malvasia bianca

Some items feeding into each other that I ran across last Friday:

StartUp episode #16: The Secret Formula

In the first season of StartUp, one of the possible routes that they considered taking is the traditional VC strategy of getting a large audience by making lots of stuff, trying to build a large and defensible business via network effects. I was glad to see that they didn’t take that route: these days I’m getting more interested in what it takes to do something really well rather than to do something at scale, and I’m getting less interested in VC growth strategies. (See also Signal v. Noise post suggesting reconsidering VC money.)

So I really enjoyed this episode, where they started off by talking about how their “secret sauce” is to put in a lot of very skilled work producing very well crafted podcast episodes, and then they gave a live example of how that works. They showed how they go from idea to raw footage to a better idea of where the story is to a revised script to better footage: I love this sort of concrete, worked-out example.

And I appreciate seeing an apparently successful small business, with some modest VC pressure, navigating the waters of growth.

Unwinnable: Content is the Opiate of the Masthead

I’ve been published in Unwinnable twice now: a reprint of parts of my post on the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter and a reprint of my post on games, prices, value, and uncertainty. I didn’t get paid for the former; I asked about payment for the latter, was told that their standard rate was $50, and I didn’t argue.

That $50 rate felt a little funny for a couple of reasons, though. One of those reasons is that the article was almost four thousand words long; $50 feels like a token payment, given that. (I won’t say that they’re 4000 great words, but I also didn’t get paid in the learning that comes from editing, either.) And the other is that an Unwinnable subscription is $96/year; so, even though I’ve been published twice this year, I’ll still be paying them money overall! I actually thought about asking to get payment via a free yearly subscription instead of via money, but I ended up not doing that.

That was just in the back of my mind, not anything that actively bothers me; my blog posts are in the public domain, after all, so Unwinnable would have been perfectly within their rights to publish them without even asking me! I have zero desire to try to be a freelance writer, and I have a good salary, so $50 versus $250 doesn’t seriously affect me, either one is a pleasant but small windfall.

Though, actually, I have been thinking recently about unsubscribing from Unwinnable. Again, the price isn’t so much the issue, though $100 / year (or the $8 that I see on my monthlycredit card statement) is enough to pass my financial “should I keep doing this?” threshold in a way that the $35 Kickstarter subscription price wasn’t. Rather, It’s the rhythm of the thing: I either need to find time to read Unwinnable every week or I need to fall behind, and I’m not thrilled with either idea. (I have enough magazines on my dining room table already…) Five out of Ten fits into my rhythms better, as does plain old reading a book. (Or at least I would like reading books to fit into my rhythm better; and in general reading longer-form work makes me feel better about myself.)

With that as prologue: this article. Seeing that $50 is the standard rate made me glad that I didn’t argue: I’m happy to be in the same boat as the other writers, even if I do blather on more. And seeing how on the edge of financial ruin Unwinnable is makes me feel a little guilty about considering unsubscribing, though not too guilty: I hope that I am following the article’s requests of not spending too much time on word factory sites, and of paying for the more substantial writing that I am trying to spend time on.

Exponent Episode 58: The Attention Market

If you only follow one of these links, this is the one to follow, even if it will take an hour or so to listen to: once it got going, it was repeatedly fascinating. The podcast hosts have been talking for a while about a concept of a publishing landscape where the middle ground gets squeezed out but where either very large sites or individuals with a focused audience can survive; this podcast was an important evolution of that thought.

The first part I thought was really interesting was when they talk about how writing is only a part, potentially a rather small part, of how small sites make money these days. In particular, they laid out a chain of interactions where somebody follows an interesting link to your site, then they start reading it more regularly, then they follow a podcast link, then they end up being a podcast regular. This gives two opportunities to make money off of (tasteful, targeted, native) focused advertising: posts in your feed / on your site (maybe one per week), and spots on your podcast episode (maybe three per episode). (Daring Fireball / The Talk Show is a canonical example of this strategy.)

The point here is that, for a small site, standard display advertising is extremely unlikely to make enough money to support you, because the rates are too low for your volume. Subscriptions are a possibility (it’s how Ben Thompson, one of the podcast hosts, makes most of his money), but having your content be free has huge advantages in building an audience. If you’re a really focused site, though, and if you’re in the right sort of market, then there will be people who want to advertise specifically to your readers / listeners: they won’t be the big companies, they’ll be the small companies who are heavily involved in your target market. So that gives you a way to get higher rates (and flat rates instead of per-page-view rates); apparently podcast ads are actually a pretty decent way to make money these days, though you need both reputation and audience volume to pull this off.

The other part of the episode that I thought was really interesting was their discussion bundling. We all find bundling annoying when we look at our cable subscriptions and see a hundred channels that we’ll never watch, but the hosts made a pretty compelling case that bundling is actually good for both the audience and the content producers.

If all content is unbundled, and if people are choosing everything that they’re paying for, then an awful lot of time people will end up deciding not to buy, leading to less money for the producers and fewer choices for the consumers: e.g. if I’m a baseball fan but only a casual basketball observer, then I’ll be happy to pay $10/month for baseball but I wouldn’t be willing to pay that for basketball (and I probably don’t even want to think hard about how much I’m willing to pay for basketball); this can play out in various ways, but one way where this can play out is that I won’t get to watch any basketball and the basketball teams won’t get any money from me. Whereas if they’re both bundled together for $13, then I’m probably happy with that price, I have more stuff to watch, and the content producers get more money overall from me and from my basketball fan / baseball casual alter ego.

And this in turn got them rethinking their suspicion about medium-scale businesses: maybe a medium scale group that’s made out of bundled focused smaller groups could be successful.

Those last two items, of course, raise the question of whether Exponent has lessons for making thoughtful games commentary a sustainable business. One option would be to broaden the revenue stream: don’t just focus on writing, add in podcasts and youtube channels as well, with the various audiences all feeding into each other and with native advertising in all of these places. (As Unwinnable is in fact doing with their Unreal Engine articles.)

The downside there is that you still need the audience size / devotion and you still need to be able to convince advertisers that it’s worth their time and money to focus on you.

The other potential route is bundling: maybe Unwinnable, Five out of Ten, The Arcade Review, etc. could get together and offer a joint subscription that would give people access to all of their magazines at either the current price for one or something a bit higher. Or maybe a cross-genre approach would work: Unwinnable could pair up with philosophically similar publications about sports or books or music, so people who are devoted to one of those but have some interest in reading about the others could combine together to build a bigger audience than the combined individual publication audiences would be.

Or, of course, combine both of those! Have some of your content (e.g. most of the long-form writing) behind a bundled paywall, but also have podcasts that anybody can listen to with its own native advertising!

I dunno; it’s a hard problem, and I’m glad it’s not my problem to solve. I’m still not convinced that there’s enough of an audience for regular high-quality games writing to make a business out of it; maybe a patronage model, with eventual dreams of a guaranteed minimum income, really is the way to go in that sphere.

I reread The Nature of Order this summer and fall, and I’ve already talked about how the second volume, The Process of Creating Life, has a lot to teach me about to teach me about writing software.

The final volume, The Luminous Ground, is more fundamental, more basic, in a mystical way. It’s explicit about relations, about direct connections, about “the eternal self”:

This relatedness that occurs is something between you and the bit of blue in the painting. You do not, I think, experience the bit of blue as if it were your self. I believe rather, that you experience something stretching between yourself and the blue hill, something that seems to mobilize your self, stretch it out towards the bit of blue, connect with it. The thing which comes into play, is the something stretching between you as you stand there, and the bit of blue. That is the relationship I am referring to.

What happens? You look at the blue hill and something, stretching between you and the blue hill, then comes into existence. But it is a very important thing that comes into existence. It is not the mundane, everyday self, which is being mobilized. It is as if the eternal you, the eternal part of you, your eternal self, is somehow being mobilized—and has been mobilized—simply because you are looking at that bit of blue.

(p. 62)

So I asked again, “Where is your I, exactly, in this case, when you are looking at the red cushion?” Remarkably, then, he said to me, “It seems to go out toward the cushion. Somehow, for some reason, I feel my I exists beyond my body, it includes the cushion … or (he corrected himself), at least it goes out toward the cushion; when I look at the red cushion my I seems larger than before, and it tends to expand toward the cushion, includes it.”

(p. 64)

Since I read those sections, I’ve been looking around more, and noticing where my gaze expands. When I’m looking out the window at work, it often goes into the distance, at mountains and clouds. And part of that fits what I read in Alexander: my self really does move in that direction. But part of me wonders how much is just a trick of the circumstances: maybe if I were focusing on anything in the distance, I would naturally feel like I was moving that way? It’s not just that, though: the mountains and clouds really do have life that the buildings, streets, trees up close don’t.

A bit further on, getting at the core of his fifteen properties, he says:

I believe the following sentence expresses the kind of thing they might have carried, mentally, with them:

Whatever you make must be a being.

Stated at slightly greater length, it could be stated thus:

While you are making something you must always arrange things, or work things out, in such a way that all the elements you make are self-like beings, and the elements from which the elements are made are beings, and the spaces between these elements are beings, and the largest structures are beings, too. Thus your effort is directed toward the goal that everything, every portion of space, must be made a being.

Such a short rule could easily have been carried about consciously by a 14th-century craftsman as the secret of his art.

(p. 95)

I was reading this at while attending Agile Open California; the book and the conference both raised the question of what craftsmanship means to me, and what it would mean to take it seriously.

And then there’s this:

At first it may seem funny that I could write four volumes, nearly two thousand pages, and that it would all come down to this: that you must, and each person must please yourself, herself, himself fully. Then the structure of the environment will be a living structure, and everything will be all right.

But you may turn this funny-seeming statement around, and view it backwards. Imagine me saying something like this: The two thousand pages I have written about living structures are — I think — true. But they are to be understood in such a way that every line, every specific structural detail, can be rephrased to say: people will make living structure only when they truly please themselves. If there is any detail about the structure that is not clear, you should understand this fact clearly: What pleasing yourself truly IS, is the process in which we create living structure.

Our biggest problem in the world, the absence of living structure, the choked difficulty of finding true freedom, true art, all comes from this: that people do not know — emotionally — how to please themselves. In part, they are prevented by society. And in part, they are prevented by themselves, by their inner thought police.

Creating living structure is to be attained, in the end, by the greatest and most sublime process which can happen: that each person lives, works, exists, in such a fashion that they truly please themselves.

Then we may say, if we wish, that we are close to God.

(p. 299)

Listen to yourself, listen to what really makes you happy, and as part of that you’ll be part of something much bigger.

That last quote, about truly pleasing yourself, dovetails with another book I was reading at about the same time: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It sounds like a book about cleaning, organizing, and throwing away, and of course it is, but I really was not prepared for the approach that the author takes.

When I woke up, I knew immediately what that voice in my head had meant. Look more closely at what is there. I had been so focused on what to discard, on attacking the unwanted obstacles around me, that I had forgotten to cherish the things that I loved, the things I wanted to keep. Through this experience, I came to the conclusion that the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.

(p. 41)

This is so similar to Alexander’s recommendation to look at items and designs, and to ask yourself: what is a model of your self, what pleases yourself, what causes a real connection. And the section “Appreciate your possessions and gain strong allies” begins with this:

One of the homework assignments I give my clients is to appreciate their belongings. For example, I urge them to try saying, “Thank you for keeping me warm all day,” when they hang up their clothes after returning home. Or, when removing their accessories, I suggest they say, “Thank you for making me beautiful,” and when putting their bag in the closet, to say, “It’s thanks to you that I got so much work done today.” Express your appreciate to every item that supported you during the day. If you find this hard to do daily, then at least do it whenever you can.

I began to treat me belongings as if they were alive when I was a high scool student.

(pp. 168–169)

That paragraph continues, in a way that again has me connect Kondo with Alexander: taking completely seriously the notion that objects are alive, and that that matters.

So: I should pay attention to myself, to my reactions. (To, as Kondo says, what truly brings joy.) I should pay attention to other objects: what is my connection to them, but also what life inheres in them.

Paying attention to myself at a direct level is not something I’ve always been good at. I’ve been taking Tai Chi classes for a month and a half now, and that’s being very helpful and very interesting: I’m spending much more time paying attention to what my body is doing, and I think that’s also translating into paying attention to other parts of myself.

I need to figure myself out more; and I need to figure out the external facing aspects of myself. Interacting with the world, interacting with objects as craft, art, and life. And starting to take more seriously creating objects as craft, art, and life.

I’ve gone to every Agile Open (Northern) California, and it’s absolutely my favorite conference. I’ve learned a lot there, I’ve had a lot of really interesting interactions there, it always gets me thinking. For a few years, the conference was therapy for me; fortunately, that wasn’t necessary this year.

I felt significantly more detached than usual this year, but that didn’t stop it from being great: two of the sessions that I went to were excellent, and just being there got me thinking about what I might want to do with my programming.

The first talk was by Josh Kerievsky; I forget the title, but basically, it was about what modern agile might look like. (Update: Here’s his post summarizing the talk.) One metaphor that he had at the start was “getting rid of training wheels” – when teaching his kid how to ride a bike at all, they didn’t use training wheels at all, they instead used a “push bike”, which (I believe) is basically a bike without pedals. So the point is that it teaches you about balance right at the start, whereas training wheels don’t help with balance but instead teach you something that is much easier (how to pedal). In that light, when rethinking agile, we shouldn’t necessary assume that traditional practices are good even as a stepping stone to better practices: maybe they’re simply going down a route that in retrospect isn’t so useful.

Here were his suggestions for what modern agile would focus on:

Outcome. Take Kathy Sierra as inspiration: make users awesome, make them badass.

Lean Startup. Rapidly and frugally validate or invalidate your ideas. Fail fast on your requirements.

Continuous Deployment. Amazon deploys code every 11 seconds on average; Intuit runs 300 experiments a day.

Blameless Culture. His example here was Etsy: a new employee took down the entire website, and ended up getting the “three-armed sweater” award.

Somewhere around here was an interlude: lean startup changed the definition of Done. Done doesn’t mean that code satisfies the acceptance criteria: done means that users are using the code and being badass.

Kanban. Work with windows of time instead of sprints. At the end of sprints, quality goes down in order to cram stuff in; also, sprints work against continuous deployment. Thin vertical slices certainly are valuable, but sprints are bad training wheels for that. (And note, when doing Kanban, you still have to make sure your slices are thin: if something sits around too long, that’s a bad sign.)

My memory was that this got some amount of pushback from one or two people in the audience. Which surprised me, but I also heard other people talk about this in other sessions, that some people really like their sprints and their estimates.

Evolutionary Design. An old principle but still good.

Cross-Functional Teams. Ditto.

Another interlude: in early days, all teams learned managerial and technical agility. Now it all starts with the management side (i.e. Scrum); this starts off fine but turns into a mess a few years later. So he thinks Scrum is a bad training wheel, you need balance. Also, programmers want to badass, to take pride in their work.

Mob Programming. Or pairing in general, not just on programming. His company has been experimenting with mob programming from 11am to 1pm every day; it helps deal with the big problem of knowledge silos. They like the results so far. (I asked him a bit about other types of pairing; I got the feeling that in general he thought that pairing was a good idea that hadn’t gotten the traction is should have.)

Minimize Estimates. Design your process to not depend on estimates: the secret to hitting a deadline isn’t estimates, it’s evolutionary design.

(Blameless) Retrospectives. Another oldie but goodie.

DevOps. Modern agile brings devops into the fold, not as a separate team.

Story Mapping and Personas. This helps inform the notion of what it means for a user to be badass.

Lean UX. One thing he noted here is that this goes against continuous deployment: you get a better user experience if the UI doesn’t change piecemeal.

That was an interesting list from a conceptual point of view, but also useful to me from a personal point of view. It’s gotten me thinking about what learning I want to get out of my current job; I’ve long since given up on the idea that my current job will teach me much new about agile, but actually there are two items on Josh’s list, Continuous Deployment and DevOps, that my current job has taught me and continues to teach me about. So, in retrospect, while my job isn’t teaching me much new about traditional agile, there are at least some aspects of a potential modern agile that it’s a very good place for me to learn about. (In fact, my current project is getting me in the thick of both Continuous Deployment and DevOps, which is great!)

The other talk that I thought was really interesting was by Matthew Carlson, on What Social Science Can Tell Us about Agile. Here are some slides; I think they’re world-readable? Part of it was going over the Crossing the Chasm ideas: early adopters, early majority, late majority, etc. And part was talking about pressures to conform (“isomorphic pressures”) that are always present, which he classified into three groups: mimetic pressures (imitating others), normative pressures (social conformity), and coercive pressures (do this or else).

And then he talked about decoupling: gaps between policy and implementation. The point is that you have that trio of pressures both on the side of the official policy and on the underlying context that the implementation takes place in; you need to conform to both, but that may be quite difficult, putting you in a double bind. So the upshot is: decoupling is a solution, not a problem: it’s a solution to the very real problems arising from conflict between the pressures of context and the pressures of change in policy.

He presented various results related to this; e.g. that late adopters typically get less benefit from adoption than early adopters, largely (I think) because of this decoupling.

And the conference was also a time where I could sit and think. I don’t want to talk too much right now about that, but maybe more will come out in that regard in future blog posts.

I’ve come slowly to the whole ad-blocker debate: all things being equal, I’m not an active fan of ads, but I accept them as a possible way for writers to get paid, and most of the time they’re not that bad. Sometimes, they do cross the line for me—I really don’t like the “around the web” style ads that promise to tell me about strange people living near me or miracle foods or celebrity plastic surgery mishaps—but I’m generally content to ignore ads that aren’t scraping the bottle of the barrel. So, while I read many articles through Instapaper (at least if I’m on my iPad) or through Feedly instead of clicking through to the website, and while I’ll turn on Safari’s Reader View for particularly cluttered pages, I also see a decent number of web pages on the publisher’s web site as the publisher presents them. (Actually, ads aren’t the main reason why I turn on Reader View: I’m most likely to turn it on because of content width and font choices that make it hard for me to scan the text.)

In fact, what’s been annoying me more this year on web sites isn’t ads: it’s stuff that websites inflict that are about the site itself instead of about external products. I distinctly remember following a link to a Jay Smooth video, and having the page be completely covered by an overlay that encouraged me to give them my e-mail, or something like that. It was one of those things that makes me wonder just what the thought process was behind that: I have zero relationship with this site, I’ve done absolutely nothing that would give them any reason to believe that I care about the site at all let alone would be willing to give them my contact e-mail, yet they think this request for my e-mail is so important (and likely enough to succeed) that they’re going to block the whole screen with it? I guess it got me to remember the site, which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise (it was fusion.net), but not in a good way: I seriously included sticking a fake DNS entry in /etc/hosts so that I wouldn’t accidentally visit that site again.

That’s where I was until this summer’s WWDC announced that iOS would support content blocking. And then I read articles analyzing the costs that ad requests impose: loading what should be a basic web page takes 11 seconds and loads 14 megabytes of data. That’s ridiculous, and it puts a completely different spin on something else that I’d been noticing, namely that my iPad was getting slow: sure, the machine is old, but it sounds like ad networks and their scripts are significantly increasing the amount of work that my iPad has to do.

Having something that’s not actively offensive be on the fringes of my vision is fine. Having ads start crowding out content is annoying; it pushes me towards to reading articles from random web sites through Instapaper, and I’ll also turn on Reader View to deal with this. But when websites start presenting me with bullshit overlays that I have to click through, popups that aren’t for ad purposes (which I’m actually relatively happy to accept, that’s a clear tradeoff that I understand) but that I read as a complete lack of thought about how the reader is approaching the site, then I get angry. And when I realize the hidden costs that ads are imposing on me (costs that potentially translate into me having to spend hundreds of dollars for a new machine and/or having a phone battery die in the middle of the day), then I start thinking a lot harder about ad blocking. This isn’t an open exchange of my attention for value that websites provide, this is software being run covertly on my computer for purposes I don’t agree with; blocking that seems no more wrong than browsers blocking popups, as they’ve done for years. (Marco Arment’s post from August seems right to me; also, he brigs up tracking behavior, which is another aspect of ads that I do not agree to accept.)

So I’m running Ghostery now. I don’t block everything that Ghostery allows me to block: I block Analytics, Beacons, and Privacy by default, and I leave Advertising and Widgets unblocked by default. But if I go to a web page and I see bottom-of-the-barrel “around the web” crap, then I’ll figure out where it’s coming from and block that. This probably doesn’t have as much an effect on load times as I’d like, but at least it’s something.

That’s on the Mac; my iPad is, unfortunately, old enough that content blockers won’t work on it, but I expect I’ll be running one on my phone as well soon enough. The iOS content blockers don’t yet seem like they’re as fine-grained as on the Mac (though I haven’t done a lot of research); if I have to take a scorched earth approach for a while, then that’s probably what I’ll do.

That still doesn’t fix those annoying overlays, though. Maybe I really should go the /etc/hosts blocking route for that….

My iPad has been slow this year: it’s the first retina iPad model, which is three and a half years old, so no surprise that it’s showing its age. So, before this year’s event, I was sure I’d be ordering a new iPad; I was hoping it would do something interesting with force touch (maybe to make typing feel more natural somehow?), and I was vaguely curious about the rumored large model.

But: no new regular-sized iPad, the large model exists but doesn’t have force touch, and it costs almost a thousand dollars. The pen sounds neat, but in practice I don’t see myself using it; and I’ve thought in the past that I’d use keyboards with iPads but they’ve never stuck with me (I don’t even bring them along on vacation any more), and it looks like the keyboard only works in landscape mode, which I heartily disapprove of.

Force touch (which I should now call 3D touch) does seem cool, and like something that will be a regular part of all their devices starting next year. Still, I’m not sure that I’ll miss it if I get an iPad without it. And, like I said, I had been thinking that I might prefer the larger iPad: most of the time, the regular one is the right size, but if I’m reading PDFs formatted for 8.5×11 paper, then the regular iPad is too small. Still, that’s a minority case: most books I read are significantly narrower than that, and in fact magazines that are the size of the large iPad generally print their text in two columns, which suggests that the large iPad would be too large for maximal reading comfort. And, of course, the large one is heavier, though no heavier than the original iPad model was, which was light enough for me.

I guess I’ll wait until the iPad Pro is released, and play with it in stores to see how I like it? If not, though, my best guess is that I’ll wait. Maybe I’ll get an iPad Air 2—they sounded like quite good machines last year, after all—but I kind of doubt it. And the main situation in which I notice my iPad being slow is when I’m looking at web pages; maybe content blockers will help with that? Also, I’m not completely convinced that Apple will stick with a fall release schedule for their iPads; if the Air 3 shows up in the spring (with 3d touch, and with the ability to support the pencil) then that’s probably what I would want.

This (combined with the fact that we just bought a Wii U, which cost more than I expected) is also getting me thinking about how much money I want to spend on this sort of thing: it’s not like I couldn’t afford to buy an iPad this year and another one a couple of years later. But I don’t want to get in the habit of doing that sort of purchase: right now, I’m in the part of the startup growth company salary cycle where salaries are higher and stock compensation is lower, and not only do I not want to get used to that phase of the salary cycle, we also have a kid who will be starting college soon. (And while we’re not planning to retire any time soon, we also need to be prepared when that happens!) So I should pick where I’m spending money, and default to sending raises and bonuses straight to savings instead of to gadget purchases.

Alternatively, if I am going to spend a thousand dollars on something this year, then a new guitar might be a better choice. A zippier iPad would be nice, but getting to experience a different sound while having a guitar that can change tunings on its own would have its own benefits, too…

One of my coworkers introduced me to Infinite Loop, and it’s a pretty interesting game. At its core, it’s a puzzle game that would be completely at home among Nikoli’s or Conceptis’s puzzles, but it’s one that is much more at home on an electronic device than on pencil and paper. I was going to say that it wouldn’t work at all on pencil and paper, but I don’t think that’s quite true; still, a paper version would, I think, feel a little artificial, and certainly wouldn’t have the same fluid exploration.

The flip side, though, is that this implementation is geared a little too much towards exploration. There are, from my point of view, two problems with the implementations: the levels don’t, in general, have unique solutions; and the game doesn’t give you good enough tools to express the deductions you have made. So I’ll find myself looking at a position, coming to a complicated bit, and trying to figure out what to do next: setting up that situation is what can make puzzles great, but what actually happens is that I can’t easily tell which tiles I know are in the correct position and which tiles I’m not sure of, and I’m also not sure if there is a solution to deduce, or if I should just experiment and find one possible solution out of many. So the result is that that position turns into a bit of a let-down, instead of turning into a real accomplishment. (Not that I’m completely against puzzle games with multiple solutions, but if that’s the case, I like that to be more built into the game’s systems: e.g. I think Freecell is a great game, but it’s also a game that doesn’t pretend that you can deduce solutions, you have to approach it via feel.)

So yeah, Infinite Loop is designed like a Nikoli or Conceptis puzzle, but I’d like to see those companies’ take at an implementation: curate the levels (I think the levels in this version are randomly generated?), come up with ones that require a lot of thought, and give me a mechanism to keep track of that thought. Still, I don’t want to minimize this game: it’s quite pleasant to play, and the patterns the levels make can be really pretty.

I don’t have much to say about the latest Ascension expansion, Ascension: Dawn of Champions. The new mechanism never super grabbed me, and when I had spare moments, I was more likely to play Alphabear; I ended up not even giving the multiplayer a try. (Though, incidentally, Miranda and I have started playing the original Ascension together not infrequently.)

The thing I do like about the new mechanism is that it gives you a nudge (a shove, really) towards one of the factions: cards of one faction give you a potential bonus by leveling up a champion, and monsters have factions now. And there’s a potential mechanic of how much you focus on leveling up your champion (which you can even pay for) versus getting the best card on the board.

But I didn’t find that mechanic working out super well in practice: in particular, paying to advance my champion didn’t seem to pay off. And there’s a chaining mechanic where, sometimes, if the next card that comes off the deck is the right faction, you can acquire it for free: that’s a huge reward for something you have no control over, and I don’t think that helps the game.

I had a lot of fun playing Rare games in the Nintendo 64 era, so I was really glad to have the Rare Replay anthology appear. Of course, a lot of Rare’s games are well-designed examples of genres that are now familiar to us; but there’s also Blast Corps.

I still haven’t seen anything like Blast Corps, it turns out. And I still like the core gameplay idea of smashing buildings to clear a path for an oncoming missile carrier, I still like smashing the rest of the buildings once the carrier has gone through, I still like exploring for secrets, I still like using a range of vehicles. Some vehicles I like more than others, and this time, with more games available to play than I had when I first played it, I stopped after going through the medium-difficulty levels, instead of continuing on in an attempt to master (or even get marginally competent at) Backlash. But even there, I’m glad Backlash is in the game, its presence makes the game richer.

So yeah, this game has aged just fine. I would be happy if I never had to hear the phrase “you’re just trying to impress me” again, and unfortunately the port freezes significantly more often than I’d like. (If you hold down the menu button for long enough then you’ll be able to get back to the Rare Replay menu, so at least you can quickly relaunch the game, but nonetheless, it can be infuriating.) But I’m very glad to have spent a few more evenings and weekends with it.

I play Netrunner at lunch several times a week, I go to a tournament once a month, and neither of those are stopping any time soon; it’s a fun and interesting game. And I like getting better at the game (or at least I would like to get better at it, it’s not clear that I am getting better, my tournament record in particular stays at winning half the time); though given that part of the fun in the game is exploring different possibilities, I’m not sure that I want to spend my tournaments piloting the best decks. But what I definitely would like to do is build the best decks I can around whatever themes I’m exploring at the time, and to pilot them as well as possible.

When I was in grad school, I played a fair amount of go: I played weekly at the Massachusetts Go Association, I played in their tournaments four times a year, I read a lot of books, I even went to the US Go Congress once and took lessons for a bit. I’m no expert at the game (I’m only around 1 kyu or so), but I’m a lot better than I was when I started grad school, and I learned a lot about how to think about the game. It’s probably a similar level of time investment as I’m putting into Netrunner; I should start thinking about how to get as much out of my Netrunner time.

The parallel only goes so far: go has millennia of history behind it, I’m not aware of even a single Netrunner book, let alone a bookshelf full of them! So I shouldn’t expect to benefit from the same level of analysis; still, there is some material on the web. Also, there are four of us who are taking the game somewhat seriously; what do we need to do to become a real community of practice, of learning?

Looking at this through a go book lens: beginners books teach you the mechanics of the game, they teach you some basic local patterns of stones (e.g. how to make life given shapes of different sizes), and they start giving you conceptual frameworks such as the order of play (corners then sides then center), sente (making moves that your opponent has to respond to), and aji (making moves that give rise to latent possibilities).

Reading that, I feel like I have that level of Netrunner experience; and, actually, it makes me wonder how many terms from the go vocabulary would help in Netrunner. Sente is certainly there, albeit perhaps not so much on the level of individual moves: there’s frequently a question of who is controlling the tempo, even if that sometimes plays out as more of a waiting game rather than a response to individual moves. And aji, too: e.g. the way the runner manages their programs so that they’ll be able to pull out the right icebreaker in response to a piece of unrezzed ice.

When it comes to the next level of go books, though, I don’t feel like I have the same level of Netrunner knowledge. Take the Elementary Go Series: the titles there are In the Beginning (theory for the opening game), 38 Basic Joseki (specific patterns of stones that are common in the opening), Tesuji (local patterns of stones that can show up anywhere on the board), Life and Death, Attack and Defense (general middle game theory), The Endgame, and Handicap Go.

It’s a stretch to try to translate these directly to Netrunner concepts, but still: the first two books seem to correspond pretty directly to deckbuilding: general principles for how to do it well, and specific known top decks. I’d actually been a little anti net-deck, but looking at that through the lens of joseki, that’s just silly: it’s not just that there are known good approaches if you want to win, but also that those standard approaches have something to teach you about how to play the game well, and even if you decide to build a weird deck, you have to be prepared for different approaches that your opponent might take, including standard decks. One of the ideas I liked from the most recent Terminal 7 episode was keeping around standard decks to practice against: I think I’d learn a lot from testing my decks against a range of standard decks (instead of whatever three decks my coworkers happen to be polishing at any given moment), and I also think I’d learn a lot from piloting those standard decks myself.

I don’t think there’s a real analogue to life and death in Netrunner. There probably isn’t a particularly clouse analogue to tesuji, either, because you don’t have the same chains of stones, but I suspect you can find similarities if you step back a bit: standard moves and responses to local events. And I’d certainly like to see a general analysis of, well, attack and defense: the more tools to think about the flow of the game, the better.

There’s nothing like go’s endgame in Netrunner: there’s no situation where you have that kind of lengthy sequence of precise calculation. Not that calculation isn’t important in Netrunner, calculation just plays out differently with cards, money, and hidden information than it does with a massive grid of stones. And, of course, no analogue to handicap go, either.

So: I’d like to learn more about deck construction, both in terms of general principles and specific decks, and I’d also like to learn more about actual play (principles, tradeoffs, etc.). That all sounds pretty abstract, but the nice thing about go books is how many worked-through examples they go through. That’s even the case in books like the above, but there are also tons of books out there consist entirely of going through go games; I do spend some amount of time watching Netrunner videos, but the level of analysis in the videos that I watch isn’t there, and they’re also almost entirely missing the context of the actual cards that are in players’ hands and that are lying in wait in the decks.

Also, when playing go with live human opponents, it’s not all that uncommon for us, after the game is over, to talk not just about what went wrong in general, but for us to actually go over the first few dozen moves of the game. (And if we were better, we’d probably go over the whole thing!) And if you actually take lessons with an expert, then they’ll not only play in didactically informative ways, but they’ll also easily be able to remember and review the game with you.

I was about to say that that wouldn’t work with Netrunner; but, actually, it would, and in fact more and more frequently at work we’re talking about key situations in the game, what choices we made and whether or not we thought they were good ideas. And we’re even talking about our opening hands more, what choices we made at the start and how they turned out. (Especially on the runner side, for whatever reason; we should probably be more open about just what those secret corp cards were!)

Deliberate practice is all the rage these days. And, if I were to propose some steps for deliberately improving at Netrunner, here’s some proposals:

• Spend more time talking about games with coworkers. Talk about games we’ve finished; if there’s an odd number of us, have a third person pay attention to one or both sides. Heck, maybe even take notes.
• Spend more time talking about deck construction. Talk about what seems to be working and what doesn’t when piloting the decks, when playing against the decks.
• Try out a wider range of decks, including standard archetypes. Try out my own decks against a wider range of decks, including standard archetypes. Having some standard decks available would be very useful for this!
• See what theory is out there. If we can’t find it, create it.
• Watching videos if I have a spare half hour in an evening is probably not a bad idea; I’m not convinced that current videos are a particularly high-density way to learn compared to other options, but I’m also not convinced that higher-density options are out there.

What are people’s favorite online resources for improving at Netrunner?

Earlier this summer, I talked about the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter; I wanted to expand on my approach to questions like that.

In general, the price of a game (or of any product!) will be somewhere between how much it costs to develop, produce, and sell the product, and how much value people get from the product. This isn’t an immutable rule, especially the lower bound: there are plenty of companies that try to sell something and then discover that people aren’t willing to pay what that product costs; but if a company makes a habit of that, they’ll go out of business. And there are certainly situations where people buy a game and then decide that, in retrospect, that wasn’t a good use of their money. Still, that range is a good place to start.

Diving down: one big determinant of which end of that range a product (not necessarily a game, any sort of product) sells for is how many other options buyers have to satisfy the relevant desire. If a product is a commodity, something with lots of options that are essentially identical (a gallon of milk, a box of nails), then different producers can’t compete on value: they’ll compete on price, so the price will go down. And, in fact the natural floor isn’t the overall cost to develop and produce the product: it’s just the cost to produce a copy of the product (the marginal cost of the product), ignoring the development cost. Once a company has figured out how to produce a given commodity, the development cost is a sunk cost: at that point, if competitor A is selling for their marginal cost plus $5, competitor B can steal sales by selling for their marginal cost plus $4, and doing so will be more profitable than stopping production of the product. (That example assumes that both companies have the same marginal cost, so if you can produce at a lower marginal cost than your competitors, then you can steal sales by undercutting your competitors without hurting your relative profitability: this drive towards marginal cost reduction makes commodity businesses brutal.) In contrast, if a product can’t be substituted easily, then people will be willing to pay as much for the product as the value they get out of it.

Returning to games: one of the huge changes in the game industry over the last 5–10 years has been the rise of digital distribution. And, with modern networks, the marginal cost of producing another copy of a game that will be distributed digitally is effectively zero. This means that, to the extent that games are commodities, their natural price is $0; this is potentially devastating for game companies, but that hasn’t stopped it from happening.

Games, however, aren’t always commodities: some are a lot more popular than others. The problem there is that it’s hard to tell in advance which games will be popular enough to be able to command enough of a price premium to be able to recoup their development cost. This is why large studios have an advantage (because they can take a portfolio approach to average out the risk), and why those studios prefer sequels to popular games (to reduce the expected variance); I suspect it’s also why, if we go back a decade, new games all cost about $60 even though they weren’t commodities, because that was one way that stores could amortize the risk of pricing games of unknown value. (And then, as the value of those games become known, games that are less valued by buyers have their sales price correspondingly reduced; the used game market isn’t hampered by this uncertainty, so prices float earlier there.)

At any rate, there’s nothing predetermined about the price of a product, at least in the non-commodity case. Sellers can find buyers for a product at a range of prices, but the higher the price, the fewer the buyers. Sellers generally want to maximize their profits: so they try to pick a price at which the number of buyers times the per-unit profit is highest.

To recap:

1. Prices for products tend to fall in a range between its cost and value.
2. In a commodity market, prices are at the bottom end of the range, approaching the marginal cost of production.
3. While making a game, there’s quite a bit of uncertainty as to how much potential buyers will value that game.
4. Different potential buyers will value the same game differently.

And that second point plays out very differently now than a decade ago. Digital distribution means that the marginal cost of production is $0 in most cases; and the explosion of cheap computing devices mean that the potential target audience has increased by a billion people or more, which in turn increases the number of companies competing for the space, increasing the commoditization of the market. This is a recipe for companies being unable to recoup their production costs, unless they can do something to address these factors; as a result, we’ve seen huge changes on the business side of game production (and of many other markets). So I want to talk about those new models through the lenses of the four points above.

Free to play games are a reflection of the zero marginal cost of production: so, unsurprisingly, free-to-play games are everywhere. (I’m fairly sure that a majority of game titles are free to play these days.) “Free to play” isn’t a business model, though, since it doesn’t explain how companies will survive in the face of that pricing choice.

Ad-supported games are one way to make money: in a commodity market, players may not pay for the value of games, but advertisers see game-players as (just barely) valuable enough to pay for. (As the saying goes: if you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product.) This is embracing games as a commodity; in particular, you’ll see flash portals and ad networks promoting this, sites for whom games really are a commodity.

Microtransactions start to segment the market: separate the players who see the game as a commodity from the players who value this specific game over other games competing for their time. For example, we have energy mechanics: people who are grazing the game will play until their meters run out and then move on to another game, whereas players who value their time with this specific game are willing to pay more. (I see this as bringing in dynamics from real-world activities in physical spaces into virtual games: movie theaters charge you money for using their space to watch a movie, video games charge you money for spending time in their virtual space.) But there are other common forms of microtransactions: e.g. paying to unlock different characters or skins for characters.

Downloadable Content segments the market in a similar way to microtransactions: people who care about this game in particular will buy DLC, whereas people who see the game as a commodity don’t. There are a couple of differences that make me break the two apart: for one thing, DLC doesn’t generally have a recurring cost in the same way that (many) microtransactions do, so the analogy to renting a physical space doesn’t hold. And, for another thing, DLC starts to address the uncertainty question as well: if a game gets no interest on launch, then the publisher won’t spend money developing DLC, whereas if it does get money on launch, then that’s a sign that the game will reward an investment of further development dollars, at which point we have DLC. This is, of course, not a new idea: it’s the same reasoning that led to sequels.

Social Games are has some similarities to an ad-based approach, but with a couple of differences. One is that it sets up mechanisms where your friends are playing the same game as you, which (if successful) gets the game out of the commodity space. And the second is the how the costs of the ads play out: if people aren’t willing to pay money for a product, maybe they’re willing to pay not only in their attention (the ad model) but also in their friends’ attention. One analogue for the former is online games, or indeed multiplayer games in general; one analogue for the latter is multi-level marketing.

Minimal Viable Products are a way to address the uncertainty question: start by releasing a version of the game that is playable and that people can conceivably enjoy, and then, if the game gets popular, devote more resources to it. A lot of Facebook games took this approach, but it hasn’t been particularly common in general; given the phenomenal success that Minecraft has had with this approach, however, I don’t know why it’s not more common.

Patreon puts the value question front and center. While Patreons typically have tiers with some limited rewards, in the ones that I’ve seen, the rewards are more along the lines of thank-you acknowledgements than a serious sales attempt. (The Critical Distance Patreon is a good example: while Jason is, of course, a very photogenic cat, and while I do genuinely enjoy the cat picture e-mail every month, the cat pictures aren’t really the reason why I’m giving Critical Distance $10 a month.) So it’s approaching the question of value and market segmentation in a way that actually ends up setting the market to the side: Patreons generally explicitly ask you to give based on the value you see in the works under consideration, ignoring market considerations.

Kickstarter, however, addresses all four points that I listed above. It asks you to pay for a game that isn’t going to be released for months or years: that alone takes the game out of the commodity space, because if all you needed was a game to fill your time, you’d pick a game that actually existed! The different reward tiers further segment the market: people pay more money depending on how much they value the game. And it addresses the uncertainty question on multiple levels: if people don’t show enough interest in the game to make it worth developing at all, then you learn that upfront without you or potential buyers having to put in too many resources, while stretch goals are a way for companies to decide whether to put out a minimal version of the game or to bulk up the staff to develop something larger.

So, to my mind, Kickstarter is the most promising of all of the above business models, because it has an answer to all of these questions: the ideas there give hope at helping games avoid commodity hell.

Business models, of course, have consequences. Which is fine: constraints can be valuable in an artistic process, and that applies for business model constraints just like any other constraints. And business model constraints aren’t anything new: the business model of selling $60 disks in stores led to a focus on previews (with effects on both game development and game criticism), it led to measurements of games’ values in terms of length, and most companies found it difficult to create evergreen games in that model, turning instead to annual or biannual sequels. But with new business models come new constraints which will play out in different ways.

To take one example, I don’t think game designers, in general, yet have a good answer for how to best meld game design concerns with microtransactions. (Though there are some successes: I’m not a League of Legends player, but it looks to me from the outside like Riot is doing a very good job.) Energy mechanics in particular are frequently cited as something that hurt game design; in general, I think that’s probably true, but I also think that a lot of game developers get their pacing wrong even in the absence of energy mechanics, and part of the reason why I loved Social City so much was related to the pacing suggested by those energy mechanics, so I’m not sure that example is clear cut. Still, microtransactions definitely impose constraints on game design, and there’s no a priori reason to believe that all choices of constraints lead to equally good game design outcomes.

And I’ve seen complaints about (many of) these new business models on ethical grounds. I don’t agree with most of those complaints, but as with game design outcomes, there’s also no reason to believe that all constraints will tend equally towards good ethical outcomes. Looking at the list above, I compared the “advertise to your friends” aspect of social games to multi-level marketing, and part of that analogy is that neither side is a good way to treat your friends. Also, with microtransactions it’s easier to present cost in a misleading way than it is with macrotransactions: I’m a lot less ethically comfortable with asking people to pay $1 for a random choice of one in five items than I am at asking people to pay $5 for five fixed items. (People’s brain wiring generally treats those as similar choices, but the math is in fact very different.) I don’t think this is a tragic ethical choice, any more than crane games or random capsule toy vending machines or collectible trading cards are horrible, but it’s not a great one, either. Hopefully players will continue to get more informed about this; also, compare Android: Netrunner to Magic for a good example of game design alternatives in this space.

With the above as (lengthy!) prologue, I want to return to the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter, explaining my response to the articles by Houghton, Poprocki, and Horvath. (Though, before I go into details, I’ll repeat: I basically agree with Houghton’s claims that the Kickstarter should have been more upfront about funding sources from the start; the Kickstarter fixed that two or three days later, so yay Houghton for helping make that happen.)

Both Houghton and Poprocki were vocal against corporations using Kickstarter as risk management: for example, Houghton said “In a way, yes, Shenmue 3 did need that Kickstarter to succeed, but only because Sony made that the case. It made that the case by making the public pass a test before it offered its own support, a test that it knew would cost the public hundreds and thousands.” In other words, they argued that it is wrong for corporations to use Kickstarter as a tool to tackle the uncertainty that I listed in my third point above, and Houghton at least seemed to believe that Sony had no need to do so, that it was a charade.

I have no idea to what extent Sony was committed to Shenmue 3 even without the Kickstarter. But I am very certain that the uncertainty question in general is a real one: in all the companies that I’ve worked at (in my game company time, in my times in other industries), the question of how to spend resources is huge and always present. Lots of projects are proposed for consideration, fewer of those projects get studied seriously (with prototypes, with focused market research), still fewer of those prototypes make it into serious production, not everything that makes it into production actually gets published, and, of those products that do get published, some get large development and marketing budgets and some get small ones.

Kickstarter can help decide whether to commit to a project; and, once you’ve committed to it, it can help you decide how much money to spend on it. The fact that Sony has a thirty-three billion dollar market cap in no way lowers the importance of this sort of decision to them: yes, nothing horrible will happen to them if they make the wrong choice with Shenmue 3, but if they don’t take a disciplined approach towards evaluating projects in general, then they absolutely can go out of business. In fact, Shenmue itself provides an excellent example of how this can happen: Sega was once one of two dominant console manufacturers, then they made some choices in the Dreamcast era that led to them not recouping their costs on multiple projects (including Shenmue). The result was that the Dreamcast was their last console and their game development business is a shadow of its former self.

This isn’t to say that the articles were completely against Kickstarter as risk management: all three articles were fine with Kickstarter being used to manage uncertainty, as long as it’s the right people using it that way, where “the right people” means individuals and small businesses. And maybe I’ve spent too much time employed by large businesses and by businesses that want to become large, but this isn’t an area where I have particular populist sympathies. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to see Kickstarters cropping up to fund weird projects; but when I went through my list of business model innovations above, Kickstarter was the one that seemed to me to be the most complete answer to forces that companies of all size are facing. So I don’t see why the world would be better to say that corporations shouldn’t have access to that answer: all things being equal, I like the little guy, but restricting Kickstarter just sounds to me like it takes a way a tool that would help corporations experiment with producing a wider range of goods. If corporations can’t manage uncertainty with something like Kickstarter, then they’ll manage uncertainty by making cookie-cutter games, and how is that better?

That’s the uncertainty side of the business model question, but there’s also the value side of the business model question. And all three articles were extremely uncomfortable with how the Kickstarter led to Shenmue fans showing with their wallets that they value the series. Houghton characterized the Kickstarter backings as “donations”; Poprocki took that train of thought still further and said that Sony should actually return the money to backers now that the game has been funded; and Horvath said that Sony is “strip mining” fans.

Recapping my analysis above: corporations prefer for their products not to be commodities; if a product isn’t a commodity, then its price will be in part be determined by its value; and different people will value the same product differently, which raises the possibility of corporations increasing profits via market segmentation. So: which part of this did the authors find so distasteful? Both Poprocki and Horvath focused on $60 as an expected price for games, so at the very least they seemed to not like market segmentation, though they were more silent on the commodity question. (To be sure, given that he runs Unwinnable, I can’t imagine that Horvath wants games to be commodities.)

A fondness for commodities is a reasonable enough stance: I’ve talked about why commoditization is bad for companies, but it’s great for people trying to buy stuff from companies without spending much money! Or at least it’s good in general: where it starts to go bad is where you care for value beyond what the commodity good provides, and where the non-commodity market doesn’t exist. And games feel to me like a market where that problem has the potential of happening: it is very much the case that not all games are created equal, and it’s also the case that there are lots of games that I care about that aren’t necessarily going to win overall market popularity contests. I’d like the market to provide those latter sorts of games to me, but the question is how.

So if market segmentation is the way that that the market figures out that I like specific games, and if that means that games I like turn out to be more expensive, then that could still be a good outcome for me. Also, going in a slightly different direction, some of my favorite games are evergreen; I’d like companies to have more incentive to develop more games like that, and if that means business models other than a one-time $60 purchase, then that could be a good tradeoff for me.

To sum: I don’t see anything particularly optimal about $60 for a game. Please, companies, segment me in the market! Make stuff I really like and charge me more for it! I like that more than a mass of undifferentiated games. I can think of three games that I’ve spent more than $1000 on, and a fourth where I’m pretty confident that I’ll reach that spending level. I’ve had (and continue to have!) wonderful experiences with all of those games, I have zero regrets about spending that money, I only wish there were more games that had given me as much.

I should be upfront, though: I have my own preconceptions when it comes to discussions around value in games supported by new business models. I’ve read too many articles written by people who not only dislike Farmville or Kim Kardashian: Hollywood but who treat people who value those games as either idiots or victims of a scam; I really dislike that sort of attitude, the idea that people who value a game that you personally don’t value are wrong. That attitude is harmful when talking about those games now, it was harmful in the console wars, and I’m sure anybody reading this article can think of other examples where that has hurt our culture. So I’m hypersensitive to that articles that talk about companies abusing fans of a specific game: how much are such articles criticizing the companies, and how much are they instead criticizing the fans?

When I read the three articles in question, I saw a lot of complaints about people pledging more than $60: Houghton wants to make that impossible by eliminating tiers over $50, Poprocki wants the money given back entirely. I’m more sympathetic to Horvath’s complaints about the externally-directed approach that Violet took—that feels off in the same way that the social game “spam your friends” mechanic feels off—but he also says that Violet was wrong to be happy about the Kickstarter. So the implication that I get from all three articles is: you’re wrong to value Shenmue enough to buy more than the game. You’re wrong to want Shenmue figures, you’re wrong to want a soundtrack, you’re wrong to want an art book, you’re wrong to want to play an early version of the game.

And I just don’t get it. How would our world be better if people didn’t have that sort of enthusiasm about their favorite works of art? And how is the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter bad for supporting that enthusiasm?

(I don’t normally worry about spoiler warnings, but, given how recently this DLC came out, I’ll give one here.)

I thought that the first piece of DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition, Jaws of Hakkon, was meh; but still, not every piece of DLC is going to advance the series. And, going through the first half of the next DLC, The Descent, I was enjoying the experience more: I’m not a big dungeon crawler fan, but it connected to themes we’d seen before with a promise of some interesting lore.

And then I hit the second half. You go beneath the Deep Roads, with the promise of a Titan below, but you’re not sure exactly where you are, how it will work out, or even what a Titan is. And what happens is: you get attacked by a group of people that you’ve never seen before.

This could have been a moment of reflection: we’re some place strange, we’re the invaders, let’s think about what we’re doing. Instead, it just turns into (or rather continues to be) a bloodbath: we’re constantly attacked by people trying to drive us out, we slaughter them, and move on.

What made me really angry about this was the vocalizations: over and over again, when meeting a new group of enemies in this section, your character would say something like “we don’t want to hurt you!”. This is manifestly not true: if we didn’t want to hurt the people who were there, then we would retreat, we’d find some way to defend, we’d find some way to talk to people, and if that didn’t work, we’d go back up to the Deep Roads. If I wanted to be generous, this is the game making a commentary about game violence, but I don’t believe that: that may have been something that the developers would have liked to do, but, if so, they absolutely didn’t carry that sort of commentary through with conviction.

Then we get to the bottom level, entering into a world of wonder, into a city that’s the body of the Titan. It’s glorious, and it raises so many really interesting questions: what is a Titan, how does the city work? But it doesn’t answer those questions: you hack your way through the level, you don’t talk to the Titan, you can’t even go into the buildings.

Which brings us to the final battle: after killing everybody who stands in your way, enemies who are presented as trying to defend the Titan from outsiders, you get to what seems to be the Titan’s heart. And then the game tells you to kill that heart.

I almost turned off the game right then; honestly, the only reason why I didn’t was that the DLC had been so lacking in moral thoughtfulness that I was fairly sure that the game would somehow turn the fight into a good thing. And, of course, I was correct in that: it turns out that destroying the Titan’s heart is the correct moral choice, because it wasn’t really the Titan’s heart, and it had gotten corrupted somehow, and it’s your White Man’s Burden (or, in this case, a dwarf NPC’s burden) to set things right by destroying the corruption and becoming an avatar of the Titan.

Fuck this DLC; and, in retrospect, fuck this game. There’s way too much playing things by the numbers: huge amounts of slashing your way through enemies (whom I can’t even characterize as enemies any more!), huge amounts of item gathering, a completely stereotypical “savior of the world” plot, a lack of editing and thoughtfulness in the experience that it’s trying to present. Yes, there’s more to the series than that, and even to this game; but, after this DLC, I can’t pretend that the parts of the series that I like are the core to the series and the rest is some sort of necessary reflex.

One item that I forgot to add to my earlier list of requests for the next version of Rocksmith: help us get low-latency audio.

The game strongly encourages you to use optical audio; and, when I switched over to that, it made a big difference. But there’s a reason why I didn’t switch to optical audio earlier: I want the audio for games I play other than Rocksmith to go through HDMI, not Toslink. And, even when I followed the developers’ suggestion for an alternate adapter, I had to add an amp to get it work right.

Given that, my first reaction was: they should sell a peripheral that’s a Toslink -> headphone adapter, with a built-in amplifier. If they’d sold something like that, then I would have bought it months earlier, and that would have been great. But, thinking about it more, I think they can do something better. Because the game already comes with a peripheral, namely the USB guitar adapter; I’m certainly not an expert in the details of USB, but given the existence of USB headsets, presumably they can send the audio out over USB as well as sending the guitar input in? And presumably USB can draw enough power to add amplification to that audio jack?

So: I would like the next edition of the Rocksmith adapter cable to come with a microphone jack for audio out, with a volume control in it. It could be a little ungainly, which is too bad; but people who don’t want to use the microphone jack can ignore it. And it feels to me like it would significantly improve the out-of-the-box experience for the game.

One thing writing about Pamplemousse made me wonder about: I feel better sitting there than at work, but the chair isn’t the sort of chair that I would normally actively think of as a comfortable chair. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly nice chair, it’s just nice in a quiet, unassuming, and not super-padded way.)

Maybe it’s just that I’m only sitting in it for 15 minutes: you won’t notice a chair in that context the same way that you would notice a chair that you’re sitting in for hours. But I don’t think that’s all of it: I think I feel more grounded in a chair at Pamplemousse than I do in the chair at my desk.

Here’s a basic question: is it good to have a desk chair that swivels and has wheels, or is it better to have a desk chair with four fixed legs? If I had the sort of job that had me pulling files from various places, then mobility would be useful; but I spend my day typing at a computer. And, given that, it’s not at all clear that I benefit from being able to turn or roll my chair.

So I’m wondering: would I feel better working in a chair with four fixed legs? Almost all the other chairs that I sit on are fixed; why are desk chairs different? If fixed legs made me feel restricted, that would be one thing; but my guess is that they would let me feel more grounded, more supported, with the ground sending its strength up through the legs and seat of the chair to me. And sending a message that I belong there, too.

I could be wrong, though. And it’s quite possible that no chair works well if you’re sitting at it for too many hours in a day…

My basic takeaway from Tengami is that it seems that Monument Valley is part of a genre, that that’s a good thing, but also that Monument Valley is quite impressive.

Tengami really is a pretty game, the puzzles are fine, and the atmosphere is relaxing. But it just didn’t come together quite as well for me as Monument Valley. I like the backgrounds a lot, but I don’t like your character’s movements as much. And you spend a lot of time moving: while Monument Valley loves single-screen puzzles, Tengami has you moving from place to place. Which fits in with the more contemplative feel of the game: Monument Valley puts experimentation with Escherian geometry right in your face, whereas Tengami is more of a feel of traveling through a storybook.

Actually, as I write this up, I’m not entirely sure what the role of the game’s puzzles is. They’re fine, but not great; I never found them nourishing, and I found the final puzzle actively annoying. And, for that matter, while I called it a storybook above, there’s no real story there, either: no Totem, and not the same feeling of discovering history as in Monument Valley.

But still: I do think there’s something there with the backgrounds, with the the atmosphere. Maybe I’m getting distracted by the puzzles, and Proteus could be another comparison?

I’d gone through the Phoenix Wright games recently, but it had been a while since I’d played a Professor Layton game. (I didn’t play through the second Layton trilogy at all.) The Phoenix Wright games stood up quite well to replay, and I’d heard good things about Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, so I figured I should give it a try.

And I’m glad enough I did; I enjoy solving puzzles, the art is charming, the courtroom gameplay still holds up, and this game’s change to the courtroom gameplay (cross-examing multiple witnesses at once) is a fine addition.

But still: story-wise and world-construction-wise, it turns out that I far prefer Phoenix Wright to Professor Layton. I don’t like Luke’s obsession with being a gentleman, and I don’t think either the emotional heart or the outlandish characters of the Layton games compare at all well to their Phoenix Wright counterparts. And (at least in this game, but I think it was the case in the other games in the series that I played), I don’t like the way the Layton series finds it necessary to explain the fantastic events that happen over the course of each game: that’s necessary for the logic of the game, but fantasy isn’t improved by the addition of pseudoscientific explanation.

All quotes are from The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander. Emphasis and ellipses as in the original.

The further I went to understand the actual process which had been used to make the tile, the more I realized that it was this process, more than anything, which governs the beauty of the design. Perhaps nine-tenths of its character, its beauty, comes simply from the process that the maker followed. The design, what we nowadays think of as the design, followed. It was almost a residue from the all-important process. The design is indeed beautiful, yes. But it can only be made as beautiful as it is within the technique, or process, used to make it. And once one uses this technique, the design—what appears as the sophisticated beauty of the design—follows almost without thinking, just as a result of following the process.

If you do not use this technique—you cannot create a tile of this design. An attempt to follow the same drawing, but with different techniques, will fall flat on its face. And if I change the technique (process), then the design must change, too. This design follows almost without effort from this technique. It is the process, not the design, that is doing all the hard work, and which is even paving the way for the design.

(pp. 7–8)

In what follows, I shall argue that the emergence of new structure in nature, is brought about, always, by a sequence of transformations which act on the whole, and in which each step emerges as a discernible and continuous result from the immediately preceding whole.

(p. 19)

Of course, there is some relationship between the images of the professional architect, and the greed of the capitalist developer. Indeed, one might say that the very idea of city images, or plans, and the very idea of city planning as an activity, is itself inherently at odds with the idea of unfolding, and at odds with the idea of the land giving rise gradually, and of its own accord, to natural extended city form. The modern developments we know too well, associated with huge sums of money, and with vast profits in the hands of developers, necessarily depend on images—because it is the images which first draw investors, and then potential beuyers, to the land. Thus, the very core of the financial process that fuels urban development is consistent with the ideology of 20th-century developers, and at odds with the organic harmony of towns and land.

(p. 135)

In a living system what is to be always grows out of what is, supports it, extends its structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form—sometimes startling new form—but without ever violating the structure which exists.

When this rule is violated, as it was, far too often, in 20th-century development, chaos emerges. A kind of cancer occurs. Harm is done. All in all modern society succeeded, in the last century, in creating an ethos where buildings, plans, objects, … are judged only by themselves, and not by the extend to which they enhance and support the world. This means that nature has been damaged, because it is ignored and trampled upon. It means that ancient parts of towns and cities have been trampled, because the modernist view saw no need to respect them, to protect them.

But even more fundamental, it came about because the idea of creativity which became the norm assumed that it is creative to make things that are unrelated (sometimes disoriented and disconnected just in order to be new), and that this is valuable—when in fact it is merely stupid, and represents a misunderstanding, a deep misapprehension of how things are. Creativity comes about when we discover the new within a structure already latent in the present. It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries. In art as in architecture, our most intelligent and most wonderful creations come about, when we draw them out as extensions and enhancements of what exists already.

The denial of this point of view, is the chief way in which 20th-century development destroyed the surface of the earth.

(p. 136)

The significance of generated structure lies in the concept of mistakes. Fabricated plans always have many mistakes—not just a few mistakes but tens of thousands, even millions of mistakes. It is the mistake-ridden character of the plans which marks them as fabricated—and that comes from the way they are actually generated, or made, in time. Generated plans have few mistakes.

(p. 186)

In general, we may say that a complex object will only be successful if it is generated. This is obvious in the case of organisms (animals and plants), which are always generated. But it is less obvious, and so far hardly recognized at all for the complex objects we create such as houses, buildings, rooms, cities, and neighborhoods.

Let us consider the case of software. A typical computer program contains tens of thousands of lines of code; others in daily use contain a million lines, even as many as ten million lines of code.

In recent years some attention has been given to their theory of design, and some improvements have been made in contemporary ways of thinking about their design. Computer scientists have told me proudly that they consider computer programs the most complex objects designed by human beings.

Yet, to date, there is little recognition of the following commonsense point: If indeed the programs are so complex, then it is likely that they, too, will be potentially subject to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of egregious mistakes of adaptation. Here I am not only talking about “bugs”—failures which stop a program from running altogether. I am talking about mistakes of adaptation, ways in which the program fails to do what it is supposed to do, fails to meet the needs of the people who use it, or is more awkward, more annoying, less useful, than it is supposed to be. If the analysis given in this chapter is correct, then it is fair to say that truly successful programs can only be generated; and that the way forward in the next decades, towards programs with highly adapted human performance, will be through programs which are generated through unfolding, in some fashion comparable to what I have described for buildings.

This chapter was first composed as a lecture to the computer science department at Stanford University. After the lecture, I had a chance to hear comments from many of the computer scientists in the audience. Much of the commentary I heard went something along these lines: “This is really interesting… perhaps you should call it ‘evolutionary adaptation’ instead of ‘generated structures'” and “We computer scientists ourselves often practice various forms of evolutionary adaptation in software design. Good software grows, by steps with feedback and evolution, to something better…” And so on.

The essence of all these comments was what I call gradualism. It says “Yes of course, in the case of a complex structure, we cannot hope to get it right first time around, so we build it, run it, test it, fix it, change it… and keep on doing this so it gets better.” What has become known as Extreme programming is a way of doing this for software development, with a very short cycle of evolution and adaptation, repeated many times.

Of course I am in favor of small steps, of adaptation through trial and error, and of what we may call evolutionary adaptation (see chapter 8). But this is not the central point at all. After listening to all these computer scientists’ comments, and taking them to heart, I realized that I had failed, in my lecture, to emphasize the real essence of all generated structures. The real essence lies in the structure-preserving transformations which move the structure forward through time, and which are primarily responsible for the success of the generating process. The needed transformations are not merely trial-and-error steps, or some neat way of continually checking and making things better. In chapter 2, I have referred to the fifteen transformations which act, in all structure-preserving transformations, to move a whole structure forward in a deliberate and explainable way. It is because of these fifteen transformations and their effect, that a whole may be said to “unfold.” It is because of these transformations that a whole becomes coherent, and beautiful. And it is because of this unfolding, and the way the unfolding processes work, that the structure is able to become “mistake-free.”

(pp. 197–198)

I emphasize that a living process, as I have described it, is an idealized scheme. In the real world of architecture, processes which are living ones do not necessarily resemble the scheme I have described. They are often more informal, and more ordinary.

A couple of examples will make the point. Suppose I am telling someone how to improve a corner of their garden. My advice would be something modest and practical: Do one small good thing; then do another small good thing; then do another good thing. Simple as this is, focusing on creation of one good thing at a time, is already likely to work; it will make the garden better. After a person has grasped that idea, I may then point out that sometimes, the good things that we do work even better if each small good thing also helps to achieve some slightly larger good thing. You not only plant a small lilac bush, but you plant it next to a sunny spot where you might like to sit on the grass, and in a way that contributes to this larger spot. Then a particularly lovely spot may be created in the garden. If we do this kind of thing every time we improve the garden, the process will make the garden better in a bigger sense, and in leaps and bounds. This point is, implicitly, a reference to the creation of larger centers—necessarily part of every living process. But I do not need to mention creation of centers explicitly to have a living process. The idea of creating centers is crucial. The language of centers does not have to be used to make it work.

The same point holds for larger and more public problems. We might formulate a public policy which gives advice about the location of freeways in the landscape. For example: The position of a new freeway should be chosen to leave beautiful and harmonious land untouched. It must therefore thread its way through a landscape, using as far as possible only the most damaged available bits of land, both for the roadway itself and for the landscape on either side of it. The effect of this policy on our Earth, if it were widely applied, would be extremely positive. But once again, though it is implicitly a living process, since it preserves and extends living centers where they exist, it does not explicitly use the language of centers to achieve it. And it does not need to. It encourages construction of new centers (in the surrounding land and in the freeway) in such a fashion as to increase, not reduce, the harmony of the larger structure of the land. That is what matters.

(p. 218)

The effect of understanding this point can be dramatic. I remember a student, I will call him X. For months I tried to teach him. He was an outstanding student, but he was—at that moment in his life—still weak in design. He just did not seem to have the knack of putting things together to make something beautiful.

He struggled and struggled. And for months I tried to teach him. Then we came to a design class in which he had to design a house. He worked and worked at the design. Couldn’t get it right. Never knew what to pay attention to. The mess on his drawing board was pretty bad.

Of course, when someone can’t design, it is usually because they confuse themselves by taking things in the wrong order. The continuous back and forth between all possible issues causes confusion instead of clarity.

Finally, one day I sat with him, and I said “Look, I am going to talk you through your design project today. Forget what you have. Erase the whole design. Start with nothing.”

Next I asked him, “Now, tell me, what is the most important thing about the site and the most important thing your design must do in relation to the site. Don’t worry about anything else. Just tell me the answer to that one question. Tell me.” He told me.

“All right, so make a mark. Put in just that one thing. Forget everything else.” He did it.

“All right. Now tell me the next most important thing.” He thought about it. I questioned him. Finally he told me what it was.

“All right, now put that in. Just that second thing. Nothing else.”

He put it in.

We went on like that for an hour or so. If he told me something was important, when I doubted that he really felt that, I just looked at him, and said, no, tell me really what is the next, truly the most important thing? Then he told me that. I kept on like that, forcing him to say, genuinely, what was the next most important thing. And each time, when he had told me what it was, defined it, and I believed it, then I told him, “Do it. Now put it in.” Then after he had done that I asked him to choose the next most important thing he knew about the (not-yet-existing) building. Then I asked him to put that in. And so on.

At the end of an hour he had a beautiful building. It was straightforward, simple, fundamental. Above all it was beautiful. The thing he had never been able to do—to make a beautiful design—he had suddenly done. The was able to do it. At the end he came and said to me, “I had no idea it was so simple. I never understood it before,” and, as if amazed by his own insight, “Finally I understand it, I understand what you have been saying. You just take one thing at a time, and do it in the right order. That’s all there is to it. Just do the most important thing. Finish it. Then do the most important thing. Finish it. And so on.”

He was astonished. It seemed like the most important lesson of his life in architecture school. In this exercise I taught him that it was just the sequence that underlies our ability. By doing things in the right order, he was able to make a beautiful thing.

(pp. 317–318)

But there is a further complication. At each stage in a living process, the needed sequence for the steps that are to follow comes from the wholeness which has unfolded up until that time. It is the wholeness itself, coupled with the fundamental differentiating process, coupled with the use of structure-preserving transformations, which tells us exactly what the proper sequence is for the next steps. This is the crucial point of contact between the idea of the wholeness, and the idea of the sequence. The single most important thing that happens during the process of making anything, is the ever watchful task of getting the next bit of sequence right and modifying it as we go along. Paying attention to what has to be done next, and getting this right, is as important as what one actually does. The more one understands the idea of unfolding, and the more one understands the key role which sequence plays in the unfolding process, the more it becomes clear that the process of design and the process of construction are inseparable.

Compare an old-style cabinetmaker with a new-style woodworker. The old timer always knows how to make things in just the right order. He can set up a vertical in a cabinet without worrying about the next step. Then he sets the rail. Then he trims the rail. Then sets his drawer. Each element follows from the previous element. Because the sequence is right, the thing unfolds without complications. The sequence gives the thing its perfect ease and simplicity.

By comparison the modern, arty woodworker tries to be much more clever. He gets his “conception” … it may be complex. Then he figures out how to put it together. Each part is fabricated so that it all goes together perfectly. The end result is not relaxed but contrived, highly precise according to some previously created image. This thing does not unfold. It is made to conform to a rigid conception.

In this comparison, we see the essential fact: The power and relaxedness that come from a proper sequence are immense.

(pp. 321–322)

There is something in the uniqueness-filled geometry of the living structure which is precious, subtle, goes to the core of things. The living structure is based on the fact that every part is unique: Not merely that the cells inside the flowers are unique, but that the atoms in the cells are also unique, al according to their orientation and location.

So, in a living structure, we have a configuration which is unique and highly defined in its details, in this all-encompassing utterly beautiful way. From the electrons to the atoms to the branch itself—it and all its elements are unique and precious. Yet it is all repeating.

This repetition is important, vital. It is very important to observe that repetition in the world is inevitable, since indeed similar conditions do keep recurring, and since similar conditions will keep spawning similar configurations. One must not interpret uniqueness in a naive hippielike way, to imply that each building (or wall, or window, or street) would be better off if it were utterly different and without relation to others. Calm repetition, the calm beauty of the rows of vines in a vineyard, is of the essence of living structure. But the operative word is similar, not same. For the vineyard to be living, the rows must be very similar. But for it to be living, they must not be the same.

(pp. 329–330)

I want to explain exactly why the appearance of distinct levels of mass and scale must happen inevitably in a living process as one develops the building structure, and explain at the same time why the appearance of the geometry as it ensues in the building, may be described as almost brutal.

In many respects when we try to make structure-preserving buildings through living process, we are at first likely to find an order which is “informal,” not too rigid, rather soft and harmonious as its fits itself to a landscape, or to a valley, or to a street, or to the seeming disarray of neighboring buildings. This softness is what characterizes the “old” way, and is what generates the beautifully harmonious order of Marakesh, or Rothenburg, or the back streets of old Kyoto and Nara, or the sweet subtle order of Jaisalmir in Rajasthan, or the subtle site-placing of a farm in the mountains of Wales. But even so, as we try to create this kind of soft order, there comes a time, inevitably, when we (as architects or builders) have to impose. We have to create a geometry that comes almost from the space itself, from the discipline of rectangles (because spaces are mainly rectangular), and from the discipline of equal or nearly equal structural bays (because structural bays are, by and large, roughly equal and regular). So we need to introduce this almost alien, slightly rigid, formal order of the built nature of a building, into the soft landscape of surrounding forms. And no matter how subtle we may try to be, this “something” which needs to be introduced is something inevitably alien. It has its own laws, it is deeply regular or massively crystalline, and its regularity may seem—and sometimes must actually be—brutal in a certain sense, because it comes from itself.

By that I mean that it comes from the need for the internal geometrical coherence of the building, not from the surroundings. Of course, as we introduce this formal geometry, work it, care for it, we do our best to make it harmonious, we tame it, we introduce necessary irregularities to make it fit the surroundings as well as possible. We fit it to the terrain, the idiosyncracies of street and site and neighboring volume.

This makes it more harmonious, not purely rigid or crystalline. The regularities flow with the land, the structure adjusts to subtleties of interior plan, and all thereby becomes softer. And, of course, we have made the decision about the geometric form—which rectangles, how big, just how brutal?—on the basis of a volumetric conception and a conception of positive space which all have their origin in the land. So it is reasonable to hope that from that origin, too, the geometry will not be brutal; will, if we are successful, have a balance of geometrical hardness and terrain-induced or interior-induced softness.

But in spite of these reasons for hoping that what we do may after all end up soft, well-adapted, comfortably fitted to the harmony of what exists, and thus be structure-preserving to the world, there is at the kernel of the whole process, an inevitable moment of truth which really is rather brutal, the moment when geometry, coming about for its own sake, imposes a discipline of its own that must be introduced. No matter how hard we work to make the building in harmony as far as possible with what exists around it and with the subtleties of its interior plan, still, taking this step is undeniably a brutal act, frightening for an artist who has sensibility for the beauty and softness of the land and of what others have built before him. Yet it is from this moment of brutality, that real order must come. The moment cannot be avoided. The nature of artistic creation—even, we may say, the biological character of order itself—demands it.

It is this injection of definite, strong, geometrical order that allows the profound depth of the made thing—the building in the land—and it is from this that the order must and will arise.

(p. 407)

If we seek to improve the living structure of our world, we must increase the presence of living process all over the world. This in turn requires (or at least common sense strongly suggests that our effort must start from these everyday processes as they actually are, and modify them. It would be far too hard to replace all the everyday processes with new ones. That could only be done in a utopia, in some kind of science-fiction.

We must therefore find a way—a practical way—of slowly, gently, transforming today’s processes from what they actually are today, to making them better, making them more workable, without creating too much disturbance, without upsetting society too drastically, as the changes occur.

(p. 501)

Let us apply the insight of the Grameen Bank process to the evolution of social processes. Suppose, for instance, that a new contractual process is invented for construction.

Let us assume that the sequence is long and complex with many interlocking features. A move to adopt this new construction system will put stress on the human beings, the skills, the economics of the process, the city building department, the architects involved, the available contractors, the licensing laws, the insurance policies, and so forth—all this making it less likely that the innovative process will take and enter the system at large.

It is difficult to find social conditions in which all the features of the construction process can change at the same time, hence extremely difficult to introduce such a new process as a whole.

But suppose that the same improved process of contracting is broken up into, say, twenty separable sequences. Together the twenty smaller processes define the new system in its entirety. But let us also assume that these twenty sequences (or genes) are carefully defined, and chosen, so that each one, individually—any one of them by itself—is separable from the nineteen others, and can therefore be successfully injected by itself into an otherwise normal or mainstream system of construction. If the snippet works well, it may be adopted, and may spread to new construction methods, even in the context of different attitudes. (Of course, this is the way technological evolution takes place, anyway. But we are talking, now, about the possibility of injecting morphogenetic sequences into the mainstream).

Now expand to a situation where each of the twenty snippets is in circulation. We then have available a mixed system of approaches to construction: But the essential, new, morphogenetic ingredients can flourish one at a time. They can be tested, improved—and can spread deep into society and existing social processes—simply by virtue of the improved performance they create “without rocking the boat too much.”

What was difficult or impossible as a larger act of social transformation, becomes possible when one uses a genetic approach to achieve the same aims. What is needed is simply a way of “cutting up” the original innovative process, into a small set of process genes or small sequences that work individually, and that are robust enough to work in a wide variety of contexts, even when not supported by other parts of the new system.

(p. 535)

This process is very different from the normally accepted process of architectural design and construction as it was in the 1990s. To make the unfolding process possible, I was both architect and contractor for the house. The bank accepted the process, in spite of its innovative character. The submission of plans to the Berkeley building department was normal (however, see discussion on pages 604–605). The role of drawings was also very different from that in the normal professional process of today. Since the construction was indeed an unfolding process, we could not know how the house would turn out in detail, until it was finished. Although some drawings were made during the process—for permits, structural checking, and so on—all the participants knew that the drawings were merely a rough approximation of what was to become the finished building.

The house was carefully built to a fixed budget—according to contract—and came in on budget. The money was administered under a new kind of construction contract which I have developed with my colleagues over many years. This contract allows construction price to be guaranteed while unfolding is taking place, even though the design is not rigidly fixed ahead of time. Thus the client does not have the financial uncertainty that such an open-ended project would create in a typical late 20th-century construction contract where many steps of the unfolding would be viewed as changes. Rather, in our contract the unfolding was a feasible process within a fixed budget, backed by the careful cost control necessary to make this possible. This was part of the agreement from the beginning.

(p. 572)

After returning to Ico, I returned to Shadow of the Colossus. And, of course, they’re both phenomenal games; I appreciate Ico more after replaying it than I did the first time through, I think, while Shadow of the Colossus is less of a surprise this time.

In particular, playing Shadow of the Colossus right after Ico gave me a different context for the game than I had the first time I played it. It turns out that there’s more gaminess in Shadow of the Colossus than I remembered, and more than in Ico: more chrome in the UI, more goodies to find, and those goodies are actually useful in terms of letting you beat the bosses (by increased grip strength). Which is frustrating: partly because it dilutes the focus of the game, and partly because the sword combat works really badly against lizards.

But still: like Ico, Shadow does a remarkable job of being focused, and a remarkable job of being a living structure. I’ve talked about the living structure aspects before; and, as for focus, this is a game that only has 16 pieces of combat in it. Which, in turn, makes you confront your motivation and your decisions: what is the impact of killing these glorious creatures, what is your your motivation in doing so, and does the latter justify the former? It’s not like you actually have a choice, other than not to play, but it’s still a completely different mindset than most games put you in: far more typical would be to have you constantly killing in the service of saving your people against an existential threat, while both your actions and your motivation are much more personal in this game.

I wish more games had followed Ico‘s and Shadow of the Colossus‘s lead in the decade since they were published.

About once a week, on my way into work, I stop at Pamplemousse to have their “French Breakfast”. That’s a picture of it above: it’s just a sliced, warmed-up baguette, with butter and jam. And it’s my favorite part of my weekly commute routine.

There are lots of little things I like about it. The food is simple and good. The cafe is a lovely space where I always feel welcome. The table is just the right size for me to sit at alone with my food and my book. (Even if I’m reading a large book, as in the picture above!) The table is attractive, the chair is comfortable. The window looks out onto a commercial street that’s surprisingly quiet despite being right next to the train station. And it gives me a few extra minutes of quiet time on mornings when I feel like I need it, or when I just don’t want to put down my book after I get off the train.

Stepping back, though: being there makes me feel whole. It feels like the right thing to be doing, it feels like the right place to read and eat. The book pictured above is The Phenomenon of Life; quoting from p. 355 of that book:

In all these tests, the observers use observations of their own inner state, when comparing two systems A and B, to decide which of A or B is the more alive.

Some of the possible questions are:

• Which of the two seems to generate a greater feeling of life in me?
• Which of the two makes me more aware of my own life?
• Which of the two induces (as asked in Aikido) a greater harmony in me, in my body and in my mind?
• Which of the two makes me feel a greater wholesomeness in myself?
• Considering my self as a whole that embraces all my dimensions and many internal opposites, I then ask which of the two is more like my best self, or which of the two seems more like a picture of my eternal self?
• Which of the two makes me feel devotion, or inspires devotion in me?
• Which of the two makes me more aware of God, or makes me feel closer to God?
• When I try to observe the expanding and contracting of my humanity, which of the two causes a greater expansion of my humanity?
• Which of the two has more feeling in it or, more accurately, which of the two makes me experience a deeper feeling of unity in myself?

And, indeed: those breakfasts do generate a feeling of life, they feel harmonious in body and mind, they expand my humanity.

Actually, I feel good about my whole morning routine. In general, I’m not a big fan of alarms, but with Widget, having the alarm go off at the same time every morning (including weekends) works well. So the alarm goes off at 6:45, I get greeted by Widget and take him out briefly, then I shower with Liesl, then I walk to the train station (listening to podcasts), then I take the train (reading a book), then I walk from the train station to work (generally stopping of at Pamplemousse to pick up something to eat along the way, even if I’m not sitting down).

I like the contact at the start of the day, I like walking, I like trains, I like reading, I like the food. I’m not thrilled with the route from my house to the train station, and there are a couple of streets that I walk along on the other end of the route that don’t exactly expand my humanity, but those are minor issues. And I actually feel slightly conflicted about my podcast listening these days; mostly, I’m glad I do it, but sometimes I think I should fill those walks with thinking, observing, or just being. At any rate: it’s a good morning routine.

Traveling home is pretty similar; though because I don’t have to meet a train, I can take a slightly nicer route home from the train station. (And no stop for food along the way, for better or for worse.) About half the time, I walk Widget when I get home, and about half the time, Liesl has beaten me to that and I just have a bit of quiet time. Either way, Liesl and I cook dinner together and then we all three eat together, which makes me feel whole from both a family and a food perspective.

Evenings after dinner can be a bit off, though. When I’m sitting down and writing, that’s great. Or if there’s a game or a movie that I want to take in in a focused way, then that feels right as well. Too often over the last year or so, though, that hasn’t been the case: I’ve spent too much time in a combination of watching something random on TV with one eye and reading through random stuff on the internet with another eye, and that generally leaves me feeling not quite right at the end of the evening.

Sometimes I’ve been doing that because I’ve been tired: allergies have occasionally been problematic this year. Sometimes it’s because I’ve had other, less rewarding tasks filling up enough of the evening that I’m not left with a large enough block of time to feel like I can focus: for example, I volunteered to be on the board of my HOA this year, and while I won’t say that I regret that decision, I don’t like how frequently it eats into my evenings. And, too often, I’ve been annoyed or even angry at something: when that happens, I absolutely don’t feel whole.

Weekends are a little more similar to evenings than I would like. There are definitely parts of the weekend routine that are great: Friday evenings, when we generally order a pizza and watch a movie together; Saturday evenings, when we sometimes sit and home and watch a movie and sometimes go out to eat at a good local restaurant (of which there are many!); Saturday mornings, when I take Widget for an hour-and-a-half long ramble around the neighborhood; Sunday mornings, when I get to sleep in while Liesl takes Widget for an hour-and-a-half long ramble around the neighborhood; grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons; cooking a dinner on Sundays that we might not quite have time for on a workday; practicing guitar for a couple hours on the late mornings both days. And then there are times when those routines don’t work out quite as well as I’d like: when grocery shopping (and paying bills) leaves me feeling like I don’t want to cook something on Sunday that’s not pretty basic, or when I only feel like practicing guitar for an hour and when that practice is rote.

But the main issue on weekends is Saturday afternoons and the parts of Sunday afternoon before I go grocery shopping. Those are my biggest chunks of free time all week: I should either use them to relax or to focus on something that needs more time. But instead, all too often, I spend them partly chipping away at a few small things in a not-very-rewarding fashion, and partly doing things that are just using up time without letting me either feel relaxed or focused. And that’s not nourishing.

One basic issue there is that I’m being a little bit too todo-list driven without really asking myself whether those items are items that I’ll feel more whole by doing them. So the upshot is that little tasks accumulate; sometimes I take care of them, but don’t feel nourished by them, while sometimes I don’t take care of them, and then I feel bad about that as well. I think I would do better if I had fewer, more rewarding items; then I’d feel happy about doing them, but I’d also have more space to just do whatever crossed my mind. Better GTD, in other words; and I should probably consider ignoring or seriously curtailing my use of the Today list that Things provides.

That leaves work. Which raises the question: what would work look like if it were to make me feel more whole? I think I like programming the most when I’m figuring out something about the structure of software that I hadn’t seen before, while making the software better in some externally-visible way.

And, honestly, my current job is pretty good at that. The software is a large-scale distributed system with a variety of different components; it’s been around long enough to give me material to understand how the structure wants to be; and it’s been around long enough for even the initial guesses at that structure to be hidden in many places, giving me some digging to do, without having it be completely ossified. And I generally am working on projects that let me move the software forward in externally-visible ways, too. So when that all comes together, it can be pretty neat.

Of course, producing software is a social affair. And, while there are many social aspects of work that I like quite a bit, they’re not generally the ones most closely tied to the actual production of software. I would prefer to be part of a smooth (or productively differing!) cross-functional team; it’s not something I have at my current job, though. Which isn’t to say that teamwork is absent—actually, there are some informal teams that I’m part of at work that are pretty important to me—just that there’s room for improvement.

But my commute has also taught me that the physical aspects of my day are important, as are the rhythms. And work is not great on either of those fronts: I spend too much time sitting at my desk, and I also haven’t done a great job of differentiating my day in ways that make me feel better. And, from a physical space perspective: it’s fine, but nothing special. (This is maybe something that the open office versus individual office argument misses: my individual office at Stanford made me feel better, my individual office at Sun made me feel worse, the details of the space matter.) The physical aspects have been worse than normal over the last couple of months: we’re growing, so right now we’re crammed into a single floor while we build out the other floor. So there are lots of people, fewer random quiet spaces, no free standing desks; the buildout is almost complete, so that will get better soon. But still, I’m going to be spending most of my time at my desk, and my desk is not an environment that makes me feel more whole.

Room for improvement. But there’s a lot in my life that’s going well, and if I can improve my sensitivity as to why they’re going well, then I can try to spread that to parts of my life that are a bit off.

I’ve been surprised at how much negative reaction to the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter has appeared in my twitter feed. Maybe not so much in the quantity of the reaction as the tone: it seems like the Kickstarter is a flashpoint in a culture war, while I don’t really understand why there has to be a war at all, or why this Kickstarter specifically has become a flashpoint.

The first article I saw referenced on the subject was David Houghton on Games Radar. And the first half or so of the article actually seems pretty good to me: I didn’t watch the E3 press conferences, so while I’m completely unsurprised to learn that the game is getting major Sony funding and that the Kickstarter is there to gauge interest and/or to be an ad for the game, it sounds like the initial announcement wasn’t up-front about those aspects of the Kickstarter. So yay, by all means get that out into the open.

But then we have this part of the article:

Here’s where I start having a real problem with the way this has been run. Because however I spin it (and believe me, I’ve spun it like a tumble drier), I keep coming back to the same bottom line. Individual members of the public have paid up to ten thousand dollars of their own money for a game they were led to believe had no other funding options. A game they were led to believe needed that money in order to happen. And that’s not okay.

In a way, yes, Shenmue 3 did need that Kickstarter to succeed, but only because Sony made that the case. It made that the case by making the public pass a test before it offered its own support, a test that it knew would cost the public hundreds and thousands.

(Emphasis in the original.) And I just don’t get it. In particular, I don’t understand the sentence “In a way, yes, Shenmue 3 did need that Kickstarter to succeed, but only because Sony made that the case.” Of course it’s true that there are other funding models possible for the game: doubtless, in a many-worlds version of the universe, there are universes where Sony decides to pay for it out of pocket, universes where a collection of fans somehow scrape together money to buy the IP, universes where Warren Buffett is a huge Shenmue fan and decides to pay for it himself! But paying for the game without external commitment isn’t the decision Sony made, it’s not the decision Sega made, it’s not the decision any company has decided to make in the 16 years since Shenmue came out and cost Sega a lot of money, it’s not the decision any company has decided to make in the 14 years since Shenmue 2 came out and failed to revitalize the series’s finances.

Game companies have dozens, hundreds, thousands of options for games they might make. They can’t make them all, so they need a way to choose. And I just don’t see how it’s helpful to the analysis to paint Shenmue 3 of all games as a game that Sony was right to consider making but wrong to not leap into with both feet. A world where Sony makes every game that they imagine is a world where Sony goes out of business; a world where Sony only makes games that they’re convinced will be big hits is a world where games from large publishers are even blander than they are now! I don’t think that Houghton is telling us that any world other than one of those two worlds is an immoral one, but I also am having a hard time teasing anything other possibility out of those paragraphs.

Later on, he says:

More infuriating is the fact that there was an obvious, easy, inoffensive way to handle all of this. By limiting donation tiers to a single, flat, $50 rate, Shenmue 3’s Kickstarter could have been turned into an elaborate pre-order system, the same level of player commitment shown without anyone being extravagantly out of pocket, and the backer rewards becoming an extra special pre-order bonus, with added goodwill.

“Infuriating” is an interesting word: like I said, this seems to be a culture war, and I’m not sure why. Setting that aside, though, I don’t see why Houghton’s proposal is an improvement over the actual Kickstarter. Assuming the game actually does getting published, then I’m getting a copy for $29; I like spending $29 more than spending the $50 Houghton wants me to spend! But some people like physical copies of games; if they want to spend $60, then great. And, honestly, the toy capsules, the soundtrack, the art book all sound cool to me; I’m not choosing to spend my money on them in this instance, but I’ve bought art books and soundtracks and figurines for games or movies in the past, I’m sure I will in the future, and I don’t see what’s wrong with those as options for people who want them. And then there are the $10,000 rewards, I’ll talk about those further down.

The concluding paragraph lays out his position most clearly:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Kickstarter is for developers with no other funding options. Shenmue 3 has had other options ever since Sony first started to think about it (as it transpires, in 2013), and whatever the platform-holder is now going to pay into the project, it can probably afford it somewhat more comfortably than some of the rest of us can our donations.

That first sentence makes it clear where he’s coming from: Kickstarter is supposed to fit a specific place in a culture war, and people who think otherwise are wrong. Then he conflates having options with Sony deciding to commit to paying for those options. (So I guess the world he wants is a world where big publishers fund every game they seriously evaluate funding? Good luck with that one) And then the weasel words: “probably”, “some of the rest of us”. That’s so vague as to be impossible to falsify; I’ll just say that it’s also the case that some of the rest of us can afford to take a $29 flyer on a Kickstarter more easily than Sony can take a fifty-million dollar (or whatever your favorite estimate is) flyer on funding a game, and that, having seen what happened to Sega in the aftermath of the Dreamcast, it strikes me as ahistorical to present this game of all games as risk free.

The next article that I saw making the rounds was Matt Poprocki in Playboy. It started from where Houghton’s article left off, and then continued:

The barrier between consumer and corporations is dwindling. Maybe there isn’t one at all anymore. This is not capitalism—it’s a twisted and disfigured form of commerce, and it worked, and it will work again, when the next company tries it.

Of course it’s capitalism, and this shows the barrier between consumer and corporation as clearly as any example I can point to! I’m backing the Kickstarter; my risk is limited to getting nothing from spending $29, my upside is limited to getting an actual game. (Or maybe my risk is getting a game that I spend hours on and that turns out to be awful, and my upside is getting a game that I spend hours on and turns out to be wonderful.) Whereas Sony’s upside is potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and their potential downside is at the very least in the tens of millions of dollars and possibly in the hundreds as well. Sony and I play completely different roles in this scenario, and theirs is the capitalist side of it.

Now that the goal has been surpassed and Sony can rest assured that its investment in Shenmue 3 is justified, shouldn’t they stop asking for money? Shouldn’t they give that money back?

First: no, they can’t rest assured of that at all. The risk profile for the game is different now than it was before the Kickstarter, but there is absolutely still significant risk, there is still a potential downside of tens of millions of dollars. And, second: no, of course they shouldn’t give that money back! They have no reason to; and if I wanted Sony to give me my $29 back once the Kickstarter made its goal, then I wouldn’t have pledged the $29 in the first place! Poprocki apparently believes that I’m wrong to feel that way; I think Poprocki is being paternalistic.

They can just throw out classic game names to see what sticks. Actraiser, Battletoads, Streets of Rage; they would all be funded and set individual records, probably. If they fail, there’s no harm—the money stays in would-be backers’ bank accounts if the goal isn’t reached. Meanwhile, the truly independent developer whose Kickstarter isn’t backed by Sony or Microsoft or whatever huge marketing machine gets no attention, and innovation dies in the wood chipper of the triple-A blockbuster sequel machine.

And here’s where the culture war comes out. Like Houghton, Poprocki has firm opinions about the proper uses of Kickstarter; the rest of us are wrong.

I also saw retweets of a bunch of tweets from Stu Horvath on the topic; he then put his thoughts together in an article in issue 49 of Unwinnable Weekly. I said above that I thought that Poprocki was being paternalistic, but Poprocki had nothing on Horvath: Horvath says, “Think of me as the person trying to shake you awake”, to which my first reaction is that the word “sheeple” must have been deleted from an earlier draft of his article.

And boy howdy is this a culture war for Horvath. Later, he lays that out even more explicitly:

It is a kind of religiosity. Talking to Violet, I felt like we were living in a time of prophecy, that any deviation from orthodoxy might derail the Third Coming of Shenmue. It didn’t matter that maybe people were getting conned into paying upwards of $10,000 to pre-order a game that would eventually cost, at most, $60 retail.

He accuses other people of treating this as a matter of religion: but he’s the prophet who is trying to shake us awake. And that last sentence is, to my mind, a glorious combination of paternalism and factual incorrectness. He says “upwards of $10,000”, but in fact $10,000 is the highest tier, so I have no idea who is supposed to be paying more than that; and there is a cap of 23 people who have access to tiers more than $500. Right now, the game has 42,402 backers; of those backers, 24,895 are paying at the $29 tier.

So yeah, let’s assume that game will cost $60 at retail; that means that approximately 60% of the backers are choosing to get the game at half-price, and while about 30% of the backers are paying more than $60, those backers are getting stuff beyond just the game. Maybe I’m a bad person because I bought an Okami art book or a Katamari Damacy soundtrack, maybe the people I see on twitter who buy figurines for their favorite anime are horribly misguided, but I don’t see why; and I don’t see why I should treat people making similar choices about Shenmue as victims of a con that need to be shaken awake.

All three articles seem particularly disturbed by the $10,000 reward tier. (Though at least the other two articles don’t hallucinate higher tiers!) And of course there’s no way in hell that I’m going to spend $10,000 for the rewards at that level. But, seriously: there are 42,204 people who have signed up for that Kickstarter. Four of those people have decided that spending $10,000 was a reasonable choice for them. We’re not talking the 1% here: we’re talking the .01%, one out of every 10,000 people who backed the Kickstarter. I doubt that the income distribution of Shenmue Kickstarter backers mirrors the income distribution of the US as a whole, but if you’re in the top .01% of US income, then you’re making 27 million dollars a year; and if I were making that kind of money, then, honestly, maybe I would be totally happy to spend one-two-thousandth of my annual income on Ryo’s jacket! Really, the percentage of people affected is so small that we’re talking about lala land.

And I’d also like to know where the financial dividing line is beyond which Horvath will decree that people are getting conned. Was I getting conned by spending money to go to GDC? Was my family getting conned by the money we spent on our last family vacation? Are we getting conned by the tuition prices that we’ll spend to send Miranda to college? (Actually, I can answer that third one myself: yes.) Please, tell me the appropriate level, so I can make sure not to slide into religious orthodoxy!

In a less hyperbolic portion of the article, Horvath says what he wants Kickstarter to be, and it’s similar to what the other two authors want:

It is a free market, of course, and Kickstarter has a vested interest in lucrative, headline-generating campaigns. The Kickstarter I prefer, though, is the one before the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter, a place for creators to fund projects that would otherwise be impossible in conventional markets. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with the Double Fine campaign, but it started us down a long road that inevitably leads to campaigns like Zach Braff’s movie (which later got Hollywood financing) and Shenmue III.

He could just as easily have said: the Kickstarter he prefers is the Kickstarter that got Unwinnable Weekly funded. And I like that Kickstarter too – all eye-rolling at this article aside, I’m really glad that I backed Unwinnable Weekly! But small-project Kickstarter is still around: just to make sure, I looked again at my list of backed projects, and there’s a whole mixture of stuff there, with weird one-off stuff next to established small publishers next to, well, Shenmue. Maybe there’s some sort of apocalypse coming where all the small and medium stuff will disappear, but I don’t see evidence for that. And as to “religiosity”, “prophecy”, and warnings about “deviation from orthodoxy”: yes, I do see that, but where I see that is in an article that talks about “something terrible happening”, “getting exponentially worse”, that “will destroy the industry”.

I’ve been playing Rocksmith 2014 ever since it came out a year and a half ago, and I was playing its predecessor for a year before that; so obviously I like the game and the series a lot, and I imagine that I’ll still be playing it two and a half years from now. Or rather, I imagine that I’ll be playing some Rocksmith game a two and a half years from now; but, upgrading cycles being what they are, quite possibly it’ll be a new version of the game.

So here’s what I’d like in a hypothetical new version. I’m staying away from big ideas: Session Mode is great, but it’s far outside of the scope of what I would have been able to think about based on what I saw in the original Rocksmith, and I’m sure a hypothetical Rocksmith 2017 will have similar advances I can’t begin to dream of. Also, just to be clear: my baseline is that I think Rocksmith 2014 is extremely well done. So, for every aspect of the game I complain about, assume there are nine other aspects that I like just as much.

Some context on where I’m coming from: I like having the game throw random songs at me, and I like having a few songs that I’m actively working on; I’m happy to have the game give guidance in both of those areas. (I probably spend about 2/3 of my time in the former mode, and 1/3 of my time in the latter.) I have no interest in games as an attempt to make learning fun, though I’m willing to consider the virtues of games as teaching tools for other reasons. And my background is in classical music; so I’m most comfortable (and I most enjoy) playing songs as originally written, though I do appreciate support in improvisation, and I’m also more interested in the sound of the instrument and of my playing than in pedals.

With that in mind, my requests:

• Let me give more granular ratings to songs, including a “never randomly show me this song” rating

Rock Band 3 got this right: you could rate a song with 1-5 stars, unrated songs showed up randomly with the same frequency as 3-star songs, and 1-star songs never show up randomly. It’s just as easy to use as Rocksmith‘s favorites mechanic, but it gives you a lot better random setlists. And, seriously: there are songs I never want to see in either Nonstop Mode or in at the top of Recommended sorting in Learn a Song.

• Let me favorite/rate a song on the launch screen for the song

I’m much more likely to want to rate a song right after I’ve played it: but, in the modes that throw songs at me unpredictably (Nonstop Mode, Learn a Song Recommended), that’s the one place where I can’t rate a song. They’re not even doing anything with the Y button on the “done with a song” screen, so just let me use the Y button there! (Hmm, it’s been long enough that I’ve played Nonstop Mode, mostly because of tuning issues, that I can’t remember if you actually see that “done with a song” screen; but, if not I’m sure they can find a place to let me rate a song after finishing it.)

• Don’t make me change tunings so frequently

I’m not arguing against alternate tunings: in fact, there’s tons of E flat DLC that I really like, to the point that I almost actively seek out E flat DLC. What I don’t like is changing tuning all the time: two songs in E, one in drop D, one more in E, two in E flat, three in E, etc. So once Nonstop Mode puts me in a tuning, I’d like to be able to stay in that tuning for a while; and I’d be totally happy with that meaning that two-thirds of my Nonstop Mode sessions were in E, a quarter were in E flat, a twelfth were in drop D, and that tuning was in place for all the songs in that session. (Or maybe ask me to change tunings every five songs, or something.) But, in practice, I’ve almost completely stopped playing Nonstop Mode, even though it’s the mode in the game that I’m arguably most temperamentally suited for, because I end up skipping songs that aren’t in E, and skipping all those songs makes the mode feel a lot less random.

This suggestion would, of course, make less sense in a context of on-disc content, because there aren’t enough songs in alternate tunings (except probably drop D) to fill up a Nonstop Mode session. But I’m not the only person out there with two discs of songs plus triple digits of DLC; and I imagine that there are people who feel the same way about drop D DLC that I do about E flat.

• Non-440 tunings are super annoying

Like I said: I don’t like changing tunings between songs; but if a song isn’t tuned to a 440 A, then I’ll always have to change tunings every time I play it, because there won’t be two songs that both have that tuning. (Well, maybe not once I have thousands of songs, but we’re not there yet!) So those non-440 A songs are super annoying. Also, because of issues I have with the in-game tuner (see below), I have a hard time getting these songs in tune even when I am playing them: I prefer to use an external tuner to get my tuning right, and I can’t tell my tuner to set A to 447. (Or can I? Actually, looking at the back of the tuner I have, there are buttons to allow that! I should start using them…)

My understanding is that the developers realize this and have technology for bringing those songs into tune; some artists are willing to let them do that, and some art. And I’ll reluctantly agree that it’s better not to refuse to include those songs. But if there were something the developers could do to nudge artists to include their songs in normalized tunings, I’d really appreciate it.

I don’t have any great ideas for how to accomplish that goal, but here are a few.

1. Give an option to include the same song in both normalized and non-normalized tunings: purists can play the latter, lazy people can play the former. Maybe there would be some artists who would be willing to include a normalized version as an option as long as the non-normalized version was available?
2. Come up with metrics to give an idea of how much less songs in non-440 tunings are bought, and are played once they’ve been bought, to make clear what the artists would be giving up in terms of making their songs accessible by insisting on the original tuning. Hard to do, of course, because every song is unique, but maybe give stats by comparing stats for songs by the same artist: I’m sure I’m not the only person who plays the Jimi Hendrix pack songs in weird tunings a lot less than the songs in standard tunings. (Maybe break it down into E with 440 A / other tuning with 440 A / non-440 A, to isolate the effect of “non-E tuning”, which the game really can’t/shouldn’t do anything about, from the effect of “non-440 A tuning”.)
3. Don’t include non-normalized songs that have a non-440 A on disc. (Or, if they adopt my first suggestion: don’t include the non-normalized version unless they can also include a normalized version.) There are only so many songs they can include on disc; they’ve made the right decision in not including songs that require a capo, and this feels like a similar decision to me.

• The tuner doesn’t work as well as I’d like

I’m really not sure what’s going on here, and it’s possible that I’ve got bad hardware, but here’s my experience: the tuning for the bottom three strings is dependable, though sometimes I want D to be a bit sharper than the game wants. The tuning that the game gives me for G is super flat, though: I probably want it to be ten cents higher than the game wants. (Which is particularly problematic because the fine tuning mode for the game will tell me I’m out of tune if I’m more than ten cents off, and because the displayed tuning fluctuates; though once I’ve made it past the fine tuning stage, though, the game is fine with me tuning the string the way I want.) I want B to be a little sharper than the game tells me, but not as much as the G. And for the high E, I think the game’s tuning is basically fine; the issue there is that if I strum, the displayed tuning will jump up and down by about ten cents, and it barely displays a tuning for long enough on that string for fine tuning mode to give me a thumbs-up. (I realize that the high E string just doesn’t sustain as long, but I can hear it for a lot longer than fine tuning mode can.)

Note that this isn’t my ear preferring non-equal temperaments: the G string sounds out of tune if I use the game’s tuner and then play a practice track, and an external tuner that I have agrees with me that the game tunes G (and, to a lesser extent, B) too low. My current hypothesis is that the cable is slightly off (though the same cable worked fine with the original Rocksmith); I’m used to its quirks enough now (and can use the external tuner as a backup) that I haven’t spent the money to experiment with that.

• I would happily pay money for a new model of the cable that let the game work better

I don’t have any specific complaints here about the cable, other than potentially the tuning issue above; but given the progress of technology, I imagine that the developers could make pitch / technique detection even better with an improved cable. Not that I actually want the game to count it as a note failure if I, say, don’t palm mute a string or don’t use enough vibrato! So maybe just improved pitch detection, including faster detection / feedback about whether I’m hitting bends and slides. At any rate, I would be totally happy to spend another $30 on a better cable, I’m not at all wedded to using the same cable I’ve been using since 2012.

• Better handling of song arrangements

On the whole, I think that it’s good that Rocksmith 2014 lets you decide whether you prefer to play rhythm or lead; but, as somebody who generally follows the lead guitar track, on those few songs where Rocksmith chose a different arrangement than the primary lead guitar arrangement than Rocksmith 2014 has for a song, I always prefer Rocksmith‘s choice. Which is fine, that doesn’t mean the arrangement shouldn’t default to the arrangement that the lead guitarist is playing on the actual track, but if there’s another arrangement that I personally prefer, let me flag it that way! (And also don’t insist that I play a more boring arrangement so I can get past the song in the Recommended list.)

Just as importantly: make it easy for me to switch between different arrangements for a song. When I find a song that I’m interested in, I often want to dive into it: so let me explore all the different lead / rhythm (and even bass) arrangements for that song from the same screen, instead of having to switch modes and then find the song again.

And, finally: if a song only has a rhythm part or only has a lead part, then let me play it even if I’m in the wrong mode. It turns out that there are a few songs I bought for the original game that don’t have lead parts: now they’re just mocking me at the end of my Learn a Song list, and if I want to play them, I’ll have to note down the names of the songs and then switch modes.

All complaints aside, I do appreciate having distinct lead / rhythm paths: I spent a couple of months recently exploring the rhythm side, and I’m glad I did. I just wish the boundary were more porous.

• Pick goals that fit my play/learning style better

The game really thinks I should spend a lot of time on basic lessons and on the guitar games; maybe I would benefit more from that, but I’m generally not at all interested. So what that means in practice is that, the first time I play a song, I’ll clear all three “Rocksmith recommends” items; then I’ll get three new ones, and I’ll clear one that’s about improving my numbers (longer streak / higher mastery), one that’s about doing a section in riff repeater, and I’ll just let the third one sit there indefinitely.

Basically: I don’t want to be told to do a 101-level lesson that I’ve already gotten 100% on: I assure you, I’m not going to get much out of going over the Sustains 101 lesson again. I don’t want to be told do do a random guitarcade game. And I definitely do not want to be told to do score attack at any difficulty less than Hard: if there’s a section or two of the song that I haven’t gotten to purple (the solo, say), then that requires me to play stripped down versions of sections that I’m very solid on, and that’s just boring.

I like the top-level goals more: I particularly appreciated the encouragement to go through Session Mode and to play around with tones. But mostly I focus on the goal that asks me to play one specific songs: and, most of the time, it’ll quickly get to where it requests a song that I don’t want to play (usually because of tuning reasons), and then it will stay stuck on that request. (On the Xbox One version, it even stays stuck when I press the console off button: the game just treats that as a pause.)

Honestly, this one really isn’t that big a deal: I can just ignore the recommendations. The main issue there is that, if you don’t do recommended items, then it takes a lot longer to unlock stuff: in fact, there are still songs on disc that I haven’t unlocked.

• Master Mode tweaks

The way Master Mode works in Rocksmith 2014 is clearly better than Master Mode in its predecessor: before, I felt like I was being dropped into the deep end. Having said that, there’s one aspect of its predecessor that I do miss in the 2014 version: after playing through a song in Master Mode, you got to watch a replay of yourself but with the notes visible, so you could see what you missed. That was a great learning tool, and I’d like a way to get it back in Rocksmith 2014 for songs that I am working on mastering as a whole.

I’m not 100% sure how that would work in practice, admittedly. I think the only way you can actually force the game into Master Mode for an entire song is in Score Attack; I don’t like Score Attack, but I can deal with the distraction level as long as I turn down the sound effects, and maybe being able to review the song after a playthrough would fit okay thematically in that mode?

The other way in which Master Mode is a bit off is how it handles similar but not identical sections: being in Master Mode (at least once the notes have disappeared completely) makes it harder to learn the differences between those sections, which can be frustrating. I went through a phase in More Than a Feeling where I didn’t know the notes for one variant of the harmonics but did for the others, so I’d completely mess up in that section, then the game would realize that I’d need to see more notes, then it would show me notes for sections I already knew, and then the notes would disappear again right when I got to the section in which I didn’t know the notes to play!

• Notation tweaks

The notation is quite good in general, but there are two changes I would make. The first is pitch bends: I would have a consistent story on whether the high part of the bent track means the string should be bent or unbent, whereas its actual meaning shifts depending on which string you’re playing. (Which, in practice, means that my expectations are trained by the top three strings, because that’s a significant majority of the bends, and I have to remind myself to behave differently on the bottom three strings.) Maybe the game’s notation makes sense on the notation on the fretboard on the bottom of the strings, but that’s rarely where my eyes are.

The other is palm mutes versus frethand mutes: despite the similar names, those seem to me quite different techniques both physically and aurally, but the game’s notation is almost identical. I wish the game used, say, an o instead of an x to notate one of them, instead of making me remember which width of x is which.

Also, sometimes the orange string looks pretty red to me, especially when it’s asking me to play an open string. (And no, I’m not color-blind.) Maybe this is just a gold dress / blue dress thing, though.

• Riff Repeater tweaks

Riff Repeater mode is very good, but it’s still not quite in-depth enough for me. If I’m playing a tricky passage on the piano, I’ll stare at a single measure, try out a few different fingerings, and then play them over and over again until I get something that works. But Riff Repeater doesn’t let me do that: it doesn’t let me freeze a section of notes to just look at it, and it doesn’t let me go down to a single-measure granularity.

In fact, sometimes the granularity goes way too far in the other direction: I don’t understand why the game doesn’t let you select each phrase in a song independently, why it sometimes (not often, and admittedly less often in newer songs than older ones) forces you to group phrases for review. E.g. in Anna Molly, there’s one section of the song that’s far harder than any other part of the song, and Riff Repeater forces me to play four phrases in a row, when each of those phrases is more than hard enough to deserve individual study.

Also, I prefer to put Riff Repeater in “no errors” mode, but I generally find phrases difficult to pass if they involve lots of bends. Some of that’s on me, surely, but some of that is, I think, on the cable not quickly picking up on pitch changes, so it takes a while to decide that a bent note (or a slide) is accurate. Maybe they’ll need a new cable to fix that, but it seems like making the mode be more forgiving would help?

• Remember my skill level across iterations of the game

I expected it to be annoying to have to start all over again when I switched from the 360 version to the Xbox One version of Rocksmith 2014, but actually it wasn’t so bad, and I even kind of appreciated having my play counts reset. But having the game dumb down the difficulty level for the first couple dozen songs was pretty annoying, so please at least remember my basic skill level. (And probably remember my level on individual phrases of songs, if that’s not too hard to accomplish.)

• Less lag in the UI

The Xbox One version spends a pretty long time going through downloaded content every time you launch it, and during that process it mostly refuses to let you play songs even if the songs are ones that are on disc or otherwise validated. So please speed up the validation and make it non-blocking.

Also, even when I’ve made it past that initial validation, if I jump between songs (e.g. from the start to the end of a list in Learn a Song), it takes the game a while to load something, and it won’t let me start playing a song while waiting. From a user perspective, it looks like the game is loading the album art for the songs on the part of the list that’s on screen (and, in particular, the album art all shows up right when it lets me go into the song); if that’s where the delay is coming from, then that’s a very bad reason to delay loading the song. (I’m not actually convinced that that’s where the delay is coming from, though, it’s conceivable that it’s waiting on something more important.)

Seriously, though, all whining aside: it’s a great game: I’m only complaining because I spent so much time with the game: if I hadn’t spent as many hundreds of hours with the series, I wouldn’t have these little issues to talk about.