malvasia bianca

One question that I had when I started doing Tai Chi and Nei Gong was: what is going on in the insides of your body when doing these arts? Both arts talk about Qi; but it doesn’t seem plausible that there’s some substance flowing around inside your body that Western medicine hasn’t been able to find, and it seems even less plausible that there’s something nonphysical that has the described effects. Sometimes, implausible things are true (and the first of those does seem less implausible after listening to the Radiolab episode on the interstitium, admittedly); alternatively, is Qi a description of something more mundane, is it just a metaphor, is something else going on?

And, setting aside Qi, what is the mechanism by which Tai Chi works? Does it use the same mechanisms as any other martial art, just with slightly different movements? (Something that I’m bad at judging, I don’t have very much experience with other martial arts, and I’m pretty bad at the martial applications of Tai Qi.) Or is there something to this “internal versus external martial arts” distinction; if so, what?

I don’t have answers to any of this, but here are some observations about the inside of my body that come from my subjective experiences with Tai Chi and Nei Gong. I don’t claim that any of these observations are necessarily tied directly to either of the above questions, they’re just things that surprised me.

Connections at a Distance

First some observations related to bits of my body acting in a coordinated fashion, even when those parts of my body aren’t at all close to each other.

Dantian Rotation

My main Tai Chi teacher teaches an exercise called Dantian Rotation. Basically, you stand and put your hands over your lower abdomen, and then you move your hands in a fairly small circle. When I first learned this exercise, I didn’t feel anything unusual inside of my body, but my teacher said that it had helped him a lot, so I decided to try it more seriously: rather than doing sets of 6 rotations in each direction once or twice a week, I’d do a set of 20 rotations in each direction once or twice a day.

After doing that for a little while (a month, maybe?) I started to realize that I was feeling a horizontal movement across the back of my neck during the top part of the rotation; this was pretty odd, given that my hands were nowhere near my neck. And then, another month or two later, I noticed my Tai Chi changing in an unexpected way: I’d be moving my right arm and hand away in an arc away from my body to the right, say, and my left foot would want to rotate inward as well. (I don’t know 100% that that latter feeling was related to me doing the Dantian Rotation exercise, but I believed at the time and still believe that it was.) Again, a link at a distance: my right hand and my left foot are as far apart as any two parts of my body can be!

Silk Reeling Exercises

Dantian Rotation is part of a set called “Silk Reeling Exercises”. Many of these look like stretching / joint opening exercises, and that is certainly one of their roles, but when I’d do some of them, I’d get a feeling that isn’t localized to individual joints. Instead, I’d find my body wanting to follow specific curves / spirals that cross a large portion of my body, causing different body parts to move in a coordinated fashion.

For example, when doing the “Dantian to Wrist Spiraling In” exercise, I’d be moving my left hand inward towards my body in a fairly tight circle, it would translate into a spiral across left arm, that would then translate into my torso and hips shifting to the right, and a spiral would then go out my right arm to my right hand. And this would all happen synchronously, it almost felt like there were gears on my arms and my two hips with teeth that were meshing together, causing them all to turn in together.

Connections With My Hands

One of the earliest surprises I had when starting Nei Gong was how directly my hands connected with the inside of my body. Concretely, if I pause the typing of this blog post and I stretch my palms horizontally, I’ll feel my abdomen get slightly tight; that’s pretty odd, not something I would have expected a priori.

And that connection is direct and detailed. If I’m sitting or standing with good posture, with my hands in front of my lower abdomen and with the palms stretched horizontially, and I then move my hands in various ways (circles right and left, circles forward, moving them away and then towards my body, etc.), then I’ll feel reactions inside of my body that reflect those movements. Or, in various bits of religious art, you might see people making specific gestures with their fingers; and, indeed, if I’m sitting with my hands on my knees, then touching different fingers together causes different parts of my torso to respond in different ways.

Force up From My Feet

If I stand with my weight going down to the front third of my feet, I feel a force going back up my legs; it’ll generally make it up to my lower back, sometimes further up my spine.

It took me a while to notice this. I’d read / heard about “opening up your Yongquan” for a while, and when I started doing standing meditation regularly, nothing like this ever happened. Then, after about a year, during one session I felt a little pointy sensation on the bottom of my feet; I assumed at that time that that was my Yongquan opening up, but other than that one-time sensation, standing didn’t feel any different.

A couple of years later, though, I shifted my weight a bit while standing and felt something come back up my legs. Playing around with the positioning, I found that I could get this to happen fairly reliably, but I had to have my weight descending to just the right location. And also I need to relax the area around my hips in the right way (“sink into your Kua”) to get it into my lower back instead of ending in my thighs. For all I know, I could have gotten this to happen earlier, as soon as I’d opened up my Yongquan; hard to say.

My Abdomen Tugging on My Extremities

The last two reports were about the middle of my extremities affecting my lower abdomen, but the pull goes both ways. Specifically, if I do reverse abdominal breathing (where my abdomen contracts on the inside when I inhale instead of expanding), I get a slight tug on both the centers of my palms and on the bottom of my feet. It’s pretty faint, especially on my feet, but it’s definitely there.

Inflation and Expansion

Next, some observations about feelings that my body is inflating or otherwise expanding.

Expansion in My Abdomen

If I have a good Nei Gong session, sometimes my lower abdomen will feel like it’s expanding; and this expansion often lasts noticeably beyond the session. I don’t generally directly feel something inside my abdomen (at least once I’ve stopped moving my hands around): it’s more that I feel the skin stretching like a balloon in response to something inside that I can’t feel.

When this happens, I’ll sometimes feel extra tingling on one or two specific points, beyond a generalized stretch. One of the points is on the front of my abdomen, a little under my navel; the other point is on my back, a little higher up than the point in the front. (And I feel like the point in the back wanders around more than the point in the back does.) The tingling in front happens more often than the tingling in the back, but either can happen independently of the other, and they can both happen together. (They never happen without the feeling of fullness, though.)

Peng

In Tai Chi, there’s a concept known as Peng. It’s a sort of outward expansion from the center of your body: if you look at it from an arm / torso-centric point of view, it seems like upward / outward expansion, but I think of it more as a spherical expansion centered in your lower abdomen, with your legs descending while your arms go up and out.

When I get this right, my body feels inflated and springy; it’s like I’m a balloon, and forces coming in might bounce off, or might cause the balloon to rotate out of the way.

(Or, well, they might squeeze the balloon and just keep on coming in. The real failure mode isn’t so much the balloon bursting as it is my body tensing up so it loses the springiness entirely.)

Straightening Via Relaxing

If I just sit down, my torso will slouch and my head will stick out farther than my torso. But if I relax, then my body will start to straighten up. And if I continue to relax and wait long enough, then my head will start sliding back, my neck will get longer, and my chin will tuck in.

I have to relax in the right way to do this; if I relax the wrong way, I’ll just collapse completely. But if I relax the right way, my muscles will back off while maintaining my body’s basic structure, and something unfolds inside my body that causes it to rearrange its structure in a way that feels rather better.

Internal Substances

The next set of observations are around feelings like there’s some sort of substance (or substances) inside my body that doesn’t clearly map to bones / muscles / organs / blood / etc.

Moving Sludge Around My Torso

I talked above about how hand movements lead to reactions inside my body. Often, I’m doing the movements in a way that localize those reactions to my lower abdomen, and that can in turn lead to the abdominal expansion that I mentioned. But then, if I move my hands up and down in front of my torso, it starts to feel like my hands (or rather, the shadow effects of my hands inside my torso) are moving through a sort of thick, sludgy substance inside my torso, and are dragging that substance up and down.

Sludge and the Microcosmic Orbit

There’s a Qigong / Nei Gong exercise called the Microcosmic Orbit. Or maybe it’s actually a family of exercises; the details of the descriptions from different sources certainly differ, though they generally involve something moving up your back and down the front of your body. But, at any rate, when I’m trying (usually not very successfully!) to do it, I’ll generally do some of the stuff that I describe above (moving things around in my abdomen, for example), and then I’ll try to redirect whatever that is into the base of my spine.

And, when I do that properly, I get the a similar feeling of something thick / sludgy moving up my back; unlike the previous situation, though, it’s moving up on its own, instead of being pushed by my hands. It moves very slowly (taking minutes to get up my spine), and it often gets stuck partway up (sometimes resuming its progress after making it past a troublesome bit), but there is a real feeling of some bit of goop that’s moving there.

Something Bouncing in My Abdomen

Occasionally, in one of my Nei Gong sessions, I’ll get a feeling of something bouncing in my abdomen. It’s like there’s a small ball in my lower abdomen that’s twitching around a bit; it’s not bouncing all over the place, but it’s bouncing some, and not doing that in response to any movements of mine.

Interactions with Perception

This whole post is about perception, of course: I’m just reporting stuff I’m sensing in my body that surprises me. But sometimes it seems like the act of perceiving is itself having affects; that’s what this section is about.

Perception Soaking Into My Body

If I’m paying attention to my body, that attention is localized. But if I just leave my attention somewhere and back off from it a bit, the region of my attention will start growing. It’s not expanding like a ball, though: my attention mostly goes down from where it started, and its border isn’t particularly like the edge of a sphere. Also, my body tingles in response, and expands a bit. One metaphor that I’ve heard to describe this is that it’s like water soaking into a sponge, and that’s a pretty good match to my experience: my perception soaking into and hydrating a dry sponge.

Expansion From Soaking and Relaxing My Attention

If I soak my attention into my body, as per the previous point, and then I relax my attention in the right way, my body feels like it starts expanding. And if I don’t get distracted by that feeling of expansion, it keeps on expanding to a really surprising extent, enough so that it becomes hard to believe that it’s possible. This also leads to a tingling that’s a bit like Expansion in My Abdomen but much broader.

Putting My Attention on My Lower Dantian

If I put my attention on the right place in my lower abdomen then I get a weird feeling there. Though, as I try to describe the feeling, I’m discovering that I don’t have a wide enough range of vocabulary for describing sensations to be able to come up with one that fits! At any rate, it’s odd that this one point would lead to unusual sensations.

Hypotheses

So: what’s going on here? I don’t know for sure about any of these, but I at least have guesses for some of them.

Anatomy Trains and Fascia

If we think of the insides of our body as a bunch of bones connected (via tendons) by muscles, then there’s no particular reason why contracting one muscle should affect bones that aren’t attached to that muscle. But that’s a really simplified view of the body; in particular, the book Anatomy Trains talks about different chains of muscles, tendons, and fascia that form a “train” that travels quite a long way across your body, connecting it in such a way that an adjustment at one part of the train can make a noticeable difference (e.g. provide pain relief or loosen joints) at a different part of that train. (Or, if you want a Chinese Medicine point of view, they have a concept called “Jing Jin” that seems quite similar to me.)

I don’t know much about anatomy, but I suspect that fascia are a big part of the secret to what’s going on here – my understanding is that they’re membranes that surround and connect more discrete structures inside your body (e.g. your muscles or your organs), and that they’re at least somewhat stretchy. So they seem like a good vehicle for transmitting a sort of tug from one muscle to the next to the next along the aforementioned anatomy trains.

In particular, this feels like a good explanation for what I was noticing with Dantian Rotation, Silk Reeling Exercises, and My Abdomen Tugging on My Extremities: for all of those, I can basically feel the tug going along my insides. And it’s a good match for Connections With My Hands; it definitely matches the base report of “I spread my hands and my abdomen tightens”, though I haven’t thought hard about whether that explanation makes sense with a feeling that if rotate my hands then I get a matching rotation in my lower abdomen, or if moving my hands farther away from and then closer to my body changes the depth of the location of the tightness in a corresponding way.

Tensegrity

The Anatomy Trains book also spends a decent amount of time about how this sets up conditions where tensegrity can help keep your body upright. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what I thought about that aspect of the book’s claim; but now I suspect that what I’m feeling as Straightening Via Relaxing comes at least in part from tensegrity.

Concretely, I think that, when I relax, the lower parts of my spine (and, if I’m standing, my pelvis) provide a weight that’s tugging down on the rest of my spine, and the tendons and fascia that connect lower vertebrae to higher vertebrae are pulling on both the front and the back of the higher vertebrae, so they’re willing to transmit that pull in a way that straightens up my spine, as long as my spine isn’t fighting it. And that’s the other way in which relaxing makes a difference: that tug isn’t strong, my muscles can definitely override it, and in fact they habitually do. But it seems plausible that relaxing lets tensegrity win, leading to my body straightening up because of the balanced pull on my spine.

(It’s possible that Force up From My Feet comes from tensegrity forces as well, but I’m not at all confident in that hypothesis, I don’t know that I would even give it a fifty percent chance of being true.)

Changes in Fascial Density

Of course, straightening my body could potentially also be modeled as inflating the inside of my body, and I reported on a feeling of expansiveness in a few other sections. (Expansion in My Abdomen, Peng, Expansion From Soaking and Relaxing My Attention.) Given that I’ve got fascia on the mind, one simple explanation would be that maybe fascia can change in density, and maybe those are all different reports on ways in which that manifests itself.

The problem with that is that hypothesis is that I didn’t have any idea if it made sense physically, and skimming Wikipedia didn’t answer the question. Normally, I don’t interact with AI at all when thinking about these posts (and I certainly would never use an LLM to actually write them, I assure you that my verbosity is all my own!), but this seemed like a situation where AI research help would be useful.

So I asked Claude; and the answer seems to be: it’s plausible? Fascia can definitely be sometimes more concentrated / stuck together, and sometimes looser / puffier. Most of the factors potentially leading to that difference that Claude mentioned weren’t a particularly good match for my observations (e.g. hydration, temperature, or inflammation), but Claude also mentioned something called myofibroblasts that can contract to compress fascia. Unlike muscles, myofibroblasts don’t compress directly in response to nerve signals; but they apparently do respond to changes in your autonomic nervous system, which is a decent match to Expansion From Soaking and Relaxing My Attention?

Though, when I ran that specific thinking by Claude, Claude actually wasn’t convinced; Claude said it the expansion could just come from releasing unconscious muscle tension (as I’d hypothesized in the previous section) without involving myofibroblasts, and also mentioned increased local blood flow as something that can feel like fullness or warmth that doesn’t have anything to do with fascial density at all.

I think where I’m at right now is that some of what I’m feeling does correspond to changes in fascial density, but I don’t think I want to advance any particularly specific mechanistic hypotheses about that.

Waves of Density Changes

In Moving Sludge Around My Torso and Sludge and the Microcosmic Orbit, I talked about a feeling of a viscous liquid moving around inside my body. If I had to guess, though, this actually doesn’t come from a liquid (or some other substance) moving from place to place. My guess instead is that what’s going on is more like waves in an ocean or in a pond: it looks like there’s an object that’s moving a long distance across the surface of the body, but the individual water molecules aren’t actually moving across the entire surface of the pond. The localized configuration of the water molecules is changing in a way that, macroscopically, the water is sticking up higher in one place than in other places, and where that higher place is changes over time; but water molecules don’t move forward with the wave, they stay in the same basic region.

And, I suspect that a lot of the feelings of stuff moving through my body is a similar sort of wave motion: something (fascia, probably, as per the previous section) is changing its configuration / density in response to other forces (e.g. exactly what gets tugged on inside my body as my hands move up and down my body), and the resulting internal wave feels like something is moving inside of my body.

Absence of Hypotheses

The above hypotheses gesture at potential explanations of most of the observations I listed; who knows if the hypotheses are correct, of course, and even the ones that might be pointing towards something correct would need a lot of fleshing out to be useful in any concrete way.

But also, there are a few observations that I haven’t even tried to hypothesize about (e.g. I have no idea of what’s going on with Something Bouncing in My Abdomen); and there’s lots of random stuff I’ve felt inside my body that I didn’t even write down as observations. (It wouldn’t surprise me if a list of observations that I were to write down in two years would be quite different from my list today!) And that’s totally fine: weird stuff happens, it won’t do me any good to pretend to have an explanation for everything, even if the explanations are tentative.

I mentioned Qi at the beginning of this post but then I stopped using that word in the observations and hypotheses; that was intentional. Part of the reason for me avoiding the term is because the word is used in a lot of different ways: lots of different hand-wavey ways, and when I see it used in ways that seem potentially precise enough to be explanatorily useful, that precision then turns into a bunch of subdivisions of different kinds of Qi that show up in different contexts and have different effects. (One analogy here is with the term “energy” — its Wikipedia page gives a non-exhaustive list of 15 different kinds of energy, but also people constantly use the term in much vaguer ways, like when I say that I’m feeling low on energy on some given day.)

But also, one thing that I want to avoid doing is to play a language game where I’m putting together words in ways that seem like they’re confidently constructing true statements but where I’m actually just parroting linguistic constructs that I’ve heard other people use without me being able to tie the resulting statements to anything precise / true / having real predictive value. I’ve read a decent amonut of books on Tai Chi / Qigong / internal arts, and participated in a decent amount of conversations about the subjects in person and online, so I could come up with statements that sound like authoritative pronouncements of truth; but hypothetical statements that I could come up with like that would just be me playing linguistic games. (The closest thing to a statement like that that I’m willing to say is: if we distinguish between the concepts of Jin and Qi then what I’m talking about feels to me more like it’s at the Jin level than the Qi level.)

Having said that, it’s not like I know anything about fascia, and I also don’t know what’s actually going on inside my body. So I really have no idea if any of the hypotheses that I’m talking about above are actually true. They feel to me like they’re at least potentially testable (in the sense that, if we had machines that could sense the insides of our body in real time in enough detail, then they could be translated into concrete claims), but, well, lots of testable things are false!

Anyways. Bodies are weird.

I was recently talking with some friends about To a T and Wanderstop, and I ended up going through both games again (via let’s plays rather than replaying them, admittedly) to get my thoughts in order. So here’s another set of thoughts about the two games; if you’re spoiler-averse, there are spoilers for To a T in here. (Though I’d think the game would hold up just fine with that advance knowledge.)

The reason that I wanted to talk about the two games together is that they both relate about the notion of perfection. The word “perfect” is right there in To a T’s theme song, but actually that sort of sentiment (you’re perfect just the way you are, basically) isn’t what I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking more about the beginning and the end of To a T: at the beginning, where Teen gets bullied because his shape is weird (which I’ll gloss as being particularly far from perfect), and at the end where an alien comes to town and turns everybody and everything into box shapes, because that’s the perfect shape.

That’s perfection as an externally imposed straitjacket, but Wanderstop shows a character putting the straitjacket of perfection on herself. That game’s protagonist, Alta, has a very strong conception of herself as not just a warrior but as the best warrior, and is somebody who shapes all of her life around that goal. So perfection is the only option for her; except that she burns out quite dramatically and finds that she doesn’t have a choice but to put her perfection on hold.

Perfection in To a T is a little more of a cartoonish bad than in Wanderstop, but To a T does also have its thoughtful moments in its discussion of perfection. Giraffe in particular does a good job of giving concrete examples of pros and cons; food not spoiling has real advantages, and maybe you really do like the looks of cube-shaped food. But cube-shaped popcorn doesn’t fly through the air properly, ice cream should melt, and taste is much more important for food than shape. So the question of goodness in food has many variables, and a focus on perfection, especially a narrow-minded vision of perfection, is going to cause problems with some of those.

With Wanderstop, the message is more complex. At the end of To a T, even the right-angle-loving alien agrees that “there is no point in trying to be perfect if we can’t enjoy things like delicious food.” Which is a statement that most of us would agree with, but Alta clearly wouldn’t, at least at the beginning of Wanderstop.

One of the things I like about Wanderstop is that, on the one hand, it puts front and center the case that it’s good to enjoy the richness of life; but, on the other hand, it doesn’t actually insist that you agree with that sentiment. Boro’s pitch to Alta isn’t “stopping to smell the roses cup of tea is a wonderful thing that everybody should enjoy”, it’s more “you can’t do what you want to do right now, and you seem to be the sort of person who needs something to do, so how about you help me with the tea shop? (And maybe enjoy drinking tea, but you don’t have to.)”

The whole game is full of characters who are strangely focused on one thing or another; Alta is perhaps the most extreme such character, and the game doesn’t ask or expect you to agree with those characters’ fixations. But it also isn’t mean towards those fixations, the characters generally end up being lovable, and to the extent that their fixations lead to damage, I usually ended up sympathetic to that tradeoff.

Acknowledging the problems with striving for perfection does not mean that you have to give up the goal of doing a good job, or even that you shouldn’t work hard to do a quite good job. In Wanderstop, for example, Boro unquestionably wants to do a good job: a good job of making tea, a good job of caring for the building and grounds, a good job of looking after his customers. And, as we see with Alta, he’ll go to quite some lengths to look after people who wander into his shop, and to try to understand what they really need!

With To a T, it’s a little more subtle. The main character is just a kid, after all, and not a weirdly driven one, so he’s mostly just trying to make it through life in a decently pleasant way. And the teachers are, honestly, a little odd in ways that I can’t map so clearly towards trying to do a good job? (Not that they’re doing a bad job, it’s just that they’re about something else.)

The store owners, on the other hand, each have a reason why they’re running their stores, and a vision of what’s good is part of that. (Though, admittedly, the way Teen’s aunt’s ideology leads her to have her guests walk through water to get to her cafe is maybe a bit of a warning about the perfection direction.) The characters training to be ninjas are certainly odd, but they’re also clearly putting in the work, figuring out where their gaps are and trying to tackle those directly.

And then there’s Giraffe. I liked Giraffe from the beginning; and To a T has two songs that it plays every chapter, both of which are great. Great enough that I’d find myself just wandering over to YouTube to rewatch them over the next few weeks.

After doing that enough times, I started actually paying attention to the lyrics of Giraffe Song. And now I’ve come to the opinion that, in its own way, those lyrics are awesome?

Giraffe is looking for the good: “Cooking is so amazing! / I think it’s really magical”. Giraffe is willing to go to quite some lengths in pursuit of the good: “I went to a school / So I could learn how to cook”. But this isn’t a situation of wanting to be the best: their reason is “Because I love to eat and share food”.

And then, returning to the theme of working hard in the striving for the good: “I wake up at 3 every morning / To bake the bread for sandwiches / Then I go to my tiny garden / To pick the ripest vegetables”. This is important, Giraffe repeats it, but their joy in food comes out at the end, because the repeat changes that last line to “I really love my radishes”.

This all comes together in the last verse:

When I get home I cook

Oh, it’s so tasty

Let’s not be hasty

This is amazing!

I’m asleep by 7

Dreaming of new recipes

Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings

It’s all there: putting in work, but the work is worth it because food is amazing, and Giraffe can’t wait to see how that will unfold.

There are a lot of people in the world these days who have strict standards of perfection that they’re measuring others or themselves against. And, most of the time, that sucks. But that doesn’t mean that we should instead go all the way to a banal relativism, where quality doesn’t matter. Appreciate the good! If something calls out to you, try to be good at it! Appreciate the Giraffes around you; nurture bits of your own inner Giraffe.

I’ve got an app that I’m working on. But, in this Claude Code era, I’m only doing a little bit of programming (in the sense of typing code), I’m mostly acting as a product manager for Claude Code instead.

And it turns out that being a product manager, especially with this sort of tight feedback loop, is quite a bit of fun! I can be using the app, think “hmm, there’s this way I’d like to use the app that it doesn’t currently support well”, and put a feature on the roadmap for the app. And then that thought is burbling around in the back of my head; as I run into similar bits of friction, I get a better idea for what this new feature involves and I bump it in priority. Soon enough, it becomes the next thing to do and I’ve got a decent idea of what it should look like, and off Claude goes.

That’s the broad feature side of the work but I also like playing with the details of the visual and interaction style. Last week, for example, I implemented a new feature that changed the flow for how you complete items in the app. Using it over the next few days, the new flow felt like an improvement, but a couple of the buttons in the new flow didn’t look right. So I looked at a couple of other apps for inspiration and found a different way of handling those buttons that seemed like an improvement; and it just feels good to be using the app today and say “yup, it really does feel better using it with the buttons done that way”!

It’s not a complete surprise that I’m enjoying this. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years: on the one hand, I’m not a big ideas guy, my advantages don’t lie in greenfield situations. (This is part of the reason why you won’t see me founding a startup and why I’m resistant to titles like Architect.) But, while I’m not the best at coming up with ideas / plans from scratch in a blank space, my strengths flip once I’ve started finding my way into an idea (whether somebody else’s or my own): I can come up to speed on a situation unusually quickly, I can figure out what’s really going on with it, and I can get a sense for more elegant structures that might be lurking behind it.

This in turn lets me both take an existing situation and rework it to improve it, and also to see ways to extend the situation in a coherent way. (And this is a process that I enjoy!) I’ve been doing this most often with code over the last couple of decades, and code is where I’m best at this, but it’s a skill that applies more broadly; so now I’m getting to play around with it in app design. (I still have a lot to learn in that context, though…)

I haven’t actually talked about the app (which I’m currently calling Nudge) yet on this blog, but I’m looking for alpha testers, so I guess I should tell y’all something about it. One thing that I’m not good at yet is actually describing Nudge (this is part of the reason I want alpha testers, to help with that!), but its purpose is to help you remember things that you like to do every once in a while, but not on a strict schedule.

For example, the feeling that I first had that eventually led to me writing the app was going to a restaurant, enjoying it, and thinking “we’ve been here before and we enjoyed it back then, why has it taken us four years to return here?” There are restaurants that are in our regular rotation, and we don’t need help being reminded of those ones; but there are also restaurants that, for whatever reason (price or distance, maybe), we’re not going to come back to particularly soon, they’re more a “once every year or two” thing, and those ones would fall through the cracks.

I tried entering those restaurants into the task manager app that I use, and that worked, but the fit wasn’t great. If I created them in the app as recurring reminders, then that felt like more of an obligation than I wanted: I try to take recurring reminders seriously! Whereas if I created them as Someday/Maybe items, then that didn’t create the same obligation, but it required me to do the work of tracking how long it had been since I’d been there, and also the Someday/Maybe list can (by design) turn into a pit from which items rarely emerge.

Once I was sensitized to this pattern, I noticed it in a couple of other situations. It applies to recipes in pretty much the same way as it applies to restaurants: it would really be nice to have some place to look and get an answer to the question “what are meals that I like that we haven’t made in a while?” And, over the course of studying Nei Gong, I’ve learned lots of exercises, and while there are many that I don’t plan to ever do again, there are several that are genuinely useful, that it would be nice if I returned to every so often, but that aren’t part of my daily / weekly Nei Gong routine.

So, putting that all together, what I wanted was an app that lets you store items and a frequency with which you might want to do them, but in a way that tries to acknowledge the fact that that frequency is very approximate. The app should avoid nagging or creating a sense of obligation: no notifications, no red dots appearing on the badge icon. The app should be available if you find yourself in a situation where it would be useful (e.g. if you’re heading out for dinner but don’t have an idea of where to go), but also the app should be perfectly fine with you not opening it for days or weeks on end. I started writing Nudge a few months back, and I’ve been using it for real for about three months now; it’s being surprisingly useful for the Nei Gong use case, and while I haven’t been using it long enough to repeat almost any restaurants or recipes, I’m optimistic that it will be useful for that case too.

(Incidentally, I’m actually not thrilled with the name “Nudge”, because it does have just a hint of nagging? Hopefully I’ll come up with a better name as it gets closer to release.)

If that sounds interesting to you and you’d be willing to help me alpha test Nudge, I would be very grateful. Please leave a comment below or contact me via whatever other means you have to do so, and I’ll send you instructions for how to join the test group. Though I’ll mention the limitation that it’s an Apple-ecosystem-only app: it works on iPhone and iPad now, I’ll add Mac support in the next month or two, but adding Android / Windows / Linux support is not on the roadmap.

I had no plans to play Split Fiction, but then it got suggested as our January VGHVI game, and my offspring was in town for the end of Christmas, so we went through it.

Honestly, at the beginning I was super not impressed. The plot and characters were cartoonish, and not in a good way: everything was done with the broadest possible strokes, none of the characters felt remotely realistic, and they also weren’t archetypal in any interesting way. The game play was fun enough, though, and it’s always good doing things with a family member, so we keept on going.

For a while, that’s the level that it stayed at. Pleasant enough platforming; easy, but that helps make the game accessible for more pairs of people, so I didn’t mind that. And I really did appreciate how forgiving the game was of failure: as long as one of you was still alive, the person who just died would respawn in a few seconds; and even if you both died, it’s very generous with checkpointing. I actually can’t think of another game that checkpointed in the middle of boss battles the way Split Fiction did, but I thought that was great.

The game is broken up into chapters, each of which is based on a story that one of the two in-game characters wrote. So you’d alternate between science fiction chapters (from Mio) and fantasy chapters (from Zoe). That all led to a bunch of eye rolling from a story point of view, but it actually worked rather well from a gameplay point of view: it gave an excuse to change up character abilities noticeably every hour or two in the game. Not so much as to make the game feel completely unfamiliar — a couple of core traversal abilities lasted through the whole game — but each player would always have a special ability, and that got changed up.

But Split Fiction mixes things up more than that. Quite early on, the game introduces tiny “Side Stories”; the conceit here is that these are little sketches that were never fleshed out into full stories (and which are often presented as something the in-game characters came up with when they were much younger), but also these frequently feel dramatically different both from setting and in terms of gameplay. The first one that really had us take notice was Farm Life – you’re playing as pigs, one of whom flies by farting and one of whom has a spring jump. Great change of pace tonally; and then, well, watch the end of that video and you’ll see that it gets weirder (in a good way).

This is what’s impressive about Split Fiction: it’s a design playground, diving into mechanics and settings, spending time with them until you feel like you’ve got a good amount out of them, and then moving on to something new. And it does this not just with ideas that have legs: the game is quite happy to spend five minutes on an idea that has five minutes of juice, and to then move on to something else.

Once we realized that, we were happy to make it through the whole game. And the game did actually get a little deeper as it went on: the game play was noticeably harder after the first couple of chapters, and while the story never actually got good, it at least got a little less shallow as it moved on? (I appreciated how the game portrayed Mio as being honestly pretty messed up socially but making progress on that with Zoe’s help.)

So: a pleasant ten hours or so. I’m not sure how much of that was because of the game and how much was because I was playing it with my kid, but I was glad to have spent that time. And I do think the game is genuinely interesting as a design playground, and other games could learn from its generosity.

The writing / story really was amazingly bad at the beginning, though…

Going into Wanderstop, I was thinking that it might be at least at least somewhat relevant to my life. I’d heard that it was a game about burnout; I left my job last year, and I’m pretty sure I was at least a little burned out after spending so many years there. Which isn’t someting that I’m used to seeing reflected in games (they spend their time instead on the actions that, in a normal human, would lead to burnout!), so I would curious to see what a game about that would be like.

And I wasn’t exactly wrong in my assumpion about Wanderstop’s topic, but I wasn’t right, either? Alta, the protagonist, isn’t any normal burned out person: she’s presented as somebody who was literally the best warrior in the world, never losing any battle, and who can’t deal with no longer being the best. This maybe is normal enough in video games, but in the real world, it’s pretty bizarre: I’ve actually been unusually good at a couple of different things over the course of my life, but I’ve never remotely felt like I was the single best person at those things, and I don’t think I’ve been around other people who have felt that way either? I’m not saying that people like that don’t exist, I’m sure they do, but also there are many more of us out there who have been burned out for much more mundane reasons, because of stress and repetition piling up.

This kind of sidetracked me for a while. Does it matter that the game approaches burnout through that route? Why did the developers choose that route to approach the topic? The game’s Wikipedia page mentions Davey Wreden, C418, and Karla Zimonja as key developers – do any of them feel that they were literally the best in the world at what they did? If not, why did they choose that route into the game’s presenation of burnout? Is it because game protagonists are always larger than life (with RPG heroes so often being the chosen one who will save the world, for example)? Is it because they thought it would be harder to get players to care about more mundane causes of burnout (i.e. trying to bypass the reaction of “so you had to work hard for a while, get over it”)?

Once I got past that, though, there’s something more recognizable in the game. Alta really wants to get back to work, but can’t; that’s not really the way that burnout presented itself to me, either, but it’s closer, and it’s certainly relatable? (I’m certainly willing to believe that it’s how burnout presents itself in type A people; and, given that the post I linked to above is all about a list of things to spend my time on, I can’t claim to be all that for away from those symptoms.) And the fix that the game presents is rather charming: maybe instead of trying to run full tilt at what’s blocking you, you should make some tea instead? Make tea to chill out, but also make tea to touch grass, both literally (well, you’re touching plants more than grass, but still) and with other people.

You’re interacting with the people you’re serving tea to, of course, but also with Boro, the owner of the tea shop. And I quite liked how the game portrayed Boro: he’s taking a gentle approach towards Alta, not forcing her to do things she doesn’t want to do, but also with something firm at his core. (Steel wrapped in cotton, as the Tai Chi classics say; am I just bringing my own predilections into the game, or is there actually something there about differing martial styles?)

I dunno: I’ve got topics that I’d like to talk about in this post, but I honestly haven’t put in the work. It might be interesting to compare Boro with Giraffe from To a T – both very humane people who care about their (food-related) craft? (Does Boro actually care about his craft the way Giraffe does? I get the feel that he does, but can I back that up with citation from the game?) Or, when playing the game, I got the feeling that the last chapter was somewhat explicitly Buddhist, but I didn’t actually take notes to be able to justify that one either. And then there’s the way that the game presents Alta as being really pretty messed up in ways that go beyond what you see at the beginning, but also manages to present that with quite a bit of compassion.

Honestly, maybe I should just play through the whole thing again. And I might, if we choose it as our April VGHVI game? (It’ll be my month to suggest something, and Wanderstop is one of the games that I’ll offer as a possibility.) I probably will at least replay the last chapter if we do that; not sure I want to spend time replaying the whole thing, but I might? (Which, uh, gets back to the theme that I have a hard time stopping planning how to use my time in an appropriately productive way…) Maybe we’ll be able to figure out something more interesting if we do that; I’ll report back if so.

Death Stranding 2 is, unsurprisingly, a lot like Death Stranding, and my general feeling is the same. Not like anything else I’ve played, and the formula still works for me. Still not a fan of the combat, but this time they’ve tuned it so that Normal worked for me until the end. I didn’t like the sadism of your main enemy, and the main story wasn’t particularly interesting, but that’s also not why I’m playing the game. (And I did like the cast of characters except for your main enemy.)

So I guess I’ll wonder out loud for a bit about how the game handles travel. Sometimes you’re traveling on foot, sometimes you’re traveling in a small, fast tricycle that can carry a bit of extra stuff (maybe increasing your carrying capacity by a third?), and sometimes you’re traveling in a truck that can carry a vast amount of stuff but that is quite a bit slower than the trike and also more limited in what territory it can traverse. And there’s a ship that you can usually use to get to any of the settlements in the game (after you’ve put the settlement on the net), bringing along your vehicle and items, and there are monorails that you can repair and then use to travel quite quickly between a quite limited set of locations, bringing along a vehicle and a huge amount of cargo. Also, you can repair roads that make on-vehicle traveling easier, and you can build zipline systems that let you go quickly from place to place as long as you’re on foot.

Which makes me wonder: do I think this is actually a good set of options? The trike is definitely a sweet spot: it’s pleasant to drive, it can make it through a lot of terrain, and, as you get used to it (and get used to using the jump button while driving it!), it turns out in fact that there’s really very little you can’t traverse while riding it. And you can pick up items fine while driving it, and you can almost always outrun enemies too, so you don’t have to be too focused on avoiding regions with combat.

But there’s also something to be said for the feel of traveling on foot. It’s much more personal; one of the early people you visit, The Bokka, is another porter who only travels on foot, and, honestly, that’s a good life? And eventually you unlock tools to let you carry more cargo; and then, halfway through the game, you unlock ziplines as well. Ziplines take work to set up, but once you (or other people whose constructs appear in your world) have set up a good network, they’re a much much faster way to get around than the trike, and they’re just fun to take, too.

The other forms of transportation are specialized. You do have a few periods of the game where you’re given missions that force you to carry way too much material to fit in your trike, so you have to use the truck; makes sense from a plot point of view, and from a practical point of view sometimes you want to be able to bring along a lot of construction material or something. But it really is slow, and not in a “meditative way of experiencing the environment” way either because you’re mostly traveling on roads. And, when you first get them, you can’t pick up random packages that you pass near while driving your truck; they do fix that after a bit, though.

Your ship almost doesn’t make sense to put in this list: yes, you could use it to deliver stuff by quickly zipping from place to place, but that would be boring! (And the game penalizes you for that, too.) But the ship has a secondary use: it’s a place where you can stash stuff that you’ve accumulated and might want to access again in the future, but that you don’t need right now. (Whichever of the trike / truck you’re not using; and whenever you get construction materials, you’ll want to put them in the ship’s store so they’ll be available for road building or whatever later.)

And the monorails are even more specialized. Like the roads, you (and the people you share the world with) need to donate construction materials to repair them; once you’ve done that, they give you fast ways to travel between the largest settlements and between those settlements and mines. (And you can bring tons of cargo along, and even a vehicle.) Mines are new to the sequel, they’re a way to get large amounts of construction materials, and of course once you’ve done that, you need to be able to bring the materials to wherever it’s going to be useful.

Having written all that out: I this mines are a reasonable solution to making happy the kind of players who really want to repair everything. And, once you have mines, something like monorails are probably necessary; maybe trucks would be enough, I haven’t thought hard about the tradeoffs, but I bet that there’s enough justification for monorails to exist. Though I also do think some of the roads require too many construction materials, and maybe if they dialed that down, the game would be okay for everybody without mines? And I think the ship is a reasonable solution to the question of what to do about stuff you only need sometimes; and of course it’s heavily integrated into the plot.

I’m much less sure about the big trucks, though. Maybe something like that is necessary (or at least very useful) for the sort of player who really wants to finish every single mission? I’m not that player, so I don’t have great insight to that, but now that I’ve typed that out, I kind of think that’s the real reason trucks exist. Though even given that I’m not sure that they have to be quite so slow: having them be decently fast but only capable of traversing a limited range of terrain naively feels to me like it would be better?

And then there’s walking and the trike: here is where I am genuinely torn. From the time I got the ability to build ziplines until pretty close to the end of the game, I really felt like I was missing out on the enjoyment that comes from them: I remember them being fun to use from the first game, but somehow it always made more sense to just use my trike. (I did build a couple of small zipline segments in that stretch, but those segments turned out not to be useful in practice.) Eventually I did get to one set of missions where setting up ziplines really was a good solution to the navigation, and that turned out to be enough to sate the zipline-craving part of my brain, but still: I think it’s good to find the fun, and I didn’t like having to choose between the form of transportation that’s the most fun most of the time and the form of transportation even that’s more fun as long as you find a place where it’s worth it to do some prep work. I’m not necessarily saying that the game should let me bypass that choice by letting me bring my trike on a zipline, but I’m not not saying that, either…

And then there’s the question of feeding my soul versus finding the fun. Maybe there should be more areas that you can only traverse on foot? Maybe the whole game should be smaller scale? Just from a “how much am I enjoying my time” level, I would have been a little happier if the game were only somewhere around half or two thirds as long as it actually was; shrinking that probably would have meant reducing the number of settlements in the world, but maybe they should have been also been closer together but less accessible?

Anyways, all that aside: what a series. Or maybe I shouldn’t say “all that aside”: it’s a series about package delivery, and how you traverse the map is an important aspect of delivery! And also the vibes of everything are an important part of Death Stranding, and that means that the feel of traversal is important, not just the pragmatics.

To a T, Keita Takahashi’s latest game, is charming, in a way that feels a little special? As expected in a Takahashi game, it’s surreal: the main character is a child whose arms are stuck in a T pose, a big giraffe runs the restaurant where he gets breakfast, and and so forth. But, unlike Takahashi’s other games (or at least the ones that I’ve played), the surreality is kind of underplayed: once you accept the town that it’s located in, it’s a story about a kid going through life, dealing with problems. And, until the last third or so of the game, those problems are pretty normal, human problems: not liking school, getting bullied, wondering where their dog is (leading to my favorite chapter of the game, where you get to play as the dog), etc. Not super surreal, not super videogamey.

I think there’s something interesting going on with To a T’s approach towards story telling that I can’t quite tease out. There’s an honest-to-god Greek chorus popping up at various moments; and I suppose the Greek theatre connection also relates to the fact that it’s pretty explicitly a morality play. For me, not in a way that was excessively preachy, there’s enough humanity (though that’s not really the right word, given how many non-humans in the game express the quality I’m looking for!) to keep it on the good side of that line. Maybe I should pick it as my next VGHVI game, to see if that group can help me tease this out?

And, both on the note of formal touches and on the note of being a Keita Takahashi game: each chapter is bookended by the same pair of songs, You are the perfect shape and Giraffe song. Which might be a little boring: a charming surprise the first time, then a little bit of a let down in the second and third chapters when I realized I wasn’t going to get more songs like that, it’s just the two of them. But then, as I continued through the game, I came around to the feeling that that’s okay, even good: the songs really are charming, the ritual of watching them structures the rhythms of the game nicely. And, well, you are a perfect shape, and also caring enough about cooking to wake up at 3am to bake the bread for sandwiches and then to go to your garden to pick vegetables is honestly a really good way to get a good life.

I mean, just look at those lyrics: “My name is Giraffe / I went to a school / So I could learn how to cook / Because I love to eat and share food. / Cooking is so amazing / I think it’s really magical / Taste, smell, texture, temperature / Gotta be just right!” Find something that you think is magical! Take it seriously! Try to do a good job with it! Share that magic with other people! This is a good way to live.

So yeah, maybe that’s where I’ll end up. I still haven’t figured out the game, but if you watch those two songs and think they’re charming, then you’d probably enjoy spending six or eight hours in the company of To a T.

Earlier this year, Instagram started showing me ads for mobile games, and I guess I didn’t scroll past them quickly enough because I started getting more and more of them. They generally followed the same script: show somebody play through a challenge in the game, have them succeed for a while, and then have them play badly in obvious ways and fail at the challenge. Most of these ads weren’t very interesting but occasionally the gameplay looked kind of fun, so I downloaded a few of the games.

My initial experiences weren’t promising: one puzzle game that was basically a scam, one where the intro gameplay was both boring and had nothing whatsoever to do with the gameplay shown in the ad. But one of them, Last War: Survival, was pleasant enough: the main gameplay wasn’t much like the ad (though the gameplay from the ad was at least present this time), but that main gameplay did seem like a pretty well done clicker / incremental game, and I like those.

So I stuck with it, and I’m still playing Last War almost three months later; I figured it was time to write up some notes.

Incidentally, if anybody reading this is/was in the same alliance as me (server 1791, [fknn] Airheads / Server Pirates, then [CNS2] HotShots), hello there, my name in the game was DBCXYZ, please leave a comment saying hi. (My real name is David Carlton; there are Mastodon and Bluesky links for me somewhere on the right sidebar, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Time as a resource

As I mentioned, the core gameplay loop in Last War has a lot of similarities with incremental games; if you’re not familiar with that genre, Universal Paperclips is my favorite intro to the genre, and Kittens Game is my overall favorite and the example of the genre that feels most prototypical to me. They’re all about the loop of producing resources → spending those resources to buy buildings → improving your resource production; typically, building cost increases exponentially whereas production only increases linearly. That slows down the tempo of the game as it goes on, and it also gives incremental games an opportunity to distinguish themselves by how they handle that tension; typical mechanics include introducing new resource types, new building types, multiple interacting ways of increasing the production of a given resource, and mechanics that allow you to restart the game with a permanent production bonus.

With Last War, you have three primary production resources (food, iron, and gold); you have buildings that produce those resources, you can level up those buildings to enable them to produce more. There’s also a combat mechanic (you’re supposed to be in a zombie apocalypse, after all), so you send out troops to fight zombies (which sometimes includes the minigame that those Instagram ads showed me) or to gather resources out in the world. The game provides more buildings to support combat in different ways, and to more resource types to enable you to level up your heroes and troops across a range of dimensions.

Those mechanics are all pretty familiar to me; one aspect of the game that I’m not used to seeing in incremental games (though in retrospect it’s familiar to me from Facebook games) is the explicit use of time as a resource. In Kittens Game, it might cost 1000 wood then 3000 wood then 9000 wood to build more of a given building, so it takes longer and longer to be able to build subsequent buildings; once you’ve got enough of the resource, though, you click the button and it’s built. Whereas in Last War, buildings have not only a resource cost but also a time cost.

To upgrade a building from level 1 to level 2 might only take 5 seconds, but now I’m working on upgrading buildings from level 24 to level 25, and the time cost there is more like two weeks. Coupled with that is that you only have a finite number of construction queues (I have three of them right now), so that two week wait time really is something that both the game designers and players need to grapple with. And, in fact, it turns out that the time cost is the real cost for upgrading (at least as long as you keep on chipping away in fairly obvious ways at gathering resources): in practice, these days it’s literally never the case for me that I can’t find enough resources to upgrade a building once a queue slot opens up for me to kick off that upgrade.

The game also provides a heartbeat to your building upgrades, in the form of two special buildings, your Headquarters and your Tech Center. (Or Tech Centers, I’ve currently got two of them.) You can’t upgrade any building past your HQ level, so you want to (almost) always be working explicitly on upgrading your HQ. And the HQ is the only building type that has non-resource prerequisites for building it: to upgrade your HQ to level N+1, you always need to upgrade your Tech Center to level N first, and there’s also one other building type (a different type per level) that you need to upgrade to level N as well. So half the time one of your building queues is busy upgrading the HQ, while the other half of your time two of your queues are busy upgrading the Tech Center and whatever that level’s second prerequisite is.

Incidentally, the Tech Center is almost as special as the HQ: there’s a whole research tree that’s enabled by your Tech Center(s), and each Tech Center represents a queue for traversing the research tree. In broad strokes, the considerations for research tree projects are pretty similar to those for building upgrades: a similar resource plus time cost, with the time cost almost always being dominant (though there’s one prominent special resource that is only required in a subset of the tech tree), and a similarly small bound to the number of queues. But the texture of the research tree is different enough from the texture of building upgrades to give the game some pleasant variety.

Variations on time management

From an incremental game appreciation point of view, I really like the way that Last War explores variations on the theme of how to give players tools to deal with that time costs. Some of the ways that the game allows that:

Speeding up by a fixed amount

One of the buildings in the game, the Builder’s Hut, provides a fixed speedup to building upgrades. My Builder’s Hut is currently at level 18, and, between the level and between workers that are assigned to it (you can recruit workers for each of your buildings in the game that make it more effective), it gives me a speedup of approximately two hours on every building upgrade I do. The Builder’s Hut speedup was very important when I started the game, so I made the point of leveling up that building every time I could; and when I get a completely new building now (which doesn’t happen very often these days, but it does happen occasionally), that speedup reduces the time cost of the first several levels of upgrade to zero. But it’s almost completely irrelevant once your upgrades get past a certain level: my next HQ upgrade will take 17 days, and reducing that by two hours just doesn’t matter.

Speeding up by a percentage amount

If I could cut my construction time in half, though, that bonus would continue to be important even as buildings level up. Leveling up your Tech Center provides exactly that sort of percentage-based discount; the initial discount is small, but once you get some good workers assigned to it, it becomes quite significant. Right now, on my primary Tech Center, it takes less than half the time to research a new tech than it would if the Tech Center were unupgraded and had no workers.

Speeding up via batch size

I’m a programmer, and one of my favorite tricks there is to divide large tasks into small tasks; if I could do that in Last War and if I could then apply a fixed speedup to those small tasks, that would speed things up enormously! And in fact there’s one situation where you can do exactly that: when your troops get injured, you need to heal them, and you can pick the batch size to heal them.

Your Hospital workers give a percentage discount rather than a flat discount, so just controlling the batch size wouldn’t make a difference; but you’re part of an alliance in the game, and there’s a mechanism where other alliance members can help you. And, when you do that, each member helping you (up to a cap) gives you a discount of a couple of minutes or so. So if you get your healing batch size to somethign that allows the batch to heal in 40 minutes, say, then you just need 20 alliance members to click on the help button and the batch will finish immediately, and you can kick off another batch. (Note that part of the balancing act here is the behavior of other players of the game, not just the behavior of automated systems.)

No speeding up for you

And then there are some mechanisms that you can’t speed up through any of the above three mechanisms. Training new troops is probably the most important example of that: you can pick the batch size, but you can’t get help from allies, so changing the batch size doesn’t actually help speed up your training.

If I had to guess, the developers probably primarily don’t allow speedups here for balancing purposes. If members of active alliances could both heal injured troops and train replacements for dead troops immediately, then they would have an even more dominant advantage over other players in PvP battles, and that wouldn’t be a great experience for the losing side. I could be wrong, though: maybe it’s just a monetization strategy? (I’ll talk more about monetization later.)

Alliances

After going through the first few levels of HQ upgrades, Last War strongly encourages you to join an alliance. I’ve actually never played an MMO, or other games where a guild/alliance structure is important, so I can’t really compare alliances in Last War to other games, but here are some notes about it.

On a moment-to-moment level, alliances give you a place to chat and build personal relationships with other players; that’s certainly nice, and is a reason to check in on the game even while you’re mostly just waiting for builds to finish. And there’s enough going on in the game that being able to swap tips with other players is useful, too.

But alliances also have a lot of mechanical effects, even in areas of the game that would make sense in a purely single player game. One of the basic ones is doing rallies to fight enemies: at the start of the game, you’re mostly just taking on single zombies yourself without too much difficulty, but as the game progresses, the game throws in enemies that are tougher. And so it’s useful to be able to get help from alliance members by launching rallies: that way up to five of you can do a single attack together, and some of those other players might be significantly stronger than you. (Thanks for all the help in rallies, CDAWG13!)

The person who launches the rally gets most of the rewards from defeating the enemy, but other participants also get a useful little bonus. The bonuses are more subtle than that, though: every time that a rally defeats an enemy, everybody in the entire alliance also gets a small bonus. I didn’t think too much about that small bonus at first, but now I suspect that it’s actually quite important. (Similarly to how I thought of the construction time bonus from helping your alliance members as useful but not crucial, until I learned about the small batch size healing technique that I mentioned above.) I said above that in practice I’m never starved for the three basic resources, but for all I know that wouldn’t be the case at all if I weren’t getting all of these little alliance-wide bonuses.

And then there are larger scale conflicts that the game adds in, where your alliance fights as a whole against another alliance. (Or, on an even larger scale, where all the alliances on your server fight together against another entire server.) The most important of those is Alliance Duels; I’ll spend a whole section talking about them belom. Another aspect of alliance conflict that was important early on is that there are settlements of various sizes on your server; when alliances are young, fighting over those settlements is important. That settled down later, though, as the strongest alliances enforced a non-agression pact preventing alliances from fighting over settlements.

(I honestly don’t know what I think about that non-agression pact; fighting over settlements was a kind of fun mechanism, and it seems odd that that mechanism just stopped getting used? I don’t even know for sure if the meta of the game has settled into all servers agreeing that we shouldn’t fight over settlements. One argument for the non-agression pact is that the server is running 24 hours a day, and it would kind of suck if alliance A was taking a settlement from alliance B when alliance B’s members were asleep and then then B would take it right back from A when A’s members were asleep.)

One thing that those battles over settlments makes clear is that some alliances are stronger than others: maybe they have more members, maybe they have more active members, maybe they have members who are better at working the game’s mechanics, maybe they spend more money to get ahead. And, honestly, I think that sort of sorting is probably a good thing: it’s a lot more fun to be around people who, broadly speaking, have a similar approach to the game to you than to be constantly comparing yourself in global lists to people who spend a lot more money and time on the game. Yes, it means that the alliance I’m in is always going to be just under 10th place on the strength ranking; we can hope to be a little higher, but there’s no way we’re going to be in the top three, and that’s totally fine, those folks are doing their own, very different thing.

Or rather, the alliances that I was in were both at around that place in the rankings, because alliances sometimes merge, and so I ended up in two different ones. (And you can also choose to leave an alliance or get kicked out of one and then move to another alliance, but that didn’t happen to me.) I was part of two different mergers, a failed one where we tried to merge another alliance into ours, and a succesful one where our alliance merged into another one.

Those mergers were a reminder that, well, people are people and have feelings. At work, I was pretty heavily involved with integrating a couple of acquisitions of smaller companies; that integration work takes time and effort and even so there are going to be road bumps! Fortunately, mergers in Last War are much lower stakes than mergers in your actual job, but still, we got to speed run those problems, with the extra bonus of not particularly good communication tools and with people who aren’t very experienced with managing the ups and down of mergers. (It wouldn’t surprise me if most successful alliances end up setting up a Discord to help improve communication.)

So I’d be standing there, watching a few people being vocally frustrated with the merger (while a significantly larger number of people seem fine with it), and thinking “yup, that is totally 100% going to happen in any situation where group composition changes!” (The storming part of forming, storming, norming, performing, more or less.) It was easy enough for me to sit back, not take it too seriously, and predict that things would be fine in three days if we would just not overreact to bumps and if the leadership from both sides would help calm things down; in one case, that calming down didn’t happen, in the other case, it did. Though I also don’t want to underplay the problems that cultural incompatibility can lead to; I don’t think that the two sides in the failed merger had so much cultural incompatibility as to make it impossible, but the first alliance that I was in definitely had its quirks.

One other small aspect of alliances is that it gave the game a way to work in events that would naturally cause you to lose troops periodically. Every time you add a resource into a game, you have to think about what’s going to force players to use the resource, instead of having them just hoard it. (And you have to take into account loss-averse players like me who will go to some effort to not spend a resource if we can imagine that there might be a better situation in the future to use it!)

And the alliance system is part of how Last War solves that resource sink problem for troops. A couple of times a week, there’s a Marshal’s Guard event where the whole alliance teams up to attack a very strong set of enemies; once a week, there’s a zombie raid where waves of zombies attack everybody’s base; and once a week there’s a Buster Day (and usually a Capitol War at the same time) that gives pretty strong rewards for everybody to get out there and fight. There’s also a carrot that I’ll talk about in the next section, where once a week (right before Buster Day) you get rewarded for training new troops; but to do that, you need to make room in your Drill Ground, which means you want to lose troops.

Alliance Duels

As I mentioned earlier, once you get a couple of weeks into the game, it will start taking multiple days to upgrade a single building (or to research a new tech), and you only have a limited number of queues. This leads to long stretches of time where you just don’t have much to do; the game does give you speedup items, but the natural strategies for those are either to always use them (in which case they run out quickly) or to always hoard them until you get a better time to use them (in which case they might as well not be there) so that alone doesn’t particularly help solve the problem.

So, a couple weeks into the the game, Last War introduces a week-long event called “Alliance Duels”. In these, your alliance is paired up against another alliance, and both you as an individual and the alliance as a whole are competing to get the most points; you get pretty good rewards reaching certain fixed point thresholds, with extra points coming from your individual relative ranking and whether or not your alliance won. In particular, there’s one rare resource that basically only comes from Alliance Duels that you need for certain subsets of the tech research tree; initially you only use that resource to get better at Alliance Duels themselves, but then other tech trees open up that depend on that resource, once of which is quite important.

And the way you earn points during Alliance Duels is different based on the day of the week. So, for example, there are two days of the week where you get points both from finishing building upgrades and from using building speedups. If you’re in a situation where, say, upgrading your highest level buildings takes three days, then you might finish your HQ upgrade when one of those days starts (using speedup items if necessary), then during the day you might upgrade your fastest / lowest level buildings (which lets you get the most advantage of the speedups from the Builder’s Hut and from the help from other members of your alliance). And then, at the end of the day, you might kick off the upgrades for the prerequisite buildings for your next HQ level. (And if you’ve got enough speedup items, you might even finish them immediately, which gives you lots of points and lets you start your next HQ upgrade immediately.) This really helps give structure to your building upgrades; and a similar thing happens with your research tree progression, which also gets rewarded on certain days of the Duel.

I also mentioned the problem of creating a resource sink for troops; Alliance Duels help solve that, by having the next-to-last day of the week give you points for training troops, and having the last day of the week (it’s got a special name, Buster Day) give you points for defeating the troops of your Alliance Duel opponent. (And you also get points for losing troops on Buster Day, though the number of points is smaller.) You can opt out of Buster Day if you want (the game lets you shield up to avoid atacks), but it’s a nice incentive if you’re open to PvP combat.

Finally, Alliance Duels help strengthen the social aspects of Last War. They’re main repeating structure of the game, and every day your alliance is fighting to get more points than that week’s opponents. So that gives you something to talk about and strive together for; and there’s enough not-completely-obvious strategy involved in Alliance Duels that those discussions can have substance to them beyond just saying that we should all do our best. One of the things I like about my current alliance is that we’re all trying to help each other learn how to the play the better, and Alliance Duels is one of the big things we talk about there.

Monetization

In the circles that I travel in, free-to-play games have a bad rep; honestly, I think a lot of that is snobbishness, but there are real problems with free-to-play games, and the main ones are around monetization. That’s definitely a real thing; I used to work for a Facebook game company (the main game I worked on was Sorority Life), and there are definitely some aspects of how that game made money that I’m not proud of.

Last War, though, seems a lot better in that regard? One of the things that I like about Last War’s monetization is that, honestly, it’s only nominally a free-to-play game: the game is balanced in a way that makes it much more sustainably playable if you buy a few reasonably-priced one-time upgrades.

Concretely: when you start out, you can play enough for free to get a feel for the basic flow of the game, enough to know if you’ll like it. Once you’ve done that for a couple of hours, your build times will be long enough that you’ll want to be able to upgrade two buildings at once; you can get a second build queue for $2. And there’s also a UR hero available for $1. (I’ll talk more about the game’s treatment of hero tiers below.) I have to think that most people who play the game for more than a small handful of hours will buy those two items; and I think that spending $3 on two items that give you permanent upgrades is an entirely reasonable amount of money to charge for a game that you’ve already gotten a noticeable amount of enjoyment out of!

And that $3 will carry you for quite a way; I still hear chatter in my guild from people who have been playing for months (and are decently high level, too) who haven’t bought anything more than that. I probably stuck with just those two items for over a month; eventually, though, I got to where I wanted to have two parallel builds going on that each took multiple days, and so I bought a third build queue so that didn’t block me from doing smaller upgrades; that queue cost $10. A little later I bought a second research queue, also for $10. So that’s now $23 I’ve spent; this is for a game that I’ve been poking at for almost three months by now. Again, an entirely reasonable amount of money for the game to ask me to spend! And there’s a fourth build queue available if I want to spend another $20; I think that’s it for build queues, and I think 2 is the limit for research queues.

(Full disclosure: I also bought another UR hero for $5. In retrospect, that was a mistake, I didn’t quite understand the relevant parts game’s mechanics well enough; but that’s fine, I don’t begrudge the game for getting $28 (minus Apple’s cut) instead of $23 out of me.)

And, to be clear, the game is balanced in a way that doing what I did leads to a good experience. Everything I’ve bought was a permanent, non-randomized in-game benefit: you can spend money for consumables, but you don’t have to and there’s not very much pressure to do so. Sure, if you’re impatient or really have to win something in the short term, you can spend money; but if you just want to progress steadily and appreciate the game’s systems and the constraints in them, you can have a good experience with just those four upgrades, and probably even with the first two of them.

I mentioned UR heroes above; when I first saw those heroes, I assumed this game was all about rare random draws to try to improve your squad by getting high tier heroes. That’s the way Sorority Life worked (the good loot was just clothes instead of heroes); and I think that paid randomized very rare loot drops are immoral. That feeling was a big part of the reason why I was happy to leave that job; it’s a mechanic that I’ve seen over and over in games I’ve dipped into since then, though.

But it’s not the way Last War works. There aren’t that many UR heroes in the game at all, it doesn’t take that long to acquire more of them than you can actively use just by participating in regular in-game events, and if there’s one you really want to purchase, you can do that for $5. (And, incidentally, while there are more SSR heroes than UR heroes, there aren’t many of those either, and I probably had them all through normal gameplay a month in.)

Because, it turns out that, if you really want to power game, the issue isn’t getting the UR heroes, the issue is leveling up their number of stars. (A two star SSR hero is stronger than a no star UR hero.) That could be a distinction without a difference, except that the material to need to level up those stars is something called shards, and most shards that you get aren’t specific to a hero, they’re specific to a tier. (I.e. you can easily get UR shards that can be used to level up any UR hero.) So, from a monetization point of view, you’re not tempted to buy rare random hero-specific stuff: you’re trying to get not-super-common stuff that can be used across a range of heroes. This is a much more straightforward transaction.

And, as with construction queues above, the game is tuned so that you can have an entirely pleasant experience in this aspect of the game as well without spending more than a small amount of money. ($1 to buy one hero in this case!) The game gives you one UR hero for free and one UR hero for very cheap; so, early on, your main five-hero squad will have those two UR heroes and three SSR heroes. You will get more UR heroes, but because of one detail about how the game works (hero types and squad construction bonuses), those will be less attractive to you, so you won’t end up using them much.

As I said above, though, having UR heroes without UR shards doesn’t feel great. But, while UR shards aren’t common, they’re not that rare. The Alliance Duels structure encourages you to spend your shards on one specific day each week; and when that day rolls around, I’ll have maybe 120–150 UR shards available. And that is enough to make me feel like I’m making progress on two UR heroes: right now, one is at 4 3/5 stars, and I’ll either get him up to 4 4/5 or 5 stars this week, and the other is at 4 stars. And my three main SSR heroes are a little ahead of my UR heroes but not a lot: I got one to 5 stars three weeks ago, I think, I got another to 5 stars last week, my third one is probably two weeks away from getting to 5 stars.

So this is all done in a way that feels good to play. You don’t want all the rewards you get from tasks to feel the same, some should be special; but even the special ones shouldn’t feel super random or super rare. And UR shards are nicely balanced to meet those criteria: they’re a reward that I actively seek out when I’ve got a choice, they feel special, but also I get enough that I’m not frustrated by the lack of progress.

(People playing the game are also well aware that I’m simplifying this: there are multiple other dimensions along which you can improve your heroes. But similar arguments apply to the other dimensions: they all require some sort of resource that’s not specific to a single hero, in fact most of the other ones can be applied to any hero, regardless of tier. And you get enough of them to be making a weekly drip of progress on members of your main squad.)

So: Last War is only nominally free to play in practice after the first couple of hours, but also, the game is very well balanced to play by spending $3–$23: I think of it as a reasonably-priced game with a free trial period. Except, of course, that, if you do want to spend more money, you can. Every time you launch the game, there’s an exhortation to spend; and there are pretty clear benefits to doing so.

I find those exhortations easy to resist, though? I don’t think I’d be having more fun if I were spending more money, and my psychology is such that the lures that the game puts in front of me aren’t too strong. And in my alliance, there’s only one player who is clearly much stronger than me, it’s quite typical for me to show up somewhere in rank 2–5 in the leaderboard for various alliance events, so clearly there are lots of us who are happy with the same deal that I am. (I mean, maybe they’re all spending lots of money but I’m somehow so awesome that I do well anyways! Seems unlikely, though.)

Also, I actually think it’s completely reasonable to regularly spend money on a game that you enjoy: those servers and developers’ salaries have to come out of somewhere, after all. And if you want to set yourself a budget for how much money you’re comfortable spending on the game, Last War works with you: there are weekly and monthly packs that give you a reasonable boost, and there are also other permanent upgrades that you can spend a bounded amount of money on.

But, having said that, whales do exist in the game; and if you really want to play in the upper tiers of the game, you’ll join an alliance that’s full of them, and I’m sure the social pressures there are different. I don’t necessarily see regularly spending larger amounts of money as a bad thing, though? As an analogy, a restaurant meal that costs $30–$50 per person feels like a nice meal but not like something ridiculous, and that’s something that takes an hour or maybe two and then it’s over. So I don’t see why it’s a priori unreasonable to regularly spend that amount of money on a game that you spend noticeable amounts of time playing.

Sometimes, though, games do prey on vulnerable people, and that’s not good. Without seeing more evidence of that happening in Last War, however, I’m going to assume that they’re not doing that to an irresponsible extent. In particular, the game doesn’t have prominent gambling mechanics; Sorority Life was constantly tempting you to complete a set of clothing where you could only get the items via a randomized drop, and where one item in the drop had only a 1% drop rate; Last War has nothing nearly that extreme that I’ve seen.

Fragmented Attention

I’m glad I played Last War, but I also think it’s time for me to stop, because it’s eating too much into my time. My console game playing is nicely walled off: I normally play video games on Monday evenings, Wednesday evenings, and the second half of Sunday afternoons, and that’s an amount and shape of time that I’m happy with. With games that are on my phone, I don’t expect to maintain that level of discipline, but I do still want to limit them to parts of my day instead of checking them regularly.

Last War actually wasn’t too bad in that regard at first. After the first few days, your upgrades at least take hours, and also sending out your troops to fight zombies takes energy, and that energy is limited and takes a little while to recharge. So it was easy enough to pick up the game, spend ten or fifteen minutes to advance some things along, then check on build times and note that nothing was going to happen for, say, three hours, and take a mental note to check the game at whenever I expect my next break to be after that time. And that was a pretty healthy way to engage with the game.

Over the last month, I’ve been finding it harder to maintain that discipline, however. In the mornings, my initial checkin involves more steps than I’d like, but also I’m extending that time longer than necessary. And I’m picking it up more in short breaks than I’d like, too, even when there isn’t anything productive to do.

Basically, I’m finding it harder to resist the pull of low-value intermittent rewards. For example, is anybody saying anything interesting in alliance chat? Have alliance members uncovered any rewards that I should claim? I should be able to ignore that kind of thing, but my mental defenses have been worn down a bit. This is having real consequences: I feel like I’m getting noticeably less done in the mornings than I used to, way too often I find myself hitting lunchtime and not feeling good about how I’ve spent my morning.

Another part of how Last War interferes with my times is various Alliance events, and in particular how they affect my evenings. I talked about Alliance Duels above; they reset each day at 6pm, so it’s useful to check in right before then to see if it would be useful for me to put in a final push to get a few more points. There are also some events that happen every few days that we have a habit of scheduling an hour or so after the reset; they don’t require continuous attention but I’m much more successful in them if I check in on them every couple of minutes for half an hour or so.

And that is a problem: we’re cooking dinner then, or maybe eating dinner. That’s a time where I want to be paying attention to food and my wife, not to a game!

So it’s time for me to stop. Part of me is torn: the game is still interesting, I like my alliance members, and I’m genuinely curious about the new mechanics that the game is going to be introducing in another month or so. But I’m also pretty sure that gotten most of what I’m going to get out of the game from a lens of seeing what the game is doing that’s new to me, and the costs of fragmentation at my time have started outweighing the benefits of interactions in the game.

I’m going to stop playing this weekend, after the end of the current Alliance Duel. (And I’m stopping playing permanently, not pausing, because it’s not the sort of game where you can take a few months of and then just come back to and pick it up again.) If any of my alliance members are reading this, I’ll miss you, I hope the alliance continues to do well! Do please leave a comment saying hi, and if you happen to have a blog, please let me know, I’ll read it.

It’s been about six months since I gave notice at my previous job, with an explicit plan to not get another job in the short term, and it feels like it’s time for me to give an update on how that’s been going. (Especially since that part of my plan at the time was to definitely not think about another job for at least six months, but to re-evaluate once I’d reached that point.)

In that post, I came up with an ordered list of six things to potentially work on, with a tentative cut-off after third place. And that’s been going surprisingly well: I have indeed been spending time on those three items, I feel good about that choice, and the next three items would still be the next three items in some order if I were to make the list again today. (In particular, I am thinking about spending more time reading, number 5 on the prior list.) So I’m happy with that, and the economy hasn’t bombed (somewhat to my surprise; yay excessive industry spending on AI buildout, I guess?) so I haven’t yet had to seriously rethinking the financial wisdom of continuing to not work.

And, with the time that I’m spending on those three items, they’re coming into focus a little more. So I figured I’d write down a bit more about my plans / goals there.

For reference, my current weekday schedule is that I spend MWF mornings programming, TTh mornings doing Tai Chi, and afternoons doing Nei Gong. Or at least that’s what it looks like in broad strokes: I also spend time walking the dogs, nappending, doing bits of learning Japanese, etc. But that’s the basic idea.

For Nei Gong, I’d been going through a series of online lessons for several years now, and I’d been taking an in-person Foundations course for a little over a year. So my plan was to use the time to go deeper in that: really build up my foundations so I can get as much as possible out of that course. (It’s scheduled to last for two and a half years, from summer 2024 through the end of 2026.) And I was hoping to spend two hours a day most days doing Nei Gong.

Which I’ve mostly been doing? I said above that I spend afternoons doing Nei Gong, but the nap does eat into that, as does lunch and, honestly, more goofing off time than I’d like. So yeah, two hours is a lot less than all afternoon, but it’s still a noticeable amount of time. I’ve been keeping notes about the details of how I spend that time in my other blog; when I first started this new setup, I was making it to two hours pretty reliably and it wasn’t that surprising for me to make it closer to three hours, if I’m remembering correctly. Recently, I’ve been finding excuses more often to do less than two hours, but it’s usually not that much less unless I’m sick. I do think my nap / post-nap miscellaneous time has moved noticeably latter, which compresses things, because Liesl usually gets home (or finishes work when she’s working from home) around 6, and also Ulli expects to get fed then. But at any rate my practice has a basic framework of an hour-ish on standing stuff and an hour-ish on sitting stuff every day, which is more than I was doing before.

And my goals are getting more concrete. On the one hand, there’s a lot of foundational stuff that I want to work on: I want to improve my breathing, I want to keep on getting my back in better shape (and, FWIW, I’m still a little optimistic that both of those might help with my energy levels), I want to build up the Qi levels in my Dantian better. In terms of things that I’m hoping that will enable, I would like to get to a situation where I can reliably get the Microcosmic Orbit going: I occasionally can now, but usually Qi gets stuck going halfway up my back. (Not sure whether that’s because I don’t have enough Qi that I’m sending up or because my back; that’s why I’m working on both!)

For a while I was spending more time on Calm Abiding, and it’s still a good idea, I’m just not regularly fitting it in; and I’m occasionally spending time (usually on Sunday afternoons, when I don’t do as much Nei Gong as on weekdays but I do some) on trying to get Scholar/Martial Breathing going, but it’s not something that I’m treating as a priority either. (Honestly, maybe I should stop even trying that, and spend more time on basics on Sundays? That kind of makes sense, now that I type it out.) And making progress towards a Yi Jin Jing transformation is also a goal of the course; I don’t really have specific milestones that I’m aiming at there, but some of the exercises that I do are directly relevant towards that, so hopefully I’ll ambiently make progress.

Also, outside of my practice times, I’m trying to be more aware of when my monkey mind is taking over. Not a huge amount of progress there, but I’ll keep on chipping away.

I’m actually a little bit torn about my Nei Gong time. On the one hand, I’m taking it seriously, and I’m getting something out of that. But, on the other hand, I feel like I’m not making progress as quickly as I should, in some sense: I’ve being doing this increasingly seriously for over six years now, and I get the impression that there’s stuff that should be attainable in that time span that I haven’t gotten to? Not sure if it’s because of my back or my sleep problems or my age or random chance or if I’m just wrong about appropriate expectations.

And, even if I’m right that my practice looks like it might be hitting a glass ceiling, it’s not clear what I should do about that. I’m certainly getting something out of Nei Gong; am I getting enough to justify the amount of time (and money) that I’m spending on it? If not, how much time should I be spending on it?

My current answer is: I’ve got a year and a half to go on the Foundations course, and I’ve seen noticeable progress over its first year. So I’m going to continue to taking it seriously for the next year and a half; if I’m lucky, that will get me over a hump and I’ll decide that I’ll want to keep on pushing forward pretty actively. If not, then I’ll have to re-evaluate: keep on pushing, dial it back but keep it at a maintenance level, stop entirely, replace some of the time with a different practice (maybe a Buddhist meditation practice)? Not sure; I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that I should keep on going for now.

Next on the list is programming. I have a couple of projects that I want to do: a “gentle reminders” iPhone app and a clicker game. So far, I’ve been doing prepwork for the former, going through the 100 Days of SwiftUI lesson series; it’s quite good, I recommend it! I finished it a couple of weeks ago, and I was planning to dive right into programming (mostly me doing the programming, but I’m going to experiment with getting LLM help for some of it), but Liesl and I decided a couple of months ago to get our will in order and that spawned a bunch of follow-up tasks that I’ve been putting into that time slot instead. I think I’m most of the way through those, though, so hopefully I’ll get started programming on the reminders app for real soon. (Which I expect to take a while, especially if it goes well enough that I decide to polish it; if I don’t start the clicker game until a year from now, that’s totally fine.)

Anyways, not a lot to dig into on that front. I like programming and I’m good at it; I’m not necessarily good at coming up with ideas from scratch, I’m more used to working on other people’s ideas, but fortunately I had a couple of ideas banked up, so that’s not a problem. (And they’re bouncing around in my head even when I’m not actively working on them.) And I’m optimistic that both of them are scoped plausibly for me to make progress on one of them them even though I’m only working three mornings a week on it.

Tai Chi has been going surprisingly well. It’s in third place on the list, and I’m only spending two weekday mornings on it, but I’m also continuing with my regular Saturday Chen Tai Chi class (which is pretty long, it’s not surprising for me to be there for three and a half hours or more), and I spend some amount of time on Sundays on Tai Chi as well.

I’m spending a decent amount of time working on the various Chen forms that my local teacher teaches; I now feel like I can do basically all the weapons forms that he teaches at least somewhat accurately, I’ve gotten one more empty hand form and one more weapons for to where I’m trying to go deeper and refine them, and there’s another empty hand form that I’m trying to learn.

But also I’ve been spending more time on the Yang Tai Chi lessons from the same online school that I’m going through Nei Gong lessons from. I’ve got the basics of the first form that they teach down, and I’m going back through the videos of that form a second time (or a third time for the early ones) to see what I missed, given that I don’t have in person teaching to help with that. And that feels like it’s been going well.

I’ve also been going through some isolated exercises from that school: one thing I’m trying to understand is how force is generated and transmitted in that school compared to the Chen school that I’ve been going through for a decade, and I think the isolated exercises should help with that. Though, to be honest, I think that, if I were serious about that, I’d want to work in a slightly larger range of isolated exercises and do them every day; but I haven’t found the time for that. So, as it is, I’m seeing a glimpse of possibilities there but only a glimpse.

Though, if I’m interested in force transmission, it’s kind of weird to do that exclusively via solo work. So I should work in more push hands time; I’ve been doing push hands pretty regularly on my Saturday classes for maybe a couple of years now, though I don’t think that I’m very good at that? And every once in a while I try some of the Yang stuff with that partner; it always fails spectacularly. (Which should not be taken at all as a sign that it doesn’t work: it’s a sign that I haven’t been doing the Yang stuff for very long and that I’m not spending enough time on it. Also, it would help a lot if I had a local partner going through that course so we could work on two-person drills regularly.)

There is a local (mostly Chen) group that does push hands a few times a week, and I went to one of their meetings a couple of weeks ago. That was extremely helpful (and I really appreciate the person who spent so much time working with me there); so now I feel like yes, I was correct that I’ve got a lot to learn but also now I can see a more concrete path to make progress. (At least in the Chen direction. Which is fine, I’ve got a lot to learn there!)

So my current plan is to start attending that most Sunday mornings, and if I were to make a list of where I want to make progress in Tai Chi over the next year, that would be by far the most important item on the list. Honestly, I already know enough Chen forms; I still have work to refine them, but collecting new forms just isn’t important. I do plan to continue with the Yang work and I’m sure I’ll get a lot out of it, but I expect the lack of in-person training and practice to limit me significantly there. (There are enough Nei Gong teachers in the US associated with that school that I can get a useful amount of in-person help with my Nei Gong, but there are almost no Tai Chi teachers in the US associated with that school, unfortunately.)

So that’s the state of my top three items. Though there’s also one other place I’ve been spending time on that probably deserves mentioning. I’d been learning Japanese for a while, and it got a little more organized when I started doing Duolingo about a year ago. So I spend 20 or 30 minutes over breakfast doing that, a couple of days a week I spend 30 minutes or so over lunch reading a book, and there’s a Kanji writing app that I spend some time over dinner going through. And at various points in the day I review vocabulary using that memorization website I wrote years ago.

None of those individually cross the threshold of deserving comment. But, if you put it together, it’s a somewhat less trivial amount of time.

Even with that, I might not comment on it here except: my Japanese has gotten a lot better over the last three months or so? In particular, there’s one grammatical construction that Duolingo was throwing at me that finally started to click, and that’s also significantly improved the fraction of sentences in the book that I’m reading that I can parse accurately. Also, Duolingo’s LLM-driven conversations are going better, too; so two or three times a week I talk with the LLM for five minutes about some sort of random topic, and the conversation flows decently naturally? So yay, nice when things accidentally come together like that.

I don’t have a ton to say about Yakuza 6. It’s really good, and they fixed some of the weirdnesses with its three predecessors: they’ve aligned the difficulty much better between story battles and random battles, in particular. (And they’ve made it so you can change difficulty after starting the game, though I didn’t have to actually do that.)

A little odd to have this feeling that everything in Kamurocho is slightly closer together; maybe that’s my imagination, but I don’t think so? If it’s not my imagination, I guess they were using higher resolution assets because of a console generation change, and they didn’t think the work of updating all the buildings was worth the expense?

I was also surprised that the side missions were a little more hidden. Honestly, I don’t know what I think about that; mostly I think it’s fine, maybe even an improvement. But I was rather taken aback that there was a whole chain of stuff (a baseball team to run, if I’m remembering correctly) that I only discovered right before I was about to start the very final mission.

Plot-wise I mostly enjoyed Yakuza 6 quite a bit, and the characters we were introduced to in the new setting worked for me. And seeing Kiryu look after a baby was a nice twist; and it was pretty amusing how the game made sure to emphasize supporting a baby’s head: even during the scene when they tossed the baby across the room, they made sure to immediately support his head upon catching him.

Having said that, I wasn’t thrilled with what the game did with Haruka. And the very ending post-credits stuff felt off to me: I can imagine what problem the developers were solving with that, but it also felt out of character for me in some ways? Though, honestly, I’m actually not all that confident that it was so out of character, that character makes odd choices sometimes that are consistent with this choice, I just would like to have hoped that he’d have learned his lesson about that by now.

Anyways, very glad to have played Yakuza 6; despite the nitpicks above, a satisfying end to this arc of the series. I’ll be curious to see what the newer games in the series are like, now that they’re moving away from Kiryu as the lead and changing mechanics.

In my previous post on Blue Prince, I talked a little about how it was both a roguelike and a puzzle game, how it was an odd example of both, but that they nonetheless managed to work together. And I wanted to say a little bit more about that now that it’s been bouncing around in my head for a while.

One problem with puzzle games is that you get presented with a puzzle, you fixate on it, and then you either solve it or you don’t. If you do solve it, then great! (Though even that can turn out to be a bit much if you’re going from puzzle to puzzle to puzzle without a break.) If you don’t solve it, the sensible thing to do is usually to sleep on it for a while, but usually I’m a little too hyped up to actually want to do that; and of course sleeping on a puzzle doesn’t always work.

So then I end up banging my head against the puzzle more, getting frustrated. Maybe I eventually solve the puzzle, but it hasn’t been a good experience; maybe I look up the answer, and that’s a worse experience, one that frequently ends up poisoning the game for me.

I mean, I like puzzle games and I’m pretty good at them, so usually it actually turns out fine. But still, these scenarios are real ones, and they’re a real problem.

So what would we do if we wanted to design a puzzle game that was less vulnerable to this problem? You want to discourage players from focusing on puzzles: so don’t put them front and center in players’ faces. Make the players discover the puzzles, make the players come at puzzles obliquely, make it so the player sometimes isn’t even sure if something is a puzzle at all.

Once a player has discovered a puzzle, though, you don’t want them to just bang their head against it. So put in limits to prevent that. Make it so a player is discouraged from, or potentially even can’t, try a puzzle too many times; make it natural for them to stop trying; and, when that happens, don’t throw the same puzzle at the player in their next session, give them a cooling off period instead.

And normalize failure. Maybe make it so you can’t even solve every puzzle you encounter no matter how hard you think; make it so there’s enough other interesting things going on that players still find the experience rewarding even if they were looking forward to solving some particular puzzle but weren’t able to.

But how exactly do you do that? For the first part, embed puzzles in the environment; the fuzzier the boundary between what’s puzzle and what’s environment, the better. For the second and third parts, however, you want something a little more structural. Put in resource limits; have randomized resources required to solve a puzzle; don’t have a given puzzle even appear on every session, maybe not even on most sessions.

Those latter points dovetail well with a roguelike design: roguelikes normalize the idea of repeated runs, runs that will be failures most of the time when you’re learning the game, and runs with randomized environments and items. So yay, problem solved.

If you’re really leaning into oblique puzzles, though, puzzles that you’re trying to help the player be interested in but not fixated on, then roguelike design is a mismatch in other ways. Roguelikes have you working towards gaining mastery over your runs; so yes, you’re working within a design space that depends on randomized elements, but the randomness and the interactions that it allows are pretty tightly controlled.

Also, if we’re trying to dial back our puzzle game and make it more chill, we’ve got a mismatch: “chill” just isn’t an adjective that I’d use to describe most roguelikes.

So we also have to make it a weird roguelike: just like we’re dialing back the intensity of the puzzle game, making puzzles more oblique, and making it totally normal to not be able to solve every puzzle even when we’re doing well, we also want to dial back the intensity of the roguelike, making the systems nature more oblique, and making it totally normal to not be able to meet whatever criteria the roguelike side has for progression on most runs.

In other words: a weird puzzle game combined with a weird roguelike game; but the weirdnesses on both sides are actually very similar, in a way that helps the two sides mesh and work together. And, as I’ve described here, they mesh in a way that solves certain problems that the puzzle game genre has; but, honestly, there are also just as many people who find roguelikes off-putting (I’m sometimes one of them, certainly more often than I am with puzzle games), so this lowering of tension can help from that side of the genre pairing, too.

I think this isn’t completely unrelated to why Hades got relatively broad traction: in that game, you’re not just trying to get better at making it through battles, you’re also trying to piece together what’s going on narratively. And the flow of that side of Hades has something in common with the flow of Blue Prince.

To be clear: I’m certainly not claiming that this is how Blue Prince’s designer thought about these problems. And I’m also not claiming either that this is all that’s going on with Blue Prince or that doing this well is at all easy to do: I continue to be amazed at how well the discovery flow and balance within Blue Prince runs works, getting that right feels extremely difficult to me. But I’m at least starting to understand better why the genre pairing works for me.

Blue Prince is kind of amazing? There’s this roguelike structure, but you’re not trying to gain anything approaching mastery over a single run: sure, you get better at choosing rooms in ways that make your individual runs last longer, but for a long time you’ll fail for reasons that are beyond your control. And there’s also a puzzle game structure, but you can’t actually make progress on most of the puzzles on any given run. But somehow those two aspects of the game end up dovetailing much better than I would have imagined possible: over and over, I would start a run with a list of questions in the back of my mind to make progress on, I’d actually make progress on two or three of them, and I’d add another three or four questions to have in the back of my mind over the course of the run.

And yes, some runs were duds, runs where I didn’t feel like I’d made any progress. But, honestly, those runs were extremely rare for me; and while I do think that I got a little lucky with how some things came together in my runs, I’m also pretty confident that my experience was only a little outside of the norm. I don’t know how the game’s designer pulled it off, but Blue Prince really hits a sweet spot where randomness is present but in a way that adds to the richness of the game’s texture much more than it adds to the game’s frustration.

As you play it through, the “uncovering questions” aspect of the game just keeps on going. At the beginning, the questions you have about the game all involve how to make it to the 46th room. So you’re learning about strategies for selecting rooms, you’re learning what the rooms are, you’re uncovering questions / puzzles which are generally focused on improving your ability to deal with the game’s randomness. (If you’re a pedant, you might call Blue Prince a roguelite instead of a roguelike, because of the importance of cross-run progression; for what it’s worth, I have never seen a roguelite with anything approaching Blue Prince’s variety of ways in which cross-run progression manifests itself.) During this phase, you’ll be filling out more and more of the map during a typical day, and you’ll start uncovering the different possible steps involved in reaching Room 46 and figuring out how to make more of those happen more often.

But also the estate will start feeling weirder / more mysterious / more interesting. And sure, some of that mystery is related to getting to Room 46; but not all of it is, and even when there is a relation, the mystery has its own pull beyond that goal. So the game will start changing from a game about reaching one specific goal to a game that’s about exploring both a physical space and a possibility space, with that latter exploration valuable just in its own right.

If you keep on going with the game, you’ll then uncover a third layer of mysteries: who are the people who lived in this estate, what was their history and their motivations? Yet another rich source of questions and puzzles to solve.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t make it as far as that third layer. I played (or my wife and I played: I had the controller but we were talking about everything together) far enough to reach Room 46, and far enough to start getting into that second layer of questions, but not nearly long enough to have a feel for the composition and extent of that layer. Based on some chatter that I’d heard, I was pretty sure there was quite a bit beyond what I’d seen, so then my question was: I’ve already spent a month on Blue Prince, do I want to spend another couple of months going deeper? I’m sure I would have enjoyed doing that; but also, there are a lot of other games out there that I wanted to play.

And so, somewhat reluctantly, I decided that I’d come to as satisfactory an off-ramp for the game as I was likely to reach for a while, and it was time to take that off-ramp. I still had my notebook, maybe we’d decide to pick it up again over the holidays or something, but for now, it was time for me to play something else.

That’s all well and good, but then a couple of weeks later, my wife decided to start a run of the game under her account. And she went quite a bit further than we had in our initial joint run: she made it well into that third set of questions, uncovering many aspects of Blue Prince that I had no idea whatsoever even existed from my run.

Honestly, exploring that third layer of mysteries probably wouldn’t have been entirely to my taste. (Which is totally fine, not every part of every game has to be for me!) But the second layer of mysteries would have been, and seemed very well done. Also, I suspect that the existence of the third layer of mysteries adds richness to the second layer: the backstory from that third layer makes the rooms that you’re struggling with in the second layer seem much more grounded, because it helps them fit in as part of a world, not just as abstract puzzles.

Quite a game; I feel like I’ll be trying to understand how it does what it does for a long time. Blue Prince feels like the sort of game where I should be writing three thousand words about it, but I can’t, simply because I don’t understand the magic well enough; that makes me very happy.

So, I was thinking that maybe I wanted to write a post talking about how we approach social categorization (e.g. what it means to be male, what it means to be Latino, etc.), but I’m realizing: I don’t actually understand that much at all? There is a ton of talk about gender these days, but I don’t think I understand (at least at anything other than a vibes level) what people who say their gender is G (for some value of G) mean by that statement, or to what extent there even is or should be a shared understanding of what that means. (I mean, there obviously isn’t a shared understanding, given the political divide on that question, but I don’t think the left has a shared understanding within itself. The right probably does, though.)

Probably I should reread Whipping Girl; I feel like it had some useful ways of approaching that question? But I also would be surprised if the ideas in there were anything like a consensus approach, even on the leftist side of opinions.

Anyways, just a placeholder post noting my confusion. Probably just as well that it’s only a placeholder: given the amount of tension around the subject, that reduces the amount that I can put my foot in my mouth…

When I was in grad school, I read about a book a day. These days I read about a book a week; much more than most people, of course, and it doesn’t seem all that unreasonable that that might be the right quantity of reading for me? When I made a list a few months back of what I wanted to spend large chunks of time on, books were fifth on the list, with an expected cutoff after the third item; I’m planning to give an update on that, but that is in fact how things turned out, and I’m comfortable with that.

The thing is, though, that I’m spending way too much of my time doing things that aren’t on that list. I don’t actually want to have my days completely full with doing top priority stuff, but reading books feels like a way to enjoy myself that would also leave me feeling good. So why am I not doing that more?

The best answer that I currently have to that question is that my brain is far too frequently being pulled by an urge to look up something with short term rewards / intermittent rewards. As a concrete example, I don’t actually think that it’s bad for me to spend some time each day reading Apple News; but it’s also something where I can imagine that I’ll find something new to read if I refresh it or scroll further down or whatever. So I’m doing something random (not planned focus work, something like walking the dogs or going to the bathroom or whatever), and I’ll be listening to a podcast (which is a fine thing to be doing in that context), and then somehow I’ll have my phone out and be reading Apple News or playing Flipflop Solitaire or whatever. And that’s bad for multiple reasons: I’m not paying attention to the podcast (and, if I’m walking the dogs, I’m also not paying attention to either the dogs or the world around me), but also I’m feeding / reinforcing the part of my mind that’s looking for new rewards.

I’m trying to avoid that sort of thing now: if I’m listening to a podcast, I want to avoid other technology-mediated distractions. (I.e. it’s fine to listen to a podcast while driving or walking or grocery shopping; but it’s not fine to listen to one while playing a game on my iPad.) The one exception that I give myself a free pass for is that it’s okay for me to review Japanese vocabulary while listening to a podcast; I honestly don’t know if that’s a great exception or not, but it has the advantages of being something that’s useful that I’m not doing enough of otherwise and also of being something finite if I can keep on top of it. (It feels like an infinite scroll, but then I make it through all four hundred twenty six items or whatever and it turns out that it’s not! Watching my mind react to it not being an infinite scroll is actually kind of interesting.)

I’m not completely successful at this: I’m getting much better at not looking at my phone while walking the dogs, but bathroom breaks and times like that are still a challenge. But I’m having some success even there.

I was out of town Friday through Sunday at a Nei Gong workshop. And, thinking about this sort of thing while packing for the trip, it seemed pretty reasonable that I could get back to my grad school habits and read three books during the trip. Friday was just a travel day; Saturday and Sunday I’d be busy during the day, but I’d have all evening to myself on Saturday and I’d be flying back on Sunday. And I don’t have any Switch games I’m actively playing now, so reading books felt like a fine thing to do during the non-workshop times?

Didn’t turn out that way, though. On Friday, I almost but didn’t quite finish one book; if Friday weren’t a total travel day, honestly that would have been just fine, but still, not bad. Saturday evening I got distracted by a phone game that I’m dipping into; that wasn’t great, though at least the part of the game that was distracting me was a skill-based aspect instead of an intermittent reward aspect of the game. (And I did finish the book from Friday.) On the flight home on Sunday I started another book but I didn’t get super far, a fifth or a quarter of the way through. So: more reading than normal, but not as much as seemed plausible in advance. This isn’t awful or anything, just a reminder that there’s a certain kind of mental stamina that I used to have but that I don’t have as much any more; I think it would be worth building that up again, and also to build it up again I’m going to have to learn to notice and then let go of mental pressure to follow a specific kind of distraction.

Though, even if I succeed at my goal of focusing more on long reading sessions, there’s another risk there: I might end up focusing on checklist stuff instead of just being. And that’s actually where I had an unexpected bit of happy success on the trip. A few weeks back, I read a post somewhere which, among other things, talked about how flying through the air is actually pretty cool, and a lot of us have forgotten that. So, for a while after taking off, I just looked out the window, and that was super interesting: first following parts of the landscape that I basically knew about but wasn’t familiar enough to be able to confidently recognize from the air (stuff like which town on the coast is Half Moon Bay); and then, as we went over inland California, seeing how the geography really shaped how people could use the lands (where the roads were, where the towns were, where the farms were). That was a great way to spend time.

On the flight back, as we were about 30 minutes away from landing, I thought “hmm, maybe I should pick up that book and read another story instead of listening to podcasts while doing picross puzzles”. (On which note: listening to podcasts is a fine thing, doing picross puzzles is a fine thing, but doing both at once breaks my current rule.) But then I remembered my experience flying out, and I decided to just look out the window again. And again, it was really neat; a different view this time, among other things because it was night, but I enjoyed trying to figure out what the lights were, and what the context was that they were embedded in. And then the lights got denser as we were getting closer to the bay, so I was trying to figure out what approach we were taking, and then once I figured it out (the plane was flying towards the southern end of the bay and then going up the left side of the bay), just watching and seeing a lot of territory that I’m quite familiar with and how it’s different from the air.

That would have been great, but it actually wasn’t the best part: I looked over, saw a stadium (it must have been Levi’s Stadium), and realized that fireworks were going off. It unsurprisingly turns out that seeing fireworks from a plane are really cool too, and they are something I’d never seen before.

And, if you’re in the mood to look for signs from the universe, I do appreciate that bit of positive feedback: yes, I made the right choice of just putting things down and looking out the window, and it was lovely of the universe to make that unexpectedly rewarding. I certainly won’t expect that as a matter of course; fortunately, even if the fireworks hadn’t happened, it still would have been a great way to spend half an hour.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a Persona offshoot; not directly in terms of plot, but the game is made by many of the same people and with many of the same mechanics. And, as such, it’s very good; it’s actually probably only my fourth-favorite game meeting those criteria (or third-favorite, maybe?), but I like all of them quite a lot! Interesting to see what the team decided to change with the opening that the move away from the Persona brand provided, and to see what they kept.

In terms of mechanical differences, Personas are replaced with Archetypes; it’s a very similar mechanic, but any of your party members can potentially take on any of the archetypes. There is still one linkage between party member and archetype: party members all start with an archetype, so you’ll probably end up gravitating to some extent towards having those party members take on evolutions of that archetype. But there are also archetypes available that don’t originally show up in association with some of your party members, and you’ll want to explore those archetypes as well, so your party members (as well as the main character) will end up going down those paths as well.

You probably won’t explore alternate archetypes at random: if a party member starts with, say, a sword-based archetype, then proabably their physical attack stats are better than their magical attack stats, so it will both feel right thematically and work well mechanically for them to try out other physical combat archetypes. But the game doesn’t force that, it lets you mix and match however you want. (Including giving multiple characters the same architype; I didn’t do that but I could have and maybe I should have, the game has skills that actively reward doubling up!)

And the game encourages archetype exploration in a few more subtle ways as well. The first is that the game gives you advice when entering a dungeon as to what some of the key enemies in that dungeon are like, and it translates that advice into a specific recommendation that archetypes A, B, and C would probably be useful in that dungeon. You don’t have to follow that advice, and even if you do, that advice usually gives you three recommended archetypes whereas (after the first couple of acts) your party has four members, so there’s some room for experimentation. But it’s a helpful nudge to encourage you to explore different archetypes and party compositions instead of staying in a rut.

The second is that, when you select an archetype, you can bring along a few abilities from other archetypes that that character has previously unlocked. (You have to pay a per-character fee to unlock archetypes and bring over abilities, and also you have to level up archetypes individually for each character to get access to most of the abilities from that archetype, but that’s all entirely manageable.) This makes it easier to experiment with different archetypes, because your workhorse abilities can remain available; also, in a Persona-like, it’s useful to have access to attacks of most of the different damage types, so this helps fill in the gaps: if you run into a monster in a dungeon that isn’t vulnerable to any of your damage types, you don’t have to react by swapping in one specific character or one specific archetype into your party, you can instead tweak your ability inheritance so you’ll have access to an appropriate skill going forward. So that’s great; but also, this means that party building is surprisingly flexible not just compared to other Persona-likes but compared to other RPGs in general.

In particular, you don’t need to make sure you’ve always got a character with a healer-style class in your party; instead, you have to make sure that you’ve got a character who has inherited an appropriate healer skill and has inherited that skill. That might sound like a distinction without a difference, because one of your characters is still acting as a healer, but in practice it actually doesn’t play out that way: I ended up making sure that about half of the characters (including the main character) could act as a healer if necessary, and then, depending on the details of how a specific fight went, maybe one character would be a healer or maybe another character would be the healer. (For example, if the battle was one where my main character’s other abilities were strong against the enemies then they wouldn’t do much healing, but if the enemies in the next fight were ones where my main character couldn’t attack well, then they’d spend more time healing.) And even within the flow of a single battle, there would be turns where it made more sense for one character to do the healing and turns where it made more sense for a different character to do the healing.

And the third way that the game encouranges exploration among archetypes is the archetype leveling system. Each archetype caps out at level 20; you can still leave an archetype equipped at that point and the game banks up archetype experience for you to use later, but generally when you hit level 20 you’ll use that as an excuse to try out a different archetype. There’s actually a (very small, two- or three-level) tree of related archetypes (e.g. Mage -> Wizard -> Elemental Master and/or Warlock), but frequently when you reach level 20 at one step you won’t have progressed far enough in your character bonds to have unlocked the ability to access the next step, so you’ll want to try out a different tree. Also, while it’s usually the case that, at the second level, the only archetype prerequisite for unlocking it is reaching level 20 in the first level, it’s quite common for the third level to require having spent some time on an unrelated archetype (e.g. to unlock Warlock you need to have reached level 20 in Wizard and also level 10 in Assassin, as well as raising a certain character bond to its max level). So that both puts in place a requirement to explore more archetypes and gives you a suggestion as to other archetypes that you might want to explore. And for the archetypes for the party characters, there’s a special fourth level that earch of you can access, which also adds in another level of extra archetype requirements.

So that’s the main difference in how the core combat / class archetypes play out compared to regular Persona games. Otherwise, it’s pretty familiar: dungeon crawling (with premade dungeons rather than the random dungeons that earlier games in the series had), attacks come with damage types that monsters and party members may be vulnerable to or may resist and where attacking a weakness gives access to extra attacks, a pool of magic points that’s decently large but is small enough that it’s a limiting factor in how much dungeon you can explore on a given day, and with the game broken up into chapters each of which requires you to make it to the end of one dungeon so you can fight the boss of that dungeon on a certain date.

And, when you’re not dungeon crawling, you can also do other activities, one in the afternoon and one in the evening; the main ones involve leveling up bonds (with your party members and with other people that you’ve met), but you can also do things like level up your non-combat-related character atributes. (Things like Courage, Wisdom, Tolerance, etc.; these mostly serve as gates for leveling up bonds.) There are also side quests; unlike in standard Persona games, these require you to spend time going through small (easily completable in a single day) custom-crafted side dungeons.

As with standard Persona games, the bond leveling up scenes are where some of the most important emotional interactions are. But, unlike Persona games, you can actually max out all of these bonds: it took me until quite close to the end of the game, but I made it, and I didn’t have to do any heroics to achieve that. Mechanically, I think this is reflected in the fact that there are only 14 companions to level up (instead of 22 different major arcana), that you only have to raise them to level 8 instead of level 10, and that, whenever you spend time with a companion, you’re guaranteed to level up with them; though of course that balancing also exists against a background of how many opportunities the game provides to level up at all and what alternate activities there are during those days.

I think I mostly like this design choice? There is something to be said for having to make tradeoffs that reflect your priorities, so I’m actually not particularly against the approach that the standard Persona games took. But it’s very rare for me to replay games, and I really do like the companion stories, so I appreciate being able to see them all.

Furthermore, in Metaphor: ReFantazio, there’s a mechanical reason why it’s useful to be able to max out all of the companion bonds. In standard Persona games, your persona levels are gated by what monsters you’ve been fighting, so you’ll naturally get access to a complete range of personas at an appropriate level to equip as you progress through the dungeons. (With the exception of special personas that unlock at max level with companions, but those are quite optional.) Metaphor, however, gates your archetype access through companion bond levels: you don’t even have access to a given archetype tree until you’ve met the associated companion, and you won’t get access to the second tier of the archetype tree until you’ve ranked up that bond a few times and you won’t get access to the final tier until you’ve either maxed it out or almost maxed it out. And so, given that the game nudges you to explore the various archetypes, it’s helpeful to be able to max out all the bonds in order to enable that.

So that’s the mechanics. Largely familiar mechanics, but mechanics that I like, so that’s fine. I don’t like dungeon crawling as much as the game wants me to, admittedly — I played Metaphor soon after Veilguard, and it wasn’t great going from a game where I always had plot mixed it with my combat during an evening to a game where I might spend all evening just dungeon crawling. But I liked the game’s dungeon crawling more than enough to keep going.

As far as the plot and thematics goes, Metaphor was fine compared to a normal RPG. But one of the things that I like about mainline Persona games is how local they are. In Persona 4, for example, you’re trying to set things right in a town, and the emotional heart revolves around trying to save one small child in particular; whereas Metaphor has you fighting for kingship of a country, with a goal of having the next king be the son of the prior king. Beside this backdrop of the chosen one on a grand scale, there is admittedly a theme of the importance of teamwork, friendship, and helping, and Metaphor presented that theme much more strongly than most RPGs do; but Metaphor also didn’t carry that theme off as well as Tokyo Mirage Sessions did.

And I liked Metaphor’s UI and character art. But also, compared to Persona 5, the environments (e.g. the initial city) were a bit drab? Nothing bad by normal standards, that’s more Persona 5 being amazingly stylish (as was Tokyo Mirage Sessions, albeit in a different way) than a knock against Metaphor.

Anyways: very good game, I quite enjoyed my time with it. The format still has legs, the changes to the format were well thought out and a pleasant change of pace. I wish it hadn’t lost the local spirit that distinguished its predecessors, but such is the fate of role playing games, I suppose.

Two things that I believe:

• If you buy something, it should be yours – whoever you bought it from shouldn’t get to decide how you use it.
• Legal documents like licences or waivers where the vast majority of users don’t push back on them (whether via renegotiation or via declining to use whatever the document relates to) usually reflect an inappropriate power imbalance.

I’m not completely unsympathetic to the contrary points of view here. Digital goods by their nature allow copying, and if “do with as you want” includes copying them arbitrarily, then the system breaks down. And I’m somewhat sympathetic to people wanting to provide a service but to not be opening themselves up to arbitrary lawsuit losses if something is perceived as going wrong, and so wanting to get some words in place to try to mitigate that. But still: clickthrough licenses suck, and I really don’t like showing up somewhere (a doctor’s office, a new job) and being asked to sign away rights before I can do what I thought we’d agreed to.

This is just a vent post, and a very ill-informed one at that; I certainly don’t have any great ideas about what to do about this. I can’t imagine thout our current legal regime is ideal in this regard: maybe restrict the number of situations where licenses / waivers / etc. are permitted, restrict the generality of those documents in most situations where they are used (maybe have some standard options to choose from), improve the guardrails around lawsuits to mitigate the issues that waivers are trying to solve. But I don’t pretend to know exactly what that would look like.

And I am worried that putting too many guardrails in place would chose off some good outcomes, too. So definitely have situations where experimentation is still allowed. I just want those situations to be ones in which there aren’t big power imbalances…

A few other random notes:

• It really annoys me that web pages can (if I’m understanding correctly) put licenses on their content that you’re considered to have accepted just by looking at the web page. The mathematician in me thinks that there should be a symmetric vulnerability: add a header to my browser request imposing my licensing terms, and if the web server sends me the response, then they’re considered to have agreed to my terms. Feels like something that wouldn’t work in practice. (Hmm, maybe I’m overstating how bad the situation is – poking around, the Browsewrap Wikipedia page doesn’t make it seem quite so much worse than standard clickthrough licenses. Which are, to be sure, already bad!)

• This is mostly something where I think corporations, especially large corporations, abuse the situation, but my opposition to this sort of behavior isn’t all based on that. (Aspects of the leftist discourse on AI are one of the annoyances that led to this post.)

• These complaints all apply 100% to HOA rules. (And, in some circumstances, to the existence of HOAs at all.)

Some short notes on five games I’ve dipped into over the last few months:

Magic Research 2

A pleasant clicker game. Or clicker plus autobattler game, you’re building a magic school and exploring dungeons. I liked the first game, I like this one; on the “you’re almost always doing stuff” side of clicker games rather than the “you’re spending a lot of time waiting for stuff”, which means that it can suck up time, but it didn’t take too many days for me to beat the game. (For some value of “beat”: I chose to see credits, retry it with the two story focused alternate endings, and then I did some but not all of the challenges.)

Slice & Dice

A dice-based roguelike. Took me a little while to get into it, but there’s depth there once you get past the first few battles. Lots of stuff interacting together: your characters’ classes provide dice with different possibilities, you’re upgrading one class after every battle so that’s always change, you also get equipment after battle giving you further tweaks to what’s going on, and within each battle, you’ve got choices about when to accept dice and when to reroll them, and then the order and targeting of dice.

Which gies a fair amount to do? The early battles are straightforward enough, but it doesn’t get to be too long before you’re having to think hard about when to push your luck on dice rolls, what order to apply effects in, what order to target enemies in, etc. And the class trees give you a pleasant amount of possibility space to explore, too. At first I thought rolling dice might give a little too much randomness, but, as you upgrade your classes, most of the sides start doing interesting things, so between that and rerolls, it’s fine.

Having said that: it never quite grabbed me? Listening to the Eggplant Show folks, I’m sure there are depths here that I didn’t reach, but I somehow ended up watching Slay the Spire videos again and deciding that I’d rather replay that game instead. (Still a very good game, it turns out!)

Cookie Clicker

An early clicker game; I’d never gotten around to playing it, but a mention of it on a podcast reminded me of its existence, so I figured I’d give it a try.

And it’s okay, I guess? Pretty basic, though, the genre has come a long way since this one. There’s really just one main type of currency (cookies) in this one, and all the buildings just let you make more and more cookies. Which, in a weird way, made my initial run through the game kind of fun, because it put the question of optimizing which building or upgrade to buy next front and center; so the fun in the game turned out to be building a spreadsheet to try to more-or-less optimize that. (Though, weirdly, I couldn’t get the numbers to work out perfectly; not sure what was going wrong? I would think that, if I’d been missing something big, they would have been more off than they were…)

And then I restarted, and stuff got faster, pretty soon fast enough that my spreadsheet wasn’t useful. And the game got odder, which was pleasant; once I got used to the oddness, it didn’t give a ton more to think about, though. I stuck with it for a while longer, following a guide for a recommended upgrade path; but then I decided I’d had enough.

Also, one aspect of Cookie Clicker that I wasn’t entirely thrilled about: you can play it without spending too much time actively paying attention to the screen, but clicking on the periodic powerups and then, if you get a lucky draw on the powerup, clicking a whole bunch on the big cookie, really does make a difference in your cookie acquisition. But that means that the game takes enough of your attention that you can’t really do much else (or at least much else visual, you can probably listen to a podcast), and I’m not sure there’s enough meat in the game to justify that.

Little Dig Game

A cute little clicker game, with a visual component because you’re clicking to produce workers who are digging through a sequence of planets (or asteroids or whatever they are). And you’ve got an upgrade tree to make the workers more efficient, and then a plot thing that starts appearing. Not much going on, but that’s fine, I’m not sure it took me 30 minutes to finish the game, and what’s there is well done, happy of spent that time on the game.

Paradise Killer

This had been in the back of my mind as a game that I should maybe get around to playing at some point, and then it got selected for our July VGHVI game. And I was out of town at a Nei Gong workshop for a little over a week in the middle of June, so it was convenient to have something I could play on the Switch on the plane and during evenings.

Didn’t really click for me, though. It’s an open world detective game, and honestly I would have preferred a little less open world and little more detecting. Especially since the open world included a fair amount of noticing random optional items in the environment (e.g. the game’s currency); as far as I can tell, I don’t actually need to use the currency, but I don’t want to spend time looking for it or thinking about what to use it on? And I really did not like it when, after finally deciding that I had enough currency that I could start unlocking fast travel locations, it turns out that you need to pay to use the fast travel system as well; that makes no sense to me.

Also I think that it didn’t help that I was playing it on the Switch. It’s a stylish game, I think I would have enjoyed seeing it on a TV screen; and maybe looking for stuff would have been less grating on the larger screen, too?

At any rate: I saw stuff that I liked, enough so that I’m kind of hoping Liesl will decide to play it and I’ll be able to see more of what’s going on there. (And if I had twice as much time as I actually do to play games, I probably would fit in time to play it.) But enough aspects of Paradise Killer were grating that, even while I was on the trip, I decided I’d rather watch basketball games or read books, and when I got back, other games (Metaphor: ReFantazio right now, but there are others after that) have priority. So, unless the discussion on Thursday is significantly more interesting than I expect, I don’t expect to come back to this one.

For much of its development, I really was not optimistic about the game that eventually got the name Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I thought Mass Effect: Andromeda was a pretty clear step down from prior games in that series (and for that matter there were aspects of Dragon Age: Inquisition that I wasn’t 100% thrilled about); and it seemed like the development of the next Dragon Age game was in real turmoil. It got rebooted a couple of times, and every time I heard new information about the game’s development, that news was paired with more people leaving BioWare; I was worried that the game wouldn’t be well done along traditional evaluation axes, but I was much much more worried that it simply wouldn’t feel like a BioWare game at all because there might not be enough people around who knew how to do that.

Fortunately, as I started plaing the game, that worry started to disappear. Veilguard did indeed feel like a Dragon Age game: the world, the characters, the interactions, the ongoing broader story were all there.

And, actually, there were some ways in which I thought Veilguard was an improvement over other recent Dragon Age games. I liked how Veilguard handled its open world nature: there weren’t any overwhelming areas like Inquisition’s Hinterlands, and they did a good job of having you frequently return to the larger areas to make them feel at home while giving you missions that focus you on a specific subset of a given larger area, along with a pleasant amount of missions that had you go into one-off spaces in the world.

Item gathering and management has generally been an issue with Dragon Age games, and I thought that Veilguard did well in that regard, too. And did well compared to other RPGs in general: there’s the question of what to do about weapon/armor power curves, and the general solution of “have your character constantly find / buy weapons that are appropriately leveled” just isn’t that satisfactory. What Veilguard did instead was have a limited set of possible weapons, with different weapons generally of comparable power: the attributes that they differ in are instead related to damage types and other attributes that make them more powerful in some contexts and less powerful in other contexts.

So you equip a set of weapons / armor on your character whose characteristics combo together well with each other and that enable a play style that you enjoy; and, as you gather more weapons, you’ve got a richer set of options for combos available. Each individual weapon / armor can level up (usually with three upgrades over the course of the game); even those level ups are as much about increasing the capability space / ability to combo as about strictly increasing the power. And then there are these legendary weapons / armors that have one extreme characteristic: they’re not overpowered, they’re just an invitation to go deep into one corner of the design space.

So that’s all good, right? The problem is that, as I was playing, I realized that the game just wasn’t grabbing me the way I expect a BioWare game to. I honestly don’t know 100% exactly what’s missing, but my best guess is that the main issue is that the characters didn’t quite get their hooks into me in the way that the best BioWare characters do. They weren’t bad or anything, and any individual one would have been fine; but I just didn’t quite care about them enough.

And maybe that’s where the loss of staff showed itself? It’s not that the people working on the game didn’t know how to make a good RPG in general, and it’s not that they didn’t care about BioWare games. I’m quite willing to believe that the developers were extremely familiar with Dragon Age lore and prior games in the series, and loved those games as much or more than I do. But I certainly don’t know how the magic of those prior games came together; I’m sure Veilguard’s developers have a better idea about that than I do, but maybe not enough?

Also, the overall plot didn’t sit right with me. That, honestly, might be a me problem rather than a Veilguard problem, because the seeds are all there in Inquisition: coming out of Inquisition, you know you’re going to be trying to save the world at a massive scale, and you also know that the dividing line between gods and regular people isn’t as clear as you’d think. And a game like that is just going to not leave as much space for mystery as I’d like, and will contain way too much wish fulfillment power fantasy for me.

Of course, the end of that sentence describes a lot of other RPGs out there, it’s probably much more the norm than not! I’m just one of those weirdos who thought that Dragon Age II was by far the best game in the series: the plot was at a much more human and local level, and the party members (and their interactions!) were the best. That’s where Veilguard fell down the most; but Inquisition’s plot was way too grandiose, too. So: unfortunate, but at least part of that is me not quite being the target audience for the game.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Veilguard, there was never any chance that I wasn’t going to finish the game, and I think it was a better game than Andromeda. Also, I’m playing Metaphor: ReFantazio right now, and while I’m enjoying that game as well, I far prefer the rhythms of Veilguard to the overwhelming presence of dungeon slogs in Metaphor.

But also, my assumption is that Veilguard will be the last Dragon Age game, and I’m fine with that. Written speculative fiction has an unfortunate tendency to turn into series and for those series to go on too long and to lose the magic as that happens. And that’s happening with Dragon Age in the game space as well. The existing games are there and they’re wonderful; and sure, it’s a rich enough world that I’m sure that there’s space for more excellent games within that world. But if what we want is something that feels as special as earlier Dragon Age games and other games from BioWare in its prime, then I think that’s more likely to happen in a new setting. And, given the turnover that’s happened within BioWare and the fact that it’s a part of a massive, risk-adverse company, I’d expect it to happen elsewhere. I’m hearing a ton of buzz right now about Clair Obscur, for example; I haven’t played it yet, and so I don’t know how it will hit for me, but at the very least it’s yet another reminder that we shouldn’t pin our hopes on existing studios, there are tons of people experimenting out there and some of those experiments will hit.

I’d been intending to go through the Yakuza series playing one game a year; but, for whatever reason — maybe I was just too busy with other games, maybe it was a subconscious affect of Yakuza 4 being my least favorite game in the series — I didn’t play any in 2023, and it actually took me until most of the way through 2024 before I started the next one. But I did indeed play Yakuza 5 in 2024; turns out that it’s a really good game!

And a really good game that, in retrospect, makes me actually like Yakuza 4 more? I’m still not convinced that the new lead characters added in Yakuza 4 are as good as Kiryu and Majima (a high bar, admittedly), but I actually was genuinely quite happy to see Akiyama again, and I like Saejima quite a bit more now that I’ve had two games with him. (And I liked Shinada, newly introduced in Yakuza 5, from the start.) And, if I’m being honest with myself: how much do I really like Kiryu as a character as opposed to liking Yakuza games, their world, and their ongoing stories? Not clear; I certainly don’t dislike Kiryu, I like him at least a decent amount, but, well, he’s no Majima.

The other thing I liked about Yakuza 5 is how much it experiments with gameplay (and how gameplay is situation). To be honest, I find it pretty boring to have people constantly picking fights with me while I wander around a section of a city; wandering is great, fights not so much! So it was a pleasant change of pace to have Saejima spend time in a small mountain town where he was going into the snowy contryside laying traps for animals, harvesting fur, gathering stuff, and doing a different kind of combat. (And, of course, doing plot-related stuff too.) I don’t know that I would enjoy a whole game like that as much as much as standard Yakuza gameplay (actually, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, because I really like spending time in the cities in the game, and small mountain towns aren’t the same), but I quite enjoyed it as an interlude.

But then we get to where we play as Haruka Sawamura (Kiryu’s adopted daughter). Honestly, when I first heard about her in the game, it felt a little off, with Kiryu trying to hide any connection between himself and Haruka so he wouldn’t interfere with her budding idol career. That didn’t feel right: it didn’t feel like something Haruka would have wanted, and the start of the section where you’re playing as Haruka continued to make me feel that the game was taking a misstep. (In ways that aren’t unrelated to my complaints about one particular side story in Yakuza 2 when I first played it 15 years ago!)

But, as that story evolved, the game’s treatment of Haruka got better; I’m still not going to say that I think it’s super well done, but at least the game dug itself somewhat out of that hole. And the big difference there is: Haruka doesn’t constantly get into fights with random strangers, she instead can opt into dance battles when wondering around town and she progresses through the plot and side stories via singing battles.

And, let me tell you: this is so much better. It’s not better because the combat gameplay is significantly improved: it is true that I generally prefer rhythm games over fighting games, but it’s also true that, honestly, the rhythm gameplay in Yakuza 5 isn’t particularly well done, being neither as rich as the fighting combat in Yakuza 5 or the gameplay in games that are rhythm games front and center. But the change of pace that the gameplay switch provides outweighs that downside; and the much much lower volume of battles (whether while wandering around town, where the battles are opt-in, or in the big plot points, where you don’t have to fight through an army of grunts before making it to the big boss) is such a huge relief.

So: yay to expanding the world and cast, both in Yakuza 5 and, retroactively, in Yakuza 4. Yay for sprinkling in little bits of experimental gameplay; yay for not only letting you play as Haruka but trying out a rather larger experiment there. The experiments weren’t all perfect, but that’s okay: that’s the point of experiments! And that’s also completely in character with the series: games in the series aren’t these immaculately elegant gems, they’re these amalgams of different materials that somehow manage to come together to make something wonderful.

I gave notice at my job this week; nothing against my job, I’ve very much enjoyed my time there, it’s just that I’ve been there fourteen years and it’s time for a change. And I figure that working there fourteen years means that I should probably take some time to reset instead of jumping straight into another job; fortunately, our finances are such that taking a noticeable pause should be fine. (Though it would be nice if our president weren’t actively trying to drive the economy off a cliff…)

Which raises the question of what to spend my time on now that I won’t be working. The ideas that feel right enough to be worth considering are:

1. Spend more time on Nei Gong
2. Spend more time on Tai Chi
3. Do some programming projects
4. Get back to playing musical instruments
5. Read more
6. Chill out

So, some notes about the pros and cons of each of those and where I’m currently ending up.

Nei Gong

I’ve spent more and more time doing Nei Gong over the last several years. First doing a bit of standing practice and a bit of sitting practice every day; then, when I switched to working part time, trying to do a couple of hour of Nei Gong on my days off (and also on Sundays); and then increasing the frequency with which I go to in person workshops.

And I am definitely making progress; and I can also see hints of where the next steps would be. But also there’s some basic foundational aspects of Nei Gong practice that I could use stand to improve on, and even if I do shore up my foundations, taking some of those next steps will require a decent amount of work. So spending more time on Nei Gong would make a difference.

Tai Chi

I’m getting better at Tai Chi: I think my external and internal mechanics are pretty good, I think that I’m getting pretty good at doing some of the forms my teacher teaches. But there are several forms where I’m still working on getting the basic external shapes down, and I would benefit from spending time going deeper into those forms where I do feel like I’ve got the basics down solidly.

Also, the head of my Nei Gong school also offers online Tai Chi courses. I’ve started spending a little bit of time on those, and they’re surprisingly interesting, interesting in a way that complements what I’m learning from my main Tai Chi teacher. So I would definitely benefit from spending significant amounts of time on that approach to Tai Chi as well.

Programming Projects

There are a couple of programming ideas that have been bouncing around decently actively in my head over the last two years. Nothing big — we’re not talking about ideas that would lead to found a company, just a small utility app and an idiosyncratic game idea — but ideas that I would like to get out of my head and into reality.

Also, one concern with taking a noticeable break from working is that it would create a gap on my resume. So if I could do something that was keeping me fresh, teaching me new skills (I haven’t done iOS development, and it’s clearly time to start getting used to AI-assisted programming), and producing some concrete products that I can point at, that should help shrink that gap. And heck, maybe I’ll be lucky and one of these ideas will scratch a few other people’s itch too; they’re definitely not going to bring in a lot of money, but even bringing in a little bit of money while I’m not employed would help.

Play Music

In the second half of last decade, I spent a decent amount of time playing guitar. And maybe three years ago, I spent a decent amount of time playing piano; I stopped doing that soon after we got Velvet, though. Both of those felt good for my soul at a fairly fundamental level, I’d like to get back to that.

Read Books

When I was in grad school, I read about a book a day. These days it’s more like a book a week; and without me regularly taking the train to work, that frequency will go down further unless I take more action to stop the decline. Like pretty much everybody else, there are way too many short term micro-distractions pulling at me; reading books would be a good way to counter that.

Chill Out

Like I said above, I’m not quitting my job because there’s anything actively bad for me going on there; but, honestly, I probably am at least somewhat burned out. And probably jumping into a bunch of other projects isn’t the best way for me to recover from that burnout!

Also, my body may or may not allow me to really work hard on all of these areas: some are things that I can do just fine if I’m a little tired, but Nei Gong in particular is hard to do really well when my energy levels are noticeably off. I wrote a year ago that I was making progress on my energy levels, and I think that progress was real, but subsequent experience has made it pretty clear that there’s still something going on with my sleep that affects me noticeably during the day.

I’m actually pretty optimistic that my doctors and I are finally zeroing in on what specifically has been going on over the last year, and a concrete plan for noticeably improving that might well be coming into shape over the next few weeks. So hopefully things will be significantly better by, say, the end of the summer? But I can’t count on that; so any planning that I do has to be realistic, has to take into account that, in the short term, strategic napping will be a good idea, and that there will be days when I have to pick and choose how I spend my energies.

Putting It All Together

So, having gone through that, what’s the upshot? The best answer that I’ve come up with is that I’d like to spend time on these three areas:

1. Nei Gong
2. Programming
3. Tai Chi

Those are listed in priority order, and while I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to spend noticeable amounts of time on the first two, I’m actually not at all sure that increasing the amount of time I spend on the third will make the cut in practice. (Especially given that, as I mentioned above, Chill Out is going to force its way into the list at least to some extent.) But, when push comes to shove, I think I’m at a place in my Nei Gong progress where giving it some extra oomph would really pay off; and I really do want to get those programming ideas out of my head, and I think the pragmatic reasons to spend time on that one are important too. I really would like to spend more time on Tai Chi, so I’m putting it on the list, but in third place with a big gap between second and third; I really would like to get back to a regular music practice routine, but I’m not at all confident that I’ll be able to do that without eating too much into the top two priorities, so it’s going to stay in the aspirational bin of things to maybe work on later once my health gets a little better and/or my priorities change.

So that’s the plan; though, of course, who knows how the plan will work out in practice. And if any of my coworkers are reading this: I’ll miss you, please stay in touch!