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There is an old game development philosophy, now considered outdated, that suggests that players should have to ‘earn’ their fun in a game. It’s the source of the “grind”, and it’s where the idea of pitifully weak low-level characters who grow to be powerful comes from. A lot of games have their really fun, exciting levels a little ways in, and in older arcade games, you’d have to be really good or pump in a lot of quarters to reach them.

You can pretty easily see when and where it fell out of favor, and in which genres. RPGs made you work your way through quite a bit of experience before you had interesting abilities and weapons. First-person shooters made you go through several levels with very simple weapons before you got to play with anything really cool. MMORPGs would make you spend weeks or months fighting boars and wolves before getting powerful enough to even fight an enemy of a player race, much less something big like a griffon or dragon.

I’ve seen this elsewhere as well– I’ve talked before about certain TV shows having really slow or confusing opening episodes, which set up significant payoffs later on down the line. It’s something I’ve noticed an incredible amount of in anime, and while I don’t watch as much American TV, quite a few people I know who watch a lot of it tell me the same is true there. Bel commented over the weekend that he doesn’t decide if he likes a show or not until four or five episodes in at least, and it’s a rule I’ve adopted for anime as well.

There’s a flip side to the concept of “earning” enjoyment out of a piece of entertainment. If you’re invested in an experience, you’re a lot more likely to enjoy it, and if you have to work to get that investment, you’re going to value it more. It’s a fairly straightforward bit of psychology that crops up pretty much everywhere, and it’s fairly clear here as well. Things that are easy to get into are also easy to get out of; the games and shows I remember the most about are the ones I had to do some work to get invested in, whereas the easy shows don’t tend to stick with me as much.

As an example, I can’t really remember much about what happens in Azumanga Daioh, despite liking that show quite a bit when I watched it. It was easy to sit down and watch and while I have a vague recollection of it and I know it’s relatively simple, I can’t recall specifics even on rewatching episodes. On the other hand, in rewatching Baccano recently, I realized that I remembered pretty much everything that happened in the show, and with a brief memory jog could name characters and even specific scenes. Baccano is a much more complex, much less accessible show, and I had to put some effort into it. The payoff was fantastic, and it’s one of my favorite shows, but it requires that effort– that investment– to get the most out of it. Its spiritual successor, Durarara, had a similarly slow first episode, but once I got into it I was absolutely hooked, and it’s propelled itself easily into my top list of favorite shows.

I find myself seeking that investment in my entertainment– I want shows and games that I need to put a bit of effort into before they pay off. It’s something I’ve recently realized drives a lot of my interests; a lot of people like entertainment that they describe as “a way to turn my brain off”, and I’ve very rarely enjoyed that kind of experience. A lot of my friends are playing Diablo again recently, and it’s a game I’ve tried to like but don’t really enjoy most of the time– not because it isn’t fun, but because I don’t find it engaging and I get bored. In a similar vein, when I load up a new stealth game, I tend to crank the difficulty all the way up. I’d wondered why I do this, but it fits nicely into the idea of investing in the experience. It makes the game harder, so I have to work at it, and as a result I enjoy it more, because my victories feel more real. When I play minis games, I’ve put in the effort to acquire, assemble, and often paint the models I have, and in most cases I’ve constructed themes and narratives around them, so they feel weighty and meaningful.

FFXIV has an incredibly slow start compared to other recent MMOs– it’s a LONG time before you’ve got a variety of cool abilities and even have the basic mechanics of the game unlocked– it’s level 30 at least, sometimes later, and your class doesn’t feel like a complete concept until 50 in many cases. There’s a ton of mandatory story and a lot of things you simply have to do in order to progress. One of the criticisms levelled at Heavensward was that you had to play through the entire story of the game, including all of the main story content patches, just to even access the expansion content. For a lot of people, this was a wall that they had to climb to get into the new, cool areas they just paid for. However, the story of FFXIV is so central to the experience that a lot of what happens in Heavensward would be either nonsensical or have no impact if you could skip all of that content. The game forces you to invest some time (and, to be fair, rewards you fairly well if you’d not previously done it) so that you’re in a position to appreciate the new content.

I’m tempted to say I’m torn on this– that on the one hand I really do value the experiences I didn’t instantly love but came to enjoy a lot more than the ones I liked from the start, but that I also despise grinding and doing repetitive, grindy content just to “get to the fun part”. I’m really not torn at all, though. The investment is valuable, it just needs to be applied properly. The show has to be well-written, or the game well-designed, so that there is a satisfying payoff after you put in the investment. It’s got to feel like your time and effort are respected.

There’s a certain amount of trust that goes into it as well. You’ve got to be willing to trust that this thing you’re experiencing that seems like utter crap right now is going to all be worthwhile later. It’s a tall order, because we’re so inundated with quick, thoughtless entertainment experiences that aren’t trying to be thought-provoking or offer any payoff other than the immediate. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of entertainment– it has its time and its place– but it’s very difficult to tell off the bat whether you’re dealing with something shallow or something deep until you’ve put a bit of time into it.

This isn’t to say that all meaningful, thought-provoking entertainment experiences have to be obtuse and inaccessible at first; what I *am* torn about is whether that’s a good idea. While it certainly forces me to put effort in, it’s also really good at losing me. I have to go digging for the hook, and sometimes it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a hook to find.

That having been said, my track record thus far with shows I haven’t liked at first but have put effort into is really great. Of the shows I’ve watched at least four episodes of this year, there’ve been two that I’m not enthused about watching more of, out of twenty or thirty by now. It’s a really good track record. Games have been starkly less good, though I think a lot of that is because my feelings on playing games has been changing since I stopped working on them, but it’s easy to fall into old “force yourself to play” habits.

Part of me is looking at the new Metal Gear Solid game– a series I haven’t played in a decade by now, and wondering if it’s worth the investment. Certainly I know a lot of people who are very into that series, and while it seems like inaccessible nonsense from the outside, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a solid (ha!) payoff for the invested player. I’ve got other games to play right now, and no disposable income for an MGS game, but still, I wonder.

[Another installment of Short Fiction Friday, about a few NPCs from my current Shadowrun campaign. This and all future entries will be written on the spot, please forgive a lack of editing, this is all one pass. Enjoy! If you like the art, while I’ve used it for my NPCs, credit goes to http://tapastic.com/series/fisheye — the comic that’s the source of these characters.]

Alice missed crème brûlée. Once a month, if she’d gotten good grades, her parents would take her out to a fancy restaurant in Harvard Square Upper. She would read the menu, read about the restaurant in wonder as she always had. It was called Finale, and according to the story in the menu, it had been around for almost 75 years. It had vanished in the mid 2020s, but had been revitalized a decade later by an elf who’d remembered it from his college years. She loved the story, that a restaurant could have such history and endure through so much, and she’d always happily read it, pretending to her parents that she was deciding what she wanted to order, then order the crème brûlée, like she always did. While she waited for it to come, she’d look around the restaurant.

Finale sat on the edge of the massive plate atop which the higher-class citizens of Boston lived. Its awe-inspiring view drew Alice’s parents, but she was always more interested in the interior. It had beautiful glass chandeliers and glasses in interesting shapes, and she didn’t like the reminder that she lived atop a massive plate over the rest of the city, she just wanted to enjoy her dessert. Her parents would get something her dad called “ice wine”, but it wasn’t anything like the heavy, sour red wine they otherwise drank. It was a clear, peach color, and if she’d been really good and gotten really good grades, she’d get a little taste. It was sweet, but hinted at flavors she was still too young to really understand. She’d found it, once, on a job at some posh businessman’s apartment. It was the same as what her father always ordered, and seeing the price tag on the bottle reminded her of everything she’d given up. She’d never be able to afford even a glass of it, much less a bottle. She hadn’t been able to resist having a taste.

Ken was the one who’d figured out what she’d done, a few days later. She’d left DNA evidence on the bottle when she’d had a sip, and it’s how the police got information on them. She never figured out how he knew; that was his knack– knowing things. Alice’s knack was a lot less subtle. She was good with the elements. Her instructors at school called her a “pyromantic prodigy”, and she’d quickly spread from fire to other elements. She’d been told that people who were particularly gifted with one element generally had a hard time learning an opposing one, and she took it as a challenge. Just to prove a point, she passed her second level apprenticeship tests as an aquamancer, three years earlier than the school had ever seen before, using an element diametrically opposed to what she’d seemed most attuned to. Prodigy was an understatement. Her parents had been thrilled, particularly when she’d been invited to the Oxford Academy for Gifted Magi at an unprecedented age. She’d gotten to eat TWO crème brûlées that time.

Oxford was far away, a boarding school, and Alice was initially terrified of the place. It didn’t help that, at age twelve, she was younger than almost every other student there. There was only one student younger than she was, an electromancer named Nicholas, who wanted everyone to just call him Nick. He was eleven, and the two of them bonded quickly. Nick was cheerful and vibrant, and Alice enjoyed his company. Together they weathered some awkward years, as they both grew into teenagers. She was there for Nick’s first heartbreak at the hands of another boy, and he helped her work up the courage to approach a slightly older student and ask him to a school dance.

The older boy was named Ken, a mage like the two of them. Alice never had to ask the question; she just walked up to Ken and he looked straight at her and said “Yes, I’d love to go with you”. It was a shock, and her expression must have given something away, because Ken was almost immediately just as flustered, apologizing for being too forthright and looking abashed. He explained later that it was his knack, knowing things, but that sometimes– particularly when he was nervous– he had trouble remembering what he was already supposed to know and what he wasn’t. After the initial awkwardness, Alice and Ken became fast friends, and Nick helped Alice pick out her dress. A little later, he helped her pick out a second dress, a much fancier, much more elegant one. When she asked why, he winked and grinned. “For prom… eventually, you know? Ken’ll love it.”

Alice, Nick, and Ken became fast friends at Oxford, and Alice learned more about their histories. Nick was from a poor family, and Nick’s penchant for accidentally damaging their limited electronics meant that they put him in a foster program for mages very young. He’d proven he had incredible talent, and Oxford had picked him up, offering him a free ride. He’d taken it, knowing it was his only hope to get out of poverty. Ken didn’t talk much about his family, but Alice had pieced together that something horrible had happened to them, and that he was at Oxford because he’d somehow survived whatever had happened and was paying for it with inheritance money. Alice introduced the other two to her parents when they came to visit, and they became her companions during breaks, spending it at their parents’ home in Boston.

It was on one of those visits that things took a turn for the worse. Nick was having trouble in classes, and Alice and Ken were trying to teach him. Frustrated and defeated by the advanced electromancy skills he was supposed to have mastered (and that Alice had been able to effortlessly pick up while studying with him), he revealed that he only had a middling talent with electricity. He confessed that it had been a front the entire time– his real talent wasn’t elemental at all. He could dive into the wireless Matrix and manipulate it, changing things like a masterful hacker, entirely without any sort of equipment. He was a technomancer. His parents had kicked him out of the house when they’d found out that he was “some kind of freak mage”, and no one he’d spoken to had any idea what kind of magic he had. People were suspicious, and whenever anything inexplicably went wrong while he was around, anyone who knew his power would cast blame his direction. He used the computers at Alice’s home to show off a bit of what he was capable of, showing them some internal corporate memos that he was able to seemingly conjure from nothing.

Ken’s response was immediate. His gaze from behind his glasses became glassy, the look Alice had come to associate with Ken’s unique form of magic. Almost dreamily, he spurred the other two to action, getting them to grab their bags, still only partially unpacked, and move. They’d learned to listen when Ken got this way, and followed his instructions. He got the two of them out of the house mere moments before a corporate black ops team descended on Alice’s home. Chased by the sounds of gunfire and rising flames over her once home, Alice’s life was shattered, and she and her only two friends vanished into Boston. After a life of living in the sunshine, above the Boston Plate, Alice disappeared into the Boston underworld, the shadowy world beneath the Plate.

–to be continued–