Topics

1

Discussion / SCIENCE!

« on: December 19, 2018, 04:04:45 PM »

So...I guess in the past I haven't made a science topic, because pop-science is trash (pro tip, you can ignore news headlines that say stuff like "a new study shows asparagus causes cancer!!1!1") and the kind of science I studied in university is...old; I figure people can look that stuff up in textbooks or encyclopedias if they want.

But recently I've actually been outright reading blogs by scientists, summaries of research papers, or even outright research papers.  From 2018 (*gasp*).

So...let's give this a try.

Two results that jumped out to me recently.

Mitochondrial DNA has traditionally been thought to only be inherited from the mother, but a case was found recently where it was inherited from both parents:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/dads-mitochondrial-dna/

This second one...I genuinely found hard to believe so I ended up reading the whole paper; I'm still a little skeptical because these are some extraordinary claims:

https://www.athensjournals.gr/history/2018-1-X-Y-Sweatman.pdf

Basically the result they found is that cave paintings and statues in Europe up to 40,000 years ago had astrological signs represented (OK sure) that there's thousands of years of continuity in these zodiac signs--some of them lasting till the present day, but most lasting at least until Göbekli Tepe (surprising, but alright) and that people at the time knew about the procession of the equinoxes that happens roughly once every 2000 years, and used this as a method for marking dates.  (Um, wait really?)  But they manage to show this with...at least they claim relatively high precision (Four animal pictures in cave paintings they will generally interpret as the zociac signs for the four equinoxes, and then they can use this to predict the date of the site, which...apparently in all but one case matched perfectly with the carbon dated date).  They also claim to understand the significance of Göbekli Tepe--one of the earliest religious sites and a large stone monument, which has confused scientists for a while since people living at the time were nomadic hunter gatherers so why build a huge stone monument?  (They claim it's a monument to the Younger Dryas event, which was a return to ice age weather a thousand years after the end of the previous ice age).

EDIT: Alright, sounds like I was right to be skeptical about this one; my followup with AskAnthropology points out some stuff like the authors of this study are an associate professor of engineering, and a postdoc, neither of them in anthropology or archeology:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/a7nyrt/so_i_read_this_paper_by_sweatman_and_coombs_and/

2

General Chat / Song selection topic for "Kaitlyn's Song of the Week"

« on: August 26, 2016, 04:34:51 AM »

So...every week I listen to lots and lots of music at work (forcing myself to listen to only music that has a music video or lyric video that came out this week).  I pick out the six best, or six that stand out the most to me, and then run it past anyone who wants to comment in the DL (usually Alex and Grefter, sometimes Gate--anyone who wants to comment on music is welcome).  These comments are an important filter step, since at work I don't watch the videos, and only half listen to the words, so sometimes I've been listening to a hilariously inappropriate video >_>.  Collectively we pick out one song/video, which gets emailed to my family, and posted on the DL with a brief writeup:

http://www.rpgdl.com/KSotW/index.php

(People have been saying for ages that I should make a new topic for this, rather than using the 2.5-year-old planning topic so here it is).



-------



Anyway, this week's finalists--anyone who wants to: listen to all six, and comment on which ones you feel I should pick/not pick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiUibQxWgik
Jidenna

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y95B-dZ32uQ
Pentatonix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giKRecwNJxM
Johnathan Young ft Malinda Kathleen Reese

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ_GIRTTRaA
Bambino

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud6p20uxmOk
Santigold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzx0d3pZbdA
Sammus

3

Discussion / I might be DMing a 5e game; plans so far

« on: July 03, 2016, 04:45:02 PM »

(Planning on running this for my coworkers, probably; here's my first draft.  First post will be the stuff I give to the players; next post will be some NPCs and stuff)

The setting is as follows: a standard D&D world with magic, D&D races, etc.  Much of the planet worships The Great Cthulhu, many indirectly through its herald, the Silver Shepherd.

Clerics of the Silver Shepherd
Clerics of the Silver Shepherd wish to feed and foster life on the planet, bring about world peace, and preserve as much life as possible.  This is the largest "Lawful Good" group.

Falken Necromancers
This chaotic evil faction opposes law and order, and claim obvious heresy such as "Cthulhu is a tentacle monster that wants to eat this world!  The Clerics of the Silver Shepherd are fattening you all up!"

Druids (and other religions)
Druids have long memories.  They remember a time when Cthulhu was not worshiped on this planet, and are naturally mistrustful of those who claim Cthulhu is the "one true god."  But they are at peace with the Clerics of the Silver Shepherd who seem to preserve life and the forest.  (As are many other older religions).

Warlocks of Cthulhu
This group is seen as a bit old-fashioned.  Historians claim they were the ones who brought the good word of Cthulhu to this planet.  But Cthulhu is so wise and so great that communing with it directly seems to prove...perilous for mortal minds.  Most prefer to worship the Silver Shepherd.

Paladins of the Silver Shepherd
"Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Therefore: the prime directive of these paladins is to slay the most powerful to ensure peace.  They hunt down the Falken Necromancers, all varieties of dragons, Warlords who seek to conquer, etc.

The secular populace
Bards, Rogues, shopkeepers, town guards, Barbarians, and Sorcerers, oh my.  Much of the population cares little for religion, but benefits from the peace and food it brings.  A few people would like more power for themselves, but fear (and resent) the Paladins of the Silver Shepherd who would interfere.

---

Party alignment--unlike most D&D campaigns where running with an evil-aligned party members is off-limits, evil alignment might be an option if, for example, the party decides that Cthulhu and its followers must be destroyed at all costs.  (This would open up NPC classes such as Oathbreaker Paladin and Death Cleric).  What will be more important is party consensus--there will probably come a decision point in the campaign, where the party will choose between law and chaos: try to pick characters who could be swayed to either side.

4

Discussion / Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

« on: February 13, 2016, 09:46:39 AM »

So...a few things recently I found interesting.

First, the DNC chair on democratic superdelegates who don't represent any voters said this:

Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.

Um >_>

Meanwhile, this has been going on for months, but only really surfaced now--I was under the impression that Obama really hadn't done much on campaign finance reform...but it turns out that's not true; he did stop the Democrats from having a PAC for the democrat party:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dnc-allowing-donations-from-federal-lobbyists-and-pacs/2016/02/12/22b1c38c-d196-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_dnc-1100am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Aaaand the DNC is already breaking Obama's reform before he even leaves office.

5

Discussion / MOVED: Hey guys!

« on: December 09, 2014, 04:51:26 PM »

This topic has been moved to General Chat.

http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=6622.0

6

Discussion / Thoughts on gamergate

« on: November 11, 2014, 11:54:11 AM »

Note: I make assumptions that people reading this post are pretty intelligent (which most of the regulars on this forum are).  I would advise against linking this post to random people on the internet.


Gamergate on the whole, while it has not directly affected me, has been a bit of an emotional drain on me as it has affected game industry friends around me.  And for better or for worse I've been reading a lot about it.  Misinformation has been floating around, and also just an extraordinary amount of fluff.  Things do seem to be winding down now, though, so I'm collecting my thoughts.

Origins and Zoe Quinn

Most likely everyone is familiar with the basic story now; Zoe Quinn, who is an indie developer, and who has been in the news even last year (when in December 2013 the internet got angry about...I actually don't know what they were angry about that time; possibly just her game).  Anyway, this time, turns out she was cheating on her boyfriend.  Boyfriend posts about the infidelity.  And suddenly there's a mob of angry people on the internet.

So a little bit of context:

https://medium.com/@srachel_m/gamergate-launched-in-my-apartment-and-internet-im-sorry-not-that-sorry-13e5650fd172

This is a woman who is friends/acquaintances with Zoe and the boyfriend.  She suffered from some serious sexual harassment herself in the workplace, recognized similar emotional patterns in the boyfriend, and encouraged him to make the post.

And the general evidence on the internet points towards Zoe being...not very nice.  (For the Grefters who like psychological analysis, there is literally hours of analysis on the original chat logs).

That said, being not very nice is...not illegal, and not justification for death threats, and does not imply widespread corruption of videogame journalism.

Internet propagation and 4 chan

So...this is a Cracked article written by Zoe herself.  Most of this is stuff that is well-known; harassment happened.  The one interesting point to me is point #5:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/

4 chan, or sites like it, have been known to organize campaigns in the past, trying to get hashtags trending by making fake feminist twitter accounts.  Zoe has been vocal about certain elements within the movement (such as #notyourshield) being planned and executed on 4 chan (complete with screenshots she took).

Meanwhile, Jennifer Allaway states that gamergate formed like a hate group, and at the time of writing, continued to operate like a hate group, detailing the recruitment tools, the way propaganda is framed to the outside world, etc.:

http://jezebel.com/gamergate-trolls-arent-ethics-crusaders-theyre-a-hate-1644984010

Ethics in Video Game Journalism

Despite "actually it's about ethics in video game journalism" becoming this year's punchline...there are indeed people who care about ethics in video game journalism.

Well...two camps really.  There's one camp that cares about feminism in video game journalism and wants it removed.  And another group that legit cares about ethical breaches.  The first camp honestly comes across as the louder camp, but doesn't really present much that I find worth discussing.  The second group:

http://blueplz.blogspot.com/2014/10/whose-side-am-i-on.html

Totalbiscuit here rambles on for quite a while, but nicely encapsulates a lot of ethical concerns in the massive third-to-last paragraph.  Now, Totalbiscuit is someone I've been familiar with for several years now due to his involvement in the SC2 community; I've seen no sign of him being a misogynist; quite the opposite if anything.  But what's interesting is combining this with Jennifer Allaway's research above.  She describes hate groups as needing a leader to get started, and the effective leadership of gamergate passing a couple of times.  So what happens when someone who is not hateful becomes a key leader of the movement?  Because certainly it seemed like that was what was happening...to a certain degree.  There were some people actively pushing back against Totalbiscuit, and certainly gamergate forums tended to contain plenty of "Mens Rights Activists".

Although that would be baseless speculation as of today, since within the last day, Totalbiscuit decided that it would be better to pursue the same ethical concerns without using the hashtag:

http://blueplz.blogspot.com/2014/11/i-spoke-to-david-rosen-of-wolfire-and.html

Impact on people in the game industry

The mood has been generally negative.  More women than usual have been talking about considering a new line of work.  I very much like this article on tackling the issue of recruiting and retaining female talent:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LaralynMcWilliams/20141030/229072/Shes_Not_Playing_It_Wrong.php

Feminism vs other social justice causes

Something I observed a while back that I thought was odd: 12 years ago, I could post something feminist on GameFAQs and it would not be an issue.  The reaction would be "Huh, you're one of those feminist people; I've heard that people like you exist."  The reaction is roughly what I would expect if I were to announce on a board that I had a nose ring.  "Interesting.  I'd never do that myself."

Lately the reaction has been very different, and much more negative.  If I post something feminist on a game forum like Reddit, I expect to get downvoted to roughly -15 or -20.  By comparison, something I've noticed at least on Starcraft forums (which does contain a few popular transgender personalities) is that positive transgender stuff tends to get upvoted, and transphobic stuff tends to get downvoted.  Similarly, I've notice that internet gaming forums tend to overall be very much in support of gay marriage.  This is all anecdotal, of course, but general internet mood is what leads to things blowing up rather than not being a big deal on the internet.

The #notyourshield hashtag is interesting, in that it is an anti-feminist tag, but the statements made within it are often of the form of "I'm a minority other than white female, and mainstream feminists have not been representing me well."  Which...naturally evolved into bringing some attention to Disability representation, and Transgender representation in games.  Not exactly what I would expect out of what is undeniably a pro-gamergate anti-feminism tag.  It is also noteworthy that the guy who runs 8-chan is a disabled man, and is pretty much universally liked (hell, from the one interview I heard, I liked him too; seemed like a reasonable guy).

But it does feel like some kind of bizarre universe, where people don't support things that everyone supported when I was 10 (like feminism), but do make statements on Albeism.

7

General Chat / Gauging of interest on music review thingey

« on: January 25, 2014, 07:56:49 AM »

EDIT: this is a thing that exists now:
http://www.rpgdl.com/KSotW/


So...last time I saw Ciato, she commented that the topic I did on country/pop/kpop lyrics had basically turned into a review topic for recent pop music, and that I should keep doing pop music reviews.

And...actually I did start writing about music regularly, just...not on the DL or public on the internet at all.  I started an email series pretty much just to a few family members as "Kaitlyn's song of the week"--which was generally chosen between music I had listened to in the past week, and generally limited to music that was new (came out within the past month usually--or at minimum I hadn't heard the piece before).  The "new" restriction was in part to force me out of my comfort zone, and get me not just pulling music out of a nostalgia hat.

So anyway, I figured my interest would wane pretty fast and I'd stop sending the emails, hence a pretty non-committal choice to hit a small audience (of like 8 people) but I've been doing these since August, and I haven't missed a week yet.  Not only that, I've had some successes where I predicted popular culture before it happened (I caught "The Fox" by Yvlis when it had 40k views, and predicted it would become a thing, picked it for the week #hipster).  And some failures too, of course.

But at any rate, I'm thinking about taking the "Kaitlyn's song of the week" series public.  Which is kind-of weird to me, since...while I know more about popular music than my 60-year-old parents, the internet has a way of making me feel dumb in music discussions.  Still, seems to be something I'm going to continue researching and writing about every week so...maybe it's worth-it?


Stuff I'm curious about:

1. Would the DL read these?
2. The super lazy way would be to just start copy/pasting my emails onto the forums.  The slightly less lazy way would be to make a sub-website like FE.php with some handy stuff like navigating by week and pretty layouts.  Which...really isn't very much additional work (and it'd be one-time work; once it was implemented, it would still be pretty much a copy/paste).
3. Assuming the marginally more ambitious plan, should I continue to solo it, or collaborate with others on the DL who, undoubtedly, have better musical taste than I do?

8

General Chat / Language learning scratch topic

« on: September 14, 2013, 09:09:20 AM »

So...I'm starting to get a bit more serious about learning korean, and I kind of want to quiz myself, and see if I actually know how to spell some of these words outside of just hearing them and can spell them without cheating.  In theory, I know the audio of most of these words, and the korean alphabet is 100% phoenetic so I shouldn't get any of these wrong, right?  Right?  (So not happening)

So...let's see...

thank you

감사 (informal)
감사합니아 (formal)
고마와 ok no, wrong spelling/pronounciation
고마워

and...ok, totally missing some variations; let me cheat sheet... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POz6web6h_4

missing:
고마워요 (just add yo)
감사해요 (just add hey-yo)
고맙습니다 (ok, 습니다 is a super common polite ending, but wth did the ㅂ come from?)

I don't know

멀라 ha, wrong
몰라
나몰라

best

장 nope, wrong.
짱

awesome/big win

대백 (wrong)
대박

king

왕
And combining it with the above...
왕대박 (for super special awesome)

Who

누구
(and the phrase "with whom?")
누구하고
(formalized
누구하고요

foreigner

외국인

love

사랑
사랑해 (I love you)
사랑해요 (formal I love you)
사랑흡니다 (super formal)

what?

무엇
(let's see if I can remember "what to eat"
무엇모지 (not even close to the right spelling)
뭐목지 (for all that google translate doesn't believe in this one)

when?

언재 lolll screw the stupid ㅔ /ㅐ vowels.  They sound exactly the same to me, and I've seen videos by korean speakers who say "these sound the same to me."
언제
(let's see if I can remember the phrase "when to meet")
언제말나가 (there's three things wrong with this; I can't even complain about double consonants)
언제만날까

where?

오디에
(where is it)
오디이소 (nope)
오디있어

why?

왜
(why are you acting like this)
왜그대 (wow, not even close to the right consonant)
왜그래

how?

어더개 lollll, right general sounds
어떻게

9

General Chat / mc's Pop/Country/K-pop topic.

« on: May 21, 2013, 05:40:52 AM »

With one or two notable exceptions.  Yes, I know: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis made a fantastic pop song called thrift shop.  I've sung it at Karaoke.  You should all listen to it on repeat if you haven't already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9mmhh_wvkA

And this says nothing about musical merits/complexity.  In a lot of cases I like the pop song better in the comparison for the music/arrangement, but find the lyrics worse.

Ok, that exception/caveat asside...



Country seems to much more consistently have songs that make me think "hey, wait, I actually want to listen to this" (a reaction that is usually reserved for parody songs like Wierd Al Yankovich).

For instance, take

In the I'm a slob category

(country)
Billy Currington - Pretty Good at Drinking Beer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShMNIWSsf8k

I wasn't born for diggin deep holes
I'm not made for pavin long roads
I aint cut out to climb high line poles
But I'm pretty good at drinkin beer

I'm not the type to work in a bank
I'm no good at slappin on paint
Don't have a knack for makin motors crank, no
But I'm pretty good at drinkin beer

[...]

I aint much for mowin thick grass
I'm too slow for workin' too fast
I don't do windows so honey don't ask
But I'm pretty good at drinkin' beer

Let's see...is there even a pop song that covers the same kind of topics?  I guess there's...

(pop)
Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDzO8gh5Cgo

And...I struggle to find lyrics that are worth quoting from this song.  I mean, I guess this section is decent

Tomorrow I'll wake up, do some P90X
Find a really nice girl, have some really nice sex
And she's gonna scream out
This is great
(Oh my god, this is great)

Yeah, I might mess around
And get my college degree
I bet my old man will be so proud of me
But sorry pops, you'll just have to wait

In the Destruction of Property category

(country)
Carrie Underwood - Before he Cheats
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAFvlknsT4U

I'm not even going to bother quoting this one, because the emotion in her voice is actually very important.  As I understand it, she writes songs based on personal experience.  Listening to it again with that little piece of information certainly made me react "holy fuck."

(pop)
Icona Pop - I love it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_q8L8Tksd8

You know what this reminds me of?  The Nihilists from The Big Lebowski.  And I think there's maybe something interesting philosophically here, where 90s generations are much less materialistic in a way--give them an internet connection--who needs anything else?  The thought of getting upset about a car being ruined is almost bizarre.


But...ok, maybe this isn't a fair comparison, there are pop songs that are sung from the heart, seemingly about personal experience.  Let's try this again.


emotional/personal experience category

(country)
Carrie Underwood--Think Before he cheats
(linked above)

Although, I feel like I should at least link another song, because it's not like Country has only one offering in this category

(bonus country song)
Reba Mcentire - Fancy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzsWaEs_dNc

In the area of pop, the pickings are a bit more thin, but this one struck me as emotionally plausible for a normal human being

(pop)
Demi Lovato - Heart Attack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdlEGQk_8TE

So like...here's the weird thing about comparing the Demi Lovato song to the Carrie Underwood song.  Carrie Underwood is blatantly breaking the law, and I find myself cheering her on.  Demi Lovato's song is literally about wearing extra makeup so that the guy she's interested in won't notice her blush, and yet she still somehow comes across as someone you don't want to root for at all:

When I don’t care
I can play ‘em like a Ken doll
Won’t wash my hair
Then make 'em bounce like a basketball

The shake your posterior category

Let me preface this category by saying that it IS a total fluff category, and that's kind of what you should expect from the songs.

(country)
Country girl - Luke Bryan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEUCuX5cFRA

Ok, on the one hand this loses some points with me for

Shake it for the young bucks sitting in the honky-tonks
For the rednecks rocking 'til the break of dawn
The DJ spinning that country song
Come on, come on, come on

Which is like total branding of "this is a song for cowboys."  Then again, it's no worse to me than using the word Nigger, which is equally exclusionary, and even more awkward if I ever want to sing it as karaoke.

On the other hand...

Shake it for the catfish swimming down deep in the creek
For the crickets and the critters, and the squirrels
Shake it to the moon, shake it for me girl

We have CATFISH.  And Squirrels.  SQUIRRELS!

I'm also fairly fond of this line

Spin me around this big ole barn
Tangle me up like grandma's yarn

(pop)
Kanye West - Mercy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybK4KTzVzp4

Ok, this isn't a dedicated shake song, so let's just focus on the lyrics that are.

Drop it to the floor, make that ass shake
Whoa, make the ground move, that's an ass quake
Built a house up on that ass, that's an ass state
Roll my weed on it, that's an ass tray

These lyrics make me kinda uncomfortable.


Nerd Cred category

(country)
Mark Wills - 19 something
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkB2-5ic7S8

So let's see...

Star Wars
Pac Man
Stretch Armstrong
Rubix Cube

Pop, whatcha got for that?

Lady Gaga - Bad Romance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVnSV6jvraE

I want your psycho, your vertical stick
Want you in my rear window, baby, you're sick

Some easy to miss Alfred Hitchcock references, that we wouldn't want to be too obvious, oh no.  Then people might realize we're a nerd.


Religious references

(country)
Billy Currington - People are Crazy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv3ujzEC6jg

We talked about God's grace and all the hell we raised
Then I heard the ol' man say
God is great, beer is good and people are crazy

You know, you'd think religious references in country would be unpalatable extremist southern baptist references, but not so much.  On the other hand....

(pop)
Don't you worry child - Sweedish House Mafia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shQ5Gvb4xgM

I still remember how it all changed.
My father said,
"Don't you worry, don't you worry, child.
See heaven's got a plan for you.

O....kay.  The wheels of heaven/fate will direct your life.  Really pop?



But surely, surely country has a song of letting religion take over your life?  Hmm...well I can think of one song...

(country)
Carrie Underwood - Jesus Take the Wheel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_OpRlUZQoI

See, this actually strikes me as a much more reasonable point in your life to turn to religion.  You haven't been taking your life in a great direction, and also the car your driving is about to crash with your baby in it.  And so you say to yourself "I need help, I need all the help I can get, please give me a chance to turn my life around."  For all that it is a very unapologetically religious song, you can re-wrap the story in non-religious terms and have it sound sensible.  (She had a near-death experience and promised to turn her life around).

Whereas Sweedish House Mafia, hell if I know what's going on in that song.


Let's get some action category

(pop)
Get Lucky - Daft Punk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psP5xGSl-Xc

Shiny shiny daft punk song.  Of course, as you might expect, there's not much to it lyrically, but I am excited that it's getting radio play.  Here let me sumarize the entire song.

She's up all night 'til the sun
I'm up all night to get some

(country)
Rain is a Good Thing - Luke Bryan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vogS-Fp2QVI

Rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey
Whiskey makes my baby feel a little frisky

So...let me summarize this.  Getting laid plan:

Pop:
1. stay up late
2. ???
3. Get Lucky

Country:
1. Wait for rains
2. Use rain to Grow Corn
3. Turn corn into Whiskey
4. ???
5. Get Lucky

I am much more entertained by Country's method.

10

Game Design and Modifications / Game Design Theory -- Pt 3: Player Psychological Types (and The Big Five)

« on: April 02, 2012, 05:15:18 AM »

Alright, so a lot of the stuff I'm going to talk about is quite cutting-edge in psychological game design, and the research is literally still in-progress.  (In fact, I was just a research guinea pig a couple of hours ago).

Short version--I know a lot of you are familiar with stuff like the Myers Briggs (y'know, ENTJ and all that).  Now, it turns out that the Myers Briggs test is owned by a corporation, who won't let outside research psychologists make changes to it.  Most research psychologists in motivational psychology today are working on a model called The Big Five--and there's mountains of research done on it, and how it varies across genders and across cultures.  Which means...well, I know how popular personalty tests are on the DL, so I'm just going to link this before people TL;DR

http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/

Take test, post scores, whee!


------------------------

So...here's where it gets interesting.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/165358/gdc_2012_applying_psychology_.php

And if you want to look through the slides:

http://www.darklorde.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/5_Domains_of_Play_GDC2012.pdf
http://www.darklorde.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/5_Domains_of_Play_GDC2012.pptx

Jason Vandenberghe started trying to see if there were some correlations between this model and the kinds of games people play and what kind of play they enjoy.  And he found out that yes: an extremely strong correlation exists.  Something like three or four test subjects in he was finding that he could predict what kind of games they would like to play and what aspects they would enjoy based on their test scores.

Interesting things too, like...people whose personality skews towards being an asshole, but that's not really socially acceptable, were saying things like "Well...in real life I'm actually really nice, but when I go online I grief and troll people all night."  Jason's metaphor is that basically "we're the Sims".  We have psychological meters that need filling, and sometimes games can fill these in ways that real life cannot.

So...the big five is five scores, and then 30 sub-scores.  The interesting thing is that they are all bell curves and have two extremes, and the people at each extreme are looking for different things.  This is to contrast with earlier player models, which looked something like...this:



This would be the famous Bartle types for MMO games, which probably many of you are familiar with.  Ever wondered--what's the opposite of an achiever?  Well...now we have an answer.  (One of the 30 sub-facets has one end of the spectrum as achievement-striving, and the other as contentment).  In fact, one way in which this is already changing the way we talk about game design, is that when someone says "players want X" the response becomes "well, yes, half of them do, but the other half want Y"


Now, this post is going to be a little devoid on specifics, because I've yet to use and apply the Big Five at all (just looked at it long enough to realize it plugs a lot of the holes apparent in other theories I've been using).  Like I said, relating the Big Five to game design is brand new and shiny and only barely tested research, and I'll be posting more as I figure stuff out.  I CAN, however, talk about player categorization systems, why they are useful, and how to apply them.



Player Categorization Systems

You can actually take people, in a lab setting, watching them play games, film their faces, and detect different emotional states.  Nicole Lazzaro's excellent research is definitely worth a read if you're interested in this:

http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf

And there's a big advantage if your game can achieve multiple different emotional states.  Because different people actually seek and enjoy different kinds of emotion.  Magic the Gathering has been doing this for years:

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11b

It has three player categories, and they actively intentionally design cards for each of the three categories.

Spike: people who care about winning, and showing off their skill
Johnny: people who want to make crazy card combos
Timmy: people who are looking for an interesting experience, and want a crazy story to tell

And...three years ago, this was the system I used when designing LFT (the FFT mod) with Laggy, as it was the best system I knew at the time.  Actually, let me go on a tangent to a tangent.

1.3 vs LFT (OMG, Hal's going to ban me for reopening this discussion)

FFT 1.3 does its best to appeal to the challenge crowd and does so explicitly at the expense of all the other archetypes.  Most of the combos from the original are dismantled (MP-Switch and Move MP Up were put one on Bard, one on Dancer, stuff like that).  A lot of the skills are homogenized as an experience--swordskills are given charge time and MP cost, for instance.

For LFT...we specifically aimed to target the other magic the gathering player types.  Instead of removing combos, we kept damn near every combo from the original, and intentionally added several more.  We left Orlandu basically in-tact, because while neither of us understood the appeal of Orlandu, when we observed other people talking about the game, they would say "Oh man, remember how awesome Orlandu was?"  We wanted to buff Knights, and neither of us were really into tanky melee characters, so we sought out people who WERE and had them tell us what kind of buffs felt satisfying to them.  At the same time we didn't completely throw challenge-seekers under the bus--we made the game a little harder and added some optional superbosses.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being laser-focused on a certain kind of player.  People who really skew towards that kind of psychological archetype are going to love your game.  There are people who think 1.3 is much better than LFT, because of their psychological inclinations.  At the same time, people have IMed me claiming that on the internet as a whole, LFT has spread further with broader appeal than 1.3--which is to be expected based on the psychological design decisions.  When you do a pretty good job of appealing to multiple psychological archetypes, you tend to reach a wider audience than when you do an excellent job of appealing to one psychological archetype.  The reverse of that is that I've seen people express the opinion that 1.3 is not only the best game ever but that it's lightyears ahead of anything on the market.  That's the kind of evangelism you can only get by laser focusing on a narrow audience.  (The highest praise LFT tends to get is "Well...FFT was already a 10/10 game for me, and LFT is generally an improvement, so I guess it's my new favourite?")


Player Categorization Systems

Which is to say, there isn't a one -correct- way to use these models.  Unless your goal is to make lots of money--in which case you want to appeal to the widest number of players possible.  But it is perfectly valid to laser-focus on one audience.  Where these models ARE really useful is helping you to understand players that aren't you.  Pretty much anyone can design a game that they would like.  But designing a game for a different audience is hard.  For instance, there are games designed for little girls, and since most developers are adult male computer nerds, presumably the people who made the game had no interest in playing the game.  How do you understand what's a good game design decision for someone that is not you?  It's hard.  And it's especially hard because a lot of the time people don't even REALIZE that not everyone thinks the same way they do.  But not only that, if your goal is to design for a wide audience, then you need to know a LOT of people who aren't you, and not only that but know that these people actually exist and what they want.

The Big Five

Which brings me back to one of the reasons I'm really quite excited about the big five, and how it's going to mesh with game design.  The 5 categories have been broken down into 30 subcategories, and some of these are very much off the radar for game designers.  When Jason interviewed me, one of the things we discussed was that I like silly characters--Yumei from Valkyrie Profile because she does the chicken dance, and Lilka Eleniak from Wild Arms 2 because she beats people up with an umbrella.  So he asks me "Would you anticipate a game that does something like this?"  And my response was "Well, I can only think of a few games with stuff like this, so if I did I wouldn't be anticipating very many games at all."  And he was like "Yeah, I think we as an industry have been overlooking some audiences."

Work in Progress

I'd love to now tell you exactly how each of the 30 facets of the big five relates to game design, but...that's still being figured out.  Jason's got some good ideas, but they're still changing and adapting rapidly as he gets more data.  I will, however, probably have several follow-up posts with my speculation about a lot of these categories.  (Well...either that or I'll go into crunch and you won't see me for several months ).

11

General Chat / Future tone of chat poll

« on: August 30, 2011, 02:23:11 PM »

Normally a poll like this would go into the "RPGDL Policy Discussion" forum, but all the talk has been going on in General Chat anyway, so I'm just going to stick this here for now; might move it to policy discussion later for archival purposes.

There's just been a vague observation that, actually, there might be some interest in a safe-for-work DL chat, and we're not sure how much interest.  So...this poll is just to get a rough headcount (which we somehow actually haven't done yet).

I'm not necessarily looking for discussion here (there's already been plenty of discussion) just looking to get a sense of demographics (because I like statistics ).

12

Game Design and Modifications / Game Design Theory -- Pt 2: The psychological state of Play

« on: July 30, 2011, 05:04:03 PM »

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php?page=2

Play is instinctual. In low stimulation environments where we are not actively pursuing activities related to food and shelter, people will begin playing by default. Strong feedback mechanisms in the form boredom or frustration prod us into action. Given a spare moment, we throw ourselves into playing with blocks or dolls as children and more intricate hobbies as adults. It is a sign of our need for meaningful stimulation that solitary confinement remains a vicious punishment for the most hardened criminals.1

The flip side is that we are rewarded for learning. The sensation that gamers term ‘fun’ is derived from the act of mastering knowledge, skills and tools. When you learn something new, when you understand it so fully you can use that knowledge to manipulate your environment for the better, you experience joy.

There is a reasonable amount of neuroscience available to support this claim. Edward A Vessel, a cognitive neuroscientist at the NYU Center for Neural Science writes:

“These “aha” moments, when a concept or message is fully interpreted and understood, lead to a flood of chemicals in the brain and body that we experience as pleasurable. It feels good to “get” it. The deeper the concept is, the better it feels when we are finally able to wrap our head around it.”

Upon the click of comprehension, a natural opiate called endomorphin, a messaging chemical in the brain similar in structure to morphine, is released. As humans, we are wired to crave new information constantly. In some sense, what you and I term curiosity can be interpreted as our brain looking for its next fix of deliciously fascinating information.

Ever seen one of those big colourful things from the 80s where they say "learning is fun"?  You know, these:



They weren't kidding.  Learning is fun.  Learning is like taking goddamn heroin.  Without any of the downsides.


Now, there's no question that people mean different things when they call games "fun" (I'm sure some of you have read Mark Rosewater's Timmy/Johnny/Spike), but I'd estimate that a good 70% of people, when they refer to "fun", they're referencing the psychological state of play.  And since the psychological state of play is the primary method of human learning (and mammal learning, for that matter), we can actually say that fun is literally learning.


And once we realize this, we get a large knowledgebase at our feet--namely, all the academic research done on Education.  We know, for instance...

People are highly resistant to un-learning things they already know (which is why you get nerd rage when you can't invert analog aiming in console games).

Learning works like a tree structure, with more advanced concepts being built on less advanced concepts.  You need to be able to jump before you can jump on a platform.  This also has implications for re-learning--if you're going to make people re-learn something, make them re-learn it at the top of a tree.  When you do something like invert people's aim controls, you not only disrupt their learned aiming skills at the base of the tree, but all the skills further up that tree branch too, like "aiming while moving, jumping, crouching, and shooting".

Synthesis is challenging.  People tend to compartmentalize their learning, like "I freeze blocks to get past those pits" and "I dig to get around those obstacles".  Thinking like this makes it very easy to miss moments when "I'd normally dig to get past this obstacle, but freezing is better."  Or, moments like "If I freeze over here, it will allow me to dig when I otherwise wouldn't be able to."

And so on (I don't have a degree in Education; others can probably fill you in more than I can).


So...knowing that we're trying to design something that maximizes people's play-state and learning, even if the learning is not directly applicable to anything in the real world, how do we do this?

One way is to make a system with a fixed number of rules but nearly unlimited depth, so that there's always something new to learn.  Chess or Go, for instance.  (I believe there are more books written about Go strategy than any other game in the world--clearly a lot to learn--and the game has, what, four rules?)  This appeals a lot to some people when done right, but has some downsides.  First, it's really hard to make these games.  Second, it's going to miss some audiences--the player needs a good deal of self-motivation to either network with people smarter than herself and learn their strategies, or desire to experiment and compare the effectiveness of various strategies knowing full well that most experiments will be failures from which she will learn little.

The second way is to just provide the player with lots of small easily-learnable chunks.  This will feed new players with a constant, unbroken stream of learning, but may lack replay value.  For an example, let's look at Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Star 1: reintroduces the basic jumping mechanics from 3D Marios.  Has some platforms that rise up and disappear (which may not have been in SMG1).  Has a boss that's...slightly different from past SMG bosses (although trivial if you're used to SMG bosses).

Saddle Up with Yoshi: makes you learn riding Yoshi, swinging from flowers as Yoshi, eating enemies as Yoshi, dragging large drawers with Yoshi's tongue, fluttering with Yoshi

Storming the Sky Fleet: Introduces Circular/Curl gravity (gravity that works like magnetism, where "down" takes you around the center of gravity).  Introduces phantom Marios that chase and try to kill you.  Also a bunch of things that haven't shown up yet like keys, various new enemies, colour-changing panels that you need to change from blue to yellow.

Spiny Control: introduces spitting things with Yoshi.  Makes you aim what you spit.  Makes you jump and spit.  Oh, and makes you fight a boss where you have to jump and spit while avoiding increasingly complex patterns.

Spin Dig 1:  Introduces Drill Mario.  Makes you use Drill Mario to drill to specific points on the other side of a planetoid (in increasingly complex ways, like drill sequences).  And...gives you a boss with boss patterns to learn.

Spin Dig 2: Introduces using Drill Mario in 2D situations, including stuff like bouncing off of 45 degree slopes.  Introduces Drill Timing, where you need to time your drill so that you don't hit electrical enemies on the other side.  Has a bit of a memory game going, where you need to remember the layout inside of the dirt to figure out where to drill.  Brings back the "collect 5 silver stars" mechanic.  Brings back the "kill a pirhana plant, get a massive vine" mechanic.

Flip Swap Galaxy: Introduces the "shake = platform change" mechanic, and makes you learn to deal with how that interacts with "shake = double jump".  Brings back some more enemies/obstacles.

Fluff Bluff Galaxy: introduces Cloud Mario.  Teaches you that Cloud Mario should fear water.  Brings back some enemies.

Fluff Bluff Galaxy 2: Intorduces this crazy jumping minigame where you're trying to score points by killing lots of enemies quickly and getting combos.  When to jump on enemies heads and when to run collect coins before they disappear.  Completely new skills to learn.

Fluff Bluff Secret: Brings back coin-hungry Lumas.  Makes you search for secrets.  Makes you do "grab this coin formation before it disappears".  Has a basically 2D Cloud Mario sequence.

Rightside Down Galaxy: throws you into a 2D Sequence where you can alter the direction of gravity by flipping switches.  Makes you do problem solving with this mechanic.  Introduces new enemies.  Brings back the fire flower.  Brings back burning through obstacles with the fire flower.  Requires wall jumping (or at least a backflip).  Brings back overhead 2D-Zelda style sequences.  Introduces sideways gravity right at the end.

Rightside Down Secret Star: Brings back "burn some boxes in time X".

Bowser Jr's Flotilla: New boss with new patterns to learn.  Brings back a bunch of old enemies like rotating firewheels.

Interspersed with all this, your spaceship is getting updated and you can learn where everything is, slowly growing your knowledge.  You get to learn a new world map system.  New and old characters get introduced.  Your brain is subconsciously learning new music.

Basically, SMG2 here gives the player new stuff to learn at every star (even the players who've played SMG1).  We can say, with quite a bit of quantifiable measurements to back us up, that the first world of Super Mario Galaxy 2 is "very fun".  (Or, a bit more rigorously, it's very good at creating the play psychological state).

I'm sure there's some skeptics who are saying "so all I have to do is throw 20 different minigames at people?", and no: that would fail badly as game design.  People are attracted to learning things that they feel will be relevant.  In Galaxy 2, the core jumping mechanics, the core navigation mechanics--a.k.a. the core skeleton of player knowledge--remains intact between all of these levels (no water level!!!!)  Even a lot of the new skills end up similar in player execution--Cloud Mario tends to jump and spin.  Shooting with Yoshi is a jump and spin.  The Flip Swap Galaxy is about jumping and spinning.  And with all these power-ups and mechanics there's the promise of "there will be more levels like this later, so you should really learn this mechanic".  All of this comes together to make the brain think "This is relevant information that I want to learn because it will help me later"--a necessary state-of-mind for learning.


Let me end by saying that you don't have to focus on the psychological state of play.  It's hard to imagine a game that would never once put the player into this psychological state, but there are definitely games where the primary focus is on other psychological states, like relaxation or competition or fear.  Certainly not every game has to be Galaxy 2, where the game completely bends over backwards and twists itself in half to give you steady shots of fun at least once per minute.  But that is also a viable game design direction, and something that's handy to have in your game design toolbox.

13

Game Design and Modifications / Game Design Theory -- Pt 1: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness

« on: July 08, 2011, 04:04:33 AM »

Well, I figure as long as this forum says "Game Design" I might as well throw in a game design topic or two.  If I actually finish what I start, I hope to gradually cover several topics in such a way as to be a useful reference.

-----------------------

TOPIC: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: These are used to make a game more compulsive and compelling.  In psychology labs, they are statistically more effective than any other measure at getting people to keep playing a game.  MMO developers and makers of Facebook games have put particular emphasis on these above everything else.  (Most likely you won't want to go that extreme, but these are still handy design tools).

REFERENCES: These are pretty hot topics right now, so...there's lots.

This one goes into a lot of good detail about the theory:
http://www.jonselin.com/uploads/Immersyve%20SRigby%20Talk_AGDC%202007.pdf

This has extremely little detail, but it's a TED talk and thus automatically entertaining:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
Bits and pieces of it have even hit classical news sources
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/15/video-game-design-psychology


-----------------------


The theory holds that motivation in the human brain is driven by three fundamental needs.  Competence (feeling like you're capable), Autonomy (feeling like you have choices), and Relatedness (receiving recognition from others).

COMPETENCE:
How often is the player's intended action the actual outcome?
How quickly do players feel they're on top of the in-game mechanics?  The in-game controls?
This extends to "my avatar was walking in a 3D space and fell off a cliff".  This extends to "I'm playing Portal 2, and it really looks like I should be able to make a portal on that wall, but I can't.  Screw this game!"
And yes, to be honest, the simpler and easier your game, the better you're likely to do on competence.

Examples of non-Competence:
Final Fantasy Tactics is a big offender here.  You need to use L and R keys to insert characters into the fight, which is non-obvious.  It's a 3/4 perspective where it's not clear which direction of the D-pad corresponds to which diagonal axis.  It throws a preponderance of mechanics at new players, and forces them to use many of them (like setting your orientation after you move--it's not like this is an optional extra that experts can turn on; even a brand new player has to do this after every move).

Note that different audiences are going to come in with different prior competencies.  For a fun example, I've heard it argued that if the Atari E.T. were released five years later, it would have been considered not that bad.  What E.T. did was context sensitive actions (i.e. "A button opens doors, talks, extends E.T.'s neck, uses tape recorder, etc depending on E.T.'s location") which at the time was horrifying inexplicable madness--no one could understand these controls!


AUTONOMY:
Players feeling like they have real choice.  Not only that, but that they are the cause of their actions.  (As opposed to, say, "I stepped forward and was entered into a cutscene where the main character punched the boss").  And measurably, the number of different game objects you can interact with (including levers, treasure chests, NPCs), the number of different modes of gameplay you can go into.  (This is why GTA offers 50 dumb minigames rather than doing one thing very well).

Examples of non-Autonomy
I'm going to skip the obvious "games with lots of FMV and forced linear paths without customization" examples, and jump straight to Portal.  (minor spoilers).  In Portal, there's a scene where GLaDOS forces you to do something that you emotionally really doesn't want to do--destroy an inanimate cube to which the player has grown attached.  There's no alternate path; no sidequest you can embark on to delay the inevitable, you're just forced to do it.  And this is actually brilliant design--taking away player autonomy makes the player upset, but it is framed in such a way that the anger is focused towards the villain, not the game designer.


RELATEDNESS:
Humans are wired to seek recognition and connection with others.  The good news for everyone working on single-player games is that this stimulus can be faked with NPCs (often more consistently than real humans, because NPCs will be more consistently grateful and positive than a random 14-year-old on the internet).  Statistically, people respond better to positive feedback, than to belittling feedback (so in Katamary Damacy, the King of All Cosmos telling you your efforts are pathetic when you complete a level may have been part of why the game never got that large in popularity).

Examples of non-Relatedness
I'm just picturing "Super Luigi RPG" here, where you walk up to NPCs and they say "I'm sorry, what was your name again?"  You stop a volcano from destroying an entire town, go talk to the townspeople, and they're like "Hey, did you hear?  Mario saved a kitten out of a tree!  The poor kitten couldn't climb down...."  You perform a super ultimate charged crouching jump, and some kid says "That's not impressive.  Mario can jump way higher!  That's why Mario's a hero!"


-----------------------


Note that there isn't necessarily an automatic right-answer to any of these.  I mean, there is if you want to make people compulsively return to your game without understanding why they like wasting time playing it.  But in a forum about made-for-fun ROM hacks, that's not necessarily the goal....

14

Discussion / MOVED: Eternal's Den of Welcomes*

« on: May 17, 2011, 04:32:34 PM »

This topic has been moved to General Chat.

http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=5792.0

15

General Chat / Jenn Sand fanclub!

« on: March 09, 2011, 03:30:23 PM »

So...at GDC I was roommates with a rather awesome Australian game designer.  Just...really clever stuff like combining Snakes and Ladders with Uno (play movement cards from hand; reverse card reverses the snakes and ladders).  Also, I'm totally jealous: she got to go to a "meeting of the design minds" at GDC where they mixed high profile western and Japanese developers with translators.  In actual videogames...she just finished up work on LA Noir, and is looking to get hired at Telltale (but I'm also selfishly trying to recruit her to CCP >_>).  As it happens, though, she has a lot of indie projects too:

http://www.jennsand.com/

(I've only seen Vet Lucie, where she did the ZUN-style of doing all the programming/art/music herself, although got a writer to make the dialog snappier.  Note that much of the stuff on that page was made in the past year...some of it like Vet Lucie presumably completed during 100 hour/week crunch on LA Noir).

Maybe not a big name yet (she's only been in the industry one year) but I totally think she's someone to watch.

16

General Chat / Ringette = best sport ever

« on: January 22, 2011, 11:46:18 PM »

Growing up I played an obscure Canadian sport which I rather liked called Ringette.  I had a group of friends in the sport who all dreamed of moving to Finland to play professionally (the one country with professional Ringette).  I had silently assumed that the reason I love the sport more than any other is nostalgia.  A conversation with Dunie last night got me thinking, though, and I think actually the sport can be shown to be objectively excellent in several categories.

Maneuvering

I remember a comment that Zenny made in the world cup topic a while back: that a sport is exciting for him to watch if there's a lot of opportunities to maneuver around an opponent (so he likes Soccer, Basketball, Hockey).  Ringette does this flat out better than any other sport I know, and here's why:

1. It's an ice sport.  You can maneuver with skates in ways you just can't with shoes.
2. Moving with the ring is just much easier than moving with a puck, basketball, etc, so the maneuvers are much crazier.  See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc-3K5TfZ-0
I can do maneuvers with a Ringette ring on a consistent basis that I just don't see done in Hockey even at NHL level.  This isn't me being arrogant (I'm actually not that great at Ringette) just pointing out the difference equipment makes.
3. There's no bodychecking in Ringette, which means you can maneuver close to an opposing player (same as Soccer or Basketball, except with ice skates).
4. In Hockey, zone is almost more important than which team has the puck, so you'll see defenders dump the puck into the mid zone.  In Ringette, possession is very powerful, so it's better to maneuver with the ring until you have a clear pass.

Teamwork and plays

Picture this scenario: a pass is thrown to a player way deep in the offensive zone, who then proceeds to score in spectacular fashion.  What game am I thinking of?  A lot of you probably thought American Football (and yes, that's something American Football does very well).  But it could also be Ringette:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-imWSH4vSo
Ringette doesn't have the offside rules that most sports have.  Teamwork is extremely powerful.  (And also pretty much mandatory: you have to pass over both blue lines.  You can't just one-man army it).

Simple rules

Not the only sport to pull this off, but I can think of a few sports that fail.  (I recall my Canadian Hockey-watching parents asking "wait, how does Icing work again?")  Ringette I can explain in about two minutes "pass over both blue lines.  Never enter the goalie's crease.  3 max per team (plus goalie) in the end zones.  Your team has 30 seconds to take a shot after gaining possession."


It's honestly a sport I would watch on TV if I could...and yet I can't seem to find full games on Youtube (just videos set to terrible eurodance tracks.)

17

Discussion / Magic the Gathering Great Designer Search 2...DL collaboration?

« on: October 05, 2010, 06:19:38 AM »

http://community.wizards.com/magicthegathering/wiki/labs:Gds/gds2

So...four years ago WotC did GDS, with questions and exercises that looked very fun, but hey: I had a good job already, and I was pretty busy.  Flash forward and they're doing GDS2, in which they encourage internet collaboration.  Is there a group of people online I'd want to collaborate with when designing stuff?  *glances at the DL. Glances at LFT.*  Yes, yes there is.

I don't know if anyone here is actually interested in an internship making a children's card game, but I totally want to DL collaborate for the fun of it.  (Card games on motorcycles?) Anyone else interested?

18

Discussion / What makes a well-designed Lunatic?

« on: June 24, 2010, 12:32:30 PM »

This is a design question that's been on the back of my mind for a while.  And...also an area where I claim no expertise (I haven't seen any GDC talks or gamasutra articles focusing on the subject...other than one-liner mentions of the audience).

What I am looking for is things like "Touhou is good because when you die it's your fault, not the game screwing you, and you know what you should have done differently."

Another one I've heard is avoiding "that's not hard, that's just tedious."  (like the level 99 in first FF7 reactor guy, for the most extreme example).

But after that we get questions to which I don't know the answer.  For instance, is "both hard AND tedious" bad design?  (For an example of what I mean, watch a "let's play" of Ginormo Sword).  Or is this merely an audience difference?

Is there an optimal length?  Even Touhou here ranges from less than a minute spell practices to hour long no-shoot runs.  (And for a more turn based example you have things like HUGE x Blind Mamono sweeper which is a good hour of "don't make a single mistake").

What role does probability play in all of this?  My kneejerk is that randomness is bad because of the first point mentioned above (not losing should be within the player's control), but at the same time statistics are interesting to optimize (watch a good Fire Emblem player on a challenge run--the best-case probability calculations are fun to watch).  And obviously it's a bit different in the case of random Touhou bullet spreads, since you can react to the random before it gets to you (and it serves an important role of preventing memorization).

Thoughts?

19

Discussion / Theorycrafting! (Because I like competitive metagames too much)

« on: April 08, 2010, 05:05:12 AM »

You know...every once in a while I analyze the metagame for Starcraft or Magic the Gathering or Pokemon or Advance Wars.  I don't always have anywhere to put my thoughts (and notably, some of these communities will flame you off the board for theorymoning/theorycrafting/etc...and not without reason--it's easy to overlook stuff when you theorize).  But I just happen to find theory fun, so as long as I'm entertaining myself by theorizing, I may as well store my thoughts somewhere.  And the DL seems like the place that would most appreciate analysis just for the sake of analysis.


So...without further ado, I'm kicking this off with...Pokemon:



Garchomp


Garchomp was banned from Standard play (i.e., declared an Uber) in September 2008.  The question that interests me is analyzing why.  When I first saw the ban, my thoughts were "but...but... it's a non-legendary with a three stage evolution and it's not completely weird like Wobuffet!  How could it be Uber?"  Well...let's actually look at the numbers.  What are the statistical differences between Garchomp and, say, the similar Salmence (which has remained legal for standard play).

BST
Let me first talk a little about Base Stat Totals (where you sum up all six stats).  BST values look as follows--a big group of ridiculously uber pokemon with 680 BST (or 670 in the case of Kyogre and Groudon).  Then a large gap, followed by an enormous group at 600 BST, including all the pixies with 100 in every stat (Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, Manaphy, Shamyn) all the Deoxys, and most of the top of the metagame including Garchomp, Salmence, Heatran, Tyranitar, Metagross, etc.  This group is about evenly split between OU and Uber--there's no Pokemon above this line that aren't banned (not counting Slacking and Regigas who cripple their own stats).  And there's no banned Pokemon below this line (except Wobuffet and Wynaut, which have their own way of breaking the game).  So...it's reasonable to say that this is roughly the borderline area.

Speed
So what differentiates the banned and unbanned 600 BST pokemon?  Well, for starters, the ubers are faster--all but three of the 600BST Ubers have over 100 speed.  The last three, at 100, 100, and 90, are Mew (incredible range of abilities), Manaphy (is a questionable ban--I'll probably look at her next), and Deoxys D (in competition for the most durable pokemon...while also having averagish speed and attack).  By comparison, the OU ones...half of them have speed 80 or below, four have speed 100, and one Latios (only recently unbanned) is at speed 110.

The speed, while clearly not a foolproof indicator, is actually relevant to Garchomp.  One thing you might notice is that there's rather a lot of pokemon with a speed stat of 100.  Garchomp, with a speed stat of 102, outspeeds that group.  (And, of course, in pokemon you just have to be faster to act first).

Damage
Now, while pokemon have six stats layered on top of abilities, you can roughly reduce them to Speed, Damage, and Durability.  I'll talk next about Damage.  Is damage important to whether a pokemon is ban-worthy?  All evidence points to yes--Latios remains banned while Latias gets unbanned--the big difference being that Latios has more damage and Latias has more durability.  On the lower end, Cresslia (a 600 BST pokemon that emphasizes durability over offence) dropped into Underused.  Other people have written before me on why offence dominates the current metagame (whereas defencive stall dominated the Gold/Silver metagame)--I'll just take it as a given that offence is good in the current metagame.

So...how's Garchomp's offence?  Its attack stat of 130 is hardly gamebreaking--among the legal 600-BST group, it's beaten by Salmence (135), Metagross (135), Dragonite(134), and Tyranitar(134), (and Heatran has 130 Special Attack).  Move-wise, however, it's better set up, getting STAB bonuses on 120-power Dragon and 100-power Earth moves (both types that hit some important weaknesses).  Nobody else in the unbanned 600 BST group has quite as much STAB relevance--if they have two types, one of the types is usually psychic (hits none of the 600 BST for super effective) or Flying (relevant against Grass...but neither Dragonite nor Salmence learn a flying move with more than 60 power...unless you count Fly).  Heatran...Fire is good, and Steel technically hits one 600-BST Pokemon for super-effective (Tyranitar), but it's rare to see Heatran with steel attacks as Steel is good against little else.  Which brings us to the one real exception--Tyranitar, with a STAB Rock and STAB Dark (both with 80 effective power when accuracy's accounted for).  But there you have it: 80 power moves, not 100-120 power.

The other important offence threat, of course, is stat raising.  Going through the unbanned part of the 600 BST group...Garchomp gets Swords Dance.  Celebi gets Calm Mind and Swords Dance.  Dragonite gets Dragon Dance and Agility.  Heatran gets nothing.  Jirachi gets Calm Mind.  Latias gets Calm Mind.  Metagross gets Agility.  Salmence gets Dragon Dance.  Tyranitar gets Dragon Dance and Rock Polish.  And for completeness, Cresselia gets Calm Mind and Shaymin gets Swords Dance.  So...almost everyone can buff.  Is Garchomp's Swords Dance any better than the others?  Any worse?  Garchomp arguably fares decently well against all of these--an argument can be made about whether Swords Dance or Dragon Dance is a better move on a physical attacker, but certainly if the physical attacker is already fast, then that gives Swords Dance a big leg up.  Calm Mind...it's noteworthy that Celebi who gets both uses more Calm Mind than Swords Dance...but Celebi's best moves are all special, and I'd wager that Celebi would prefer Nasty Plot/Tail Glow if it were an option.  (If nothing else, the fact that the +2 defence moves get completely ignored by the competitive community suggests Nasty Plot > Calm Mind).

Durability
As already mentioned in the previous section, durability is less important than speed and damage.  But...it's not completely unimportant.  Notably, Azelf has 115 speed and 125 in Attack and Defence...and isn't uber, and the 75, 70, 70 defences probably have a lot to do with that.  So...Garchomp's durability stats are 108, 95, 85--a little worse than the 100, 100, 100 pokemon, but only slightly.  He can reach 101 HP Substitutes (important because they survive Blissey's Seismic Toss) which...only about half the 600 BST pokemon can.

Ground/Dragon is Null Electric, Resistx2 versus Fire, Poison, and Rock, Weakx2 against Dragon, and Weakx4 against Ice.  The resistances are relevant (well...except Poison).  W2 to Dragon and W4 to Ice also matter a fair bit.  Just in terms of soaking up damage moves, this set of weaknesses/resists is unremarkable; W4s are pretty common (W4 to ice in particular...Salamence, Shamyn-S, Gliscor...it's almost like they're intentionally trying to emphasize ice W4s...I'm expecting a Grass Dragon in Gen 5).  So...yeah, not fantastic but not awful for damage taking.  Certainly better than some of the 600 BST group with 5+ weaknesses (Tyranitar, Celebi, Latias).

The typing is actually pretty strong in other ways, though.  Immune to Thunder Wave.  Having a Thunder Wave absorber can be fairly important for a lot of teams.  Not only that, against a fast pokemon that threatens to sweep your team, "thunder wave it" is a common strategy--Garchomp does threaten to sweep, but can't be shut down that way.  Perhaps more important is R2 against Rock.  Stealth Rock is everywhere, being a version of Spikes that hits everything (instead of missing the 1/3 of the field thanks to Levitate and Flying)--except that Stealth Rock really is a rock-type move, so Salmence (weak to rock) takes 25% every time it switches, and Garchomp (resists rock) takes 6.25% every time it switches.  Sandstorm doesn't hurt Garchomp (a pretty common weather because Tyranitar and Hippowdon cause it every time they show up, and both get used).  (Not that Garchomp avoids all battlefield stuff: hit by poison/burn/spikes/hail/sleep).

The final bit of durability is from Garchomp's ability (Sand Veil) which gives it +20% evasion in Sandstorm.  Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Sandstorm is going (you can use your own Tyranitar to start it, for instance).  For comparison...let's compare to Salmence's intimidate.  80% hit rate from all three of status/physical/special versus 67% damage from physical...but the 67% goes away if the opponent switches (and on a simultaneous switch, may not be relevant at all).  Sand Veil does seem better here, although that's only in Sandstorm (and in the defence of intimidate, there's switching in and out to stack intimidate as a relevant anti-sweep desperation strategy).

So...in the end, decently tanky.  There's tankier out there, but they tend to be specialists.  Granted, Garchomp only learns Rest, not Recover/Roost, so it's not going to head up a stall team any time soon.

--------

So...to summarize...among the non-uber 600 BST Pokemon, he's faster than almost all of the unbanned ones (and back in Sept 2008, was faster than all the unbanned ones), arguably has the best damage due to STAB options and skillset, and is more durable than about 2/3 of the unbanned 600 BST group.  Granted, there's a couple things I'm not accounting for here--like Standard is more physically oriented, which arguably makes the special attackers relatively better at damage (but also makes Garchomp's durability look slightly better).  Also Explosion--Garchomp doesn't have it, and he's not a steel/rock/ghost so he doesn't resist it.  But approximately speaking, "tied for highest stat total, and beats most of the other high-statters for speed, damage, and durability" is a decent description.  Which makes the ban look rather unsurprising....

20

Discussion / 3DS

« on: March 24, 2010, 06:25:35 AM »

So...Nintendo has announced it's next generation handheld.  Here's what we know for sure:

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2010/100323e.pdf

Relevant points are...

* 3D without the use of glasses (and Nintendo started buying hologram companies something like 6-9 years ago, so this is believable).
* Release date before March 11, 2011
* Backwards compatible with DS and DSi games.

Additionally, unconfirmed rumors on the internet say

* About as powerful as a Gamecube (graphics card nVidia Tegra)
* Force Feedback
* Accelerometer
* Joystick
* Playable at E3

I find some of these rumors pretty unbelievable (force feedback for one--that chews through batteries and...well...the thing that's vibrating would be attached to your screen which sounds annoying).  Then again, I'm a little surprised about DSi backwards compatibility (this forces it to have two cameras).  Athough...one of the currently known 3D screen technologies uses cameras to track the viewer's head, and focuses the hologram on the viewer's position; so they might have wanted the player-facing camera regardless.

Interesting, anyway.  About time someone ventured back into the realm of 3D (it's been, what, 15 years since the Virtual Boy?)

21

Discussion / Is it just me, or does FFXIII sound...kinda bad

« on: February 05, 2010, 05:19:33 AM »

I keep hearing stuff that just sounds like I wouldn't like it much.  For instance....

AI party members.  You can't switch who you're controlling in-battle.  For the first half of the game you can't even choose which character you control (later in the game they let you pick party leader).

Some good stuff (they heal you after every fight, so you don't have to waste time) some weird stuff (no MP, apparently) and...

Speed it sounds like they're using the Hoshigami system, where each turn you get 2 bars (4 bars by the end of the game) and you choose a bunch of actions until you run out of bars (some actions costing more time) and that's your turn.  It's a speed system that...well...has potential to be done right, but I've seen it done wrong so many times.  I'm told walking does not use up your bar, at least, which is the usual huge flaw of this system (makes it such a bad idea to charge an enemy as they'll then get to attack back three times in a row).


I mean, I dunno: when people talk to me in vague terms, they say it's a game with a tactical battle system that's all combat and plot, no minigames or sidequests, and the combat makes you think a lot.  This sounds great in the abstract.  But whenever I hear more technical details it all leaves me very worried.  Then again, if someone had described Fire Emblem as a game with only attack commands and with breakable weapons, before I played it I'd be like "okay, sounds like a 4/10" whereas FE7's 10/10 for me.  So...I guess I shouldn't completely write it off.  Still....

22

Discussion / DLC 5 tournament

« on: December 11, 2009, 07:09:23 AM »

So...looked in the DLC5 topic, noticed that I had missed the time period when everyone was discussing the fighting game tournament, and that there didn't seem to be clear organization this year.  Actually the tournament organizing is something I've been thinking about a bunch lately, I just wasn't logged into the DL when I was doing so (Bus/Train/Work/etc).

May as well share my observations...

#1 Historically, the organizer of the tournament does not participate in the tournament
Okay, so Captain K broke this one on games he didn't know well in order to fill out the bracket, but in general I think this has a lot of benefits.  First, someone's actually running things and moving things along instead of being distracted.  Second, as the organizers have a tendency to pick out games that they know well, them participating seems kinda unfair and less fun.

#2 So far, the organizer has switched every tournament
This seems like a good policy.  Different organizers = different games.  Different organizers bring different things to the table.  If we're sticking with rule #1, different organizers means that nobody's stuck never playing.  (Eventually I'm sure we'll have to repeat an organizer, but I feel like we should give people decent breaks).

#3 The tournament is entertaining because there's spectators oohing and ahing--this is it's main advantage over the rest of the 40 hours we spend playing videogames.
How do we emphasize this aspect?  Well for starters, no-seeding + single-elimination keeps things exiting (though perhaps not strictly fair--see my DLC4 bracket placement ^_^).
Perhaps more importantly, one thing I learned from the DLC4 tournament is that splitting rooms is bad.  DLC2 where we had two TVs running SF2 worked fine.  DLC4's room split just subdued the mood.

#4 So far, we have yet to repeat a game
We will likely buck that trend this year with Brawl...although actually, that might deserve further analysis.  For instance, Smash Bros in general was barely touched the last time we were in Pacifica, so maybe Brawl is bigger on the east coast?  (Then again, DLC5 might not be the same crowd as DLC3--I should compare guest lists).  There are also Smash Bros games that have yet to be used in a DL tournament, which could be included in lieu of Brawl for a change of pace.

#5 These things are too damn long
I think everyone agrees on this point; by the end most people are tired and the excitement is drained.  And if DLC attendance (and by extension tournament enrollment) keeps growing without us addressing time, then the problem will just get worse.  Several solutions:
1. Make sure the next pair is ready to go and has their character selected before getting a controller.
2. Use quicker games (in terms of match length)
3. Use fewer games. (so far the format has been 4 games and a "secret" 5th game)
4. Use multiple TVs (preferably in the same room as mentioned above).
5. Skip the "stop and look at the movelist" step, or include more games where you don't need a movelist.
6. Have two games running simultaneously.

Not saying we need to make every one of these changes.  Different tournament organizers might even have different ideas of what is "sacred and can't be sacrificed."  These are just places where corners could be cut.

#6 We have never had two games from the same series in the same tournament
Fairly obvious (these tournaments are significantly about variety) but it bears mentioning.





--------------------------

Aaanyhow, that's the end of my sort-of general analysis section.  On a personal level, I'm actually interested in organizing this year (or else I probably wouldn't have done this much thinking).  Figure I should say some stuff about me specifically:

To be perfectly honest, I may not be the ideal candidate, and won't be offended if people argue against me.  On the plus side, I'm eager and have done a lot of thinking about tournament structure.  On the minus side, I'm the girl who pushed for PoFV last year (I eventually ended up agreeing with Sage that PoFV matches take too long, but point is if people are looking for a "fighting game tournaments with nothing but real fighting games", I'm not your girl).

One area I do feel is my strength, however, is time management analysis.  Like, I started getting a bit obsessed with how to get a scientific idea of match length.  For instance, my analysis of Super Mario Kart went something like... 3:10 between good players, 3:30 between amateurs--which is to say: SMK matches are too long (I was aiming for 1:00 at the time--longer if the game had a very strong argument outside of match length).

Anyhow, figure I may as well toss this out there, and get discussion going on general observations of what works in these tournaments, as well as discussion going on whether people would be happy with me running things.

23

Discussion / mc attempts to associate each 10^X meters with a real-world comparison

« on: September 11, 2009, 01:27:17 AM »

Was messing around with this a few days ago, got an okay list going, figure I may as well stick it up here.

Note that in general my attitude was "this is a first pass that I was trying to fill; if someone can think of a better example for a particular length, then please suggest it.  If you have criticism of an example, please speak up--so far these discussions have led to better examples."

10^-15 m: Size of a Proton
10^-14 m: Size of a large nucleus (like Uranium)
10^-13 m: ?
10^-12 m: ?
10^-11 m: ?
10^-10 m: Size of basically every atom (heavier atoms pull their electrons in more, apparently)
10^-9 m: Pentacene (the molecule that was photographed recently)
10^-8 m: Small viruses
10^-7 m: HIV
10^-6 m: E. Coli Bacteria
10^-5 m: Length of a human DNA chromosome when laid out on a dish
10^-4 m: Particle of (white) Flour
10^-3 m: Flea
10^-2 m: Human fingernail
10^-1 m: Diameter of a CD
10^0 m: Height of a 5-year-old child
10^1 m: Height of a telephone pole
10^2 m: Length of a football field/pitch (both kinds of football)
10^3 m: World Trade Center towers if they were stacked on top of each other
10^4 m: Width of San Francisco
10^5 m: Most sprawling cities in the world, like Dallas-Fortworth-Arlington, and the New York metro area.
10^6 m: Length of Italy
10^7 m: Earth
10^8 m: Saturn
10^9 m: Sun
10^10 m: Some larger stars (like Beta Centauri)
10^11 m: Distance from the Sun to Venus
10^12 m: Distance from the Sun to Jupiter
10^13 m: Distance from Neptune to Pluto when they're on opposite sides of the sun
10^14: Distance from the Sun to "90377 Sedna" (a Planetoid like Pluto except it's about 15x as far away).
10^15 m: Radius of the Stingray Nebula (Okay, could definitely still find a better example here)
10^16 m: Gravitational Boundary of our Solar System (furthest distance comets can travel and still keep rotating the sun)
10^17 m: Distance between the Sun and most nearby stars (Sirius, etc).
10^18 m: Radius of the average Globular Cluster (bunches of stars, usually close to the center of the galaxy)
10^19 m: Thickness of the Milky Way Galaxy
10^20 m: Diameter of an average sized Galaxy
10^21 m: Diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy


Some videos and images that I inevitably bumped into while on my search (not that they really helped me any, but they are really cool looking)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BjHvwSvpOw
http://sizeofworldse.ytmnd.com/

24

Discussion / Mathy/Programmy thing; could use readability feedback

« on: May 14, 2009, 11:35:18 PM »

Well, a lot of the time I was in Manitoba, I was screwing around with this:

http://www.rpgdl.com/wiki/index.php?title=BBCPP:Main

I think I have a pretty shiny thing going on here, but part of what I find shiny is that I, personally, find the code it produces readable (while I don't find code from the project that inspired it readable).  But that's only my personal perspective; if other people look at the programs and think "that syntax makes the code horrible to read", then the language is not really doing its job.

So...people with some amount of math/programming knowledge: is this stuff readable?  Does it make sense?  Is there something I should change to make it more readable?

25

Discussion / How "important" is -insert country/region-?

« on: April 08, 2009, 12:06:35 AM »

I remember seeing a debate on whether, say, California was more important than Spain, which got me interested in how you would measure such stuff.  I was recently linked to "the 2008 global city index" and after a few rants of how they're doing it wrong (Toronto is the 4th best cultural experience in the world, but no other Canadian cities are even mentioned in the top 60???) I figured I should share the various available measures I found on...well mostly wikipedia.

GDP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_(nominal)

GDP is "is the total value of all final goods and services produced in a particular economy".  For all that it is purely economic, so it can't tell you, for example, which countries have nukes (for all that the countries the UN allows to have nukes are...every GDP top 8 country from 2008 except for Japan, Germany, and Italy--a.k.a. the countries that lost World War 2.  Funny how that works).

GDP, PPP

This tries to adjust for the fact that the cost of living isn't accurately reflected by most currency exchanges:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

For the most part, I don't find it as helpful as GDP for gauging "my country has a lot of money to throw around."  Where it is helpful is if you're trying to gauge standard of living, in which case you look at GDP-PPP per capita:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Exports
Imports

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_imports

These kinda suck as a measure.  I've had a few people tell me "oh, GDP is a bad measure of economy; you should look at Exports".  There's a huge gaping hole in that strategy, though.  There was one point last year when I looked at an export table, and "Germany" was ahead of "European Union".  It's easy to see how this happened--Germany exports to other EU countries, but since these goods don't leave the EU, this doesn't count as an export for the EU.

I mean, imports/exports mean something, but need to be taken in context (of course they're going to be lower for island countries).

Population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

Well, the idealist viewpoint would be that all people are equal.  The reality is that power is not evenly distributed among every person on the earth; for instance, the UK is 22nd in population, yet a member of everything (G8 country, has nukes, is home to the effective European stock exchange).

Area

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_area

Yeah, there isn't even really an idealist viewpoint that every square kilometer is equal.  For example, the United states has a lot of natural resources like oil; China has very few.  Similarly sized countries.

Education/standard of living

Is...not well-measured at all; there's some stuff out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index

But I would assume a large margin of error with this.  (Countries have been known to jump several ranks on HDI over very short time periods).

Game Developers

Hey, it's a field most of us are familiar with, that is present in most major countries.  Always better to go with something you can measure fairly well than to go with something you can't.

Gamedevmap is a decent measure of this:
http://www.gamedevmap.com/

Places that have GDC conferences:
San Francisco, USA
Vancouver, Canada
Cologne, Germany
Austin, USA
Shanghai, China

Other notable videogame gatherings:
PAX: Seattle, USA
E3: Los Angeles, USA
Leipzig Gaming Convention: Leipzig, Germany
Tokyo Game Show: Tokyo, Japan
OSL: Seoul, South Korea

Car Manufacturing

This is another major industry that people tend to know a lot about (most people can name an American car, a German car, a Japanese car, etc).  Much like presence in the game industry, it would be silly to take it completely in isolation when judging a country, but it's interesting information, and actually has documented statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#World_motor_vehicle_production

Might also be informative to look at this on a per-company basis to get a better idea of company headquarters (as opposed to which countries house manufacturing plants).  For instance, while a fair few car manufacturing plants are located in Canada, there's no such thing as a "Canadian car".


---

Anyhow, just some metrics that I've found available and played around with.  Might be of interest to other stat nuts here.