Gaming

Game vs Metagame

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Tam's recent post about solved games really crystallized something for me with regards to why I do and don't like certain games.  In particular why I will sometimes really like the concept of a game and yet end up absolutely loathing it in practice.  In a word, metagame.

...game

I've come to realize that the existence of a codified metagame for something is a pretty good sign that I won't want anything to do with it. If there's a way of doing things that is the way, the truth, and the light, then I get to choose between following the crowd or trying to go my own way knowing that I'm actively not playing optimally. The former tends to lead to me getting bored quickly, particularly since the one right way rarely ever syncs up with the way I want to play, and often relies on degenerate strategies. The latter puts me in a spot where I don't get to take joy in improving, since I'm aware that I'm actively not playing 'the best way'.

Beyond that, I'm being forced to spend time figuring out how to play the game 'properly' rather than actually playing the game.  Part of the problem with metagame for me is that it is, by definition, external to the game.  So I end up having to look for FAQs, wikis, or even *shudder* official forums to even begin to figure out what I'm 'supposed' to be doing.  And then, without fail, I learn that I chose the wrong class, hero, skill set, or whatever and I can either start over completely or bull on with the knowledge that I'm 'doing it wrong'.  At least if it's a single-player game I can take comfort in playing the character I want to play even if it isn't optimal.  In a multi-player game there's the added joy of other players more than happy to tell you that you're stupid and wrong if you dare to step outside of the accepted orthodoxy.

My roots in tabletop role-playing, where metagaming has long been viewed negatively, may also enter into this. For me playing a game is about working within the bounds of the assumptions that are made by the system. Avoiding use of out-of-game knowledge as much as possible is part of this. If a game is well designed and things are messaged properly, I should be able to figure out everything I need to know to play well without having to resort to outside information.

Ultimately, the more time I'm having to spend playing the metagame instead of the actual game, the less I tend to enjoy myself. I want to do my learning as a part of playing, rather than as a prerequisite to even getting started.

Building Puzzles is the Hardest Puzzle

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I picked up Hexcells recently on the basis of Kodra and Rae's talking it up, and have enjoyed it quite a bit. I've always been a big fan of logic puzzles of any sort, so it was right up my alley.  The basic gameplay is much like Minesweeper, where each cell is either part of a pattern (blue) or not (black). Yellow cells are of unknown status and must be marked by you. To solve the puzzle you must successfully mark all of the cells. Unlike Minesweeper, however, each puzzle gives you some information to start with and can be solved with no guessing at all.

As you graduate to more and more complex puzzles, additional methods of providing information to you are introduced. You'll be told how many blue cells are in a particular line of cells, or that all the blue cells in a particular line or around a cell are contiguous. Eventually you start getting cells that contain a number signifying the number of blue cells within two spaces of that cell. Ultimately you find yourself having to combine information from multiple sources to identify cells properly. It's very difficult by the end, but extremely gratifying when you successfully solve a puzzle.

There are 3 Hexcells games, each with 36 puzzles of increasing difficulty. The difficult also increases more quickly in each successive game, so you're quickly solving puzzles harder than the previous games hardest.  By the end they're downright fiendish and I found myself having to take a break and come back with fresh eyes on multiple occasions (thankfully the 3rd game saves your progress on partially completed puzzles).  Ultimately though, I made it through and finished the final puzzle.

My wife saw me playing and asked "Are you a bee?"

The third game, Hexcells Infinite, introduces Infinite Mode, which boasts 100,000,000 computer generated puzzles.  Put in a numerical seed, get a puzzle.  Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, they're just not as good as the set puzzles you get up to that point.  The game's main puzzles contain a paucity of information, forcing you to determine which of a very few existing clues your latest moves will combine with to identify your next move.  The generated puzzles I've tried, on the other hand, are overrun with numbers from the very beginning and are mostly a matter of scanning through the puzzle for the next obvious move.  Occasionally I'll have to stop and think a bit, but it's mostly just click click click done.

The problem is that programming a computer to build interesting puzzles is difficult.  Much more difficult than writing a program to solve puzzles; that's generally trivial if the puzzle is based on pure logic and intended to be human-solvable.  Building a puzzle requires you to develop explanations for what make a puzzle good that can be expressed in code.  I have no way of knowing how the Hexcells puzzle generator works, but if I had to guess I'd posit that it generates the field of hexes and assigns them each blue or black based on an algorithm that uses the seed as input, creates all the possible clues the puzzle could have, then starts hiding cells and removing clues while checking that the puzzle remains solvable.

With a million possible puzzles, I'd guess that from sheer happenstance some clever ones will show up, but Sturgeon's Law appears to apply in this case.  That said, it's still a great game and would have been well worth my time if the Infinite feature didn't exist at all.

Hello there, Ladies and Gentlemen

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Welcome to any new readers that came from Massively to check me out!  I'm actually double glad Syp linked to me, as he mentioned the post that he made some years back that was my inspiration for my ability identification post!  For some reason I was misremembering it as something I saw on the LotRO forums.

I don't know how many folks might stick around and keep reading, but I've been considering a state of the gaming post in any case, so what better time?  Here's what I've been up to recently.

FFXIV

The 2.5 patch came out Monday, and for the first time I was entirely caught upon the various questlines.  I didn't really have time last night to try running any new group content, but I got everything unlocked and am ready to give some of it a try.  The Hildibrand questline continues to be the best thing ever, and I'm especially looking forward to the new Gilgamesh fight.

Apart from the new stuff, there's still plenty of existing goals that I'm still working towards.  I've leveled all my crafting and gathering classes to 50, but I still have plenty of better gear to work on so I can craft 3 and 4 star items.  I've been in a bit of a conundrum where I didn't want to spend a lot of gil melding materia into gear that isn't best in slot, but working on desynthesis has opened up my ability to craft the best jewelry for gathering and crafting, so that should help me move on up the chain.

I've also been working on my battle classes and have 3 of those at level 50.  Bard remains my main to which I've added Dragoon and Warrior.  I'll probably be focusing on White Mage or Scholar/Summoner next so I have a healer job available, but I haven't decided which yet.  I suspect I'd actually be better tanking as Paladin than Warrior, but I won the most absurd axe in the game off Titan a couple months back, and I've been wanting to use it ever since.

Dat Axe

Marvel Heroes

I've honestly not done much in Marvel Heroes recently apart from try to log on once a day to collect daily rewards.  I'm sure I'll swing back around to it again before too long, but for now FFXIV and occasional single player games are dominating my PC gaming time.

Shadow of Mordor

Among my Christmas presents this year was Shadow of Mordor, which I have been enjoying the hell out of.  I absolutely love Arkham City, so the basic gameplay is right up my alley, and the orc captains are a great element.  I had one poor idiot come back a total of 4 times, jumping me out of nowhere each time and looking rougher and rougher as it went along.  I do have trouble focusing on the story at all since I keep running into captains that need killing and Power Struggles to deal with.  I need to at least get to the point where I can brand captains so that getting them promoted actually benefits me.

FFX

Finally, I picked up the FFX/X-2 remaster recently and have been playing my way through Spira again.  I'd forgotten how dark that game is underneath the surface once you know what's actually going on.  So many things that were relatively innocuous the first time through have a whole new level of sad attached to them.  Really though, I guess Final Fantasy games have a history of darkness. mass genocide in VI, the whole Cloud/Sephiroth thing in VII, and Tactics, man don't get me started on Tactics.  It's like a Shakespearean tragedy told with Precious Moments figurines.

In any case I just wrapped things up in Luca and am headed out on the Mi'hen Highroad.  X is one of the Final Fantasy games that I not only beat but pretty much burned to the ground content-wise the first time around, so it's interesting seeing what all I remember and deciding how in depth I'm going to go.  I have a hard time not collecting all the things, but I don't know if I'm going to be willing to put forth the effort this time around to, for instance, get Lulu's final weapon.

Ladies

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Some people get really weird about playing characters of a different gender than their own.  I don't mean in an "I wish Assassin's Creed had playable female characters" way, I'm talking about people, mostly guys, who seem to think that choosing to play a female character makes a man less of a man.  Look around on any MMO forum and you'll likely find the 'why do guys play girl characters, what's wrong with them?' thread.

You see a lot of reasons suggested, ranging from 'their gay lol' to 'they want people to give them stuff' and so forth.  It's depressing, honestly.  So many of the posts always seem to boil down to 'I don't want to do thing X so anyone who does must be wrong/different/weird'.  There's a self-centeredness and lack of empathy that seems emblematic of so much of what's wrong with online culture.

When I create characters in online games, tabletop, or whatever, I generally have a basic outline in my mind when I start.  I'll either have a class or a personality in mind and everything else flows from that.  One of those elements is gender.  I'd feel as strange trying to make a character male that I've pictured as female as I would the reverse.  Playing a female character is comparable to playing a dwarf, or a robot, or a psychotic little cat thing for me.  I'm not any of those things in real life, they're elements of a character I choose to inhabit.

That's not to say my views on characters are the way, the truth, and the light.  I can absolutely understand wanting to play 'yourself' (or more likely an idealized version thereof).  My version of the Avatar in Ultima games has always been simply me at the core.  It's also not at all surprising that a transgender person would want to play a character of the gender they identify as.  For me such a role is a challenge to attempt; for them it's an opportunity to inhabit a more comfortable skin.

I think a lot of my view on this comes from my roots in late 80s and early 90s tabletop role-playing.  This was a time when story and setting was really coming to the fore, and games tended to involve a lot of social elements along with the combat.  Like most players I started out pretty much playing 'me with magic', but that gets boring after a while.  For role playing to be interesting, the role needs to require some effort.  As one gets better at it, the effort needs to increase.  Particularly once I started running games, I needed to be able to play all sorts of different NPCs, some of whom were female.  From there to a female PC isn't much of a stretch.

Ultimately, choice of character gender is just one of many, many ways that different people play the same game in a different way.  Trying to claim that someone else is playing wrong because of that choice says a lot more about you than it does them.