Digital Initiative

Blog Posts from Tamrielo on Digital Initiative

Curating Media

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I get exposed to a lot of media, and I’m continually finding new stuff that I never thought I’d like, but turns out to be great. There’s very little that excites me like finding something awesome when I expected nothing at all, and a lot of it is because I have people very carefully introduce me to new stuff.

Very little turns me off of seeing something quicker than “OMG you HAVE to see/play/experience X, it’s about this and that and it’s totally up your alley and it’s AWESOME, you gotta watch it”. Possibly it’s me being obstinate, possibly it’s my desire to explore and find new things on my own getting in the way, but a lot of it is the weight of expectation that I must watch this thing and must love it. I’m familiar with a lot of media, and I see a lot of it from a lot of different people– it’s very, very rare that something grabs me enough to warrant capital letters.

Similarly, when I do gush about things, I tend to watch other people shut down– the same thing at work, I suspect. As a result, I try not to gush at people, unless I already know they’re into what I’m talking about or I already know it’s a lost cause and I just need to get the gushing out.

Instead, I try to curate my recommendations to people. There are a lot of things that I like that I don’t recommend to others unless directly asked, because I don’t really feel like people are likely to enjoy something just because I like it. I do keep an eye on a lot of media that I don’t personally consume, though, because other people I know might enjoy them. I’ve recommended games and TV shows that I’ve never played or seen to people.

The key, for me, is to keep mental notes of all the media I think someone would like, even if I’m not interested in it myself. It’s not just about picking things in the same genre, it’s about drilling down into the core and thinking about why someone likes the things they do and how some experience might meet that. When I suggest things, I bring that into the description– “if you liked Mark of the Ninja, you might like the new Assassin’s Creed: Chronicles game”.

shadow-of-mordor

As an example, I suspected Bel would really like Shadows of Mordor, despite his general disinterest in the Assassin’s Creed series, because it’s more about stabbing orcs and combat than the sneaky politics of AC. Very similar games, very similar styles and gameplay, but Shadows of Mordor hits the right buttons. I was right, Bel enjoyed SoM rather more than I did.

It’s not always perfect. I have to know what I’m recommending better than I sometimes do. I suggested Warmachine to Kodra at one point, because I felt like it was a highly strategic “deckbuilding” style of game with a heavy emphasis on synergy and building engines to move forward and accomplish goals. What I didn’t consider was that Kodra likes building engines that get the chance to work properly, and that Warmachine is a game about trying to build your own engine while stopping your opponent from building theirs– meaning most of the time (read: in games that aren’t one-sided) you don’t get to see your engine functioning as it ought to.

One of the other things I try to do is undersell things and stay vague unless asked about whatever I’m recommending. I usually say something like “oh, I heard about X, you might think it’s interesting” and leave any further research up to the person I’m talking to. There are some psychological reasons for this relating to mental investment, but it boils down to “if you’re not interested enough after the first sentence or two to do a quick search, you’re probably not going to be interested by me telling you more about it”. Underselling is also important for me– more “you might like this” and less “THIS IS AWESOME YOU HAVE TO SEE IT”. I try to use phrases like “it’s worth checking out” over “you should/need to see this” because I think of it more like setting something down on a table for later perusal than pushing something into someone’s hands.

Very rarely do I see someone gush about something and have someone else pick it up and have the same reaction. It happens, but it’s rare, and it’s often disappointing for the gusher. By reining it in, I find that people are a lot more likely to check out stuff I think they might like, especially if they don’t feel like I’m breathing down their necks about it. It’s also much less impactful when a friend tries something I love and hates it– I’m a lot more likely to get an honest discussion than a “um it was cool I guess” reaction if they don’t feel obligated to be excited about it just because I am.

My current recommendation is Hero Emblems. It’s an iOS puzzle RPG without microtransactions, just a one-time-purchase. If you like puzzle quest or similar bejeweled-alike RPGs, you might like it. The translation is hilariously awful, but the game is fun.

Source: Digital Initiative
Curating Media

Degenerative Strategy

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I really, really loved The Secret World for a long time. My close group and I blasted through that game together, loving every second as we worked our way up through the areas and got new, better skills. I’m still of the opinion that some of the best atmosphere and best storytelling (covering the entire spectrum of ways to tell a story) can be found in TSW.

I stopped playing in an abject, frothing ragequit. Today I’d like to talk about degenerative strategy.

When playing a game, especially a complex one, you make decisions. Broadly speaking, the decisions you make in the moment– where and when to move, when to attack, what spells to cast and when– those are tactics. The decisions you make in the planning phase– what movement abilities you’re using, what weapons you have equipped, what spells you have prepared– those are strategy. This is something of a simplification, but it’s not terribly inaccurate, either.

When I played TSW, I focused heavily on the Blood Magic healing tree, and was my party’s healer. Through most of the dungeons, I used blood magic to keep the group alive and continued investing in the tree. Thematically, it was a great choice, and one I enjoyed a lot. As we reached more and more difficult content, notably the hard-mode dungeons at the endgame, I found myself brutally struggling to keep up and keep everyone alive. It became stressful, and I started to get burned out.

At the same time, some of my group was starting to feel like their choices (particularly: to play melee) were getting unduly punished in the higher-end content. At one point, Kodra, having saved up some unused skill points, dumped a handful into the Claws healing tree, a different healing tree that I previously hadn’t touched, because it wasn’t really the theme I wanted.

Instantly, he was a better healer than I was. With less than a tenth of the investment I’d put into my strategy and no practice, he’d exceeded the capabilities I’d honed over my character’s entire progression. The choice for me became clear: play a Claws-based healer, or don’t heal. Blood Magic was simply not good enough. I took a third path: quit the game in disgust. I had invested a lot into the theme of the character, putting together a specific look and an entire concept based around being a blood mage. The endgame for TSW wasn’t worth sacrificing that to use a strategy I didn’t enjoy.

I refer to that as an example of a degenerative strategy. A degenerative strategy is a strategy that, for one reason or another, limits the effective choices you can make. You are either playing that strategy, a strategy that can directly counter that strategy, or you are losing. It’s degenerative if other choices exist, but are so far behind in effectiveness that they are no longer competitive options. As players discover the strategy, the viable options for the playerbase as a whole diminish; the strategic playing field degenerates into a small number of “correct” choices and a rather larger number of bad choices.

World of Warcraft’s old talent tree system created degenerative strategies. There was at least one “correct” build for every class, and even when there were multiple build options in a given class, the actual distribution of talent points in that build had an incredibly small amount of variance. If you were playing optimally, and had a build that allowed you to choose which set of talents you wanted, it was because you only needed to spend points in that tier and the actual distribution didn’t matter, generally because none of the talents were any good.

If there is a “right” way to play that excessively limits other options that appear on the surface to be viable, that is a sign of a degenerative strategy. If there is only one correct choice, there shouldn’t be a choice. It’s really important to note that this doesn’t mean that every choice you can make in a game has to be viable, if the game design itself isn’t trying to support that choice. As an example, in FFXIV, you cannot functionally form a group that lacks a tank, a healer, and some DPS in content that is relevant to you (if you far exceed the intended power level of the content, you can largely do whatever you like). This is a design choice, and it’s reinforced at every stage of the game. It’s not a degenerative strategy because the game doesn’t suggest that any other choices are intended or supported.

On the other hand, claw-based healing in TSW was a degenerative strategy, because it was so much better than the other healing trees that (at the time) there was no other viable option. As your understanding and skill at the game increased, and you sought to play as best you possibly could, you would have to move away from options like blood magic in order to play the more powerful, more effective, and thus more optimal claws build. Blood magic still *appeared* to be a supported option, but in practice it wasn’t effective and was, in essence, a “trap” build.

Game balance is a touchy thing, and is honestly not as relevant as people might expect. It’s less important that everything be equally balanced against one another and more important that degenerative strategies don’t exist. Certain games offer options that are very high-risk, high-reward, where a high degree of skill lets you outperform other options, but low-skill players will lag significantly behind less risky options. Perfectly optimal play would suggest that everyone should play the high-risk high-reward options, but in reality this isn’t that necessary, because balance is achieved through the demands of player skill.

When players get upset about game balance, it’s often paired with a claim that “everyone should just play X”, which is an implied suggestion that X is a degenerative strategy. Most of the time, this isn’t the case, but it’s very important that a game designer keep an eye out to see if a particular strategy is degenerative or not. It’s usually important to leave the strategy in place for a certain amount of time to see if it actually *is* degenerative– it takes time for the strategic geography of the game to degenerate, and a strategy with a functional, accessible counter is not degenerative.

In general, a good way to determine if a game is struggling with degenerative strategies is to look at how the game is played at the highest tiers of play– the most competitive, most optimal players– and see if there is a downward spread of those players’ choices to lower tiers of play over time; essentially, is the strategy causing degeneration in the game? If the highest tiers of players are making the same (small number) of choices out of a (much larger) selection, it’s a good indicator of a degenerative strategy.

Frost Mages, waaaaaaaay over to the left.

Fixing this problem is difficult. A direct nerf (reduction in power/effectiveness) of the degenerative strategy isn’t necessarily the way to go. If Claws had been nerfed to the functional level of Blood Magic, it would have been impossibly punishing to heal at the higher tiers of content in TSW. Sometimes, bringing the noncompetitive options up to par with the degenerative strategy evens the playing field and stabilizes the available strategies. Sometimes, introducing a new element to the game that shakes up the geography simply by existing can shake loose degenerative strategies and stabilize things.

One of the places I’ve seen this done very elegantly is in League of Legends. Oftentimes, a new champion will also bring other, older and less-used champions to the fore. The new champion may work very well with the older champions, or the older champions may be a strong counter to the new champion that is otherwise very powerful. The new champion may simply be very good at shutting down the existing dominant strategies, forcing new ones to be formed. It’s not a perfect process by any means, but it’s a very elegant one.

The main thing to remember is that fixing degenerative strategies is EXTREMELY difficult, and is a slow process. Discovering and refining a degenerative strategy takes time, and allowing it to take root and then watching to see if acceptable counter-strategies arise takes even more time. Since the changes required to fix the issue are generally not subtle, it’s important to be sure to collect enough information to correct it properly. Sometimes this is easy. Sometimes it is very, very hard. Games have rewritten their entire ruleset, sometimes multiple times, just to hammer out degenerative strategies.



Source: Digital Initiative
Degenerative Strategy

A Wednesday Afternoon Post

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I normally write these entries relatively late at night, as a way of processing my thoughts about each day, then schedule them to post early in the morning the following day.

Today, as a bit of a departure, I wanted to try writing a post in the afternoon, to see how it changed my outlook.

I’m a big fan of breaking from habit and trying different approaches to things, because I feel like it’s very easy to get into a rut and just do the same thing over and over again. I like to think that continually breaking the habits I fall into lets me reform them in ways that work better for me, and keeps me aware of the various mental loops I sometimes get stuck in.

It’s been suggested to me that my anti-habit mindset is indicative of discontent– that I try to change things because I’m not happy with how they are. I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong, and I think that analyzing my own habits as well as how and why they form lets me find out what I’m unhappy about and why.

I read the above book recently, and found the first section of it extremely interesting. It talks about how we form habits and how we can change them.

This blog itself is me attempting to rewire my own habits– I’m notoriously bad about doing anything on a daily basis (see above, about me being anti-habit), and I used the book’s concepts and suggestions to flip around my own habits so that I could start blogging five days a week.

It’s been an interesting ride thus far; I’ve blogged every day for about a month and I’ve found it relatively easy to do. I have missed some days, but I generally find I have something to say each day.

I will say that I don’t think I’ll be writing and posting at this time in the afternoon in future– my thoughts are scattered and I’m a little too distracted by the lovely day outside. Something about it being dark outside focuses me and helps me hone in on a topic, whereas I feel like this post is a little all over the place (certainly my mind is).



Source: Digital Initiative
A Wednesday Afternoon Post

Jargon

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Late post today, sorry. I was up late diagnosing issues with the site, only to find out (around 4am my time, when Ash got up and helped out) I couldn’t actually do anything. Alas.

site-down

Searching for help in resolving a particular error was interesting, and paired with some other conversations I had earlier inspired today’s post. In searching for tips online, I had to filter through multiple pages giving tips like “repair the DB” and “try to resolve localhost”, without any indication whatsoever about what those actually mean. In my extremely-late-night mind fog, I was having trouble remembering how to do those things, and it got me thinking about how the language (and lack of details) was getting in my way.

A professor of mine once described jargon as “a shorthand language used to create haves and have-nots”, and separated it from professional shorthand while noting that the two look very similar. Jargon is useful when time-to-communicate is a valuable factor, but this is surprisingly rare. We’re in love with efficiency of communication, but I’ve commented before that we have a very reductive culture surrounding it, and I think that we often think we’re making communication faster and more efficient when what we’re actually doing is denying access to anyone who isn’t as in-the-loop as we are.

What I find interesting is what happens when two different types of jargon collide. I’ve spent a lot of time around highly technical people, and the idea of impenetrable technical jargon among engineers is pretty well known. What I’ve been discovering lately, as I delve deeper into business, is the jargon that exists in the business world, that’s every bit as complicated and detailed as the technical jargon.

3d18da9

If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking at the above image and alternately laughing or rolling your eyes. What’s really interesting to me is that every single one of these terms is functional, useful business shorthand that often gets used to exclude non-business types, in the exact same way technical jargon is. It’s used and misused in all of the same ways, and from the other side, the use of highly technical jargon gets the same not-always-so-gentle mockery as “business-speak” does.

What I wonder about is how the functionality of the two different types of jargon interact. One is operating on a (mostly) macro level, another is (mostly) operating on a micro level. An engineer can, after several minutes of someone being unable to process the language being used, just push their audience aside and say “look, let me just do it”. The same is not true in business, generally speaking– the jargon is used as shorthand for very large, slow processes and in many cases are more about applied psychology than technical skill– something that many people like to think they’re immune to and will resist as a matter of course if they see it in action.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do in my own communication is to be very precise with my choice of words, avoiding both technical and business jargon unless it’s precisely applicable and I know the person I’m talking to is aware of what I mean. It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do, because the coded languages we use get very deeply ingrained.



Source: Digital Initiative
Jargon