Tamrielo

I’ve recently come to realize that I don’t really care to play most board games more than a handful of times. It’s something I’ve spent a bit of time mulling over, because I feel like a board game is the kind of thing I should really enjoy, but it very rarely is after the first couple of playthroughs.

I really like to leave my personal touch on a game when I play it. I like to really dive deep in a game and own, customize, and play a strategy. I get this in a minis game– my minis are, at the very least, chosen by me strategically before I start the game, and to a greater extent they have customized assembly and paint schemes to match my interests. Even if I didn’t paint or assemble them myself, they’re still unique to me. I’m reminded of this while I play Fallout. My settlements are incredibly bare-bones, nowhere near the lavish affairs Bel spent hours working on. I spent hours today pursuing a silencer for my weapon, seeking out new places to explore simply to find the components necessary to put it together. I’m playing a stealthy sharpshooter (quelle surprise), and I have been since the very start of the game.

I pursued a specific in-game reward to supplement the strategy I’d chosen from the very start. It’s analogous to selecting a particular deployment zone or chasing a particular objective in a game of Infinity, or choosing a particular perk as I level up in an RPG. I’m able to choose what I want to do strategically before I play, and the tactical choices I make as I go along align with that strategy (or adapt it to a changing situation).

It’s a thing I seek out in games, especially ones without a strong narrative to keep me interested. I want to be able to express myself from the start, and make decisions based on a strategic choice I made, rather than making purely tactical decisions. In most board games, I don’t get this choice. The board is set up to a particular exacting static standard, and either starting positions are doled out randomly (as in Agricola) or are undifferentiated (many other games). Most of the time, I don’t get to pick a long-term strategy before the game begins. There are a few games that let me do this, but they’re extremely rare (and often picking that strategy is a minigame itself, as in Galaxy Truckers).

Most of the choices to be made are tactical choices, not strategic ones, and there’s very little personalization available when those are the only choices you’re making. There’s “selecting the optimal tactic”, which can vary somewhat based on your ability to execute, but it’s not really a form of self-expression, or doesn’t feel like one to me. It’s an optimization game rather than a customization one. What I like about strategic choices is that they give me the opportunity to alter the optimal tactical choices over the course of the game according to preferences that I’ve set beforehand. I have made a choice to have an aggressive Lieutenant in Infinity with a support network in the list, and so I make the choice in the game to play forward and daring with my Lieutenant. Alternately, I’ve chosen a vulnerable lieutenant, who I need to hide during the game and potentially take pains to protect. My overall strategic choices change the valuation of my tactical choices, so the optimal course in any situation has been customized by me.

That layer of strategic customization makes the game deeper and richer for me, and can make two otherwise identical matches feel very different. In most board games I’ve played, if you were to completely remove randomness in two consecutive games; play twice with the same die results and same card draws, you’d have an incredibly boring second game. There’s no change you could make (other than potentially a different tactical choice, if you played the first game suboptimally) that would change the outcome. By comparison, if I can alter my strategy at the start of the game, I could have absolutely identical variables elsewhere and the importance of those variables would change. I can play the same minis game on the same terrain (and honestly, could have the same exact die rolls) and if I came into it with a different list it would be a wholly different experience.

I’m really interested in a board game that gives me that kind of strategic depth. I find that most “strategy” board games are actually tactics games, with very little strategy involved. You might be thinking multiple turns ahead, but you’re still mostly reacting to the board, not planning. I’ve played a few that touch on it, some of the Arkham games, City of Thieves, and to some extent the Shadowrun board game, where you select a character which changes your approach, but these tend to be fairly insignificant choices in the long run (Arkham games being something of an exception here).

Returning to Fallout 4 (look, I’m playing a lot of this game), it’s really exciting to me that the various people I know can take extremely different strategic approaches– make strikingly different characters– and not only have a very different set of experiences in the same game, but all be equally effective. As a stealthy sharpshooter, I’ve mostly eschewed my power armor, using it only when stealth isn’t an option. I’m pretty sure Bel and Kodra are wearing theirs constantly. Some of my friends are playing melee characters, others are playing characters who are looking for the biggest guns possible. All of us are looking for different things but are all supported by the game. Bel has made his mark by tearing down his entire starting settlement and building anew; Kodra has made his mark repeatedly, with a metal bat. I make my mark once, with an exquisitely crafted implement, and once is enough.

Strategy is, for me, a form of creative self-expression. It’s something I’ve kind-of known for a long time, but the implications are a lot more significant than I’d realized. It helps me better understand why I don’t like certain games and why I like other games that are ostensibly very similar. It helps me make better decisions, and it’s nice to be able to put words to a feeling.

Here comes the first of what will probably be a LOT of posts about Fallout 4. I’ll try to curb things, since other people are playing it. Full spoilers to come in the Aggrochat podcast.

In general, I don’t love post-apocalyptic settings. They’re kind of a study of what happens to people when civilization is totally destroyed and everything sucks, and honestly the answer is “nothing all that great”. It’s really easy for your post-apocalyptic setting to just become a joyless, bleak world, and without joy, there’s not a lot of motivation to do much of anything. It’s the same problem I have with the Warhammer 40,000 universe– it’s a massive, joyless universe and I’ve never heard anything convincing that explains what anyone in that universe is fighting for.

For the most part, I like my futuristic games to be a bit more optimistic. I tend to believe that the future is pretty much going to be better than the present, and a terrible post-apocalyptic setting doesn’t really mesh with that. I don’t even necessarily have anything against post-apoc per se, I’ve seen the occasional dark future where things are actually pretty okay, even if the world has been ravaged. Maybe we’ve got a cool colony on the moon, or some nice high-tech living spaces away from the devastation. Something to point at and say “this is worth fighting for”.

So, Fallout. I played through Fallout 1 and 2, but they don’t make my list of favorite games, and I didn’t really explore them much; I didn’t feel motivated to. Fallout 3 didn’t grab me– it felt like the exact sort of joyless future that I’m not interested in experiencing. It made things worse by making most of the actual civilized settlements pretty villainous, with Megaton, the Town of Terrible Ideas, being this sad bastion of hope. New Vegas was the first Fallout game to really capture my interest. It showed me the same dark future, but there was civilization, and the civilized people weren’t all utterly awful human beings. There was technology, and places I might actually want to live. It wasn’t just all suck all the time. Indeed, one of the big things I did was rebuild, and establish a bastion of actual civilization in the desert. It felt good.

Fallout 4 feels like it’s continuing the trend. It’s now the second area I’ve lived in that’s been the focus of a Fallout game, and truth be told I’m more partial to Boston than Washington DC. It also lets me rebuild, not just a little bit, but actually put together my own settlements and build real homes. It’s satisfying, and exciting. I’m also operating in real cities and towns. Damaged, certainly, but recognizable as places that people live.

Fallout 4 is a post-apoc world that isn’t scrounging the remnants of a technologically advanced society– it’s possible to get new, fancy technology and not just hope that the one working laser pistol I’ve found stays functional. I don’t have to hope that I run across a place that seems like a decent place to live– I can actually build one from scratch.

It’s pretty exciting, and lets me enjoy the Fallout world without the crushing pessimism that I see in other settings. Now, time to find some aluminum so I can build a new reactor core (!) for my laser pistol (!!).

I am distinctly in the minority when it comes to games where “you can turn your brain off”. Per this week’s podcast, I’m probably at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum as Bel, who, as he puts it, tries to “get to a point where playing a game requires no thought”. Pretty much everyone on the podcast other than myself had some kind of “relaxation” game, something they’d mastered and find relaxing to play because it doesn’t really require them to be engaged.

It’s something I find hard to wrap my head around. It’s one of the blind spots in my ability to recommend games to other people and understand what they find appealing; I mostly go off of what I hear other people talk about rather than my own feelings. It strikes me as similar to people’s descriptions of cilantro– I’m aware that some people find cilantro appalling, “like eating soap”, but it’s hard for me to visualize because I don’t taste the same way. The best I can do is remember that some people really don’t like cilantro, and remember that some people relax through unengaged gaming.

I really don’t have a good set of terms to even talk about the concept. The ones that come to mind– “mindless”, “unengaged”, “requires no thought”, even “junk food” have hugely negative connotations for me, and I don’t necessarily like ascribing such negative language to what is essentially a difference in opinion. Other than that I personally get bored, I don’t have a fundamental problem with these kinds of games. I’ll get frustrated when that’s all anyone seems to want to play and I find it boring, but that’s true of anything where I’m not interested in what everyone is playing.

What I’m more interested in sussing out is *why* I don’t have the same craving for low-stimulation games. I really do get antsy and bored when a game isn’t keeping me engaged enough– I’ve nodded off while playing all kinds of games, mostly at points where I’m just not interested in them or I’m not learning anything new. At the same time, even slow- or variable-paced games like Civ, Anno, or Crusader Kings all keep me alert, just because I’m juggling so many things in my head and managing my territory. A friend of mine suggested a possibility to me: I’ve played a lot of games, so I reach a comfortable point with them a lot sooner. She pointed out that while my threshold for boredom is a lot lower, my threshold for relaxing is a lot higher, so it’s easier for me to hit a point where a game “requires no thought”, and do with a lot more games.

I’m not convinced by that explanation, but as was (sharply) pointed out to me, I have a history of disbelieving any explanation of something that speaks to my own abilities. It’s possible that I simply learn games quickly and that I’m really doing the same thing as everyone else when I play. I don’t have a good way of knowing if the way I play most games is the way that other people play their “most relaxing” games. I do know that I don’t have any particular game I return to over and over again; I almost never play a game more than once unless it’s been long enough for me to forget significant amounts of it (and thus, relearn them while playing). I get bored quickly when playing a game I already know, even if there are little tidbits for me to still pick up. New Game+ is REALLY hit or miss for me. As a result, there aren’t really any games I can claim mastery over, but there are a lot that I feel comfortable with.

Now I really want to plug myself in to an EEG while I play and compare my results with my friends’ over various games.

I keep working on Japanese, though my pace has slowed down a little bit. Not having the weekly tutor to force me to keep up means I study less, and with classes having started up again, my focus is going there first and foremost. I have, however, started supplementing my use of the Genki textbook with Rosetta Stone, which has been interesting.

Before I talk about Rosetta Stone, I should recap my studies thus far. I started studying Japanese about twelve weeks ago now. The first two weeks were me memorizing kana, specifically hiragana, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can just read them now. I’m not fast, but I don’t need a reference anymore. I spent the third week on katakana and some basic vocabulary and phrases. I really need to spend a lot more time with katakana, because it comes up a LOT in writing, and I really didn’t give it the same amount of time as hiragana. I find it a lot harder to memorize, because the syllables are visually very similar, and as a result my ability to read katakana is HORRIBLE.

After the first three weeks, I took about a month’s worth of lessons with a tutor, during which time we were able to blaze through the entire first Genki book. It was a whirlwind, and while I picked up concepts extremely quickly and can suss out grammar, the pace was too fast with too many new words being introduced for me to keep up with the vocabulary. After the last tutoring session, I took about two weeks off to process, which in retrospect was a horrible mistake. I didn’t lose much if any of the structural stuff I learned, but my already limited vocabulary atrophied, and my pronounciation suffered. I also lost my tenuous grasp of katakana, though I’d ingrained hiragana enough that I didn’t lose it, I just got slower.

Since then, I’ve been working with Rosetta Stone, and am going to return to doing exercises from the Genki workbook as well. Rosetta Stone is a very different structure for learning, and it works pretty well for me, but I’ve read a LOT of criticism about it. Since a few people have commented that they’ve liked to see my learning process, I kind of want to break down how I feel about Rosetta Stone, in case it’s helpful for anyone eyeing it but concerned about the (rather high) price.

The teaching method appeals to me, as I’ve mentioned before, because it avoids using English entirely. Pretty much everything is kana and images that you match or speak. I like this, because it removes all of the English-language distractions and forces me to connect concepts with Japanese directly, rather than using English as a go-between. You can pick up a free app that has the first handful of lessons for a variety of languages on mobile devices, to see what I’m talking about, and it’s what gave me my initial foothold into Japanese.

One of the interesting things about Rosetta Stone is that it doesn’t at any point explicitly tell you what you’re saying or what the pieces of the sentences are. It slowly becomes clear as you work, but you’re looking at hours of work before you can see the shape of a sentence, because you may or may not be picking up which words mean which things, and how they’re all fitting together. It won’t stop you from progressing in the lessons, but it’ll make it difficult to feel like you’re making tangible progress until you’ve put a few hours into it. It’s an intentional bit of design, it forces you to process the sentences as a whole and work to make sense of them, so you retain the information better. Rather than telling you how to say something, it has you say something and forces you to figure out what you just said from context clues. If I wasn’t aware of that style of teaching and how effective it is, I’d probably find it very frustrating. Certain critical reviews describe it as “nonsense”, which to me sounds like frustration with the style; everyone learns differently, and while this works for me, it likely doesn’t for other people.

I’m glad I have both the textbook and other translation aids available to me as well. It lets me see interesting things that Rosetta Stone teaches me how to use, then look up the structure, how they’re being used, and what they actually mean. It’s resulted in a lot of spin-off lessons, where I learn about the different ways to use pronouns because Rosetta Stone switched pronouns on me. A great example is when the book switched from using 男の人 (おとこのひと, “otokonohito”, man) to 彼 (かれ, “kare”, he), which changes the sound of sentences significantly but can be used functionally identically in a sentence. It uses a lot of the same basic sentences with various swaps to help build vocabulary while giving you a sense of structure.

For example, you’ll have one exercise where a sentence might be “The [boy/girl/woman/man] runs,” where the exercise is appropriately recognizing the words for “boy”, “woman”, “man”, and “girl”. The next exercise might be “The woman [runs/eats/reads/swims],” where the exercise is about recognizing the verb. It builds on the structure of the first sentence and swaps out a different part, so you slowly get a feel for all of the different pieces. The whole thing could probably use a tutorial, but once you realize what it’s asking you to do it’s pretty intuitive.

The real question is “is it worth $200+”? It’s not a question I can really answer for everyone, obviously, but I can explain my approach. I tend to look at how much content I’m getting and how valuable the content is. The demo for the software should give you a pretty good idea of whether or not the content is valuable for you; it may work well with how you learn or it might not. As far as amount of content goes, the program is structured in chunks. The smallest segments are called “lessons”, and range from quick, 5-minute items to 30-minute “core lessons”. There are a handful (six to fifteen or so) 5- and 10-minute lessons after each 30-minute “core lesson”, and after four core lessons and a final refresher at the end, you’ve completed a “unit”. There are four units, each comprised of four core lessons and numerous mini-lessons, all of which make up a “level”. The Japanese module for Rosetta Stone contains three levels. All in all, that’s 3 levels, 12 units, 48 core lessons. I tend to take slightly less time per lesson than the estimated time. By the estimated times for each segment, it works out to 60-120 minutes per core lesson+mini-lessons. If we lowball that and say it’s about 4 hours per unit (kind of a fast pace, but it’s close to the speed I’m going at), that’s on the order of 48-50 hours of lessons.

Assuming you don’t repeat any lessons (i.e. do each one once and never look at it again), for the currently-listed $209 for the software (Rosetta Stone site, cheaper on Amazon), you’re paying about $4.40 per hour. As a point of reference, an inexpensive Japanese tutor in my area is on the order of $30 an hour. It’s certainly not as personalized an experience as a tutor, and I’m really glad I spent time with my tutor because it let me focus on certain specific things, but as far as a time/money value proposition, it’s better than going to go see a movie. Whether that’s time/money well spent is probably up to the individual.

Currently, I’ve gotten to the point where I can watch subtitled anime and clearly hear sentence structure, though my vocabulary isn’t close to keeping up. I can tell when the translation is different from the audio, and I’ve started being able to pick up on nuances that enrich the experience for me. It’s really funny to me, for example, how in One-Punch Man, Genos’ speech to Saitama is hyper-formal and very precise, whereas Saitama’s responses are incredibly laid back and almost too casual. It lends a lot to both of those characters that I’d otherwise have trouble picking up on just from the text and the tone of voice.

I’m a little ways into the third unit of Level 1, so I’ve still got a ways to go. I’ll keep commenting here as I get to other interesting pieces.