malvasia bianca

(If you’re super spoiler sensitive, then I guess there are spoilers here. If you’re only moderately spoiler sensitive then this post should be fine, I think.)

Animal Well is a platformer Metroidvania. And, I suspect, it’s a somewhat unusual one?

One way in which it’s unusual is that the abilities that you acquire are a little bit nonstandard. Instead of giving you a double jump, for example, you get a bubble wand which produces a bubble rising in the air that you can jump onto and then off of, and which has its own physics. None of the abilities feel bizarre or anything, they’re just capabilities that I’m not particularly used to seeing. (And that usually contain implications that aren’t obvious at the beginning.)

Another unusual aspect is the game’s attitude towards difficulty. Fairly early on (possibly before I had any non-starting abilities?) I fell down a two screen room with five columns of rising bubbles; because I get nervous when I don’t know how to backtrack, I tried hopping up the bubbles to the top. And that turned out to be surprisingly difficult!

Like I said above, bubbles in this game (whether produced from the environment or from your wand) have physics; so if you stand on a bubble for a while, it’ll start sinking, and kind of nudge other bubbles out of the way. (And, related to that, even though rooms are designed with a grid pattern, you and items like bubbles aren’t constrained to that grid, so the jumps are less regular than you might expect.) And that physics combined with the fact that bubbles pop when you jump off of them made it not nearly as easy as you’d think to jump up the columns all the way to the top of the screen; but the column of bubbles goes up two screens, and you don’t gradually scroll between the two parts of the columns, you go from being at the top of the bottom screen of the room with the columns to the bottom of the top half of the room. And then, if you don’t jump off your bubble immediately, you go right back down to the top of the lower screen.

So that whole setup was disorienting in a sort of casually offhanded way, like the game was telling me “sorry, this is the way it is, deal with it”. Or, alternatively, the game was telling me “don’t try to backtrack right now, just keep on going”. Which is what I did; but you do have to succeed at that puzzle eventually.

And the third surprising bit of the game was the freedom that it gives you to decide how to navigate the world. It wasn’t entirely obvious to me when I was playing through it how many choices I had as to where to go, but it did feel to me like there were other options in how to sequence things than the specific route I took. When I was done with the game, I listened to a podcast interview about it; if I’m remembering correctly, there are four major areas of the map, you can do them in any order, each of those areas is divided up into three sections, and it’s something like you get an item at the end of the first section, you need to show that you can use the item in the second section, and you need to use one of the items from a different area in order to progress through the third section?

I might have the details wrong there, but basically: you can do stuff in any order, but as you go deeper, it’ll start pushing back at you, and eventually it’ll force you to make some progress in a different area before finishing the area you started with. And, of course, there’s also the standard Metroidvania thing of stashing little secrets in various places: maybe gated by you not noticing the path to them, maybe gated by a skill check, maybe gated by an item you haven’t picked up. (But, unlike most Metroidvanias, those little secrets themselves aren’t powerups: your capabilities are gated by which major items you’ve acquired and the extent to which you know how to use them in the world, not by how much numbers have gone up.)

This all added up to a game that was pretty pleasant to explore. It didn’t take me too long to realize that I should annotate the map with signs showing secrets that I hadn’t unlocked and alternate routes that I hadn’t gone down; and there were a lot of those!

I settled into a nice rhythm of picking an area, trying to get to all the chests and flip all the switches that I could figure out how to do but not worrying to much if I couldn’t figure one out, I’d just add a question mark to the map. And then I’d go back to the central area, and pick a different direction. Eventually, I’d acquire an item that reminded me of some earlier bits that I’d seen before, so I’d go back to that earlier area and I’d make more progress.

Again, the standard Metroidvania thing, but I liked how Animal Well managed the rhythms: you weren’t just going back to get some isolated secrets, you were going back to be able to make progress. (With a side effect of also getting isolated secrets!)

Honestly, this carried me most of the way to the credits: the map shows four special points that you want to get to, I’d made it to three of them, and I’d made it almost to the end of the fourth one, and I had a couple of hypotheses about what to do to get that fourth one. Specifically, one of those hypotheses was “there’s some other item that I’m missing because I missed a path somewhere or noticed a path but couldn’t figure out how to go through it with my current tools”, and the other hypothesis was “this one specific item from earlier on in the game has a second use that I need here”. And the problem was that the first of those hypotheses would involve going all over the map yet again, whereas the second one of those felt like it would probably be a probably not very enjoyable skill check. And if I picked the wrong hypothesis (or if the right hypothesis was a third option I hadn’t thought of), then I’d spend an entire evening making zero progress, which would kind of suck.

So I looked it up; once I knew what to do, actually doing the correct thing was fine. And then, of course, that unlocked another area of the map.

That new area of the map I didn’t like. The difficulty level of the initial puzzles in that area would have been pleasant, but the game added in some mechanisms that simultaneously ratcheted up the stress level and meant I couldn’t pause at a screen and look around, plotting up my next move. This happened some in earlier parts of the game, but not very often or in a sustained manner; listening to that aforementioned podcast interview, the developer had intended there to be a horror aspect to the game, but it hadn’t really come out particularly strongly before to me? But it showed up in this new area; and once I made it past the initial bit of challenges, the game gave you an item that let you deal with that and then immediately added a new enemy that meant that you still couldn’t pause and stare at the screen to plot out what to do. Sigh.

This didn’t take me a super long time to go through or anything; maybe an hour for both parts, definitely not the whole evening. And then I made it to a final room and credits rolled; yay. After feeling in my previous session like I wanted to look up how to get that fourth flame, I’d decided in advance that this session was going to be my final session, so it was nice to have made it to credits. I had an hour left before going to bed, though, and people had told me about post-credits content; so I decided I’d spend the rest of the evening trying to explore that.

The problem was, I couldn’t quite jump out of the pit that the final room is in! After thinking about the problem, I decided that I could do it if I used the bubble wand to spawn a bubble right when I was jumping, to let me do infinite chains of jumps off of the ground; something I knew was possible but tricky, so it was a skill that I hadn’t gotten particularly good at. (The game intentionally hadn’t required that skill until then.) But that was hard, so after 15 minutes or so I said “I’d really rather be playing Yakuza 5” and I said farewell to Animal Well.

Poking around in guides after that, it turns out that, right before falling into that area, if you go through a different passage then you can (probably) reach a chest that gives you a different wand that makes multiple jumps much easier? Pretty weird choice to put that chest in a location where you can miss it right before you fall into a location where it would be really helpful; for me, switching over to Yakuza 5 when I did was definitely the right choice.

So I ended up with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth after the final couple of sessions. But, also, I was quite enjoying the game before then; I think it’s very well constructed in general, good puzzles at the micro level, good structure at the macro level, a pleasantly mysterious feeling to the environment.

And if you like games that have even more oblique mysteries, then apparently the post-credits content contains some of those that such folks have found worthwhile? Though the flip side is that, if you don’t like uncertainty or platforming challenges, you’ll probably give up before I did, and there’s a chance that you’ll get frustrated pretty early on. So certainly not the game for everybody, and even people who like it in general will probably find something that grates. But I’m certainly glad to have spent the time with it that I did.

I was very much looking forward to playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake, was probably my favorite game I played that year; and the parts that I liked the most about it were wandering around town with my party members and interacting with them while helping townspeople, I wish the game had gone on longer and I’d had more of that! So for all I know I’d quite like an open world game with the same characters, where I’d spend more time doing random stuff.

And, as it turns out: I did enjoy that! Not quite as much as I hoped: wandering around the world with my party was fun, but the checklists got a little long, and I’m not great at only doing some of the items on a checklist. So, personally, I wish that the open world had been maybe half as large as they had been?

Your party is still great. It was good to learn more about them; the bits around Cloud’s and Tifa’s past were well done, a genuinely interesting dialog with mental illness, I think. (Not sure how much of that is new to this game and how much was in the original, it’s been a couple of decades since I’ve played it.) And I still don’t know what all is going on with the alternate timeline stuff, I’m looking forward to how that plays out in the third game.

Though also I think maybe I underestimated how much I enjoy the series’s antagonists? They’re not all great (but, with the expanded party in this game compared to the original, the characters in your party aren’t all top tier either), but the parade in Junon and the bits surround it were absolutely one of my favorite parts in the game. And, later on, when I was starting to feel that it was time for the game to end, I ran into the My Friend guy again; what a wonderful character he is, 100% pure joy. So actually it turns out that my initial feeling going in was probably wrong, the antagonist interactions are quite important to me too.

Also, I want to give a shout out to chocobos. Usually, when wandering around game worlds, I prefer to go on foot: I like to stick my nose in things and grab random stuff in the environment. But Rebirth doesn’t just let you do most of that from the back of a chocobo, it frequently does it in an adorable way (I love having my chocobo repair the sign for broken down rest stops), and picking up crafting items from the environment is actually more efficient on a chocobo than on foot. So yay to the game for their solution to that design problem: they didn’t give you with a tradoff between a more pleasant way to travel versus a more pleasant way to interact with the environment, and they didn’t even solve that by making the interaction experience on foot the same as the interaction experience on the back of your vehicle: they make it so it’s actually more pleasant to interact with the environment while you’re on the faster mode of travel.

A very good game. Not quite as good as its predecessor: it went on a bit long, and its predecessor was helped by the more compact setting. But still, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and I’m looking forward to the final part of the trilogy.

A random observation: I sometimes see arguments between groups of people about a situation where A harms B. (Or where A does something B doesn’t like, but whether the question of whether A is harming B is contested.) One side is focusing on A doing wrong; the other side is focusing on things B could do (or could have done) to reduce the chance of the harm occurring. And neither side likes where the other side is putting their focus.

And this seems like maybe not a great thing to be arguing about? Like, both points are potentially useful things to bring up, they’re just ways to think about answering different questions. For example, in a lot of situations, you only have influence over one side or the other of the situation (heck, in a lot of situations, you don’t have influence over either side of the situation), and trying to convince somebody to think about the situation through a lens that they don’t feel they can influence doesn’t feel particularly productive to me.

Politics come into this, of course. I’m not sure whether a more accurate model for how politics interacts with this is “liberals focus more on A’s actions and conservatives focus more on B’s actions” or whether a more accurate model is “people in general are more focused on the actions of the group that they’re less aligned with”. (If I had to guess: probably both, but probably more the second than the first?)

Also, in general, focusing on A increases the chance that moral absolutism / totalizing will come into play. Which might be appropriate and/or useful? But I think, a lot of the time, it isn’t.

Maybe that last bit is what’s bugging me in ways that lead me to write this note. US society feels to me like it’s been a lot more polarized over the last decade than it was in other periods of my life. Some of what the other side is doing / believes is, from my point of view, genuinely horrible, but it feels to me like more acceptable forms of difference are getting pulled into that polarization? So I’m trying to figure out ways in which I can train myself to notice places where I’m being taught to see something as part of an eternal struggle even though other options are out there. And this pattern feels like a candidate.

Three quick game notes, with the unifying theme being “games that I didn’t like as much as I hoped I would”. (Balatro is pretty good, though. Loop Hero might be, too, I just don’t have a feel for what I would have found if I’d spent more time with it.)

Balatro is pretty good and also pretty interesting, but I don’t quite understand why it’s grabbed so many people? It’s neat crafting your deck in response to where the jokers and other cards are leading you. It’s interesting how many different workable strategies there are for crafting your deck to build synergies. There’s a pleasant amount of risk management required, and tools for dealing with that. And there’s definitely room for building up your skills: you can keep on playing once you’ve won with a deck, and the targets ramp up very quickly once you’ve done that, so you can keep on challenging yourself for a while.

But it never made it beyond that for me? I enjoyed playing it for a few weeks, I’m glad I spent that time with it, but it didn’t get any sort of real hooks into me either.

I did enjoy the Eggplant Show interview with the game’s designer.

I didn’t play Loop Hero when it first came out because I had the idea that it would fit better on an iPad; so when I learned a few weeks back that it was out on the iPad, I decided to give it a try.

And, indeed, the iPad is a good platform for it; but it turns out that it’s not the game for me. I was hoping that Loop Hero would be more of an idle game than it is: but, even though you’re not controlling it directly, you probably do want to be evaluating equipment / tile drops pretty regularly, so you don’t want to take your attention off of it for very long. But the auto battling aspect also means that you don’t have much to do when you are paying attention. And that combo of characteristics just wasn’t very satisfying for me.

I’m a little curious what I would have found if I’d dug into the mechanics more, because I really did not get very far into that. (I got enough to beat the first two bosses, and maybe I unlocked a half dozen buildings in my town.) Somebody on a Slack that I’m on said it reminded him of Vampire Survivors in some ways; I was surprised to hear that but, after having played it some, the analogy makes rather more sense to me. But in Vampire Survivors you’ve got something to do all the time; and also maybe the mechanics are a little more readable?

I was really looking forward to Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: my impression was that it was made by people who cared a lot about Jet Set Radio, and they even got that game’s composer to work on the new game. And, while I really love Jet Set Radio, it’s also a game that certainly has its rough edges; I’m all for friction that gives character, but I’m not convinced that all of the friction in Jet Set Radio adds to the game, so if the new game sanded some of that off, I wouldn’t complain.

Unfortunately, Bomp Rush Cyberfunk was a pretty solid disappointment. There are hints of style, heck there are more than hints, but the new game fails to cross whatever threshold the magic happens at. Just to make sure I wasn’t being too swayed by nostalgia, I went back and played 30 minutes of Jet Set Radio: my basic takeaway there is that just the act of selecting Gum in the character selection screen shows more style than anything I saw in the first three or four levels or however long I played of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.

And, adding insult to injury, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk doesn’t even sand off the rough edges! I’m not going to say that the combat in Jet Set Radio is any good; but the combat in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk isn’t either! It throws you right into an under-tutorialized boss flight with an enemy that is flying around in a jetpack, and you don’t have obvious tools to reliably hit her in midair. Eventually I made it through that battle; and then she showed up again in the second boss fight, and it wasn’t any better the second time.

I was wondering why I hadn’t heard much talk about Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, but I’d assumed that it was just a sign that there aren’t that many Jet Set Radio fans out there. And that might be true; but that’s definitely not the only reason…

The oldest post on this blog was published twenty years ago yesterday. A quite different blog back then: shorter and more frequent posts, and while the video game posts were still there, they weren’t nearly as dominant. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to move a little bit back in that direction! Though, to be sure, I write in more places these days: small bits on Mastodon, Nei Gong / Tai Chi notes on my other blog that these days is only used for that, links on tumblr. But still, there’s something nice about having short but not tiny posts on a wider range of topics.

Anyways, nice to form a habit and stick with it; I still think blogging is a good habit to have, I will keep it up.

I was really looking forward to Baldur’s Gate 3: I’m a big BioWare fan, and while Baldur’s Gate 3 is of course by Larian instead of BioWare, it sounded like Larian had brought over many of the same virtues (e.g. rich party interactions), and added more of their own (a wide range of techniques to make your way out of tricky situations). I do prefer the way BioWare has moved in more action RPG direction, and I don’t actually play D&D, so that’s a bit of a downside, but I listen to enough D&D podcasts that it should be familiar enough. It’s pretty rare that I play games right when they’re released, but this would have been an exception, except that I was going to play it on the Xbox and its release for that platform was delayed by several months.

Wtih a paragraph like the above, I guess the expected thing for me to say next is: but I actually didn’t like it. I did actually like it quite a bit, though; just not as much as I was expecting to. Definitely happy to have played it, and I basically enjoyed my whole time with it; went on a little longer than I would have liked, but that hardly makes the game unique.

Its D&D-ness was a litlte more offputting than I expected at the start. I decided to play a bard, because I wanted my interactions with people to go well; but there’s a lot more fighting than talking at the beginning of the game. And your special moves require spell slots or other similarly limited use resources (extremely limited, at the start of the game); so there’s pressure to avoid using any special moves at all during most combat encounters.

It took me a little while (not a long time or anything, but a couple of play sessions) to get a feel for when a combat encounter was big enough to be worth using spell slots on at all; and while I’m sure there were alternate solutions to those early encounters, the ones I tried (e.g. talking my way through one of them) didn’t work. And, over the same period of time, I was getting used to the economy of long rests: they’re presented as something that’s at least somewhat scarce, with you needing to spend food to engage in them and with them not available in all locations. But, in practice, I always had food, and it was rarely the case that I couldn’t take a long rest if I really needed to.

So, after a bit, I fell into a rhythm that seemed not super dissimilar from what I’d hear in D&D podcasts: use a few spells on minor encounters, go all out in larger encounters, and trust that I’d be able to rest after those larger encounters. Which worked well enough; not always, in particular the Halsin rescue really didn’t want to give you long rests between battles, but even that one was willing to grudgingly let you rest if you really insisted.

That’s the rhythm of combat. Which was more present than I would have liked? In good actual play podcasts, people are doing a fair amount of creative problem solving in ways that don’t involve fighting; listening to people discuss Baldur’s Gate 3, I’d hoped that there would be alternate routes around problems, but I didn’t see as many of those as I would have preferred.

Though the truth also is that I just didn’t engage that much with objects in the environment; for all I know, I could have avoided a bunch of fights by doing that more. Which is maybe a sign of a larger aspect of how I related with the game: I just didn’t interact with systems that deeply at all.

Which is in large part on me, I suppose. Though also there’s a lot to think about when leveling up an entire party’s worth of people and figuring out what possibilities that enables, given what all D&D enables; I don’t know that I would have done a great job of mastering the possibilities of my character if I’d just had the one character to deal with, but at any rate dealing with all of those characters was just too much. Just trying to figure out all the little specialization options for one character is something I don’t know that I would have succeeded at, given the game’s UI: when I was at that screen, I only had a vague idea of what weapon specializations I had, for example, or of what weapons fit into which bucket.

Still, very far from a deal breaker, more of something that I needed to adapt to. I started the game playing in Normal and Liesl started playing in Easy; watching her, I got the feeling more and more that she had made a better choice in that regard. I stuck with Normal for quite a while, out of stubbornness; finally, though, when I got to the final battle of Act 2, I played through it maybe four times with two or three of those times ending with me literally one attack away from winning the battle. And that convinced me that Easy was the way to go; at which point the battle became exciting but something that I succeeded at just fine. And I stayed with Easy for Act 3; definitely the right choice.

I didn’t really go into the game wanting combat or environmental interactions, though: I wanted party interactions, I wanted towns with people to talk to, I wanted an overall plot to pull me through. And the game was good in that regard, good enough that BioWare was a reasonable comparison. Party members had character, I liked talking to them, I liked where their stories led me. Settlements were dense enough and had interesting enough people to keep me happy. The plot was fine; not entirely to my taste, maybe in part related to its D&D-ness, but not bad.

Navigating through the interactions was a little less prescriptively structured than I’m used to from BioWare games. I actually almost completely missed one of the companions until I went back to the start area and did a thorough sweep; and there’s another companion that I ran into at what seemed like a normal enough time, but other parts of the game had advanced by then in ways that affected interactions with her. (I’m pretty sure that I’d inadvertently closed off romance options with her by the time I met her, though the game didn’t make that particularly readable.) Which, on the one hand, felt a little odd from a visual novel point of view; but, on the other hand, that’s more like the way life works?

And actually the romance interactions were unusual to me in another way, too: there was one character that I wasn’t into at the start of the game, but as the game went on and we went through stuff together, our shared experiences had me liking her more and more. So I would have been curious about starting a romance with her later; the game wasn’t free-form enough to allow that, though. But, again, that’s fine: nothing wrong with having somebody that you respect and enjoy working with more and more but whom you remain friends and coworkers with rather than romantically involved: that’s a healthy sort of relationship in real life and so it’s kind of nice to see that in a game! Kind of weird to be playing this kind of game and not end up romancing anybody at all, but I’m not complaining, it was an interesting change of pace.

Good game. Didn’t quite scratch my BioWare itch, mostly because I prefer the BioWare that’s moved away from D&D, and the second act wasn’t entirely to my taste and the game had gone on long enough by the time I reached the third act that part of me was kind of waiting for the game to be over by then? Though, well, there are aspects of recent BioWare games that I’m not entirely thrilled with too! For all I know, the Dragon Age game that’s coming out in a few months will show that BioWare as I think of them simply doesn’t exist any more…

DodecaDragons is a clicker game. Its distinctive feature compared to other such games that I’ve played is how far it leans into numerical growth; such games sometimes switch into numerical notation (1e9 instead of 1,000,000,000), but, in DodecaDragons, sometimes your exponents get large enough that the game switches over to exponential notation for those, too. (So you end up with 1ee9 instead of 1e1,000,000,000.) And, in the end game, it even triples up on exponents.

Which is a nice gimmick; still, not my favorite of these games. That’s partly because it’s a little graceless in how it handles that progress; some of the increase is decently well done, in that there are an unusual number of ways in which growth in one item scales based on the quantity of another item, and there are even loops of that, so you get nice self-reinforcing cycles that help numbers get big. But that has its limits; so, decently frequently, the game will have you struggle a bit to reach a threshold where you can purchase something, but once you’ve purchased that thing, some class of numbers magically gets multiplied by 1000, or whatever, enabling more purchases.

Another aspect of the game that felt a little off to me was its smoothness. They’d give you some new currency to earn; you’d have to deal with it manually for a while, to get a sense for it, but fairly soon, those clicks would get automated away. For example, the game has you resetting much more frequently than most other games in the genre that I’m used to; and unlocks that preserve some particular currency on reset, or unlocks that let you do mass purchase after reset, are both quite common. And, well, I feel a little funny complaining about that: doing the same thing over and over again is a little boring? But also, the choice of where to insert friction in your games is an important part of game design; I’m not sure that DodecaDragons made the right choice there.

One concrete downside of that, for me, was the tempo of the game. I was going to say that I’m used to clicker games where I get fairly soon to situations where I have to wait hours to unlock something, where leaving the game running overnight is useful, but honestly that might just be Kittens Game. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, Universal Paperclips has you buying stuff pretty often through the whole game; but that game is short (you can finish it in an afternoon), it’s very strongly themed, and even during its short length the nature of gameplay transforms noticeably. Whereas DodecaDragons has short enough loops that it’s reallly hard to do sustained work on something else with a window open on the game without have the game distract you; but, because of exponential growth, letting it just sit and run for an hour isn’t actually that much more useful than leaving it alone for three minutes. And the game still took me a week or two to finish, and it didn’t have nearly the narrative color of those other two games. (Actually, this kind of reminds me of when I stopped playing Kittens Game: I gave up when it started wanting me to click too often, because resets were having numbers get too big.)

I won’t say that I’m unhappy to have played Dodecadragons: ultimately it didn’t take that long to finish, the way exponentials on top of exponentials play out is kind of new, and I also appreciated it leaning into resets as hard as it did. And I appreciated it experimenting with visual design the way it did. But also none of those experiments had me really excited about their results…

Wow, I really am behind on my game blogging – I finished Chants of Sennaar in April and I’m only getting around to talking about it now.

Anyways: it’s a translation game, but one with five languages, in a Tower of Babel setting. And this opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for a translation game, it turns out.

At a basic level: the languages aren’t all skins of English. They’re not shockingly different or anything, but they’re not all Subject Verb Object languages, they handle plurals differently, stuff like that. A pleasant enough way to provide variety across levels; and the game occasionally requires you to produce sentences instead of just understand sentences, which forces you to be able to actually make concrete that understanding of language differences.

The different writing systems are kind of cool, too? No straight up alphabets, most are at least a little bit ideographic; and the game uses that intelligently to help modulate the difficulty. But, beyond affecting the difficulty, the writing systems help improve the aesthetics of the game; and the game ties some of the writing systems explicitly to cultural touchpoints, which I enjoy. (I can’t say I found the specifics of all of those realistic, but that’s okay, it’s a game!)

And this does all fit together well as a game. The game gives a pleasant difficulty ramp; the way it asks you to prove your knowledge of the languages isn’t particularly realistic but works well from a gameplay perspective; and they do you a good job of pacing your encountering of new words and of new uses of existing words in a way that has you alternating between thinking you should be able to figure out what a word means but something’s wrong with your guess and then having the satisfaction of figuring out where you went wrong and learning something new about the game as a result.

That last part in turn gets to why I thought Chants of Sennaar was interesting beyond just the translation game mechanics / challenges. The different groups in the different levels of the tower don’t just have different languages, they have different cultures and ways of thinking about the world. And there was one level in particular where I just couldn’t get the game to validate my translations for much longer than I expected. A little frustrating, but I kept at it even as my stack of unvalidated words got longer and longer despite it clearly containing some quite fundamental words. When I finally figured out how to translate those early words on the level, it turned out that I’d been missing something pretty fundamental about the culture of the people who lived on that level; I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that gave a cultural reveal in that sort of manner?

So yeah, good game. A solid puzzle/deduction game based on a Tower of Babel concept; and that concept not only provides an extra layer to the deduction mechanic, it also motivates the game culturally in meaningful ways. And this is all executed well: I didn’t feel like individual sections or the game as a whole overstayed its welcome, and the game frequently felt pleasurable slightly annoying and only rarely “I’ve been banging my head against this for too long, I should probably check a walkthrough” annoying, which isn’t an easy balance to strike in a puzzle game.

I’ve been rereading The Book of the New Sun while listening to some podcasts that cover the book in various levels of detail. Excruciating detail in the case of the first of those podcasts, ReReading Wolfe: the series (and, I believe, most of Gene Wolfe’s books) has a lot hidden in it that only reveals itself on rereading; there’s a puzzle box nature to these books; and, based on that podcast, it’s not at all clear that anybody other than Wolfe can solve some aspects of this puzzle.

Which I had Feelings about, so I tried to turn them into a blog post. But, so far, I’m failing, just sitting on the post without maing progress for weeks and without liking what I’ve written so far. So instead I’m just going to write a post listing a grab bag of topics that this has set bouncing around in my head; I doubt this will end up turning into a coherent post, but hopefully it will flush the ideas out of my head so I can move on to blogging about other stuff.

Last year, I reread The Waste Land. The book contains end notes to the poem; at first, I was glad to see them, because I figured they’d make my reading richer, but once I dipped into them, I realized that wasn’t the case. I’d have to do the work of digging up the sources mentioned in each end note, I’d have to go through a fair amount of that source to figure out what specific bit in it was linked to the given line in the poem. That’s a huge amount of work; and it wasn’t at all clear to me that I would get anything out of it, given that neither The Waste Land nor the works referenced therein were enough of my personal canon to set up resonances for me. (I hadn’t read most of the referenced works at all, in fact.)

So I bounced off of those end notes, but I’m glad they exist. A T. S. Eliot scholar or somebody who was already quite familiar with many of the works in the end notes probably actually would get a lot out of them. There was a lot of stuff bouncing around in Eliot’s brain, and it’s going to come out in a particularly oblique / condensed form in a poem like The Waste Land; giving people a bit of help in unpacking that is all to the good. And if you’re not interesting in doing that unpacking, that’s fine too, the poem stands quite well on its own.

When I was an undergrad, I went on a talk about memorization given by two speakers, one of whom talked about how Chinese literature functioned in an imperial social context. Because of the country’s exam system and related social forces, people not only memorized a huge numbers of texts, they memorized a huge numbers of texts that referred in turn to other texts. So what might just look like a simple phrase to you or me would be, to those people, a phrase that was originally used in text A a couple of millennia ago, and then famously referred to by texts B–1, B–2, and B–3, which in turn were referred to by texts C–4 and C–5.

That’s a very foreign world: we get the first layer with bible quotes and Shakespeare and even quotes from pop culture, but going even one level of reference beyond that is very rare. But still, there are references bouncing around in all of our heads; it was kind of cool to hear that one culture at least had made that manifest, collective, and productive.

One of my favorite ReReading Wolfe episodes was their interview with Ada Palmer. She wrote one of my favorite series, Terra Ignota; and, in that interview, she made the point that both Terra Ignota and The Book of the New Sun are presented as if they’re written by an author living in a world that is quite foreign to our own. And, as a corollary, there’s quite a lot in both series that assumes context of an in-world reader that actual readers don’t have. (Especially on a first reading.) I like that sort of puzzle!

When I was growing up, Isaac Asimov published a set of novels that unified two of his settings (the Robot novels and the Foundation novels) into a single shared universe. This did not recapture the magic of the original settings. And Anne McCaffrey wrote a series of followups to her first two Pern trilogies that told the full story of certain pieces of historical lore that played a key part in those series; the lore in question turned out to be much less powerful in novel form than it was in a more oblique form.

The conclusion that I drew from that (and other similar examples) was that the best science fiction / fantasy series are built on worlds where you have a strong feeling that there’s a world with a rich context and history behind the parts that you see in books, and that it’s probably healthy for authors to actually have worked out a decent amount of that context; but mining that context for further novels is not going to turn out well. (At leat from a quality point of view; quite possibly it does great from a financial point of view.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve bounced off of The Silmarillion every time I’ve tried to read it, and I’ve never tried to read the other Middle Earth back history books. But that’s a different sort of thing: they’re much closer to raw author’s backstory notes than to new novels telling the history of the existing setting.

Having said that: Tehanu is my second favorite Earthsea novel, and I’m glad Translation State exists. So returning to a universe can work; it’s possible that what I’m observing has more to do with reversion to the mean than anything about persistent context. After all, if an author has written something that really does feel magical, what are the odds that their subsequent books will recapture that same magic, whether those subsequent books are in the same setting or a different one?

I’m still pretty dubious about explicitly expanding fragments of backstory into future novels, though.

We live in a decade where Marvel and Star Wars have become massive worlds that more and more art works are set in. Definitely not to my taste, and I don’t want every popular series to turn into that sort of thing; but part of me thinks that it’s probably a good idea for a few settings like that to exist? Maybe something interesting will come out of it, after all; heck, some people would certainly claim that something interesting already has come out of it, and maybe if I read more Marvel comics I would even agree with them.

I assume the corporations involved are doing that out of a risk mitigation strategy; understandable enough. (Though also it doesn’t really matter if it’s understandable: I should train myself to not spend time nearly as much time evaluating and second guessing the motives behind corporations’ actions as I do.)

It is potentially worth spending a little bit of time figuring out if I think the outcomes of corporations’ actions are likely to be good or bad; if shared universes were soaking up too much of our society’s ability to produce creative works, then that would be a problem. But there are tons and tons of movies being made, tons and tons of TV shows being made, tons and tons of comics being made. So whether the net impact of the Marvel and Star Wars shared universes on overall cultural production is slightly positive or slightly negative, the production of art works overall is doing fine.

I suppose I should gesture at myth here. That’s a harder one to analyze: I think it’s reasonable to say that, for example, The Divine Comedy takes place in a shared universe, but I’m not willing to describe the source texts for that universe in the same way as I would describe the source texts of more recent shared universes. But there’s certainly power in producing art works coming from shared tales: we see this with Greek plays, with Italian poetry, with German music.

Maybe that’s the problem with modern shared universes: they (generally) haven’t yet left copyright.

I gave a talk at work recently riffing on Test-Driven Development, Getting Things Done, and what they have in common, and I think it went pretty well? So I got permission to distribute the slides externally; I put in pretty thorough speaker’s notes, so hopefully they make sense without the recording.

Anyways, here are the slides: When To Think About What.

Genshin Impact was our March VGHVI game, and I was happy to give it a try. The game had caught my eye when it first came out: I liked the art style, and it apparently took some level of inspiration from Breath of the Wild. I’m dubious about free-to-play games but this didn’t sound like the most exploitative one of those, so maybe that’s okay. None of that pushed it over the line for me to start playing it on my own, but I was glad to have an excuse to dip into the game for a bit.

And I’m not unhappy to have dipped into it; and maybe if I had more time and less money, I might dip into it noticeably more? But, as it turns out: not the game for me. The free-to-play stuff isn’t horrible but does make the game slightly worse; the plot is aggressively generic and threadbare; and while the moment to moment gameplay and the overall world structure are both pleasant enough, they’re not particularly an active hook for me. I actually think there might be something in the way combat is put together that I would find somewhat interesting if I dug into it more, but I’m not curious enough about that for me to keep playing.

One way in which the free-to-play design makes it feel a little odd is how the leveling curves manifest themselves. If a game has a core plotline, I’m used to it being possible to follow that plotline’s missions more or less directly one after another, though it’s not a bad idea to do some amount of side quests. With Genshin Impact, though, once I made it past the first few hours (maybe a third or half the way through the intro plotline), I hit some dungeon sections that required my characters to be noticeably higher than they were.

I’d unlocked some side quests as well, so my first assumption was that the game was nudging me to do those. And I like side quests, so I was happy to be nudged. But even when I did those, I was still underleveled. (Or maybe only just barely leveled enough, I can’t quite remember the details any more, but something felt off at any rate.) At first I thought: am I really supposed to grind by fighting random overworld monsters or something? That doesn’t sound pleasant.

But it turns out that something else was going on, and that something else was more interesting. I’d been leveling up so far just by accumulating experience like in tons of other games; but also on the level up screen, there’s this option for using items to gain experience. I’d been ignoring those because they hadn’t previously been necessary, and I’d kind of assumed that was some sort of bad free-to-play pay-to-win thing; but actually I’d accumulated a lot of those items, and it didn’t feel like the sort of thing that free-to-play games sometimes do where they give you a lot of rare items / currency at the start but then dial down the frequency of those drops a ton to get you hooked.

Instead, I think what’s going on here is: the game wants you to unlock extra characters. And those unlocks are a big part of where the game wants you to spend money. But once you’ve gotten a new character, the game design problem that arises is: how do you get that character leveled up enough to play with the rest of your party? And Genshin Impact has what I think is a pretty elegant solution to that problem: it gives you experience partly in the form of plain old experience points that apply immediately and partly in the form of items that can be converted to experience points at some time in the future. And I suspect (but haven’t verified) that, once you get past the beginning, most of the experience you get actually comes in the form of the items rather than the raw experience points. So, sure enough, I had way more than enough experience point items to level up my current party to be able to go into those next set of dungeons.

The system is actually a little more complicated than that: there’s a different kind of item you need to be able to go from level 20 to 21, or from 40 to 41, etc. I think that’s also related to the same problem: they probably structure areas to have you spend a decent amount of time at level 20, a decent amount of time at level 40, etc. And, once you’ve spent some time in the level 20 area, it’s not hard to get enough of the experience point items to get new characters all the way up to level 20; so you can do that and then stop there, knowing that the game is fine with you sitting at that level for a while? I’m not completely sure, because I stopped playing before I’d done more than dip my toes into the beyond-level–20 area of things; it’s possible that those gates are also a monetization thing, I don’t have a feel yet for how hard it is to get the items that let you cross through those gates. But I’m willing to believe that it’s another part of their solution to the tension between traditional leveling curves and wanting players to be able to add new characters in their party.

Speaking of new characters: I did a couple of pulls on the new character loot box, and got a few more people to add into my party. Didn’t change things too much, though? I looked at a character tier guide; one of them is actually supposed to be a quite good character (presumably an intentional good drop by the game), but I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that.

So I read through the guide a little bit more; my conclusion is that, when you start going deep into the game, combat turns into a completely different thing, with passive effects having a huge impact and in general with advanced effects firing off a lot. This is potentially pretty interesting; I don’t know whether or not I would find the higher level combat more enjoyable than the combat at the level that I’m playing at, but I’m curious how it morphs from one to the other.

But I wasn’t curious enough to keep on playing: I’d put in enough time to have something to say in the discussion, but I needed to get back to Baldur’s Gate 3. Happy enough to have played the game, but the plot construction and moment-to-moment gameplay weren’t something that I enjoyed enough for it to beat out a good non-free-to-play game.

Though Genshin Impact did actually catch Liesl’s eye a bit; she’s going through various Final Fantasy 7 games now, but I wouldn’t be completely shocked if she picks up Genshin Impact at some point this year. So who knows, maybe I’ll be ambiently exposed to it some more; I wouldn’t mind having that happen.

Music

A year or so ago, I decided that I’d feel better if I was spending more time with music; so I started practing piano on a decently regular basis. I’d already been occasionally sitting down at the piano, pulling out a book of music, and trying to play through a few pieces (show tunes, usually); I liked that, it’s fun dipping into music, but it’s also fun (and rewarding) to go deeper.

So I decided to start at the beginning of Well-Tempered Clavier I. It’s music that I like; I enjoy and am good at playing fugues; having the preludes there forces me to not spend all of my time on fugues; and it’s something that’s familiar but that I haven’t seriously worked on for three and a half? four? decades.

This got me thinking about what I might mean when I say that I’m learning to play a piece of music. There are a few different stages that I might be at in that process:

• Stage 0: Just Playing Around. In this stage, I’m actually not trying to learn to play a given piece of music: I’m just randomly pulling some sheet music off of the stack on the top of my piano and trying to play my way through a piece, without particularly worrying about actually getting it right.
• Stage 1: Getting the Basics in Place. In this stage, I’m going through a given piece regularly (multiple times over the course of weeks or months), stopping at places where I’m really falling apart and isolating and repeating those bits until I more or less get them into my fingers.
• Stage 2: Getting the Details Reliably Right. In this stage, I’m significantly raising my quality bar compared to Stage 1: getting a single note wrong or with the timing noticeably off is enough to get me to stop and work on that section some more.
• Stage 3: Improving my Artistry. In this stage, I’m thinking much more about questions of phrasing and articulation, the broader structures in the piece, and so forth.

The reason why I’m writing this down is that, if I’m not careful, I’ll avoid Stage 2. I’ll play through on a piece of music, most of it will sound decent, but there will be some notes that I flat out miss or where the timing is off. And I’ll notice that, but there will be something in my brain that says “that mistake wasn’t a big deal” or “well, I should be able to play that right, I’m sure if I were to play it again it would be fine, so why stop now?”, and I keep on playing.

And it’s bad for me to listen to that specific voice in my brain! I’m not a total stickler for perfection: sometimes I just want to play through a piece of music without worrying about it too much, sometimes I just don’t have the energy to seriously work on a piece, sometimes a piece is at (or past) the limits of what my fingers can currently do. But, a lot of the time, when I listen to that voice, I’m not doing so for any principled reason: I’m just fooling myself.

In particular, whenever I think “I should be able to play that right”, I really need to face up to the fact that my evidence for that is generally not particularly strong! And, even if I were to play the notes correctly next time I go through that piece, I’d probably feel shaky while doing that, which isn’t a good foundation to build deeper musicality on.

So, if I’m serious about learning a given piece, what I should actually do is stop every time I get a note wrong, or even every time that I feel lucky that I got a note right, and go over that section repeatedly until I’ve figured out how I want my fingers to approach it and until I feel better about it. Sure, maybe play through the whole piece once at the beginning and/or end of my practice session, just to get a feel for where I’m at with it, and to get the pleasure out of listening to it, but if I’m serious about working on a specific piece of music, then I should act serious!

For whatever reason, I don’t have the same mental block when it comes to Stage 3. I enjoy working on the artistry of a piece of music in a way that I don’t really enjoy working on the notes; and I think it’s probably more immediately rewarding to work on the artistic aspects of a section? Whereas, if I’m working on the notes in a Stage 2 way, then it’s pretty frequent that I’ll bang my fingers against it ten or twenty times, at the end of that I’ll be playing it better but I’ll still feel shakier than I would like, and not super confident that I won’t regress the next time I practice.

This relates to another question I have: right now I don’t spend any time working on artificial drills (e.g. practicing scales), and I suspect that that’s a mistake? When I’ve been taking lessons from a music teacher, they’ve had me spend time on drills, and I’m certainly very glad that scales are decently well embedded in my fingers. It’s possible that I’ve gotten all that I need to out of that, but that seems pretty unlikely!

Tai Chi

I also spend a decent amount of time working on Tai Chi. And, actually, there’s a decently close analogy between the way I play piano and the way I do Tai Chi. When playing piano, I’m playing by myself, instead of as part of an ensemble, and I’m working on individual pieces of music where every note is written down, instead of improvising. And, in the main Tai Chi class I take, we’re mostly learning fixed individual forms, instead of doing partner work and/or free-form work. I’m not saying that that’s a better (or worse) way to do music or Tai Chi compared to other options — honestly, I would benefit from spending more time in other formats in both arts — but still, there is a direct analogy.

And, of course, that analogy extends to the stages with which I’m practicing a given Tai Chi form. If I’m at Stage 0 with a particular form then I’ll follow along with that form in class but I won’t even try to practice it at home. My Stage 1 forms are forms that I’m practicing at home but I’m not surprised if I feel like I’m doing something wrong in one of the moves, or if I have to stop for a bit to try to remember one part of the sequence. My Stage 2 forms are ones where I’m trying to get the details right, e.g. so that, if I were called on in class to perform them, I’d feel fine about that. And my Stage 3 forms are ones where I’m trying to go deep into them and figure out what that form is teaching me about the insides of my body.

The way the stages play out for me in Tai Chi is pretty different than in music. For a while, I didn’t distinguish clearly between Stage 0 and Stage 1: if we were doing a form in class, then I’d try to practice it at home and learn it as well. But that ran into problems: usually the first time I was learning a form in class, I’d have a hard time keeping up and actually getting to where I can do the whole thing at home. (With Tai Chi, I don’t have sheet music that I can look at while I’m going through a form!)

And, even if I did manage to keep up, we’d finish up that form and start a new one; now the time I’d budgeted for practice at home was consumed by the new form. While I’d occasionally go back and go through the earlier form, it didn’t take too many months before I’d realize that the earlier form had fallen out of my memory. So I’d have to wait a couple of years until that form came around again in class and hope that it would stick better the next time.

I’m doing better at that aspect of learning now, fortunately. I don’t try to learn more than two new forms at any give time: if my teacher is teaching more than two forms that are new to me at a given time, then I consciously treat the extra ones as Stage 0 instead of Stage 1. (Sometimes I even skip that part of class entirely.) I’ve got videos saved of all of the forms that I’m learning, which makes me more resilient to weeks when I have to miss class or where I hit a part of a form that I find particularly difficult. And I’m fairly well disciplined about running through every form I know at least once a week; I won’t say I manage that every week, but I manage it often enough that I’m doing a pretty good job of keeping the forms in my body, and of noticing when I’m starting to lose them and going back to videos to figure out the big gaps, so I can preserve my Stage 1 knowledge.

So that’s how Stages 0 and 1 play out for me in Tai Chi: make sure I have the scaffolding in place to bring a given form from Stage 0 to Stage 1 while we’re covering it in place, and make sure that I’m putting it the reps to keep it in Stage 1 during the time periods where we aren’t going through the reps. Stages 2 and 3 layer on more difficulties: when I’m playing a piece of music while looking at a score, I have a pretty good chance of noticing if I play the wrong note, whereas with Tai Chi, I can be completely unaware of problems like that! It’s not an unsolvable problem — I can spend time watching videos and being particularly aware of places where the performer does a move in a different way than I am, for example — but it does add a layer of difficulty. And I just don’t have well developed sensibilities for what it means to perform Tai Chi artistically, and for that matter I’m not convinced that performing Tai Chi artistically is the right goal for Stage 3?

Fortunately, my teacher is hugely helpful with those difficulties. For years, there was basically only one form (the Lao Jia first form) that I was really trying to get past Stage 1, and my teacher would give me detailed feedback on my form once every three months or so. His feedback is a mixture of Stage 2 (e.g. my left hand should go up more at the end of some specific posture) and Stage 3 (e.g. I should be more conscious of how I treat the space between postures), he does a great job of pointing out Stage 2 corrections that I wasn’t aware of and of giving me Stage 3 ideas that I’m ready to start grappling with and that will keep me busy for the next three months.

My Lao Jia first form has finally gotten good enough that I’m ready to dip my toes into Stage 2 and even Stage 3 considerations for other forms; still a long way to go, and I still need help, but I’m starting to make broader progress along that path. I’m even teaching a course this summer that’s all about some Stage 3 concerns that I feel like I understand well enough to be able to try expressing them to other people.

I mentioned at the end of my discussion of music that I suspect I should probably spend more time on isolated exercises; with Tai Chi I’m quite sure that I should, and in fact I am.

Part of the reason for this is that I’ve decided that, for me, Stage 3 considerations in Tai Chi aren’t so much about how something seems to an outside observer, they way they are in music: they’re about what I’m learning about the insides of my body. And sure, Tai Chi forms are a great road for understanding that; but isolated exercises, repeating a single movement for five minutes or standing in a static posture for 30 minutes, can be at least as useful in that regard. (It’s kind of amazing how the insides of your body and your perception of the insides of your body can change over the course of 30 minutes holding a static posture!)

And reason for this is that, over the last four or five years, I’ve added in Nei Gong (with a different teacher) to my practice routine; Nei Gong is a form of internal work that is more explicitly focused on internal transformation (“nei” means “internal” or “inside”), and the exercises that it uses to that end are much more isolated than Tai Chi forms. That’s given me quite a bit of exposure to isolated exercises, and I’ve seen the benefits of that kind of focus; so I want to get those benefits for my Tai Chi as well.

And, to be sure, my Tai Chi teacher has us spend quite a lot of time on isolated exercises as well: in his introductory course, he devotes almost half the class time to isolated exercises. So it’s an important part of his class syllabus, and I’ve got quite a few exercises that I can and do spend time on in that domain.

Generalizing

So what are the takeaways here, for music or Tai Chi or other areas that I’m trying to improve at? A few stabs at generalizing the above:

Pay attention to when you’re overloaded

This relates to the difference between Stage 0 and Stage 1: for Stage 0 stuff, I’m messing around with no commitment, whereas for Stage 1, I’m putting in sustained effort. Both are fine things to do; just don’t get so constantly excited by shiny stuff that you decide you’re going to learn everything, when you don’t actually have time (or want to make time) to do that, you’ll just get frustrated and burned out.

Raise your standards

If you’re serious about learning something, then don’t make a habit of settling for good enough: instead, periodically try to get things really right. Basically, operate in a Stage 2 mode instead of a Stage 1 mode; or, for that matter, a Stage 1 instead of a Stage 0 mode.

Go deeper

Don’t just follow the basic rules for whatever you’re learning: figure out what’s behind those rules, what’s missing from what those rules. This is Stage 3 versus Stage 2; maybe it manifests itself as improving your taste / artistic sensibilities, maybe it manifests itself as understanding underlying concepts, either way it’s important.

Effective practice sometimes looks quite different from the finished project

This might show itself as the difference between Stage 0 and Stage 2: constantly stopping to try to get a detail right instead of playing through an entire piece of music. Or it might look like spending time on isolated exercises (e.g. scales) that don’t look much like what you’re trying to learn (playing pieces of music). Either way, the most effective way to get better at doing X isn’t always (or even usually) to do X from start to finish: it’s often to dig into components of X (maybe parts of X, maybe skills that feed into X) and to focus on your capabilities at those components.

A month or two back, I ran across a mention of the game Magic Research; my replaying of Kittens Game had reminded me that I like clicker games, and Magic Research looked interesting, so I decided to give it a try.

And it’s good! It’s no Kittens Game, but it’s solid, and there’s stuff in there that was new to me. As is unsurprising given the name, there’s a lot of spell stuff going on: so while you do have buildings that produce various materials (wood, stone, etc.), you also have a magic level (in fact a bunch of different levels, corresponding to different schools of magic), and that has you casting spells; sometimes those spells also produce materials, sometimes those spells make your buildings more efficient, etc. Which would get unmanageable pretty quickly if you had to cast those spells all the time; but hey, you’re in charge of a school, so you’ve got a bunch of apprentices around to put to work casting spells on regular intervals for you, to keep your buildings working at peak efficiency.

And then there’s the combat aspect of Magic Research. I guess the term here is “auto battler”; that’s not a genre that I’ve played any games in, so I don’t how how much Magic Research is like other games in that genre. But at any rate you’re off exploring dungeons while you’re running the school, defeating monsters and getting items. Which works well in the clicker genre, certainly: it’s another way to gradually acquire resources over time, and it lends itself to crafting items to improve your ability to explore dungeons, so it also adds in a resource sink. And it motivates some of the schools of magic: there’s an Evocation school for offensive spells and a Protection school for defensive spells, etc.

Each level of the dungeon has a boss; those battles are tough enough that you probably want to monitor the battle and cast your attack spells yourself. This is the one part of the game that doesn’t feel like a clicker game, but that’s fine: it gives you something to pay a little more attention to every so often in a way that remains in conversation with clicker mechanics. And also, one aspect of this sort of clicker game is where the walls are going to be; just hitting a wall because it’ll take a week to gather enough material for one more building gets old after a while, so it’s nice that, in Magic Research, the walls take the form of bosses that you can’t beat even after trying out a few strategies against them.

Which brings us to rebirth mechanics. In Magic Research, it’s themed via retirement, which works well. But then the question is: what will be different next time? And, to that end, the game has mixed in some plot elements: there are various events that happen, sometimes randomly (once you’ve satisfied certain conditions), and sometimes based on triggering certain specific events (e.g. defeating some of the tougher bosses). When you hit those plot elements, you generally don’t just get narration, you get something that affects gameplay, e.g. by making it easier to produce some kind of resource or to store some kinds of resources or level up in one of the schools of magic. And some of those gameplay changes take effect immediately, but some of them only take effect on retirement; so generally each time you retire, you’ll have unlocked a handful of different changes that will speed up your next run. (And the plot elements also give an overall goal / arc to the game, to try to win a big magic tournament.)

Also, on each run, you pick a school of magic to specialize in; you can level up faster in that school, but also, when you retire, the game looks at your overall collection of maximum level you’ve reached in the various schools, and gives you a production boost based on that. So that gives you an accellerant to help you make it a little farther on subsequent runs; and also it’s designed in a way that gives you an active incentive to change schools every time you retire, which makes the different runs feel a little less repetitive.

So: solid game. Some mechanics that I’d seen before that I liked; some mechanics that I either hadn’t seen in the genre or hadn’t seen at all, and I liked those mechanics too and thought they worked well in the genre. Respectful of my time: it ate up a little more of my time while playing it than I was comfortable with, but that’s the way the genre works, and it was totally manageable in this case. And the game didn’t outstay its welcome; I don’t remember exactly how long I spent on it, but if I had to guess I’d say two weeks, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t as much as a month.

(Warning: this is a long post, even by my standards.)

For several years (a decade?) now, my energy levels during the day have been pretty bad. A few years back, I decided to try to do something about it. Things still aren’t completely fixed, but they’re significantly better, and I also have a better understanding of what’s going on, so I figured it was time for a post about it.

At first, I had two hypotheses: that allergies were making me tired, and that my bad sleep was also making me tired. (I was waking up maybe four times on average over the course of the night, and not always falling right back to sleep either.) I also talked it over with my GP; she tested to see if my thyroid level was off (it turned out to be fine), and talked about sleep apnea (but I was kind of actively in denial about wanting to even think about that path, CPAP machines didn’t sound pleasant to me).

Getting my allergies under control seemed like a good idea, at any rate, so I went to see an allergist. First I tried one with the medical group that my GP is at, but I got annoyed enough by him scheduling expensive and ineffective tests and the cavalier attitude of the billing office towards those expenses. So I looked around, and found an independent allergist who was in-network.

I initially kind of slow rolled the allergy treatments; my allergist put me on new drugs, which helped, but not enough. So, a year or so later, I started also getting allergy shots; that helped more.

My sleep was pretty bad, though, and I was starting to come around to the idea that I had sleep apnea. In particular, sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I was kind of jerked out of sleep; it sounded entirely plausible to me that sleep apnea would lead to that symptom. One of the things that I like about my allergist is that she really likes going deep into problems; one direction that she went in was that yes, my nose was constricted in part by allergies, but my nose’s geometry wasn’t helping things, and that could indeed lead to sleep apnea. And another direction that she discussed was environmental factors: dealing with my carpets, in particular.

I can’t remember the timing of all of this, but she eventually convinced me to have nose surgery to correct a deviated septum and reduce an internal structure inside my nose. (I think the turbinates?) Which helped some with my sleep but didn’t completely fix the problem. She also got me to vacuum my bedroom carpet weekly with a high-quality vacuum cleaner, and to improve our dust mite mitigation strategies around our bedding; that made a difference, too. (Dust mites are my main environmental allergy, I have what I think is an unusually strong recation to them.) I also noticed that, at the start of the winter, I was much more allergic overnight and when waking up, which I blamed on the heating coming on, so we’ve started getting our air ducts cleaned out once a year, which also helps. (We were already regularly cleaning our furnace filter.)

She kept on pushing me to do more with the carpets; eventually, at her urging, we replaced our bedroom carpets with hardwood floors. That actually ended up not making a noticeable difference in my allergies, I think the shots and the other mitigation strategies had made enough of a difference that that wasn’t necessary; but I really liked the look and the feel of the new floors, so I’m entirely happy to have done it even if it didn’t help with that specific issue.

As a result of all of the above, my sleep apnea is, I believe, completely gone: it’s been ages since since I’ve been startled awake. My allergies are noticeable but entirely manageable; I’m still getting allergy shots, but I’m down to doing those once every four weeks, so it’s not too bad an imposition on my life.

So that’s one victory; yay. Unfortunately, I was still quite a bit more tired during the day than I would have liked, and while my sleep was better, it still wasn’t great. And I said above that it’s been ages since I’ve been startled awake; that’s true now, but it wasn’t entirely true even after I was starting to get my sleep apnea under control, because sometimes I’d get startled awake by acid in my throat. And I’d also get woken up by having to pee (yay getting old?), by worrying (fortunately not a frequent issue these days), and sometimes for no obvious reason.

I mentioned some of this to my allergist; she thought that maybe the acid problem was related to meat digestion, and gave me some drug samples that might help. I thought that sounded plausible, but also I’d been curious about acupuncture / Traditional Chinese Medicine (a.k.a. TCM) for a while, both because that’s the sort of thing that you hear about when you spend enough time doing Tai Chi and Qi Gong and because a family member had had good experience with acupuncture. So I figured I’d try out TCM treatment next, and leave the digestion stuff as a later potential idea to try.

I went to the same TCM doctor that the aforementioned family member had gone to; his diagnosis was that I had Liver Heat and weak Kidney Qi. I also mentioned some other random problems that I had, e.g. a limited range of motion in my right big toe; he said that that was caused by tightness elsewhere in my body, related to back problems that I’d had earlier. (I thought of my back as being basically fine, it’s not causing the same sort of active problems it was a decade back, but I also wasn’t shocked that there were still some areas for improvement there.)

And wow, his diagnosis of the toe thing was definitely correct. In retrospect, I’m kind of annoyed at a foot doctor I saw a couple of decades ago who diagnosed me with Hallux Limitus and told me to wear insoles, without telling me (and I assume without realizing) that my foot problems were a symptom of a problem elsewhere in my body! I don’t know if I had a bad foot doctor or if foot doctors these days are better about that sort of connection or if Western medicine promotes a sort of specialization that misses that kind of thing; at any rate, score one for TCM there.

Anyways, my TCM doctor started off by focusing on the Liver Heat issues, via acupuncture and herbs. And my sleep got better: I fairly quickly went from waking up three or four times a night to waking up two times a night. So that was a noticeable improvement; but there was still work to do on the sleep front, both in terms of the number of times I was waking up and in terms for how long it took me to fall back asleep after waking up in the middle of the night.

For a few years now, I’ve doing something called “Nei Gong”, which translates to something like “internal work” or “internal skill”, and which is sort of Qi Gong combined with meditation and physical activities that are vaguely reminiscent of yoga. I got curious about it after reading some books by Damo Mitchell, and so I took some classes from teachers in his Lotus Nei Gong school. And a year or so after I started doing that, he opened up an online school called the Internal Arts Academy (IAA) which takes students systematically through Nei Gong processes.

One of the reasons why I bring that up here is that some of the Qi Gong sets in the IAA program talk about Liver Qi and Kidney Qi as well. (They mostly call it Wood Qi and Water Qi, but it’s the same thing.) Also, generally, after an exercise set, the program recommends a brief cooling down set of movements, designed to get energy down your body instead of stuck up in your head.

So I started experimenting with the Wood-related exercises, and the cooling down sets; and in fact some of those were very similar, which is certainly not a coincidence. I put the wood exercises into my rotation more frequently, and I did the cooling down exercises for longer, sometimes for quite a bit longer.

And towards the end of a particularly long session one day, I realized that a certain specific sort of tingling in my head had gone away. That night I slept better than normal; experimenting with this more, if I did a long enough session of those cooling down exercises then the tingling would go away and I’d fall asleep more quickly at the start of the night, wake up less, and go back to sleep less when I did wake up. Fortunately, I didn’t have to spend vast amounts of time doing those cooling down exercises: once I got that tingling under control with a few forceful sessions, then the regular cooling down exercises that he recommends were generally enough as long as I performed them thoughtfully instead of perfunctorily.

And it was also important for me not to do the wrong sorts of activities in bed or late in the evening. Reading books is fine; some kinds of puzzle games are fine but some are dangerous. Regular video games are fine during the evening (and I never played them in bed), but this was during my recent Kittens Game phase, and that game has enough open loops that I needed to stop playing it half an hour or so before going to bed, an hour or so before going to sleep; I also strictly avoided looking at it in the middle of the night when I did wake up.

With all of this, my sleep got noticeably better. I remember one night where I went to sleep, didn’t wake up until the alarm clock went off; this was honestly disconcerting, and I realized that it had been years (a decade? probably longer…) since the last time that had happened. Unfortunately sleeping through the entire night is still extremely rare for me, but these days waking up once approximately six hours into my sleep and then falling back to sleep almost immediately is decently common. (Or at least was before getting a new puppy threw a wrench in my sleep…)

One other thing happened that might (or might not) be linked to this Liver-related treatment: at one random doctor’s visit, I got weighed and my weight was 10 pounds lighter than normal, which is definitely outside of my normal variance. I didn’t actually own a scale so I didn’t have much data about that; I bought one, the measurement wasn’t a fluke, and in fact my weight kept on going down until it stabilized at 25 pounds lighter than I was.

Some of this might have been behavioral on my part: I started trying to do a better job of paying attention to signals that my body was sending as to whether or not it was hungry, and not eating as much when I wasn’t hungry. So I’m not sure how much the weight loss was caused by me behaving differently, how much it was caused by my body being less hungry than it was before, and how much was caused by some other metabolism change in my body (e.g. from the Nei Gong changes in my body); I’ll take it, at any rate, I wasn’t particularly worried about my prior weight but all things being equal my new weight is better than my old weight.

And I bring that up in part because there’s another food-related thing connected to these issues that I discovered relatively recently: my sleep is surprisingly related to my food consumption at dinner. (Or at least it was a surprise to me!) Specifically, if I either eat a large dinner or a late dinner, then I generally sleep worse, where by “large” I mean “the size my dinners used to normally be” and by “late” I mean “the time when I used to eat dinner”: now I want to have dinner on the table by 7:30, and even that is pushing it. That was completely unexpected, and makes me wonder how long I’ve been been reacting to food timing / portion sizes in this way: is it another side-effect of metabolism changes, or what?

At any rate, score one for my allergist to suggest that some of my remaining sleep issues might have something to do with food; I don’t know that this specifically was one thing that she had in mind, but she was poking at a useful area. I can’t say I’m entirely thrilled with discovering this, I like sometimes going out for a decently large dinner, but still, understanding is good and it’s not too hard to adjust to this for the significant majority of days where we eat at home. And, if I’m going to have to make food-related changes, I’m glad it was these instead of something like removing gluten. (I experimented with that for a couple of months during this, but that had no effect.)

So yay, with all of that, my sleep was actually pretty well under control. The thing was, I was still tired! Less tired than I had been, but I still wasn’t at top energy levels during the day, and sometimes I’d still feel like I needed to take a nap during the day. (Less often than before, admittedly.)

Which wasn’t a huge surprise from a TCM point of view: the sleep stuff was associated to the Liver Heat problems that my TCM doctor diagnosed me with, but there was another half to his diagnosis, deficient Kidney Qi. So my doctor switched the herbal mixture he was giving me, and I think switched some other details of the treatment that were less clear to me. In particular, he spent more time talking about my back, especially my lower back; he felt like some blockages there were causing problems, and while he’d already given me one back exercise (in addition to a neck exercise to help with the sleep problem), he gave me a couple more exercises to do every day.

My Nei Gong practice started running up against problems with my energy levels, too. For the last few years, I’ve been working part time; I’d hoped to spend a good chunk of my days off doing Nei Gong and Tai Chi, but while I did do those more, I just didn’t have the energy most days to put in the hours that I wanted. (Sometimes it manifested itself as low motivation, too, but I think that was related to energy rather than a more deep seated “I was fooling myself when I thought I would want to spend time on this” potential issue.) Often I’d flat out start to fall asleep during seated exercises; and during standing exercises, it was hard to keep going as long as I felt like I should be able to. Experimenting, it helped if I didn’t eat breakfast before doing my Nei Gong, but it didn’t help enough.

And then I went to a nine-day Nei Gong workshop, about something called the Microcosmic Orbit. Mostly that went well, actually: I certainly can imagine having more energy, there were some days where I wasn’t participating as fully as would be ideal, but also doing Nei Gong for 9 days is legitimately hard work even if you don’t have fatigue problems. So yay, that was a good sign; and I did actually manage to get my Microcosmic Orbit going on the last couple of days of the workshop.

There was one lecture during the workshop that seemed potentially relevant to me: Damo talked about how, if you hold your body in a way where you’re sinking in on yourself, then that can hurt your Spleen Qi in a way that hurts your energy levels, whereas if you actively expand your body then that will grow your Spleen Qi and energy. This is related to a concept called “bones up, flesh down” that he and other teachers had talked about in the past but that I wasn’t very good at putting into practice; fortunately, he had a different take on bones up, flesh down that I found easier to carry out. (For other Internal Arts Academy folks, that talk was recorded: it’s the Errors in Qigong video from the Maryland 2022 set.)

It actually seems decently plausible that, to some extent, Nei Gong had been hurting my energy levels, because of that mechanism? I certainly hadn’t seen evidence that Nei Gong was giving me more energy; I’m not completely convinced that it had been making my energy levels worse, but it might have been.

So I was pretty optimistic after the workshop; but I didn’t stay optimistic for long. Outside of the workshop setting, I couldn’t keep the Microcosmic Orbit going; so, while the workshop showed that it was something I was capable of doing, at my current state of training, I clearly needed to be putting in more time than I was managing in a non-workshop context. And my fatigue levels weren’t particularly better, either.

Thinking about it for a while, I decided I should take a back-to-basics approach to Nei Gong: rather than banging my head against the Orbit, I should spend time on more foundational exercises. And also I should spend time on Qi-building exercises: in particular, there were exercise sets that Damo recommended for building Kidney Qi and for building Spleen Qi, both of which seemed relevant to me. So I stopped doing new lessons in the Nei Gong course: I made just to find time to do each of those Qi-building exercises for 40 minutes twice each week and I spent the rest of my Nei Gong practice time on foundational exercises.

I liked those two exercises; I’m not 100% sure how much they helped my energy levels, but they might have, and I’m pretty sure that the Spleen Qi set helped build connections in my body that were useful for both Nei Gong and Tai Chi. (It led to me feeling a sort of stretchy, elastic feeling inside of my body.) And spending time on foundational stuff instead of pushing forward in the course definitely felt right.

I also went to a few (three?) in-person three-day Nei Gong workshops that winter with local teachers. And those were surprisingly interesting and effective: in particular, both teachers had us working on building out space inside of our arms and our shoulder joints; not the most pleasant experience, but the experience of feeling my arms expand on their own from the inside was pretty interesting, and I really did manage to build space inside my shoulder joints in tangible ways and with tangible effects. That sort of practice was something that I hadn’t been doing enough of on my own, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to to do it as well without that instruction, so that was extremely useful. (And it was nice to feel like I was making progress in Nei Gong, too.)

At some point around here, I started spending some time squatting with my feet flat on the ground. This is a normal way to rest and hang out for many people in many parts of the world, but it’s not something I (or most other Americans) can do; when I first tried it, I felt like I was constantly struggling to stay upright, and I could only last a couple of minutes. But, it turns out, that if I kept at it and if I stopped struggling and let my body relax, it was actually able to hold itself up when I was squatting like that; and, as part of that adjustment process, it was a really strong stretch on my lower back, because the more I relaxed, the more my pelvis was stabilizing me by being a weight at the bottom of my spine. That seemed useful; and, the more I did it, the more comfortable it felt, and the back stretch remained but transitioned from something that felt so strong as to be a little scary to something that felt like it was just being helpful at keeping my back open. So I still do it, and not just as an exercise: squatting like that is the most comfortable way for me to hang out when waiting for the train, for example.

At any rate, my health stayed in that state for a while: my sleep was pretty good, my energy levels weren’t good but were manageable, and I was making progress with Nei Gong. I kept on going to acupuncture; some weeks were better than other weeks, maybe there was a slight improvement trajectory, but I didn’t reach any sort of step change.

I also started gently moving my Nei Gong out of Qi building mode and more into other sorts of internal conditioning. I gradually started doing out some of the pre-Microcosmic Orbit lessons again; and I even slowly started going through new lessons (e.g. one on Ping Heng Gong, a way of connecting with the environment). And since my TCM doctor kept on focusing on my spine, I did an hour-long Spinal Dao Yin once every week or two that felt particularly effective to me; here’s the link for Internal Arts Academy folks.

In the fall, I went to another in-person workshop with a local teacher; this one covered the first of the Dragon Dao Yin exercises. Those exercises are focused on your spine, stretching and purging them in various different ways; I’d gone through video lessons on them before, so I knew the basic moves, but I picked up a lot of pointers from being taught them in person. And, in particular, those pointers had me doing the exercise in question in a much more forceful way than I had been doing before; it only covered one of the four Dragons, but once I had my eyes opened to that, it gave me ideas for how to approach the other exercises differently. (Not just stretching more forcefully, it got me more aware of connections in my body as well.)

So, when I got back from that workshop, I spent more time working on the Dragons: it was interesting and useful from a Nei Gong point of view, and my TCM doctor was still talking about spine blockages and misalignment, so I figured it couldn’t hurt from that point of view either. Also, the teacher in that workshop spent some time talking about an exercise called Spine Waves; I’d actually been doing Spine Waves fairly regularly already, but I started doing them for a five minute or so chunk every day instead of mixing them in sporadically in shorter bits.

With all of this attention I was paying to my spine, I realized that my lower back positioning wasn’t quite right. When I did a Gokhale course a few years back, the instructor pointed out that I was arching my stomach forward; I’d significantly improved my habits in that regard, but I was still arching a little bit. So I started working on getting my lower spine positioned properly; it turns out that, if I got it just right, then I’d actually feel like the rest of my spine was being actively lifted. (I think there’s maybe some sort of tensegrity thing going on that’s enabled by the proper positioning, as long as your spine is in good enough shape in other ways?) And my Nei Gong felt better when I got that positioning right, too.

This all seemed like good ideas, but still, no big change in my energy levels. My TCM doctor said that my Kidney Qi levels were getting closer to being where he wanted them to be, but still weren’t there; but also my improvement had slowed, and I didn’t really like spending most of an afternoon doing that every Friday. So I switched my TCM appointments to every other week instead of every week.

And then, one Saturday morning, I woke up with a ton more energy than I had. It was actually kind of disconcerting, but in a good way: this is what it feels like to not just be low-level tired? I really like this! Exploring how I felt a little more, there was still a bit of the habitual tiredness there somewhere in my head, so there was still room for improvement, but wow, things were a lot better.

That was just before Christmas, so I had a couple of four-day weekends coming up. And my brain and body decided to respond to this by doing a lot more Nei Gong and Tai Chi than I normally did; so yes, my hypothesis that these were things that I really did want to spend a decent amount of time on was correct, I just only wanted to do that if I had the energy to do that.

So that was a great week and a half. Unfortunately, my energy levels started dipping back down; at the end of the second week, I was feeling a lot closer to my previous more-tired-than-I-would-have-liked levels (admittedly potentially caused by bad sleep one night) than to my recent improved levels. I had an acupuncture session then; my doctor was actually really impressed by my Kidney Qi levels, so things looked better from his point of view as well; and things got a little better after that? Though my Kidney Qi levels were noticeably iffier at my next appointment after that one, two weeks later.

So, the good news was: it’s possible for things to get better, even dramatically so. The bad news was that the improvement wasn’t going to magically sustain itself, and I didn’t actually know what had triggered the improvement!

The best hypothesis that I had was that I’d been working on my spine in a few different ways over the last few months; so maybe that had gotten my spine into better shape? And then I guess a TCM treatment one Friday (maybe the acupuncture part of the treatment, but I think it’s at least as plausible that it was my doctor doing some fine-treatment manipulation on my spine after the acupuncture) pushed things over the edge to get things lined up properly. And then, once things were lined up, my body could generate more energy. (Or, alternately, that it could get energy it was already generating to more of my body.)

So I kept at the spinal exercises. And I also tried paying more attention to how energy was flowing where in my body; I noticed that, when I was doing Wu Ji, which is the fundamental standing exercise in the Lotus Nei Gong system, that I’d feel energized at the base of my skull (where the spine enters my skull), which is one of the places where my feeling of tiredness had previous been localized at. Maybe Wu Ji had always been having that effect, but I don’t think so; so one hypothesis that is consistent with these observations is that the various Kidney Qi building exercises that I’d been doing (the Kidney Hui Chun, but also some of the Microcosmic Orbit prep work exercises that I’d been spending time on) had been building that up, but it had been stuck in my lower abdomen; but then when I freed up my spine, it started to make its way up my spine.

And yes, I realize that, to those of you who don’t do Qi Gong / Nei Gong, that probably sounds like ridiculous mysticism. And I’m not even going to argue with you there! All I really know is that my energy levels sucked, but they were getting better, that I could feel some tingling and/or decrease of fatigue in various parts of my body that felt to me like they were correlated to those improved energy levels in ways that weren’t a coincidence, and that I’d been doing some other exercises (both for my spine and for my abdomen) that might or might not be correlated to all of this. And yes, using TCM and Nei Gong ideas, I could come up with a story that wove all of that together; but I also didn’t have strong enough experimental evidence to really know what was a coincidence and was was a causal link, especially if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t have any particular reason to believe in TCM or Nei Gong ideas.

At any rate, where this is currently, a month and a half after those first signs of improvement, is: things are better than they were, but I definitely have my ups and downs, with the downs pretty similar to my previous kind of bad normal state, and I still haven’t gotten back to that holiday state. I’m still sticking with my hypothesis that my spine is very relevant to what’s going on, and I think I can point to linkages between it and some of my ups and downs in energy levels.

And some of the previous issues are still occasionally popping up. I realized that my sleep had gotten worse again; not horrible, but it was more common than not that I’d wake up maybe three times in the middle of the night? A few focused sessions of one of the cooling down exercises seem to have helped with that, fortunately, so I just have to make sure to mix those in sometimes when my sleep is off. Also, weirdly, I’ve lost a little more weight; we’ll see how long this stretch of losing weight lasts, it doesn’t necessarily seem quite as persistent as my earlier one.

In case any of this resonates with other people, I guess I’ll put in a few notes about stuff that might be useful more generally. First, let me be clear: my fatigue issues aren’t / weren’t nearly as bad as some situations I’ve seen and/or heard about. And I don’t have any reason to believe that what’s going on with me is related to any of the common causes of hard-to-kick fatigue: e.g. this was happening to me before COVID, so it’s not Long COVID, I have no reason to believe that it’s Lyme Disease either, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Anyways:

• If you have noticeable allergies, maybe look into that. The right medicine can help, shots can help, environmental improvements (e.g. dust mitigation strategies) can help.
• It’s useful to figure out what gets your brain active in unproductive ways and to avoid those in bed / near bed time. I’m not a no-screens person, reading novels on my iPad seems totally fine, and there are even some puzzle games that are fine, but games with open loops are bad.
• Food seems to affect my sleep in ways that were unexpected, at least to me. Maybe that’s the case for other people as well? So play around with the timing of eating, the quantity of eating, and specific types of food.
• Having said all of that, fatigue isn’t necessarily particularly related to sleep.
• If you’ve talked to Western doctors and they’re not coming up with useful suggestions, maybe try a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor? It’s unlikely to hurt, it might actually help, and TCM analytical categories divide up the world differently (and more coarsely, I think) than Western medicine, which means that TCM doctors might spot different connections.
• My current theory is that my spine is weirdly relevant to my fatigue issues; not sure how broadly that’s the case, but it wouldn’t necessarily hurt to poke at that if you’ve got fatigue problems? Paying close attention to spinal alignment helped, I think; the Gokhale Foundations Course was extremely helpful for getting me started, and in retrospect I wish I’d pushed farther on getting my alignments really solid instead of getting them pretty close and declaring victory.
• Also exercises for stretching and opening up your spine are useful; the Gokhale exercises for that actually didn’t help me so much, but they might help other people? But I do like Spine Waves and squatting with my feet flat on the ground for that. Though I’ve also thrown a bunch of other random exercises at my spine, hopefully you can find ones that work for you. Find a collection of exercises that you don’t mind spending ten or fifteen minutes a day on and that make your back feel warm when doing them once you’ve been doing them for a week or so.

And, if you happen to be a Nei Gong person:

• If you’re waking up more than you’d like while sleeping or having a hard time falling asleep, try doing closing down or the Wood Wu Xing for ten minutes straight a few times. (Not necessarily right before bed, it works fine as part of your practice during the day too.)
• Don’t neglect your Dao Yins and other body opening techniques. I was just reminded this weekend that Coiling Snake does good things to my spine, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks focusing on that, I think!
• Don’t accidentally collapse your body while sinking: expand internally, and pay attention to Bones Up Flesh Down.
• Don’t rush through the lessons: listen to signs where your body might be telling you that you need to work more on your foundations.
• The Water and Earth Hui Chuns are useful if you’re feeling depleted.

I do think that Nei Gong has a potential to be a double-edged sword for people with fatigue issues. I think that, ultimately, Nei Gong probably turning into something that’s actively helping me, but I think it’s also potentially the case that it might have been making my fatigue worse for a while. And it’s taken a decent amount of focus, persistence, and instruction to get it to where I think it’s helping, there are a lot of ways to do Nei Gong wrong. Also, if you’re tired, then it’s hard to do Nei Gong!

Still, I’m very glad for non-health-related reasons that I’m doing Nei Gong, so if you’re curious about that sort of thing, then I definitely recommend giving it a try. Just do it because you want to do Nei Gong, don’t come in with too much hope that it’ll necessarily help with some specific problem you have.

Two more games this time that I started but didn’t finish; both played because of VGHVI discussions, both pleasant games that I might have finished in other circumstances, but also both games that wouldn’t have been at the top of my list otherwise and where that placement in my list was correct.

Lies of P was our December game. Part of me thinks that I should know better than to try another Soulslike, but hey, this one’s a Bloodbornelike, and I’ve never actually played Bloodborne. And podcasters seem to like Lies of P quite of bit; of course, game podcasters like Soulslikes a lot more than I do, but still.

Anyways, it was available on Game Pass, so I figured I’d give it a try. And it was fun, I probably enjoyed it more than any other Soulslike that I’ve played so far? I was only expecting to go through a couple of levels, but I enjoyed those just fine; and I was still waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 to come out on Xbox, so I had some time to kill, so I kept on going.

Having said that, I eventually ran into a boss that I didn’t want to deal with. It wasn’t a horrible boss, but I did need to move on to the next VGHVI game, so I figured I’d let that boss be my excuse to stop playing. If I wanted to find something to complain about, I’d say that there’s a large enough gap between regular enemies and bosses that the regular enemies aren’t great training for bosses; that some items are still limited enough that I don’t feel great using them against bosses (charges for that cube thing in particular), and that there’s a curious lack of hilts in the game if you’re taking a balanced approach. And of course there’s all the Soulslike opaqueness in the systems; but I can deal with that okay these days.

So, if I were to want to make a push to finish a Soulslike, this would be a good candidate. But I still don’t see a reason why I should do that; clearly not the genre for me.

The January VGHVI game was Dave the Diver. That one I wasn’t worried about not enjoying; and indeed, it was a pleasant mixture of genres. I liked the core loop of fishing and running a restaurant; I liked the light plot bits mixed in; I liked the random challenges the game threw at you.

They started to throw more stuff at you, managing both a fish farm and a vegetable farm. I’m not sure what I think about that, but it also doesn’t seem to be something that will take up a huge amount of time. And I encountered a sea people village; seems like a source of minigames and fetch quests.

With all of that, the game was getting a little busy? I was in chapter 3 out of 7; I felt like the game was starting to lose the virtues of its core loop a bit, and honestly the core loop is fine but not super engrossing or anything. So I wasn’t sure that I would want to take the time to finish Dave the Diver; even setting Baldur’s Gate 3 aside, there are a handful of other games that I really would like to get around to. (Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Cocoon, Chants of Sennaar; and I missed doing my yearly play of a Yakuza game, and the next part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake is showing up soon! Hmm, maybe I should play Chants of Sennaar on the trip instead…)

And then Baldur’s Gate 3 finally got released for Xbox; that pushed me off the fence and had me stop Dave the Diver. I actually do expect to come back to it, though: I’m taking a trip in April, and I think Dave the Diver is probably my best choice for a game to play then. So I will pick it back up eventually; I might even finish it, we’ll see. Liesl is playing through it as well, so I should have a sense by then what the later levels are like so I can get an idea of how far I want to push into the game.

Part of me feels a little frazzled, jumping between games like this. But one of my hopes with Game Pass was that I’d be experimenting with more stuff? Though actually my issue isn’t really that I don’t have enough random games I want to play: it’s that VGHVI discussions are having me play games that are a little further down the list than I’d like, and that I expect Baldur’s Gate 3 to take up my time for way too long. But the next stretch of VGHVI games will have fewer that interrupt my other playing; and I’m enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 fine but not necessarily so much that I feel compelled to do every single quest. So maybe I’ll be able to get through that game more quickly than I’d thought, we’ll see.

And also I’m just not feeling like playing games quite as much as I had been? Which is for good reasons: I’m wanting to spend more time doing Nei Gong and Tai Chi and playing piano, which are all things I feel good about doing!

Earlier this year, we had a VGHVI discussion of Against the Storm. That game is Windows-only, so I couldn’t play it, but the discussion and a let’s play that I watched got me thinking that I probably would enjoy playing Against the Storm if it were available on console. And, during that discussion, Frostpunk came up; I started watching a let’s play of that game as well, and thought it was interesting enough that I ended up sticking with the let’s play through the game’s entire first mission.

So I was happy when we chose Frostpunk as our game to discuss in November – it’s available on Xbox Game Pass, and I was happy to have an excuse to give it a try. I figured that I’d just play through one mission; but I enjoyed it enough that I decided to play a second mission, and ended up going through all the non-DLC missions.

So yeah: a solid game. It’s a city builder survival game in frozen (and getting more and more frozen) wasteland. So you’re gathering resources, through both exploration and production; you’re making sure that you’ve got food and heat and medical care to keep people more or less healthy; you’re researching new technologies to keep your production curve ahead of the oncoming problems; and you’re enacting laws to manage people’s response to problems. It’s all well done; I was very very close to the edge of failure in my first playthrough of the initial mission, which felt like what I would want out of a game like this.

What impressed me more, though, was how the game explored its design space. I was expecting the second mission to be a lot like the first mission, just with a different set of events, and maybe a bit harder but that would be okay because I’d have a basic understanding of how the mechanics work. But that’s actually not what the designers did: the second scenario changed your population in a way that basically made a third or so of the buildings inaccessible (because you don’t have the right kind of people to operate them), and also removed the mechanic where you’d periodically discover new people during your exploration. So that meant that I had to explore different paths to accomplish my needs (e.g. because the building I’d been depending on for food in my first run was no longer available), and also I had to manage keeping my city ahead of the technology and resource curve needed to survive the increasingly cold temperatures without having an expanding population that would let me build and staff more production buildings.

And the other missions changed things up in similar ways: forcing me to explore different aspects of the possibility space, or expanding the possibility space in well thought-out ways. I appreciated that; I actually wouldn’t have minded if the game had repeated itself more, but what they actually did was more interesting. (I’m the sort of player who is prone to falling into a rut by sticking with the same strategy over and over in a given game.) Enough so that I was a little sad when I hit the end of the missions that were included in the base game; I thought about getting the DLC, but my game backlog was unusually long so I decided that it was time to move to a different game.

I’ve got quibbles with Frostpunk: while in general I think it did a good job with its tutorialization, there were some situations where I simply did not know how to accomplish some task that it was asking me to do, because they’d buried it some place I didn’t normally look. And I think they expected some of their moral choices to be weightier than they felt to me; call me callous, but if I were to find myself in the middle of an apocalyptic frozen wasteland, I would tell kids to help out instead of wringing my hands about child labor.

But none of that was enough to cause any particular problems in my enjoyment of the game. (And lord knows that most other video games do a lot worse at addressing morality.) Definitely glad I played it, and it’s probably a genre I would enjoy dipping into more. Probably also a PC-centric genre, so who knows how many such games will be available for me, but I was glad that VGHVI discussions gave me an excuse to play this one. And, for that matter, that Game Pass exists and makes it easier for me to try out games in genres that I’m not used to.

I was surprisingly nonplussed by The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom while going through the tutorial island. The first tutorial shrine was fine; it gave me a power that let me move stuff around, which seemed useful enough, and to stick things together, which sounded fine as long as I wasn’t constantly having to build large structures? I was more dubious about power I got in the second tutorial shrine, though: it let me fuse stuff to my weapons to make them stronger or to change their functionality. And I didn’t really see how having to fuse stuff to strengthen my weapons was an improvement over just having the weapon strength already balanced in a way that worked well to fight enemies; I wasn’t particularly in a mood to be experimenting with weapon powers to do weird stuff, either.

Traveling to the third tutorial shrine didn’t improve my mood: the environment wasn’t pleasant to travel through in the way that Breath of the Wild was, my encounter with some enemies didn’t do anything to allay my worries about the fuse power, and the ways in which I had to assemble stuff from the environment were okay I guess but not something that I wanted to be constantly encountering. Still, I made it through the rest of the tutorial island, and, after watching some narrative, reached the mainland.

I landed in Hyrule Field not too far from the central town, so I headed towards town. Which also wasn’t great, in a different way. The first problem was that Hyrule Field is actually one of the most boring parts of the map: there’s just not enough variance in terrain and height for the remarkable charms of the Breath of the Wild map to manifest themselves here. And the second problem was that I walked past this big hole that was surrounded by ground that would hurt me if I walked on it; the hole wasn’t particularly inviting, and I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of a Zelda map where ground that damages you was a key mechanic.

Not a big deal, though; and I made it to the central town, got some pointers as to what was going on and what I should be doing, got a map of my surroundings, and got my glider. Which is exactly what I want: improved navigation possibilities plus a bit of guidance as to where to go next.

If I’m remembering correctly, one of the initial nudges sent me back to that hole; I jumped down it, and it was fine but not great? The hole didn’t lead to a cave, this was a whole underground layer of the map that’s the same size as the ground layer. But it’s darker; you unlock the map (simultaneously lighting it up) in much smaller chunks; there’s dangerous ground all over the place; and there are these walls that are tall enough and/or covered enough with dangerous ground that I actually wasn’t sure if the underground area was all (or mostly) connected up or if it was a bunch of isolated separate areas that each had their own entrance hole.

So: not wonderful, though the flow of seeing a lightroot in the distance, traveling towards it and having to navigate the darkness as you get there, and then getting to the lightroot and lighting up / mapping a decent-sized chunk of your surroundings is a flow that has something to recommend it. But I missed the joys of traveling the land, and enemy encounters got on my nerves even more here than up above. (I’d decided that I’d deal with my annoyance with weapons fusion and how that affected combat by mostly avoiding enemies; a little harder down here, but still entirely workable.)

Once I got past that, though (and some more intro stuff, like the initial sync up with the team at the castle): wow, Breath of the Wild was a great great game, and basically all of that goodness is here too. I’d pick my next quest and start heading in that direction; but while doing that, I’d see something a off of the side of my track that caught my eye and I’d head over to it. And I’d do that over and over again, and, well, I’d make it to where I was going by the end of the evening, but in the meantime I’d probably have solved five shrines, turned on one sky tower, helped a wandering signpost person prop up his signs four times, found a stable, and three koroks.

And that is all so much fun. The shrine puzzles are really solid; I wasn’t necessarily super sold on gluing stuff together while wandering through the world, but put me in a shrine where I have to do that and I’m happy. So I was becoming a fan of that ability, and of the that lets you rise through the ceiling. (Not so much of the other two abilities, though; I’ve played through the whole game now and I’m still not a particular fan of either fusing or reversing objects in time, though I’m much more at peace with fusing than I was initially.) The signpost person was a pleasantly absurd addition to the puzzles the game throws at you, too.

It’s not just that traveling through Tears of the Kingdom is fun, though: it’s that it’s pleasant going through the world; life-affirming, even. I felt at home, at peace, like I was taking a walk through nature when playing Breath of the Wild, and that setting is powerful enough that it can easily support another game.

I could give more of a travelogue, but honestly, we’ve now arrived at the core of my feelings about Tears of the Kingdom. It’s Breath of the Wild with a different mix of special powers, and with a sky layer and an underground layer added to the map.

And that means that the core experience is still flat-out wonderful. I spend most of my time on the ground layer of the map; it absolutely had not grown old. The new powers were fine, even good; I liked some more than others, but honestly the powers in Breath of the Wild weren’t fabulous either, there’s nothing special about being able to conjure bombs out of think air!

If Tears of the Kingdom had leaned harder into having you constantly constructing stuff from items at hand, then I wouldn’t have liked that so much, because it’s simply not what I want out of a Zelda game. (No judgment there, if it is your thing then great, in other contexts it might even be my thing too, but not here.) But the game didn’t force me to go deeper with that than I wanted; and the powers worked very well for shrine puzzles. I actually appreciated the way the powers played out in shrines: even when the set of items is limited enough that there’s one clear path to a solution (which isn’t always the case), there’s enough roughness in how items glue together for the solutions to feel surprising and personal.

That’s all good; but there are also these two other layers to the map. And neither one has a tenth of the joy that the ground level has. Sky islands don’t even try to have an organic feel, and they’re way too small to give you room to explore and be surprised at what’s over the next hill. The underground area is too dark; and even when you have it lit up, it’s much less satisfying than the ground layer on a pure traversal mechanics level, on the metric of quantity of surprises that you find, and on the level of how organic it (doesn’t) feel.

So, to me, Tears of the Kingdom is no Breath of the Wild. I mean, that’s not true: a third of the map and probably eighty percent of my time spent was on something that literally is Breath of the Wild! But Tears of the Kingdom took two big swings beyond that: the new powers, and the new map layers. The new powers were a success (though not as wild a success for me as they were for some people); the new map layers were honestly just fine or even good compared to the standards of a regular video game, but compared to Breath of the Wild, they were a noticeable downgrade.

Still a wonderful game, though.

Another blog post in the category of “stuff that I probably should not blog about”, but it’s been bouncing around in my head. So: here are two things that I like about capitalism.

The first one: I like the way capitalism acknowledges risk up front. Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more convinced that predicting what’s going to be important for society is really really hard, but also that the value that comes from working on the right things is really really high.

Capitalism cuts straight through the prediction problem: don’t try to pick winners on a structural level. Instead, let individuals / companies try to do that by putting their money where their mouth is. Make it worth their while by letting people who guess right keep profits off of stuff that’s valuable but hard to predict. If you do that, most individual attempts will fail; that’s totally fine, having enough attempts that succeed is what’s important.

The second one: I like it that capitalism has a simple rule for how to get permission to do something. Right now, in California and much of the company, we need a lot more housing and a lot more clean energy infrastructure. But, in many instances, the way you get permission to do that is gather together the land / money, then submit a proposal to some committee, then wait to see which of your neighbors (or random people elsewhere) complains to that committee, then hope that you can modify the proposal in a way that causes the committee to approve it, then wait for people to file a lawsuit claiming that you missed some part of the process, then wait for that lawsuit to make it through the system, etc.

And by the time that’s all done, it’s years later, the cost of your project has probably significantly increased, and the housing / clean energy benefits have probably significantly decreased. And that’s bad! Maybe the process has resulted in a noticeable improvement to the project in some way; if so, yay, but even when that that’s the case, the time cost and uncertainty cost of the process is not good. And, an awful lot of the time, the altered proposal is worse than the original proposal rather than better. (The bootleggers and baptists concept is relevant here.)

So I really like the simplicity of the rules that the capitalist answer provides: if you’ve got the money and the property rights, you can do it. I’m not saying it’s the best simple rule, but the fact that it gives a quick, clear thumbs up / thumbs down is very much in its favor.

This is where this post could get a lot longer: there are a lot of ways in which what I’ve written could be misinterpreted, and so I could add defensive wording that would triple the length of this post. But I don’t think that sort of defensive writing is particularly healthy; and, fortunately, this blog has very few readers, so I think the benefits of adding in defensive writing would be few. So I’ll skip that.

Or rather, I’ll skip that except to try to be a little more explicit about the limits of what I’m saying. I’m not making grand totalizing claims here; in particular, I am not saying that I believe that these two solutions are perfect solutions to these problems.

What I am saying is:

• I think these are two problems are important. (And it took me a while to appreciate their importance.)
• I think these solutions to these problems have virtues that are worth trying to learn from.

I broke a bone in my hand at the start of August. I was out jogging during my lunch break at work, and I tripped somehow; I’m not actually sure what happened, maybe there was some uneven sidewalk pavement, or something? At any rate, my toe got caught and my whole body pivoted around it, converting my forward momentum into downward momentum. I stuck out my hands to brace the fall; probably a good idea, given that, even with my arm absorbing some of the momentum, I still face planted pretty hard.

At the time, I honestly wasn’t sure what state I was in. My face and arms were scraped up; my legs weren’t in too bad a shape, fortunately. My glasses were holding together but they had a fair amount of blood on them, so I took them off. I was still able to walk and there wasn’t anything causing me to scream in pain, so I decided to walk back to the office and do a more thorough evaluation there.

I must have looked like I was in pretty bad shape (no surprise, given that I already knew I had blood on my face and arms), given my coworkers’ reactions; I wish I’d thought to take a picture of myself before cleaning it off, but, well, I was distracted. At any rate, with the help of coworkers, I got the blood cleaned off and got bandaids on some of the worst bits.

I still wasn’t completely sure what shape I was in. At first I was afraid that I might have broken my nose, my hand, and/or my glasses; but actually my glasses were surprisingly usable, and I didn’t feel any bones moving in weird ways in my nose and my hand, so maybe they were okay? (I looked at my glasses more carefully later, and there were a few small scratches, but nothing that interfered with my vision in a really noticeable way; yay Warby Parker, I guess their glasses are pretty solid! Also my Apple Watch was quite visibly scratched up; totally usable, but it made me glad that I was already planning to replace it this year.)

But, on the other hand, maybe my hand and/or nose weren’t okay; I’d gone through enough that I figured I should get things checked out. It didn’t seem serious enough to go to the emergency room, so I called Liesl and asked her to pick me up and take me to the urgent care center at my doctor’s office.

I was still feeling not horrible, so once I was checked in, I was pretty confident that she didn’t need to wait for me. It took maybe an hour for them to see me; by then, the adrenaline had definitely worn off. And, with the adrenaline wearing off, my nose still didn’t feel too bad, but I was starting to get a little more suspicious about my hand.

They cleaned things up, took a look, and bandaged me. And the doctor agreed that my nose seemed fine, but he also thought that my hand needed more looking at, so he had x-rays taken. The x-rays confirmed that there was a broken bone; it was in the bone that’s on the outside of my left palm (basically the part of my pinky that’s inside my palm), and was a clean break. So he put on a splint, wrapping my hand and immobilizing my hand and fingers.

And then Liesl came to pick me up, and we went to the drug store to pick up a whole bunch of bandages, so I could replace them regularly. (Or rather, so Liesl could replace them regularly! I was very glad to have her looking after me.)

I went to an actual hand doctor four days later; he took a look and agreed with the diagnosis. Clean break, shouldn’t actually take too long to heal. The splint got replaced with something a little less intrusive, only immobilizing the pinky and ring finger, and that second splint was possible to remove when showering. (For the first splint, I left it on and wrapped it in a plastic bag when showering.)

By then, the rest of the abrasions had almost completely healed; there had been a quite noticeble amount of blood initially but it seems like it all came from a bunch of relatively shallow surface scratches. And Liesl was great about helping me deal with wrapping things back up every morning, of course.

Having three fingers free with the smaller splint was nice, too: it made typing and driving easier. Or at least mostly made them easier: the splint on the outside two fingers was decently long, and it was curved just enough to be annoying: when typing, I had to tilt my hand a bit to avoid having the splint hit keys, and if I put my hand on its normal position when driving then the splint would activate my turn signal. Still, totally workable.

I didn’t think Tai Chi was workable at this point, though. And most of my Nei Gong exercises weren’t workable either, because they had me move my fingers / hand / wrist in ways that aren’t particularly compatible with the splint, and that in some cases might put undesired stress on my hand. But some of them were totally fine (e.g. exercises that focus solely on breathing or concentration); and, honestly, I hadn’t been spending as much time on that sort of exercise as I’d like, so I kind of appreciated having an excuse to focus on those for a month!

Two and a half weeks later, I went back for a follow-up appointment. I got a clean bill of health; and they switched me to a brace that left all of my fingers free. It’s actually not 100% obvious to me exactly what the role of that brace was: it did cover the place where the bone broke, but it’s not like there was tons of padding right there or anything. It had a piece of metal which prevented me from moving my wrist very much; I guess that was its main purpose?

Certainly that was a big improvement: it made typing and driving easier, partly because I could move all of my fingers and partly because the splint wasn’t hitting random things. And I started doing Tai Chi again, at least in part; I couldn’t do all of the silk reeling exercises, and there were bits of our main form that I either couldn’t quite do or had to do with quite a bit less force than normal. But ultimately, that form was still doable, as were some (but not all) of the weapons forms. Nei Gong was still about as restricted as before, though: not being able to bend my wrist really restricted the set of exercises I could do there.

I took off the brace a couple of times a day to do stretching exercises. I could definitely tell that my wrist was less mobile than it had been; in particular, I couldn’t rotate my left hand side to side (on the plane of my palm) nearly as far as I could rotate my right palm, and it hurt when I tried to push it. I’m still not entirely sure what was causing the restrictions there – the place that hurt wasn’t right where the broken bone was, I don’t think anything was shifting there – but there was a clear effect.

Four weeks later, I went back again; I got another set of x-rays, they were clean, so I was okayed to have the brace off most of the time. They warned me that the break still wasn’t completely healed, and in particular that I’d be at greater risk of re-breaking the bone at that location for another four weeks or so, but it also wasn’t so fragile that it needed to be coddled all the time. I decided to wear the brace while walking Velvet, in case I got tugged in a weird way, but other than that I left it off.

The nurse also made some comment like “you’ve probably already been leaving it off some of the time already”, and honestly, I wish I had; the restricted range of motion was kind of annoying, in a way that felt like I’d gone too far in terms of immobilizing it and having bits of my hand seize up in bad ways? Having said that, it had only been a couple of months, so presumably I could undo the effects by stretching it regularly.

And I increased my activities still more. I tried out push hands in my Tai Chi class; that was a mistake the first week, but a couple of weeks later it felt okay for me to do that, at least for a few minutes. And I started getting a little more forceful in the movements that I’d toned down. I was also able to basically go back to doing my normal set of Nei Gong exercises.

I also started practicing piano for the first time since breaking my hand. And I will say: before going through this, I didn’t realize how much playing piano involves rotating your hands along the plane of your palms. It makes total sense in retrospect – if both hands are playing keys near the center of your body, then they’ll both have to rotate, after all – but it’s just never something I’d thought about.

That definitely hurt some, as did the contortions that my fingers had to go through to play various phrases. But, ultimately, that’s actually an example of the kind of range of motion that I really want to recover, and it didn’t feel like I was re-injuring myself; so I tried to practice piano every day, but with a mindset of doing it in order to regain mobility, instead of doing it in order to actually improve my ability to play pieces musically. And I think it helped.

Now it’s a little over two months since I got the brace off, and things are pretty much back to normal. Not entirely: if I push my hands to the limit, I still feel like my left hand isn’t the way it was before. (But the flip side is that I don’t actually know what its range of motion was before!) And if I do single hand push hands with my left hand, it aches a bit; nothing that’s strongly dissuading me or anything, but it’s still there.

Honestly, though: if you’re going to break a bone in your body, this is about as easy as it can be. I broke a non-critical bone in my non-dominant hand, but my hand was usable enough that I could work by the next week, I could use all of my fingers a couple of weeks after that, and I didn’t even have a brace less than two months after breaking things. And that seems fine: in terms of potential and actual road blocks in my life, this was a pretty small road block.

One change is that it’s made me gun-shy enough about jogging that I’ve stopped doing that. And part of me is glad, because I didn’t actually enjoy jogging, but my lungs (and heart too, I guess?) really did benefit from the exercise, I think, it’s a different form of exercise than any other that I do.

Most of me says that this is silly and that I should get back to jogging: it was a fluke, I shouldn’t let that throw me. But there’s also a part of me that says that maybe it wasn’t entirely a fluke; bad luck, sure, but not that bad? The possible issues there might have been that I just wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, or that I actually was stumbling a little more than is comfortable.

If so, part of the reason for not paying attention is that maybe I get too distracted by devices; I definitely wasn’t checking my phone when I fell, but still, maybe my phone or watch distracted me? (I was listening to a podcast, but that should be okay.) But also my pants were fitting badly (I’ve lost twenty five pounds over the last year, and I was waiting until my weight stabilized before replacing my panst), and that actually was distracting me at that time. (Since then, I’ve bought pants that fit better.) So, hopefully if I can just be present a little more when jogging, including actively paying attention to pavement irregularities, then I shouldn’t get too distracted.

Then there’s potential clumsiness. I feel like I might actually have been stumbling more than I historically had been? If that’s true and I had to guess as to why, my first guess would be tiredness; I’ve been noticeably more tired than I would like over the last few years, and while that’s been improving, I still have work to do. And in particular over the summer we got a puppy, and while she’s a great puppy, that definitely interfered noticeably with my sleep for several months.

So I’ll keep on monitoring the situation; and maybe I’ll get back to jogging at some point? Or maybe I’ll find another way to get similar health benefits; swimming would probably be an even idea, but that would require actively finding time in a way that jogging doesn’t so good luck with that. Not committing to anything one way or another right now, there are other things that are a higher priority for me right now.

Earlier this year, I played Crank and The Barnacle Goose Experiment. And, as I noted at the time:

Ultimately, I think the lesson here is that what I really want is more Kittens Game.

So I dived back into Kittens Game. And, you know what: it’s an amazingly good game. You can see the spreadsheet there right beneath the surface; but it’s a really good spreadsheet!

Just the first run experience felt super well done. It would gradually lead you from material to material, from concept to concept. Over and over you’d hit the end of some particular leveling curve, but you’d realize that, in making that progress, a new leveling curve was available for you. Maybe an obvious one (starting from a new building or a new kind of metal, for example), but fairly frequently you’d get access to a new game tab, introducing you to a whole new concept.

Eventually, the curves would run out: most ways of advancing would be shut off, and the only way to get enough storage to reopen them would take multiple days, or even multiple weeks to build. And then you do your first reset; and you start over, but with each building producing slightly more quickly or providing slightly more storage. Which starts to get at what makes Kittens Game special: it’s not just about artfully designed growth curves, it’s about getting an appreciation for how those growth curves change as you play with the parameters. Yes, exponential growth beats out linear growth, but the constant factors in those equations have an effect! (With extra spice coming from the low-degree polynomials that are sprinkled into the mechanics.)

So, the second time through, you’re making progress more quickly; it’s still not a quick game, it’ll take weeks, but eventually you’ll make it to the moon and be able to start mining unobtanium. And that in turn unlocks upgrades called “metaphysics”; some of those decrease the base of the exponents. So, after resetting a second time and starting your third run through the game, you’ll start to be able to produce quite a bit more quickly, because of the extra buildings that you’ll be able to build from a given amount of a material. And, in turn, you’ll be able to make it farther into space.

That’s about the level of mechanisms that I’d explored the last time I played the game. But I went farther this time, and I’m glad I did. In particular, the game lets you take on various challenges: these have you restart the game with some aspect of the play space either walled off or made much more difficult to use. And playing that way provides yet another way that the game lets you understand the impact of the different systems: how they play out, how they interact, how the scaling factors have an effect.

And, of course, completing those challenges gives benefits as well. So that’s yet another mechanism that enables you to appreciate different aspects of the growth curves in the game.

I made it farther, but I didn’t make it to the end game exploration that the wiki talks about. Part of that is that I hit one part of the growth curve that wasn’t to my taste; I asked for advice on the Discord and got some advice for how to make faster progress, which helped, but it was still a bit of a slog.

And, in particular, even the faster version was a slog in a way that required way too much action from me. The thing about clicker games is that, well, they require clicking. Which is fun if you’re in the mood; but eventually the require less clicking and more waiting; that’s good in a different, more mellow way, because it lets you check in every hour or so while mostly doing something else.

Just operating in that last mood does require discipline: for example, I found that, if I spent too much time thinking about the game, it actually messed with my sleep, so eventually I adopted a rule that I would stop playing the game an hour before bedtime, and if I woke up in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t check on it, even if I probably had unlocked buildings. So, for all of its virtues, I can’t unconditionally recommend Kittens Game: it really does require care to have it not take over your life in an uncomfortable way.

And I’d already started to wonder if I’d reached a point where it wasn’t quite worth it: the problem with those growth curves speeding up as you improve them in various different ways is that you spend more time clicking and less time waiting! Clicking instead of waiting for 5 minutes is good, because it gives you something to do during those 5 minutes; clicking instead of waiting for an hour is maybe not so good, though, because there’s lots of other things you can do with a free hour. So, as the waiting decreased, Kittens Game would take over evenings that I had budgeted for doing something other than playing video games.

In particular, when I reached the place that I mentioned above where I asked the Discord for help, the answer was: reset the game every couple of hours. And, indeed, I could make progress that way; but that meant that I was contantly in the “frequent clicking” part of the growth curve.

I tried that for a while, and it was fun in its own way. (And fun in a different way from my previous experiences with the game: yet another texture that the game revealed to me.) But it was messing with my life, and it was still taking long enough that I’d be stuck in that phase for a while.

I could have shifted back to the way I’d been making progress before I’d asked for help; that would have been better for my game / life balance, but the earlier method really was a lot slower, it honestly might have taken me a year to get to the next part of the game’s design space that way. I could repeat challenges to push on some of the relevant curves; I did that for a while, it helped (and was interesting), but it didn’t really make enough progress to resolve my dilemma.

So I stopped. Which is fine; that happens with games that don’t have clear ending points. There’s nothing magical about the so-called “end game” in Kittens Game, after all, it’s just where the growth mechanism peter out in the current stage of development, it’s not like it’s some big narrative conclusion or anything.

And I’m definitely glad I spent the time with Kittens Game that I did: in its own way, it’s absolutely one of the best games I played this year. And it’s good in a such a different way from other non-clicker games I’ve played; and Kittens Game is a much much better clicker game than any other one I’ve played other than Universal Paperclips. (Which I definitely appreciate more now than when I first played it.)