt refreshing. When I played the original Psychonauts, I was suffering from 3D platformer overload to some extent, but I’ve recovered since then. So I wasn’t bringing baggage to the genre; and I also suspect that Psychonauts 2 does a better job as a platformer than the original did?

 

So, at a basic level: I enjoyed wandering around the worlds, I enjoyed poking my nose in places, and I even enjoyed collecting stuff. It’s hard to strike the balance correctly in platformer collect-a-thons, but I think Psychonauts 2 did a good job: you don’t have to go out of your way much to get the majority of the collectibles, and the levels are interesting enough that I was happy to have an excuse to stick my nose in various places.

And the plot certainly helped keep me going as well. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of other games out there whose plots pull me along more; but, as platformers go, this was a good one. And the plot also informed the level design, in ways that went in truly fabulous directions. Psychonauts 2 takes a much wider range of inspiration than the traditional platformer notion of fire level / ice level / desert level / etc.: instead, the concepts are things like 60s/70s psychedelic band, or an animatronic amusement park ride about the history of a central european country and the fall and eventual rise of its leader.

 

So: a game I’m glad to play, and actually even a game that I enjoyed enough to 100% all the collectibles and other achievements. (I looked up a couple of things in a guide, but not many; the game did a good job both of making it easy enough for you to find things just by poking around and of giving you tools to help you find the last missing bits.) I’m not sure it’s going to be a game that sticks with me in perpituity, but it’s doing a very solid job at being a 3D platformer, and the level theming really is unusually good for the genre.

update on working part time

March 22nd, 2022

I’ve been working part time (three days a week) for most of a year, so I figure that it’s about time for an update.

My top-level take: definitely the right choice. I’m glad I’m not working full time (whether at my current employer or a different employer); but also I’m glad that I’m working a noticeable amount. Part of that is, of course, for financial reasons (or financial reasons coupled with the fact that I don’t really want to think about moving to a cheaper part of the country right now); but that aside, I’m actively glad I’m working.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I would stay working at my current company if I didn’t feel appreciated there, and that appreciation definitely includes pay; but my job is interesting, I feel like I’m still useful there. And I like having human contact at work (and I hope that the amount of human contact will increase as lockdown continues to thaw); I’m an introvert, but even so, staying at home all day got to be a bit much after the first year or so. And I actually even like my commute, because it gets me walking and out in the world more than I otherwise would, and riding the train noticeably increases the number of books I’m finishing.

 

So, yay for working a few days a week. But also, yay for having a couple more days a week off.

The off days were, honestly, disappointing at the start. I’d thought about how I wanted to spend my time off, and I started executing on that plan; but I just did not have the energy to do that. Basically, I was tired all the time; if I was lucky, I’d be able to get in a two-hour Nei Gong session, plus a bit of Tai Chi, but even that felt like pushing things. So I’d have a day off but I’d only feel like maybe three hours of that day is quality time, whereas the rest of the time I’d be lying around the house feeling sleepy, and mostly just listening to podcasts and doing puzzle games. Nothing wrong with podcasts and puzzle games, but still, not how I wanted to spend my time.

The main problem was dust mites. I’ve got a pretty strong dust allergy, and being at home was making that worse: too many carpets, and also I would respond to being tired by lying down in bed which would in turn exacerbate the allergies. The allergies were less severe on days when I was going into the office (which I started doing as soon as I was vaccinated); so I actually felt better on my days when I was working. And, honestly, there’s a lot of stuff that I do at work that requires a little less active concentration than doing Nei Gong does; sometimes I have to be focused for long stretches at work, but a decent amount of my work involves having meetings and poking at stuff in ways that don’t require the same amount of concentration.

Also, it’s possible that some of what was going on was the beginnings of burnout symptoms? Partly because of that possibility, I tried not to beat myself up; if my body and mind need to recover, then they need to recover. But, whatever the cause, not great, not what I’d hoped for.

 

It started getting better, though. I honestly can’t remember if I did any further dust allergy remediations on the at-home days that summer, but I have had a list of remediations since then that I’ve been chipping away at. For whatever reason, at any rate, it got to a situation where I didn’t feel as tired in the mornings; I wasn’t necessarily actually getting off my ass and doing stuff for most of the morning, but I was in a shape where I was physically capable of doing more, I was just being lazy.

So, once I realized that, I cut down on the puzzle games and switched to puzzles that didn’t take multiple hours to finish, to increase the frequency with which I had a natural time to switch; and, doing that, I did manage to get a second Nei Gong session (usually more like one hour instead of two hours, but that’s fine) in the morning. (Or rather “morning”: before lunch, but sometimes that meant that lunch was at 2pm.)

Didn’t happen every Wednesday / Friday, but it meant that on good days off, I actually was sticking pretty close to my plan from before: about three hours of Nei Gong a day, about an hour of Tai Chi a day.

 

Speaking of which: the extra time really is making a difference in both my Nei Gong and my Tai Chi. On the Tai Chi side, it’s pretty straightforward: the number of forms I’m learning is piling up, and I’m continuing to learn new ones, and for that to go well, I need to be able to review them all once a week and, for the ones where I want to actively improve, I need to be able to do them multiple times. Which was not going to happen when I was only practicing outside of class on Sunday afternoons; but now I do have enough time for that.

And, in terms of the Nei Gong, doing two-hour sessions a couple of times a week does seem to make a difference. It’s hard to say confidently what the effects are: I know things are different, but I’m further along in the course, so I would expect things to be different even without the change in routine. But my abdomen does feel buzzy after the long sessions in a way that it doesn’t after shorter sessions; also, it’s good to have more scope to push my physical limits (e.g. doing a moderately physically strenous form of standing meditation for an hour), and it lets me work in more of my the exercises that I’d previously learned.

 

In addition to the above, I was trying to chip away at something else on most days off. Sometimes that was just getting an allergy shot (which happens every other week); but we also had, and actually continue to have, an abnormal amount of stuff going on in the house. For example, one of the planned dust mite mitigations was to get the carpet ripped out of our bedroom (and hallway and stairs while we were at it); so maybe I’d spend time researching contractors or flooring stores, or I’d drive out to a store, or something. Not a huge amount of work, but if you keep on pushing on stuff like that, it will actually eventually happen.

(It turned out that, unfortunately, replacing the carpets didn’t actually help out a ton with allergies, possibly not at all; we’d been being good about vacuuming, and I guess that had helped enough. But the new floors look really good (and that picture understates it, there’s a ton of light that comes in during the morning, making the floor and room glow), and that makes a big difference: it puts me in a mental space where I’m actively happy to spend time doing Nei Gong in our bedroom, it makes the room into a nourishing space where stuff happens. Also, the new floor makes a nice stable base to stand / sit on too, which helps.)

I also stuck with the plan of reading a bit of Japanese over lunch (or right after lunch) on my days off. That got stuck for a while, but then I realized that sitting down to read Japanese felt like a project, whereas if the goal I set was just to reading two pages a day, then that actually didn’t take very much time, maybe half an hour or even a little less. And if I do that four days a week (I do it on weekends too) then I end up making noticeable progress on the Japanese book I’m currently reading every week.

And there have been some other little routines that have developed. In particular, Widget now gets to go to the park on Wednesdays, instead of just Saturdays and Sundays; that makes him happy, and I like it too.

 

So I’m getting an amount of stuff done that I’m happy with. There’s still tuning to do: I’m spending maybe 5 hours a day doing stuff that feels productive, and that feels about right, but I’m not that thrilled with what I’m doing during the other hours during the day? Honestly, I wish I were spending more time playing video games: I didn’t want to spend all day playing video games, but I would kind of like to play them a little bit more than I currently do, and that feels like a better use of my time than puzzle games? (Elden Ring might force my hand there, it could literally take me half a year to finish if I play it at my regular rate.)

And we did just get the piano tuned, and presumably Rocksmith+ will get released at some point, so probably playing music will make it back into my life at some point.

 

Anyways: stuff to tweak, but I’m glad with how things have been going, and the slope is positive as well.

the forgotten city

March 13th, 2022

The Forgotten City hadn’t been on my radar until I heard a couple of end-of-year podcasts make a plug for it; seemed up my alley, I figured I should give it a try. And I’m glad I did!

Partly because it’s a puzzle game in a format that I’m not used to and that I enjoy. It’s basically a detective game: you’re wandering around a town, talking to people, learning what problems people have and working to solve them. And, of course, those smaller puzzles are all placed in the context of a frame puzzle, or rather two frame puzzles: one overt one and the general puzzle of where this city and its unique rules came from.

And it’s really well done! They put this in the context of a time loop story; that means that you don’t have to worry about messing up, if you do something that precludes a possibility that you want, you can always do that on another loop. The time loop also informs the frame stories of what’s going on: in this city, if one person sins, everybody dies, and that’s what triggers the loop. So you get to poke at the question of what “sin” means in this context, while having the loop also serve to support your investigations.

 

Of course, time loops aren’t great if you spend lots of time either replaying stuff that you know how to do or waiting for things to happen; that was the big reason why I bounced off of Outer Wilds. The designers of The Forgotten City were clearly very conscious of that possibility, and they worked around it in a couple of ways.

At a basic level, you simply don’t have to loop all that often. The game doesn’t contain much in the way of a clockwork mechanisms, so you don’t spend time waiting for the right events to occur; and most of the time you’re doing stuff that isn’t likely to trigger the loop, either. So you spend most of your time poking around and making progress in your investigations; it’s reassuring to have the loop as an escape hatch, but it doesn’t get in your way.

That doesn’t solve the problem of having to redo actions at the start of the loop. The Forbidden City solves that in the most shameless way possible; I won’t go into details because it’s kind of charming to see how the developers solved that issue, but it’s great to see a game whose developers are clearly prioritizing player experience over some sort of narrative purity, and who do that while having a bit of fun with the gaminess of the situation.

 

So, basically, what you end up with is a game that has the parts of adventure games / RPGs where you’re wandering around a town, poking your nose in places, and talking to people. And, of course, that leads to side quests, but not too many of them, and they’re not the sorts of by-the-numbers fetch quests and what not that RPGs frequently have too many of. (There’s one section of the game that has a bit of combat, but that’s not something that you have to worry about in the majority of your time with the game.)

The premise of the game works well, and leads to a nice set of puzzles. And the game respects your time, both by providing time-saving affordances, as I mentioned above, and also by simply not being very long. (I don’t think I spent as long as ten hours on it, more like six or eight.)

More games like this one, please; sure, I like big theatrical games, but I also like games that know what they’re doing, do it well, and don’t waste your time in the process.

don’t let computers tell you what to do

March 6th, 2022

A few months back, some friends of mine and I talked about the game Zombies, Run! in our game discussion group. It’s a game designed to get help you exercise by playing a zombie story as you go for a walk / run; it tracks your movement as you go, and can use that to feed back into the game.

One of the options in Zombies, Run! is to have the came occasionally activate chase sequences, where you’re supposed to speed up; if you don’t do that, then you’ll lose some resources in the game. The first several times I played the game, I was walking our dog, so I didn’t have the ability to be able to break into a jog on demand; but, as I was thinking about it, I realized that I probably wouldn’t have enabled that option anyways.

Basically, I’ve gotten more and more suspicious of doing things because a computer tells me that it would be a good idea. There are two reasons why I’m suspicious of doing things because a computer tells me to: one is that the goals of the designers of the software may not match my own goals (and may, in fact, actively go against my goals); the second is that I don’t necessarily trust software to be good at a lot of things.

 

As an example of the former of those: earlier today, I’d looked up a video on Youtube. And, as happens so frequently, I looked at the video controls, noticed that Youtube had decided to turn autoplay back on, and I turned it off. Youtube’s product managers have decided that they really want me to keep on watching videos on their site, and they feel strongly enough about this that they repeatedly override my explicitly stated preference to the contrary; that is a bad decision.

Fortunately, the algorithmic “break into a run” mode in Zombies, Run! isn’t that sort of hostile action; instead, it (I am fairly sure) falls into the second category that I’m suspicious about. Designing an exercise program to help people get significant benefits from running is a skill; Zombies, Run! did nothing whatsoever to convince me that that mode would lead to a coherent exercise program. And, indeed, that it would be helpful rather than harmful: if I wanted to make running part of my exercise program, what are the odds that the specific amount of running that Zombies, Run! would be a better amount of running than what I could come up with on my own just by listening to my body, let alone what I could come up with by doing some research or getting coaching from somebody who knows what they’re doing?

 

I realize that the title of this post is way too broad. There are lots of situations where computers are actively helpful, and that’s great. We just have to turn around my two criteria above: I like it when computers are working with me instead of against me and are working in ways where they bring value that they’re particularly suited to.

For example, I work on server software, and we want those servers to be running well as much of the time as possible. And having software (our own software in large part!) help us with that goal is great: computers can constantly measure a huge number of data points, and let on-calls know if those data points are in a range where a human should take a look. Or if I’m driving somewhere that I’m not used to going to, I’ll put the address into a mapping application on my phone, and let my phone give me driving directions; computers are good at that too. And at least some of you are reading this blog post because, years ago, you told Feedly that you wanted it to automatically watch my blog, detect when I put up a new post, and let you know that.

 

I start to get a lot more suspicious about recommendations from computers that come from more opaque algorithms, though. Is the computer making a recommendation because A) it has an informed opinion about what I’m looking for, B) it actually wants to meet my goals as well as possible, and C) it has a good idea how to do so? There are a lot of ways that that could fail, but in particular I just do not trust that point B is going to be the case in a lot of opaque algorithmic situations: there’s a lot of financial incentive for companies to sell algorithmic responses, and there’s also a lot of financial incentive for companies to get me spending more time using their software than I originally intended.

This doesn’t mean that I stay completely away from opaque algorithmic recommendation systems. Web search is essential; I do what I can to avoid / be aware of situations where search engine are acting for another’s benefit, but ultimately I still use search engines. Once a week, I listen to Spotify’s Release Radar playlist; learning about new music (whether by musicians that are new to me or new releases from musicians that I already know of and like) is importat to me, and while the algorithm generatic that playlist has a very narrow view of what kind of music to recommend to me, Spotify’s algorithms have pointed me to more than enough music that I really like and wouldn’t have discovered otherwise that I still use them. (At least Release Radar; it’s been months since Discover Weekly has pointed at me at something interesting, so I’ve stopped listening to that one.)

But, in the Spotify case, I’m hiring the algorithm for a very specific job; once it’s done that job, I switch away from that algorithm. Concretely, once it’s pointed me at a song that I liked, I switch over to much less opaque methods of investigation: listen to the whole album the song is from (if the song is from an album, which is far from guaranteed these days), and, if that goes well, I go through the rest of that artist’s back catalog. (Usually also buying some of the artist’s albums as part of that process, partly because I like supporting musicians and partly because I don’t trust music streaming services to be a permanent storage space for my music collection, or indeed to be a storage space where I can trust an album I added there today to still be there next month!)

 

That last example actually points me at one way in which the Zombies, Run! mode in question could be useful: I don’t trust it to provide an exercise program, but maybe it could be useful from a discovery point of view? I did try out that mode once with the question in mind as to whether I should add running into my routine; my feeling was that spending some time running was a good idea, but not a good enough idea for me to carve out time in my day to spend on that instead of one of the many other activities that are competing for my time.

Anyways: computers can be useful. But computers also do not deserve the benefit of doubt that they are 1) providing high-quality advice that is 2) working for you instead of for somebody else. And that second point in particular is something that I feel that I need to be aware of more and more.

yakuza 3

February 13th, 2022

I’m playing through the Yakuza series at a rate of about once a year; so now I’m up to Yakuza 3.

Which is the first entry in the series that I’ve played in over a decade that’s not either a prequel or a from-the-ground remake. It’s a port of a PS3 game, so it looks fine; it’s just maybe not quite as over the top as Yakuza 0 and the Kiwami games in terms of all the things you can do other than the main plot? Don’t get me wrong, there are still tons of side missions, plenty of restaurants to go to, and what not; just not the same sort of elaborate minigames to go along with that.

There is a cabaret to run, but it was hard to figure out and didn’t seem like it was nearly as extensive as what I’d gotten used to from Yakuza 0, so I didn’t explore it much. And the leveling up system was pretty bare bones: you have a bit of choice as to the order in which you perform your upgrades, but in practice they show up in groups of four where you have a pretty strong motivation to finish that group before moving to the next group. So there’s really not much of a skill tree here, it feels a lot more like static unlocks based on a global character level.

Still: very much what I expect a Yakuza game to be. With the twist that, while you do of course spend lots of time in Kamurocho, in Yakuza 3 your second location is Okinawa rather then Sotenbori.

 

And that’s not just a change in location: it’s a change in tone. Kiryu is trying to get out of the Yakuza life, so he’s running an orphanage; he does, of course, end up running into local Yakuza groups, but the first one he runs into is so hapless that he ends up getting dragged into them as a sort of father / big brother figure, instead of the grittiness that we expect from Yakuza plots.

A much more traditional Yakuza plot does surface, of course. And, for that matter, the Yakuza games have always had a family aspect to them: we met Haruka in the original game in the series, and Kiryu’s been acting as a father to her ever since. (And I like how Yakuza 3 treats her!) So I don’t want to present Yakuza 3 as a break from the rest of the series; but the weighting of the various aspects are different. And the increased weighting of Kiryu-as-dad is something I appreciate.

 

Glad I played it, I’m definitely going to keep on chipping away at the series. It does feel a little odd jumping back in time from a game design point of view while moving ahead along other dimensions of the series; I won’t say that I think the Kiwami games were a mistake, but there are downsides to that approach as well? But Yakuza 3 is very solid in its own right.

emptying out my podcast queue

February 8th, 2022

As I mentioned a few months back, I’ve been spending a lot of my podcast listening time going through Friends at the Table, first their regular episodes and then their Patreon stuff. And now I’m done with those shows as well, or at least all of those shows that I’m interested in listening to.

Which meant that I hit the podcast version of Inbox Zero. So, of course, my initial reaction was that I should find another series to fill that gap. (Coupled with a thought that I should just start Friends at the Table over at the beginning! Which I decided against fairly quickly, though I can imagine doing that a few years from now.)

 

Thinking about it, though, I didn’t feel like I’ve been budgeting my listening time correctly. I listen to podcasts while walking or driving (and sometimes while relaxing at home and doing puzzles or what not); I listen to music some of the time while working.

But that music listening is basically a combination of Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations combined with full albums from artists that I’ve learned about through those recommendations; I’ve got a pretty big backlog of albums to listen to as a result, and I’m honestly not sure whether the backlog grows or shrinks during an average week. (It would help if I didn’t have so many meetings…)

And what this means is that I spend very little time listening to music that I’m already familiar with. And that’s not great? Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I’m learning about new music, that’s important to me. But there’s a lot of other music out there that’s important to me too. And in particular it’s kind of depressing how rarely I listen to classical music these days; Spotify does occasionally toss that my way, but not very frequently.

 

So I should make time to listen to familiar music as well. I could switch some of the new music time over to familiar music, but given that I’ve just cleared up some significant free time on the podcast side of things, that feels like a more natural place to make time?

And it’s not like there were a bunch of podcasts that I was really wishing I could find time to listen to. I’ve been enjoying Rogue Runners enough that I think I’ll go and find the other podcast that those folks have done, but that’s not urgent; I’ll probably do that the next time Rogue Runners hits a season break.

 

So I’ve been spending more time listening to familiar music. Not a ton, I’m still listening to podcasts most of the time when I’m commuting or walking Widget, but some. And it definitely feels like the right choice: returning to old friends, spending more time listening to something that feels substantial in a way that many of the podcasts that I listen to don’t.

And what this is also making me realize is that I feel like I should be spending more time playing music. When I decided to take more time off, one thought I had was that I should spend some of that extra time playing music; ultimately, though, I decided that Nei Gong and Tai Chi were enough of a priority that I didn’t want to work in music time. And that was the right choice, and continues to be a fine choice. But I think soon I should work in more music playing time.

So: time to get the piano tuned. (Especially now that Omicron is dying down and we’ve made it past our major house projects.) And when Rocksmith+ gets released, I will be very happy to pick up my guitar and bass again.

a short hike

February 3rd, 2022

I’m behind on my blogging, so I would say that I wish that I’d written about A Short Hike sooner, so that I could remember what I had to say about it. But, honestly, I feel like I didn’t have much to say about the game even right after I finished it?

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a charming game, and I’m very glad that I played it. I didn’t spend much time with it, but that’s because it’s a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome: this is refreshing and good.

 

Basically: you’re taking a hike up a mountain in the middle of an island. And, depending on your route, you might run into people to talk to, things to do, tasks to complete. And, if you want, you can dig into those tasks; if you don’t want to do that, though, that’s fine too! And there’s some amount of money to collect in the environment, that you might want to collect to help you buy some feathers that improve your ability to navigate through your environment.

Which could, potentially, turn into an open world quest grind. But A Short Hike avoids that, for a couple of reasons. One is that the whole game has a charming tone, so it’s pleasant to talk to people, and the quests are nice little activities. The second is that there’s not a ton of extrinsic motivation layered into the game: in general, if you don’t feel like talking to somebody, or doing an activity that they suggest, it’s totally fine to skip that, the game didn’t feel to me like it was pressuring me to complete everything. And the third thing is that the game is well named in that it’s quite short; I think I probably spent less than two hours on the game, so the new game honeymoon period never wore off.

 

So I went on a hike; I did a fair amount of sticking my nose in places, so I’m pretty sure I saw most of the island, but I don’t think I saw all of it? And I did most of the activities / tasks that I came across, but not all of them: if I wasn’t in the mood for something, I didn’t do it. And then I made it to the top of the mountain, and was happy to be there; and, after wandering down the mountain, I decided that I’d had a good time with the game, and stopped.

A pleasant way to spend an evening; yay for games like that.

disco elysium

January 31st, 2022

I think the thing that struck me the most about Disco Elysium is that it’s, in some sense, an RPG without combat, and it shows that RPGs without combat work fine? You’ve got your stats, your leveling up, your equipment, your quests, your skill challenges; but the skill challenges are much less frequent than the skill challenges in the vast majority of RPGs, and are done by rolling dice instead of a spatially-based combat system.

I’m actually not entirely sure what I think about that last aspect of the game, and I’ll talk more about some downsides of Disco Elysium’s choice of using dice rolling and the specific way in which they implemented that below. But, from my point of view, the dramatically decreased volume of skill challenges is all to the good: constantly fighting the same sorts of battles in the same way is very rarely interesting, and while it does provide a certain comfort factor while playing, I just don’t see it as particularly rewarding at a fundamental level. In contrast, in Disco Elysium, every skill challenge has a clear narrative hook, and is interesting both in the failure case and in the success case; at the least, it’s an interesting difference in how games are designed, but it’s also a difference with significant strengths.

 

Stepping back a bit, or at least sideways: the narrative is very unusual for RPGs that I play. I’m so used to RPGs having a “you are the god-chosen hero” conceipt that is, in turn, used to justify horrific levels of violence on your part; as per the above, the horrific levels of violence are missing, but while you are claimed to be a strikingly effective detective, it sure doesn’t feel that way in your lived narrative.

And the narrative concerns are just different from what I’m used to in video games? Part of that is how much of how much of what’s going on is happening at a personal level; Disco Elysium certainly isn’t unique in that regard, but it’s not the norm. Part of that is both the explicit politics and the section of the political spectrum that the game takes seriously: many more questions around economic concerns in particular than I’m used to.

And also, the authors of the game are just having fun playing around with certain kinds of ideas. As I said above, you’re not presented as being a uniquely exceptional person in your play; but, at the same time, your character is explicitly playing around with the idea of “what if I actually were awesome in this specific dimension?”. (Maybe I’m really good at singing; only one way to find out!) And those dimensions aren’t traditional gameplay dimensions, they’re more along aesthetic dimensions; and neither the game or the character are really taking super seriously the idea that you actually are awesome in that direction, they’re having fun playing around with that possibility instead. But they’re also not completely discounting the possibility of being awesome: you’re explicitly a blank slate, and part of that is being able to treat as a real possibility that you actually are surprisingly awesome in some particular way.

(Incidentally, speaking of aesthetic awesomeness: the visual art style is very unusual and quite well done. More of this sort of visual experimentation, please.)

 

So there’s a lot that’s unusual about the game, and a lot that I really liked about those unusual choices. Having said that, it’s also the case that, a little over halfway through the game, I ran into a pretty rough patch.

Basically, I got a situation where, on the quests that I was aware of, I knew of some skill checks that would help me make progress; but for each of those skill checks, either I’d failed at them recently enough that the skill checks were locked, or else the skill check was at a low enough success probability that I didn’t want to try them. (I feel like I did do save reloading to make it past skill check failures in a couple of places, but in general I tried to avoid that.)

I didn’t feel like I was really blocked there: my guess was that, if I poked around, I’d find more ways to make progress, either in the quests I already knew about or in discovering new quests. But the problem with that was that the game was literally taking 90 seconds or more every time I did an area transition.

So if I wanted to, say, poke around in a building, then it would be 90 seconds to enter the building, 90 seconds to get out of the entry area of the building, 90 seconds to get to another floor of the building, and so forth; if you then add up the need to retrace my steps, it would easily take over 5 minutes and sometimes close to 10 minutes to explore a single building. Which is bad but workable if you’re exploring a building that’s new to you or that you’re going through for a specific reason, because you’re spending 5 minutes in transitions and 5 minutes going through dialogues and learning new things, that’s acceptable. But if you’re going into a building just because you think there’s something in the world you need to explore but don’t know where it is, and if you have to do that for five separate buildings, then pretty easily it can add up to spending half an hour where you haven’t seen anything new and where 25 minutes of that half hour is spent in loading screens.

This specific issue did get somewhat better (30 second transitions instead of 90 second transitions) after some random console update forced me to relaunch the game; I guess something had built up in memory in a bad way or something? Still, it really brought home to me the importance of that sort of quality of life issue.

 

But there’s also an issue there other than the quality of life issue. Unless I’m missing something, it really is possible to get into a soft locked state in Disco Elysium in a way that isn’t possible in traditional RPGs, and also in a way that different from the way you can get locked if you, say, can’t figure out puzzles in a point-and-click adventure game.

Because, in a traditional RPG, if a key battle is too hard for you, there’s almost always a way to grind for experience; not the best experience, and I wish RPGs had a lot less grinding, but at least it lets you make it past a bad spot / lack of skill. In Disco Elysium, in contrast, there’s no way to grind: unless I’m missing something, there is simply a limited pool of XP available in the game. And if you combine this with randomized dice rolls to make it past skill check puzzle gates plus the fact that those skill checks then get locked until you level up the skill in question (or get more relevant information through a dialogue tree or something), that means that, if you’re unlucky, you haven’t been keeping a reserve of skill points that you can use to level up in an emergency, and you’ve exhausted all of the ways to get XP that you know of, then your choices are either: 1) save scum; 2) look up a walkthrough; or 3) exhaustively search the entire map hoping you can find enough XP to bring you up a level. (And then hoping that the dice do better next time!)

This isn’t a great set of choices. Of those three, I would normally prefer the exhaustive search; but, as noted, the exhaustive search was particularly unpleasant for me; eventually, I gave up the search and did a mixture of the other two approaches to get past the worst of this. I’m not going to say that I’ve got a better alternative that avoids this soft lock possibility entirely, because I can see how design constraints led to those choices, and if the developers had made different choices, it would be a quite different game and a much less interesting one. Still, it meant that I wasn’t having much fun with the game for an evening or two.

 

I was also surprised by the game’s Thought Cabinet. When leveling up, instead of leveling up one of your (many!) stats, you can equip thoughts that you’ve unlocked; these require some research time, during which they generally have a negative side effect, but once the research is completed, they give you some sort of bonus. (Though perhaps one that still combines with negative aspects.)

Which is good: it gives a bit of flavor to the game, and the process of unlocking them also responds to the flavor that you bring to the game in terms of how you respond to various prompts. And it’s kind of interesting to have a way to use your skill points where you don’t know in advance what’s going to come out of that choice: it’s a pretty different feel from choosing which ability to unlock in a traditional RPG.

I was a little taken aback to realize that, to get rid of one of these thoughts, you also have to spend a skill point to get rid of it. When playing the game, that felt needlessly punitive to me: skill points aren’t that cheap to come by (with real consequences to that scarcity, as I discussed above), so having to spend two skill points to try out and then reject a thought felt like it discouraged experimentation in a way that I didn’t like?

Typing this up, though, I realize that the above analysis is incorrect: the point that you spend to equip the thought isn’t actually to equip that thought, it’s to open up a slot in your thought cabinet. And, if you get rid of the thought, the slot remains open. (At least I’m pretty sure it does; skimming the wiki gives that impression.) So you’re not back to where you started after spending the second skill point: you can immediately equip another thought for free.

And that choice feels right to me. If you could unequip thoughts for free, then you’d switch between thoughts like you can switch between items of clothing, to get whatever local benefits you want. That would be okay, I guess, but it would reduce the metaphorical impact of the thoughts, it would mean that the mechanical effect of thoughts was too similar to the mechanical effect of clothing, and it would encourage (or at least support) a completionist style of play where you try out as many thoughts as possible in a single playthrough.

Whereas, if there’s a cost to change your thoughts, then that feeds into a way of thinking about the game where you’re using the thoughts to shape your character or express something about the character. So your character is likely to stick with thoughts once they have them, unless a specific thought comes with a strong negative consequence; and while I expected to be frustrated when I hit the cap of thoughts that I could store at once in my thought cabinet, in practice when I hit that I was approaching the endgame anyways, and was happy to move on. So the developers sized things out nicely: putting in a constraint, but not in a way that really grated, just in a way that expressed what they want out of the game.

(Incidentally, while I don’t have any immediate plans to replay the game, I am hoping that Liesl decides to give it a try. That would let me see what some of the other thoughts look like, and to also get an appreciation for how the game feels if you choose a different set of starter stats.)

 

Anyways: very good game, other than the load times. I’m glad it’s exploring a different part of the mechanical game space than I’m used to; I’m glad it’s exploring a different part of the narrative game space than I’m used to; and the visual style is a bonus. It’s refreshing to see a game that is doing its own thing, and carrying that off in a well-thought-out fashion.

relaxing your shoulders

December 29th, 2021

Over the last year or so, I feel like I’ve gotten significantly better at relaxing my shoulders while doing Nei Gong or Tai Chi. And some of the steps in that process have surprised me, so I figured I’d write some notes about it here. (Actually, to some extent the fact that it’s a process at all surprised me a little! Just relax your shoulders, how hard can that be?)

So here are some notes on the steps that I’ve gone through. As you’ll see, most of these steps aren’t actually directly about relaxing your shoulders: instead, they’re about changing your body positioning so that you’ll get the most out of relaxing your shoulders.

 

Step 1: Gokhale Shoulder Rolls

This is a technique for proper shoulder positioning that I learned from the Gokhale Method. The problem that this is trying to solve is that, if you’re like me and have spent lots of time sitting at a computer, you’ve probably gotten used to hunching forward a bit, with the result that your shoulders are too far forward; this isn’t great positioning, especially when you’re trying to relax your shoulders.

You might think that you would want your arms to hang down from your shoulders in a position that’s in the middle of your torso, but that’s not actually the case. The majority of your rib cage is in front of your spine: the back of your rib cage attaches to the back of your spine, with your rib cage sticking out quite a bit in front of your spine. In contrast, you want your shoulders to be quite close to your spine; they’ll attach slightly in front of your spine, but it should still be the case that the majority of your rib cage is in front of your shoulders. And this means that your upper arms should hang down along the back half of your torso.

One indirect check on your positioning is to let your arms hang loosely by your side, in whatever position feels natural to you. Then look at your hands: are the palms of your hands mostly pointing towards your body, or are your palms either pointing back or at a 45 degree angle towards the back? If they’re mostly pointing towards your body, then there’s a good chance that your shoulders are positioned correctly; if your palms have a significant tilt towards the back, then there’s a good chance that your shoulders are too far forward.

 

The obvious fixes for this (e.g. pulling your shoulders straight back) turn out not to work very well: they might get the positioning right in the short term, but they don’t work to retrain your body. The technique that I’ve found that works for me is from the Gokhale Method; it goes as follows:

Pick one shoulder, and do the following:

  1. Move the shoulder forward a bit.
  2. Move the shoulder up a bit.
  3. Move the shoulder back a fair amount.
  4. Let the shoulder slide down from that position.

Then repeat that on the other side.

 

Note that you’re not repeatedly rolling your shoulder here: you do it once on each side, and let your shoulder stay where it ends up. Also, don’t do both shoulders at the same time: for whatever reason, it works significantly better if you do each shoulder separately. You can do this while sitting or standing, it works fine either way. Here’s a PDF, video, and blog post from Gokhale discussing this.

When working on this exercise, do it several times a day (but just once per side each time), whenever you think of doing it. I got my shoulders pretty well retrained after doing that for a couple of weeks.

 

Once you’ve retrained your shoulders, you’ll find that you have to adjust other aspects of your body to maintain that positioning. For example, when typing at a keyboard, if you don’t change your desk layout, you’ll probably end up with your arms stretched forward somewhat, which in turn will tug your shoulders forward. What you want instead is to have your upper arms hanging down from the proper position; not necessarily straight down, but not tilted forward enough to put any tug on your shoulder. Then, bend your arms to almost 90 degrees at the elbows, so your hands can end up in a good typing position. The result is that your shoulders will be a little farther back than they had been in the past and your elbows will be quite a bit further back and lower than they had been in the past; so you’ll end up needing to sit closer to your keyboard, with the keyboard in a lower position than it had been in the past.

Also, I should say that it’s okay for your shoulders to sometimes go forward: they should do that when there’s a specific reason to do so, like when you’re pushing something in front of you. (E.g. while performing a move with Ji energy during Tai Chi.) The goal is to retrain your default shoulder position, not to restrict your total range of shoulder movement.

 

Step 2: Reposition Your Head

Next, work on repositioning your head. Again, if you’re like me and had gotten used to hunching forward a bit, then your head and next are also probably too far forward, not just your shoulders. So you want to retrain that, for two reasons.

The first reason is that your head is heavy. So, if your head is too far forward, then it’ll drag the rest of your body forward, and in particular will drag your shoulders forward. And, if you fight against that with your shoulders, then your shoulders will be tense. Either way, they won’t be relaxed and in the correct location.

The second reason is that our goal is actually not to relax all of our body at once, because if you do that, you’ll collapse onto the floor! The best way to relax as much of your body as possible is to try to fix one or a few points of your body in space, and have the rest of your body hang down off of those points.

And your skull works well as an anchor point. If you can keep your head in place, even lightly stretching it up, then that enables you to relax your spine and torso, letting them hang down off of your skull. In particular, if you want to stretch out your spine, thinking of it as a chain with the skull providing an anchor at one end and the pelvis providing a weight at the other end can be very useful. (I won’t go into detail about that here, but relaxing your pelvis is also worth working on.)

 

So you want your skull to be lightly tugged upward, and also to be further back than you probably normally have it. The point where you want upward pressure to come from is above where your spine meets your skull, which is in the back half of your skull; not all the way at the back, but you should try to raise your head from a point above the ears.

I don’t find it so useful to try to directly move my skull to the correct position. Instead, I start by sliding my skull back; if I do that, I feel a bit like it’s moving along tracks, and that those tracks curve upward as they go back, until they’re going mostly up rather than back. So I move my skull along that curve.

As part of doing this, it feels a bit like I’m tucking my chin. You definitely don’t want to bend your head forward, and actively tuck your chin in that way, but your chin will feel like it’s not jutting out as much, and the back of your jaw will be further back along your neck.

Unlike the first step, this isn’t something where you retrain your body and then the new positioning clicks into place after a week or two. My default head positioning has definitely changed somewhat, but I still don’t think that my default positioning is the healthiest one. Maybe that’s a sign that I haven’t found the right exercise yet to help with this process; or maybe that’s a sign that there’s more muscle building and retraining work necessary for this step, which makes it a longer process?

 

Step 3: Shoulder Blade Circles

Honestly, I’d been thinking of my shoulder blades as a relatively static part of my body. But they’re not: you want your shoulder blades to sink as well when you sink your shoulders.

Also, you want your shoulder blades positioned correctly. There’s a good chance that they were dragged forward along with your shoulders and neck; if so, they’re probably too far to the sides of your back, with the center edge of your shoulder blades jutting away from your back. Instead, what you want is for them to be relatively flat on your back, running along the back of your rib cage, without a sharp edge along the inner edge of your shoulder blades.

Your shoulder blade positioning will be changing on an ongoing basis as you work on relaxing your shoulders, but to help get that process started, you should free up your shoulder blades by doing shoulder blade circles. These are like regular shoulder circles (as opposed to the Gokhale variant from above), but centered further down on your back. So do regular circles, moving both shoulders together, first up, then back, then down, then forward. But have the point around which you’re doing the circling be lower down than with traditional shoulder circles: you want to be primarily moving your shoulder blades, with the shoulders only moving as a side effect.

While you’re doing this, have your attention localized on your shoulder blades, to increase your awareness of what’s going on there.

 

Don’t start on this exercise until you’ve done the Gokhale shoulder rolls enough to have mostly reset your shoulders to hang from your sides.

There’s no fixed number of shoulder rolls to do here; maybe 5 or 10 at a time? You can also do the rolls in the other direction if you want, but if you do it in both directions, end with the version that I’ve listed, because that version helps your shoulders go back.

There’s not a particular end goal with this exercise; just do it a couple of times a day for a week or so. And even after that week, it’s a good idea to do this before standing meditation exercises.

 

Step 4: Relax Your Shoulders

With all of that out of the way, we get to the point of this post: relax your shoulders! Unlike the previous steps, I don’t have specific exercises to recommend here: I assume that, if you care enough about this topic to have read this far, you probably already know exercises where it’s relevant. (Wu Ji, Zhan Zhuang, individual bits of Tai Chi forms, even seated meditation.)

During any of these, you want to relax your shoulders. So, certainly, do that. But you should do a few other things in combination with that. First, make sure your head and neck are positioned as in Step 2 above, so that your relaxed shoulders are hanging from the base of your skull. Second, relax the front of your chest as well: in particular, if you relax the point in the front of your chest right above the notch at the top of your rib cage, then that will help relax the entire upper half of your torso. (This point is known as Tian Tu.) Third, relax your shoulder blades; Step 3 will have freed them up a bit, and has also given you practice putting your awareness in your shoulder blades, which should help you notice whether they’re relaxed or not. If you do all of this then, when you relax your shoulders, you’ll get a strong feeling that your shoulders are sliding out to the sides as they go down; this is good.

 

You should also, counterintuitively, feel your arms rising as you relax your shoulders. If you’re doing an exercise where your arms are hanging down, this rising motion be hard to feel, but you should feel your elbows being pushed out to the sides in that situation. The rise will be more apparent if you’re in a position with your arms raised; by relaxing more and letting your shoulders sink, it’ll become easier to keep your arms up, and you’ll feel energy going out along your arms.

This last paragraph is why I’ve brought up your shoulder blades. As far as I can tell, what’s going on there is that your shoulder assembly is like a pulley system, with the ball and socket of your shoulder as the pivot point, your shoulder blades on one side on one side of the pivot point, and your arm on the other side. So when your shoulder blade sinks, it acts as a counterweight for your arm, and the more your shoulder blade goes down, the more your arm goes up.

Because of this, the effects on your arms of relaxing your shoulders are particularly noticeable in positions like Zhan Zhuang where your arms are high up. If you don’t relax your shoulders, then you’ll not only be depending solely on your muscles to hold up your arms, but your muscles will be holding up the whole arm / shoulder blade assembly. Whereas if you relax your shoulders, then the balls of your arms will sink down into the sockets (which already provides some support), your shoulder blades will be sinking so you won’t spend energy holding them up, and your shoulder blades will actively help raise your arms. I’m sure I have more work to do at improving my Zhan Zhuang (it’s not a posture I spend much time on), so there must be many subtleties there that I’m missing, but this change has made it less painful for me.

 

Another thing that I’ve noticed over the last year or two is the ways in which my back aches after a long session of standing meditation. I’m used to certain kinds of pain along my lower spine that is a sign that I’ve stressed my back in an unfortunate way, but this is something different: the pain is higher up and noticeably off of my spine, centered around the bottom of my shoulder blades, and it feels different in character from lower back pain.

I’m fairly sure that what’s going on there is that, as I’ve been relaxing my shoulder blades and letting them sink more, it’s been putting pressure on soft tissues of my back that are around and below my shoulder blades. So my working theory is that that particular pain is a good sign, that it’s a sign that my body is adapting; and in practice that pain hasn’t been a problem, it goes away after a day or two and never causes serious discomfort. And also I haven’t been noticing it as much recently, which presumably means that my body has been adapting.

 

It’s been a journey, and I’m quite sure that I’ve got more to learn here. But I’m glad at what I’ve been learning about my body so far.

beast breaker

November 28th, 2021

The trailer for Beast Breaker looked charming, though I couldn’t quite figure out how much gameplay there was: was it really doing enough with Peggle-style mechanics to support a game? Were there enough adventure game trappings to make me care? Still, I heard a few people talk about it positively, including some expressing pleased surprise with how varied the mechanics were, that I decided to give it a shot as a breather between longer games.

And, for the first couple of hours, I was glad I did. Even the first weapon had some aspects that made it different from pure bouncy Peggle gameplay, having you chose between different moves with different characteristics and tactical uses. And the second weapon was completely different (and much less bouncy!) than the first one. And then I came across variants of those weapons, with different move sets that suggested a different approach to combat. There was also a little home base and characters that lived there, which suggested that, though it didn’t seem to be a full-blown adventure game, there should at least be pleasant narrative bits popping up.

 

For a while, it more less kept going like that: a third weapon type, more weapon variants. And monsters got a little harder, which made me think more about some of the mechanics that I hadn’t previously explored. There were even hints that I’d be heading out into a broader world that might lead to something interesting narratively?

But then it stopped getting better. I stopped getting new weapon types; I did sometimes unlock new variants of existing weapon types, but they were often very minor variants indeed. The plot bits got farther apart, and when they did show up, they weren’t very interesting.

And I also found that I wasn’t actually enjoying the gameplay all that much. Probably the weapon that felt the most fun was the initial weapon type, where you were bouncing all over the place, with a pleasant sort of randomness. But randomness comes with downsides as well as upsides, and as the monsters got harder, the downsides started to actually matter.

 

I kept on going for a couple more hours, but ultimately, I decided it was time for me to stop. I really had enjoyed the start of the game, but that enjoyment was more tied to the novelty of the combat and the initial charm of the game rather than the depth of the combat and the heart of the game. I won’t necessarily say that Beast Breaker is a bad game, but there’s not a lot more there than it looks like up front, and for me, that wasn’t enough to keep me going with it.

ghost of tsushima

November 21st, 2021

I recently hit a bit of a lull in my backlog: I’d made it through the recent games that had particularly caught my eye, and wasn’t sure what to do next. It had been a while since I’d done a random AAA game, so I decided to play Ghost of Tsushima: I don’t have a lot of experience playing open world games, what I’d heard about it made me think it was reasonably up my alley, and multiple coworkers really liked it.

And I’m glad I played it! In fact, it might be the only game that I’ve ever gotten a Platinum trophy on; that honestly says as much about the developer’s choices as to what to base trophies on (e.g. there wasn’t a New Game Plus trophy) as it does about the extent to which I was hooked on the game, but I do approve of a philosophy of trophy design that’s more along the lines of nudging you to dive into different areas of the game rather than asking you to be obsessive.

 

Mostly I liked the way the open-worldness played out. The world of Ghost of Tsushima is a very pleasant world to travel through: I enjoyed riding my horse, the landscapes felt natural, the settlements were tiny to small but pleasant.

And, as befits an open world game, there’s stuff to do everywhere: I’d figure out where the next mission was that I felt like doing, I’d plan out a route more or less in that direction that either passed through some question marks or else passed through an uncharted area of the map, and by the time I’d gotten to that mission, I’d probably have made friends with a fox, and I might have climbed a shrine or liberated a settlement or something. It’s always a good sign when I enjoy traveling in a game enough that I basically never use fast travel; the fast travel in Ghost of Tsushima is actually very well done, with some of the fastest loading times I’ve ever seen, but despite that I almost never used it.

And of course it helped that, in general, I enjoyed the side activities. The fox shrines were charming: I like the way the fox jumps when it sees you, and I was always happy if the fox wanted tummy rubs at the end. And the regular shrines were pleasant enough platforming puzzles. (This isn’t the sort of game where you can make it up the side of mountains by jumping on random rocks, instead there are explicitly marked areas with platforming affordances; a little silly, but I enjoyed it just fine.) The battles to free settlements were okay on an individual level but I wish the game had had a little fewer of them? The only activity that I thought was kind of bad was the haiku spots, because the poems there just weren’t very good (games, take writing seriously!), but at least those were short.

 

And I generally enjoyed the missions themselves, too. There are four basic kinds of missions: the primary plot; chains of side missions for five separate sidekick characters; one-off side missions; and missions where you’re following up on a legend. The last kind were pleasant enough excuses to travel from place to place, and each of them ended with a duel, leading to some of the harder battles in the game, which was a good change of pace. The one-off side missions had you travel a bit in a more geographically restricted area, and had you solving somebody’s problem and learn a bit more about what’s going on in that area. And the sidekick missions were a chain of missions leading to that sidekick’s primary goal, I liked learning more about the characters that way.

The main plot, though, wasn’t so great. I mean, the missions were fine as missions; it’s just that the main plot was also trying to tell a story about what it meant to be a samurai that I just wasn’t into. Basically, you have this uncle with a rigid code of samurai honor; but the game teaches you various techniques to use as it progresses, and many of those techniques go against your uncle’s code.

So the game builds up this narrative where you turn into “The Ghost”, causing more and more distance between you and your uncle. The problem is, though, that your uncle is going to say what he’s going to say no matter what you do. So there’s no talking with him about the matter; but also, early on, there was one mission where I assaulted an enemy encampment in exactly the way my uncle would prefer, and after that the cutscenes treated me like I’d done all sorts of backstabbing stuff. Which is fine in a way, it freed me up to actually do backstabbing stuff, I liked that as a change of pace; but then later on there’s one mission in particular where the game forced me to poison an entire encampment, which I didn’t particularly want to do, I agreed with my uncle that that was a bad idea, but I didn’t have a choice!

So it’s this weird combination where the game decides what sort of character you are narrative-wise but then the game gives you freedom of choice in your actions that don’t match the narrative. It wasn’t awful or anything, it was just a little off in how it fit together.

 

And then there’s the combat. You learn some number of moves for fighting with your sword, but also get access to a decent number of items that mostly work to support stealth-based combat but also can be used at times in a supporting role for sword-based combat. Also, you have access to bows, both for distance attacks and for shooting stuff in the environment to cause havoc.

That all adds up to combat that I enjoyed more than in most games. This isn’t the sort of game that requires hardcore fighting mastery, which is good, because in general that’s not what I’m into. (It does ask you to parry sometimes, but it’s okay if you don’t get your parries consistently right, situations where parries are important are telegraphed explicitly, and the parry window is pretty large.) But I did end up approaching battles in a few different ways; I didn’t use all the tools, but probably more of them than I would in most games?

Having said that, there was a bit too much combat for me. At first, I managed that by skipping most of the “this settlement needs to be liberated” markers on the map. But then I decided that I probably was going to try to get the achievements, so I started doing more of those, and then I realized that they also helped me uncover more of the map, giving me more access to the kinds of side quests I enjoyed a bit more. And the liberation missions ended up being fine; by the time I decided to stop avoiding them, I was good enough at combat (and/or had gotten enough tools and leveled up my gear enough) that they didn’t take me very long.

 

All in all, I enjoyed the time I spent with Ghost of Tsushima. Maybe if I’d played more open world games, more of it would have seemed excessively cliched to me, but I kind of feel like Ghost of Tsushima is some combination of being a relatively well done open-world game and of being a game that uses the genre in ways that are fairly well targeted to my tastes? Ultimately, it’s an open world game where I enjoy spending time in that world, and that’s a good combination.

unsubscribing from apple arcade

November 18th, 2021

If you like playing video games, you, up until fairly recently, had two choices of how to play them at home, a console or a PC. If you play them on console, then, basically, you can just stick in the game and it will work. But the downsides are that it will only work on that specific console model, so good luck being able to play that game in a decade; that the console manufacturer keeps very tight control over what games are even allowed on the console; and that the manufacturers only put out new console models every five years or so, so the hardware gets obsolete very quickly. Whereas, on a PC, all this is flipped: it’s up to you to find the magic incantation to get a game working on your specific machine (and even to keep the machine running at a basic level without viruses and what not), but Microsoft and fan communities do try pretty hard to make it possible to keep on playing your favorite games indefinitely, anybody can publish whatever game they want on a PC, and there’s an extremely competitive hardware market constantly making the machines better and driving down the price of the former bleeding edge.

Some of the details of what I’ve said above have actually improved over the last decade, but still, the broad picture holds. Or at least it holds for those two business models, but a third model is available, namely the smartphone ecosystem. And smartphones do a pretty good job of taking the benefits of both consoles and PCs: smartphone games are easy to install and get running, it’s closer to the PC side in terms of the ease of publishing games, and the hardware capabilities are actually growing at a faster rate than on a PC. (Though it’s much less clear to me what the longevity of smartphone games looks like: I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to play a smartphone game on your new phone 15 years after you originally bought it, but in practice it’s not clear that it’s working out that way.)

In other words, yay for smartphones. (And for tablets, everything about phones applies to tablets as well.) The problem is that while what I wrote above is true enough from a capabilities point of view, the actual games on smartphones mostly aren’t what I want, for two reasons. One is the input model: these are devices that are natively controlled exclusively by touch, which just does not work well for the majority of games that I’ve historically enjoyed. And the other is the business model: app store prices quickly raced to zero, at which point companies switched to free to play plus microtransactions, which again is a very bad fit for most of the genres of games that I enjoy, and which also led to abusive practices by game developers. Maybe there’s a third issue, too, which is that there are a lot more phones than tablets in the world, and phone screens are quite small.

So: not at all what I wanted. Or at least mostly not what I wanted: the iPad is, in my view, the best platform for puzzle games and for card-based games. (I just wish companies would publish their roguelike deck builders on the iPad! It’s certainly my favorite platform for Slay the Spire.) And I do have some puzzle games that I spend a lot of time playing on my phone and tablet, possibly more time than I spend playing games on consoles! But it’s still the case that most games I play and am interested in playing are games that I play on consoles.

 

When Apple released the first version of Apple TV that supported apps, I felt like ingredients were there to solve those problems. It plugs into your TV just like a console does, and while it doesn’t come with a game controller, Apple did at least talk about using game controllers with the Apple TV starting pretty early on. Yes, the Apple TV came with an underpowered GPU, but Apple had already shown that their CPUs were improving incredibly quickly, so if they could do the same thing to GPUs and if they would just release a new Apple TV every year (or maybe every two years) with a new system on a chip, then the Apple TV would catch up to consoles within three or five years, and be better than traditional consoles in pretty much every aspect not very many years after that.

There weren’t a lot of game publishers supporting the Apple TV, though, and I heard a lot of bad things about the remote that came with the system, so I held off on buying one. And, as it went on, it seemed like Apple wasn’t actually interested in directly building the Apple TV up to being a game console competitor.

But then Apple announced Apple Arcade. Which, at the very least, was an attack on some of the downsides of the traditional smartphone business model, since microtransactions aren’t a thing in Apple Arcade. And all the games on the service are supposed to work on all of Apple’s platforms, so maybe it will start making the Apple TV more of a viable game platform? Or maybe not, because it’ll require games to work with touch controls because games on the service also have to work on touch-first platforms.

 

So I figured I’d give Apple Arcade a try. I still didn’t have an Apple TV, and I still didn’t want to get one (among other things because Apple wasn’t updating it like they were their other devices, so it was getting even more underpowered), but I could at least try things out on the iPad, and I could connect up a game controller to the iPad for games that would work better with one. And it looked like Apple was working with good developers; mostly good developers in the smartphone space, but still, I was happy to see those names.

And, well, it was okay? Some pleasant enough puzzle stuff, some other light narrative games that I enjoyed. To my surprise, most of the games worked well on my iPad Air 2, even though that machine was from 2014; that was a really good machine! But not all did, so I had an excuse that I’d been looking for anyways to upgrade my iPad.

I did end up getting a game controller, to play Sayonara Wild Heards, though that ended up being a bit of a warning sign: when I connected a controller to my iPad, the audio through my AirPods started getting interrupted constantly. Which you would think would be a pretty standard setup; either I’ve got some bad hardware somewhere, or Apple didn’t care enough about that combo to test and fix it. And that latter hypothesis would mean that Apple doesn’t actually care about game controllers, since they certainly care about AirPods.

 

A couple of times a year, I’d try out another batch of Apple Arcade games, and I’d have the same feeling: these games are fine, I’m not unhappy playing them, but I could come up with a hundred other games that I’d get as much out of and a couple dozen games that I’m more interested in playing than anything in the service.

And then Apple did release a new Apple TV model (without the apparently awful remote), so I figured I’d get one; it was time to upgrade our video streaming box anyways, and if I can try out games, so much the better. I’d been thinking I wanted to try The Pathless, so I gave that a shot.

And, again, it was okay? Pleasant enough to have played, but not great. But also it was specifically bad on the Apple TV: slightly little janky at the start, though that got better, but then when I got to the third or fourth boss fight, the framerate was like fighting a slideshow.

So, basically, Apple and the Apple Arcade developers don’t prioritize having their games run at all acceptably on one of the potential hardware pillars for the service. I mean, maybe that’s a bit strong, it’s a sample size of one game, but right now it looks to me like at least some of the potential console benefits aren’t there for the service: even on a service with a limited number of hand-selected games, there’s still either too little oversight or too many hardware variants for me to be confident that games work well across those hardware variants.

 

In retrospect, this is all completely unsurprising. Apple is an unusually consistent company: they have the same priorities year after year, and for things that aren’t their priorities, they might make noise about them every so often but they don’t put in the effort to make them consistently work.

And games are something that isn’t a priority for Apple. For example, they used to periodically make noise about improving gaming for the Mac, but nothing every came out of it. (They did regularly showcase games in product announcements, but those all felt like those were because Apple wanted a tech demo rather than because Apple institutionally cared about games.)

In multiple ways, Apple isn’t the company I would like it to be; I should accept that instead of getting sucked into spending time either leaning into wishful thinking and pretending that isn’t the case or getting frustrated by the fact that that isn’t the case.

 

Anyways, I’ve unsubscribed from Apple Arcade. Though I did think about that for a bit; Apple Arcade isn’t what I would most like it to be, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in what Apple Arcade actually is. Looking at the games on the service, though, Patterned is the only game that I’ll miss, and I won’t miss it five bucks a month.

Which leads to two other points. One is that, while I do like all-you-can-eat services, I have a strong preference for ones that are making stuff available that I can also buy individually (either from the service owner or from other sources); boo Apple Arcade, boo Netflix.

And the other is that Apple Arcade actually does a good job with games that play to the strengths of the iPhone / iPad; a few months back, they added versions of a lot of older games to their back catalog, and whoever was in charge of that had very good taste. So, if you didn’t already have those games, that selection of games probably would provide enough value to be worth the $5/month that Apple Arcade costs! But I’d already bought copies of most of those games, so it didn’t make a difference for me personally.

the pathless

October 24th, 2021

I’m always keeping my ears open for interesting Apple Arcade games, and I’d recently gotten an Apple TV, which made me more curious about console-style Apple Arcade games in particular. And I saw some positive mentions of The Pathless on Twitter and in podcasts, and at least some of the people involved in it had a thatgamecompany background; some of the mentions also mentioned that the game took inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus, which is certainly a plus for me. So I gave it a try.

And I’m glad I gave it a try; I spent a pleasant six or eight hours with the game. But also: while I can see where comparisons with Journey or Shadow of the Colossus come from, The Pathless doesn’t come particularly close to reaching the (very high!) bar that those two games set. And actually it turned me off of Apple Arcade as well; I’ll write a separate post about that one, and it mostly wasn’t the fault of The Pathless, it’s more that I’d been wondering for a while whether to cancel that subscription, and The Pathless didn’t convince me I shouldn’t.

 

(There will be light mechanical spoilers below for the first hour or so of the game. Nothing to worry about unless you’re super sensitive to spoilers, though.)

The environments in The Pathless are pretty good, I think? But they’re not great, and I can’t entirely figure out why I didn’t feel more positive about them. They’re laid out in a way that feels relatively natural (as in inspired by nature) to me, which I’m normally drawn to. And the environment is dotted with ruins, which are well done, I feel like I should enjoy that too?

It’s possible that the textures are a little flat for me. Having said that, Journey largely takes place in a desert, so clearly I don’t demand too much in the way of texture in my games? Maybe the actual issue is more of the opposite, that the environment is, in some sense, a little busy. There are these floating arrow targets all over the place in your environment; their main function is to provide a boost mechanic, enabling you to zip through the environments pretty quickly if you keep on shooting them. Which is fine, I guess, but I think at some level those targets made the world feel kind of busy to me.

And the ruins made the world feel slightly busy to me as well, I think. Because a ruin isn’t just a ruin (in The Pathless or in most video games): it’s generally a signpost for a secret. So, when seeing them, my brain doesn’t just say “oh, neat ruin”: instead, it says “where’s the secret in this ruin?” And, fairly soon, it moves on to “do I actually want to spend the time on getting the secret in this ruin?” Frequently the answer was yes, but sometimes (and increasingly frequently as I spent more time wit the game) the answer was no.

So, in both cases, the environment felt a little instrumentalized to me, in ways that created a barrier to my just enjoying the experience of being present in the world. Which is quite standard in video games, of course, this just felt like the kind of game that might have the potential to step back a little bit more than it actually does?

 

That “shoot targets to dash” mechanism is actually a little odd. Like, on one level, it turns out to be a pretty neat mechanism: dashing is fun, and it turns out that the mechanism can also be used to keep you in the air while you’re jumping, so once you get good at it, you can cover pretty large gaps in space as long as there are enough targets between where you start and where you land. And the game adds in some variants later on to make the mechanism more versatile, in particular a version that launches you vertically, so you can climb up quite a bit in places where there are chains of those.

The thing is, though: at the end of the introductory level of the game, you get a bird friend. And the bird friend can carry you while it flies! So there’s this other mechanism that lets you cross large horizontal gaps, and to climb vertically as well. And using the bird to cross gaps is an awful lot easier than chaining your arrow shots. (I feel like it was within reach for me to learn how to use the arrow mechanism reliably, but why should I bother to put in that effort?) It feels pretty weird to me to have two different mechanisms that solve the same problem; the game puts in a few puzzles where you’re not allowed to use the bird to cross gaps and climb, but that feels like retroactive justification to me.

That leaves the dash justification for the arrow targets; and dashing is fun. But still, why not let people just dash all of the time, if that’s what you want? It feels odd to litter the landscape with something that’s there to enable pervasive dashing, when you could just, you know, enable pervasive dashing. And what I actually want to do much of the time is to be flying over the landscape instead of dashing through it, but flying is slower; this leaves me with a tradeoff that I’m not sure brings me much value?

Honestly, it almost feels to me like the whole shooting-as-travel mechanism would work best as a speedrunning affordance. I feel like you could navigate most of the situations where I used my bird by dashing / arrow jumping instead, and that dashing / arrow jumping would be faster for people who are good at it. But, again, that’s a pretty weird affordance to stick into the game so pervasively.

 

That’s the arrow targets. Then there are the environmental puzzles: tasks that you (with the help of your bird friend) have to figure out and accomplish in order to get keys that let you light towers that are necessary to progress. Except that there are quite a bit more keys than that; if you gather all of them on one level, it looks like something should happen, but I don’t know what, and I wasn’t quite enjoying the game enough to go back to one of the earlier levels and get all the keys. (It didn’t help that there’s no fast travel between levels and that finishing the final boss and going through credits puts you at the start screen instead of leaving you in world.)

So the upshot is that there are a lot of puzzles to solve; and there are also puzzles that don’t involve the keys that are useful for powering up your bird friend. Each individual puzzle was pleasant enough, but halfway through the game, I kind of hit puzzle overload. I still mostly kept on solving them, so even on the final level I had more keys than were necessary just to get to the towers. But it was also the case that, for the last couple of levels, I was feeling like I might have been making the wrong choice by doing that. The puzzles just aren’t different enough from each other, and don’t particularly grow from level to level, so once I’ve seen each puzzle archetype four or five times, I’ve more or less gotten what I’m going to get out of that puzzle.

Again, though, none of this is unusual for video games! Games will ask me to defeat a given kind of enemy in combat a thousand times without batting an eye; but here I’m wondering whether I want to solve the puzzles that are similar but not identical ten times? I don’t know quite what it is about The Pathless that has me questioning that aspect of the game play, and I actually think that my questioning is mostly pointing at something positive about The Pathless, because most games don’t deserve that sort of interrogation. But, also, there are lots of games out there that keep me poking at them in fairly repetitive ways for two or three dozen hours without grumbling too much…

 

There are also boss battles at the end of each section. They’re fine, nothing to write home about? I do appreciate that there’s no fail state in them: if you run out of health, it just knocks you back again, you pick yourself up, and start over at the start of the current phase. But, in general, the different bosses are pretty similar, nothing special there; and, for whatever reason, one of the bosses for some reason had huge performance problems on the Apple TV, making that particular boss battle feel like a slide show.

I think the game wanted the boss creatures to be something more, to make you care about them via a “giant majestic beast” vibe. It didn’t work for me; I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, thinking about it a bit more, one of their other design choices might have worked against that: the bosses are wandering around the level while you’re gathering keys and lighting up towers, and if you get too close to them, you get put into a stealth puzzle mode where you have to avoid their gaze. So that meant that I was actively discouraged from appreciating their majesty in the run-up to the boss battle: I wanted to stay away from them, and even when I got close, I still wanted to avoid them. And the boss battles themselves took place at a fast enough pace to discourage me from drinking in the beasts’ potential majesty there as well.

 

Anyways, to sum it up: The Pathless is okay, a pleasant way to spend 5–10 hours. And there are things in its design that I enjoyed thinking about. But I can’t say that I’d actively recommend it.

chicory

October 3rd, 2021

Chicory is, basically, a game in the style of a 2D Zelda but with almost all of the combat removed and with the game themed around coloring the world. (At the start of the game, all color has been drained from the world; you’ve got a paintbrush that you can use to paint colors back in.) These all sound like things that I like, and I did in fact end up rather enjoying Chicory, but it took me a while to get there.

It started off pleasantly enough; the initial theme is introduced, you’ve got a village to wander around and some people to talk to, and an initial task to accomplish. Which requires wandering around a forest a bit, discovering how some of the plants interact with your paintbrush, and doing a bit of puzzle solving that follows from that. Then you get to a boss battle (which does involve light combat, unlike the exploration parts), and you get a paint brush upgrade which allows you to reach other parts of the overworld along with a narrative push to go to those other parts.

And that’s all to the good. The only real disappointment there was the painting: at (almost) any given point, you only have four colors to choose from, and very little fine-grained control over your brush. So it’s hard to see the painting as a form of personal expression: it’s more like somebody gave you four buckets of paint and said “if you feel like it, you can slosh these buckets of paint over stuff”. Which just isn’t that rewarding.

The flip side, though, is that I’m actually not much of an artist. So if the game were to go in more on having me express myself through painting tools, I probably actually wouldn’t have enjoyed that? Or at least I wouldn’t have enjoyed that if I had to do it too much; in Chicory, there are a few places that nudge you to do some painting, maybe designing a logo for a store or maybe taking some classes in an art academy. And, in each of those locations, I basically enjoyed doing what I was asked to do (and some of the paintings I ended up with were kind of charming), but also, I only did the minimal amount that each location asked of me.

So, in some sense, I actually think the game made some pretty good choices there: supporting players like me (and, I suspect, like a lot of other potential players) that are a lot more into the narrative and puzzle solving aspects of the game than the creative aspects of the game. I still feel like there’s something missing there, that they didn’t get the tools quite right, but in practice, the painting was fine.

 

Anyways, after that first bit, the game continues pretty much like you’d expect. You fight a boss, you get a brush power; that gives you an ability to travel past obstacles that you couldn’t travel past before, and also enables new forms of environmental puzzles for you to solve. And, as you travel, you’ll see hints of future puzzles / obstacles that you expect will be unlocked by future brush powers, leading you to wonder a bit about the details of what’s coming. All good stuff; and I enjoyed the puzzles.

But also all a little samey, like I’ve seen this before? Not entirely: having no combat in the overworld is certainly unusual, and the various capabilities that the brush enables are different from, say, the traditional powerups in a Zelda game. So it’s not a pure retread or anything; but I can imagine a game being more novel.

Also, while I’m lightly complaining about things: I’m not so sure about the boss battle combat. I do support having a game that mostly avoids combat but does still include boss battles; one of the best video games of all time does exactly that. Unlike Shadow of the Colossus, though, Chicory has a style where you don’t want the boss battles to be too hard. And, in general, they aren’t, and if you do die, the game just plunks you right back at the current phase of the boss fight that you were at, so you don’t lose much, and if you die too many times, the game starts nudging you to take extra lives.

But also, the combat in the boss battles is all about simultaneously dodging enemy attacks with the left thumbstick while having you paint a moving enemy with your right thumbstick. So you have to pay attention to two different parts of the screen and use your two thumbsticks to control two different actions corresponding to those two parts of the screen. And in some sense that’s actually pretty hard, it’s asking you to something that’s rather more perceptually complicated than a game where you’re running around the boss and trying to figure when to whack it and when to dodge. It’s not as bad as it could be, because most of the time you can either be in a mental mode of “move my character to escape the enemy attacks” or in a mental mode of “move the paintbrush over to the boss so I can damage it”, so in practice most of the time you only have to worry about half of the potential complexity, but still, there is something complex there. And maybe that’s okay! It was just a little unexpected.

 

So, at my halfway point through Chicory, I was starting to get a little down on the game: it was pleasant enough, but I’d hoped for a little more than I was seeing.

But then I started getting impressed by the game, for a different reason. (And not one I was expecting going in.) The game, of course, has a plot: the world has a single brush wielder, you’ve suddenly gotten put into that role, and there’s something going wrong that you need to deal with, as manifested by the colors disappearing and these weird trees that are starting to crop up.

As part of this, the question of “why was I chosen as the brush wielder, and am I really up for the task?” arises; no big surprise there, except maybe for the slightly unusual wrinkle that your predecessor and even a couple of other earlier brush wielders are still around: they’ve handed over the brush but they’re not dead.

That latter bit turns out to go in ways that I for one didn’t really expect, though. It’s not, of course, shocking for a game that leads off with colors disappearing from the world to touch with themes of depression. But what was a little surprising, at least for me, is that the depression didn’t show up in the main character: the character you play certainly has their difficulties to deal with (generally related to the fact that they’ve been suddenly thrust into a role that they’re not particularly prepared for), but also, the adults around them have issues too.

So Chicory turns out to be a rather lovely game that, in part, has you grapple with the fact that adults and authority figures not only don’t have all the answers, they’re also real people who are going through stuff that can be pretty hard to deal with. And I think the game handles this pretty well: it looks at that from the point of view of an adolescent coming of age who realizes that the adults around them are people with problems, and it also looks at that from the point of view of adults who have problems, and who don’t have things magically figured out just because they’re older and in a position of authority. Chicory handles this all in a kind, nuanced way, not minimizing problems that people have or the effects of those problems but also not treating those problems as reflecting some sort of grand moral statement or anything.

(Except that the game does end with a surprising moral statement, and it’s a good one! So yay on Chicory for that, too.)

 

So, ultimately: good game. The basic mechanics are solid, so if you like 2D adventure games, you’ll probably like Chicory fine? And it turns out that there’s also something deeper going on; it wasn’t what I expected going in, but once I stopped focusing on what I was expected and started listening a little more to other aspects of the story, I liked what I found.

fill-a-pix

September 26th, 2021

Conceptis has a bunch of very good mobile puzzle apps; probably my favorite three puzzle types of theirs are Slitherlink, Nurikabe, and Fill-a-Pix, but most of them are good enough that I play the free puzzles every week, and I probably buy one paid puzzle packs of one type or another from Conceptis every week on average.

Looking at those three puzzle types, I guess it’s a pretty clear sign that I like puzzles where you build out the solution locally, with a sort of geometric / organic feel to them? And puzzles with a rhythm of watching the puzzle grow as you do fairly obvious (but pleasant!) stuff for a while, then stopping and thinking until you can find a non-obvious way to progress somewhere, and then going back to obvious mode. (Admittedly, that last sentence describes an awful lot of puzzle types!)

 

Anyways, I want to talk about Fill-a-Pix. Conceptis actually classifies their Fill-a-Pix puzzles into two buckets: Basic, which can be solved purely by directly applying the rules, and Advanced, which require you to apply techniques that are consequences of the rules rather than restatements of the rules. And their UI supports this distinction, allowing you to switch between single-cell control and 3×3-group-of-cells control, where the latter tries to apply the rules directly.

Fill-a-Pix is, I think, unique among their puzzle types in having Conceptis make that specific distinction; part of the strength of the puzzle is that Basic puzzles really are quite pleasant to fill out, and sometimes I actually do get stuck for a minute or so trying to find the next place to continue. At least I get stuck if I limit myself to the direct techniques that Basic uses; I like to do that because it’s a pleasant restriction and because it’s useful practice to be able to see the foundational deductions quickly.

The Advanced puzzles are quite a bit more interesting, though. As with pretty much all interesting puzzle types, there are theorems that you can prove from the rules; they’re of the form of “if you have a group of cells with certain numbers in some of them matching some constraints and with some of the cells known to be filled or empty, then you can prove that certain other cells much also be filled/empty”. In Fill-a-Pix, these theorems are all basically algebra combined with constraints on needing small positive integer solutions; some of them I found quickly, some of them I found a little later as I got over the hump of being able to do Advanced puzzles, but I can think of one kind of subtle theorem that I only discovered after a year or two of doing these puzzles. (And who knows, maybe there are other useful theorems waiting for me to discover them!)

 

I’ve now settled into doing Advanced 50×75 grid puzzles on my iPad; I enjoy solving them while listening to podcasts, and, at that size, a single puzzle will take me a while. Looking at the last few I’ve solved, about half of them took me less than an hour and about half of them took me more than an hour, and it’s not surprising for one puzzle to take two or three hours.

And one thing about puzzles of that size is how the locality of solving the puzzle plays out. On the one hand, you absolutely have to focus on local areas: there’s no way you can think about 3750 different possible squares all at once! So instead I’ll pick some area to start (generally a place where there are some 0’s or 9’s near each other, so I’ve got some known empty / filled squares to work with), and I’ll see what I can figure out there, growing the known area by applying the basic rules, by applying simple theorems, by applying more complicated theorems. And then, once I get stuck, I’ll pick another part of the puzzle to work on, and rinse and repeat. And hopefully the different areas that I’m figuring out will merge, and I’ll solve the whole thing.

 

The problem, though, is: what if the areas that you’ve solved don’t merge? What if you end up having five or six blobs in different places in the puzzle, with those blobs being potentially pretty large, but still in total only adding up to half or two thirds of the puzzle? At this point, with the puzzle size that I’m working with, I might still have 1500 unknown squares; that’s a lot.

And, making things worse, Fill-A-Pix hits a fairly steep wall when you fall back to a speculative search strategy. You can try picking a square that seems key in some way, setting it to either filled or empty depending on which one you think is less likely to be true, and then applying deductions from that, hoping that you get a contradiction. And yes, sometimes that works, but a lot of the time it won’t; so, when I’m in that situation, it can often take me quite a few guesses before I manage to actually make stable progress.

But even a succesful speculative search doesn’t necessarily get me out of hot water! Sure, I now know the status of one square; and generally I try out squares where I know that I’ll be able to figure out more stuff locally if I can just prove that a certain square is, say, filled. But if I’m really only two-thirds of the way through the puzzle, then those deductions will almost certainly peter out at some point, at which point I’ll be just as stuck as I was twenty minutes earlier.

 

Which brings me to the reason why I’m blogging about Fill-a-Pix, as opposed to one of the other puzzle types that I like: much more than other puzzle types, a key part of my problem solving strategy (at least with the 50×75 Advanced puzzles) is: think about things really hard! And, if you can’t figure out what to do next, think even harder!

Because it turns out that, if I think hard enough, I really can figure out what to do locally. But, to do that, I have dig pretty seriously into one specific part of the boundary between the known region and the unknown region. Are there any theorems that I can apply that I just missed? (Which is the most common case: I’ve trained my pattern recognition skills pretty well, but even so, I miss stuff.) Or can I zoom in on a specific area and combine a multi-step deduction from this side of that area with a multi-step deduction from the other side of the area and prove that one specific square in the middle has a given value?

That latter kind of deduction is harder to come up with; so I used to bail out before reaching that stage, and just move to a different part of the puzzle. But what I found was that I really wasn’t saving myself time by doing that: I’d still end up having to do hard work once I’d used up the easier work, and when I got to that stage, I’d have way too many places to consider. Whereas if I focus on smaller regions of the puzzle, I can get to know those regions pretty well, and that makes it easier for me to make leaps.

 

So, these days, I really try pretty hard to extend a known blob, instead of jumping to a different part of the map; and in fact I’ll usually extend one part of the boundary in one specific direction, so I have a very specific area that I’m working on. If I can’t do that, eventually I’ll go to the other end of that same boundary, and see if I can extend it in the other direction; and eventually I’ll even give up on that and jump to a different section of the puzzle. (But hopefully a section that’s not too far away, so I can have a hope of merging the new blob with the older blob.)

Once I get to that stage, though, I’ll work even harder to not have to jump to yet another place in the puzzle. Because what I’ve learned is that, if I’ve got two blobs of the puzzle that I’m working on, the chances are very high that I’ll be able to make progress on one of those blobs. And if I’ve got three blobs, then I almost certainly can figure out something in one of them. So I try to never get into a situation any more where I’ve got, say, six different blobs that I’m trying to grow; long before then, I’ll decide that I didn’t in retrospect think hard enough about one of my earlier sections, and I’ll go back to it.

 

It’s been a long time since I’ve been a professional mathematician, but, in a way, I think Fill-A-Pix reminds me of doing math? You’re trying to make progress and bring clarity to a situation; you’ve got a bucket of techniques that you can apply, and they’ll let you make deductions locally, but you don’t know in advance which deductions will be the correct / useful ones even locally. And, even if you do improve your understanding of the situation locally, you might continue to be at sea in trying to understand the larger situation that you’re tackling. But hopefully, if you think hard enough, you’ll break through.

At least, with Fill-A-Pix, you know that there is going to be a solution, though…