*H4773r stands before all collected upon the raised dias wearing a snappy dress outfit with a large coat (my Coat of Eccentricity). He clears his throat and raises his hands in the air.*
|3()()/\/\!!
*pyrotechnic effects erupt all around the temple. H4773r's voice booms accross the hall.*
Happy Birthday Shireroth!
First off I would like to thank you all for attending todays festivities and I hope that we all leave with a sense of pride that we are all citizens of a truly magnificent nation.
Today, I think we will ponder the experience that is life and I will be reading from the Book of....... Tim? Not the Monty Python Tim, but Tim from http://www.dragon-tails.com/
Life as a Video Game: A Weeks Worth of Musings
Excluding that last part about our prophets blindness, I think he has a valid pointLife As A Game
Monday
If you ever think your life seems too hard, and other people have it easy, reflect on this.
...
Maybe they're going to get the "PLEASE COMPLETE YOUR LIFE ON A HIGHER DIFFICULTY SETTING" screen when they get to the last boss.
Also your combos are probably worth more.
Tuesday
Life is a game, only it doesn't come with a manual, no one's produced a licenced stratergy guide and I have it on good authority that all those unofficial ones you see in book stores have been written by people who haven't finished yet, oh, and there's no restarts.
Actually I suppose it's hard to tell about that last one. What if there is a restart option and we just don't know where it is? Heck, we have no manual, not even a card with shortcut keys on it, for all we know there could be an entire submenu we just haven't worked out how to bring up. Maybe we're supposed to be able to set our controls and graphic options? Uncoordinated? Maybe you just have y axis set wrong. Short sighted? Nope, you just need a higher res. We might even have save slots, I know I could do with some of those.
...
All kind of Zen, isn't it?
Wednesday
The character generation system in life seems to use random attributes, like in a game like D&D, which I think is fundamentally flawed in terms of overall balance and fairness. Sure, genetic background gives you your modifiers, but it's possible to have characters formed of a disproportionate number of high rolls, or disproportionate number of low rolls. Unlike what cartoons will teach you, some people will simply be better than you. At everything. And some people will have no redeeming attributes. Some people will have widely different stats, excelling in certain areas, but not others, while some will simply walk the line of being average.
Personally I'd have preferred to have seen a point distribution system instead, to enforce the concept from the get go that being a jack of all trades makes you a master of none, rather than this "unless you rolled all 20's" stuff.
Thursday
Ever get that feeling of helplessness in life? That you're a little lost, confused? Uncertain what the future holds, or if you're even still heading towards it? Or if you're just doing everything wrong? Ever question why you're here, why these things happen to you or what significance you play in this world? Ever feel that you lack a truly unique or important purpose for being, that even if you can find a goal, something to put your heart behind, be it a religion, a community or just someone else, that you personally lack a coherent notion of heading? That even if you invent purpose, you never really know just what you might be missing, and ask yourself, just why are you alive? Just what are you supposed to do?
...
This is why so called free range 'virtual sandbox' games are a bad idea. So stop ragging on linear gameplay you idiots.
Friday
Life's learning curve is quite difficult - it generally takes the better part of two decades, with features introduced over time. Motor skills and speech are an initial priority, our mental capabilities and physical bodies are constantly upgraded in an attempt to ease us through the tutorial. For instance we're designed to lack the ability to cause serious physical harm until it's hoped we're developed enough not to, and compared to most animals, sexual maturity is introduced relatively late, so as not to overlay extra layers of complexity back when we were simply trying to learn how social functions work.
Like a game omitting HUD elements, to begin with gender has no real significance, it's effectively hidden from us, allowing children to focus on the general elements before coming to terms with their unit type specifications. Our society has chosen to extend the tutorial metaphor further with schools, designed to be bizarre little practice societies where we perform work for no reason other than performing work. Research and assignments are written and submitted to people who don't need the results, experiments are performed under the watchful eyes of those that know their outcomes. We are trained in mock worlds, no more real than a Hollywood plyboard streetscape in the attempt to work in a controlled environment where elements can be added slowly over time.
Being the tutorial, large parts of this are skipable however, even though you're generally forced to sit through most of it. They don't make it easy, but the truly impatent can get on with things well ahead of what was intended.
Saturday
The learning curve is actually a pretty amazing concept. The part it plays as an abstract concept in a video game is generally completely overlooked, largely because videogames are for kids, or at best offer a form of entertainment, thus are not deserving of any greater examination or thought unless they're some pretentious adventure game or some other kind of title that attempts to shove pseudo depth down the audiences collective throat.
But some of the most interesting learning curves come from purely entertainment and action game based titles. Yesterday I mentioned life's learning curve, which was supposed to be semi silly but is still very much real. And we do take the best of 20 years to work out 'how to play' so it's a difficult one to study. Video games on the other hand offer us very short learning curves - a matter of hours, perhaps a couple of days for a deep sim. By learning curve I mean going from having not played the game before to being familiar with everything in it. Understanding the controls, the concepts, the metaphors, and even a firm understanding of initial strategies, although for a game with any depth, 'mastering' it will take considerably longer.
It is all about rapidly learning and applying new ideas. It's learning about learning, we can actually watch ourselves pick up a new concept, often one that is almost alien to our pre-existing understanding. Nintendo's Warioware/Made In Wario games actually take this to the illogical extreme, being a game that consists of nothing BUT learning curve, over and over again. Some games are overwhelmingly complex to begin with, and the natural way to cope is to focus on some important elements and only expand the scope as you become comfortable, and can understand how the rest of the systems work with each other. Tutorials often walk you through this for this very purpose. Over the course of hours however, what were just a wall of meaningless stats and bars, indicators and colours, can transform itself into something innately informative and immediately useful. No simple manual, or screen legend can overcome this, like folding the four corners of a box to overlap each other, it's a combined effort. We can find ourself quickly relishing depth as we conquer each element in turn.
The analogy to real life, as it's this analogy that I've been getting at, is that we do this all the time, but the fun thing about video games is it really distils it into it's component elements. It's pure, in many ways, and innately observable and able to be studied. Computer games can be as artificial as you will them to be, we can have a game consisting of nothing but glowing shapes, with a counter intuitive yet efficient control scheme, and we could learn how this world goes together, what it's rules and objectives are, literally mapping new ways of thinking in our brain to understand a world that was beyond understanding.
Sunday
Videogames, by nature of design, are simply a collection of rules. They attempt to build a greater significance out of definable objectives. Crossing over a series of thresholds in order becomes 'performing a gruelling car race around a harrowing track'. Positioning the centre of the screen over the 3D projection of a bounding box becomes 'aiming your assault rifle at the enemy'. It's almost like a form of information encoding. The game maker, or rule setter, takes a concept, such as approaching an enemy silently means he won't notice you, extrapolates that into a series of testable rules, generally involving how fast you're moving and on what surface and perhaps what you have equipped, and then relies on you the player to decode it to believe that you can be stealthy by making sure you do stealthy things.
Life works in a similar way. The most obvious parallel is the legal system. We cannot make a law that says "don't do bad things to other people", we have to define exactly what bad things are, what constitutes doing them, and what the penalties are so we have black and white, well defined, testable rules. Then we hope that people will recognise what they're trying to say, not just what they define, or as a popular way of putting it, we hope people act 'in the spirit of the law, not just to the letter of it'.
Some games rely on you understanding the mechanisms behind it all. Some games put you deliberately close to the numbers and the rules that you have to abide by. Some deliberately obfuscate it, and would suffer if you got too close to the numbers at the heart of the game, like a deep RPG that is trying to make you believe you're an adventurer slaying monsters, not a stat builder working formulas. Many games are a form of escapism, it helps to believe what you're doing, you want to think that sneaking up on someone is a matter of being stealthy, not that you simply have to remember to only walk on certain texture maps.
But there are two ways to play a game, to take the premise at face value and play it in character (in the spirit of the game) or to understand the rules, the guts, the bits that matter, and simply focus on that. (the letter of the game) The latter, when taken to extreme, is power gaming. Power gaming is literally reducing a game to the stats that it is, refusing to see a virtual world where you might act rationally in it, but instead a series of numbers and rules, and seeing the most efficient way to make those numbers do what you want. It is quite literally the most efficient way to play a game. Maybe it's not the most fun way to play a game if it's storylines and experiences that float your boat, but it is the fastest way to a big high score. It's also impossible to beat, from a developer point of view, because it is literally stripping away everything until they get at what matters, the game mechanics. You can't make an RPG that rewards people who genuinely play in character over those who power game for stats, because any way of testing for this is artificial, and can be power gamed just like everything else.
But can this work in real life? You bet it can. Anywhere where there are rules trying to describe an abstract. Which turns out to be everywhere. We're well familiar with legal wranglers exploiting loopholes, but more natural examples are schools or universities, where the concept is to teach people how to learn or think better. It's commonly assessed through exams. You can rote learn the material, or simply study how to beat the exam, instead of studying the subject. It's reverse engineering the mechanisim, not playing along with what they'd like you to do. Sure, not having a proper understanding of the subject can hurt in the long run, or at least should, but that's not what's relevant. It works other places too, what about social circles. We have an abstract concept that we like being friends with good or cool people. But how do we define this? Rules come into it more than we'd like to admit, for instance it's easier to appear to be a good person by making sure you're seen to do good things in public than it is to actually be a good person. Think about it. A lot of it comes down to personal ethics, but for someone who doesn't have that stopping them, there is a lot of corner cutting they can take, without necessarily cheating, but simply playing the mechanics of the game, instead if playing it the way it was meant to be played.
. o O o .
On a final life is a videogame note, unrelated to the topic of this rant.. MipMapping is a 3D acceleration technique where a texture (a 2D image that's mapped to a 3D surface) is replaced by successively lower resolution versions of itself as the distance between the viewer and the object increases. Basically as a cube heads into the distance, the graphic mapped to its side is replaced with a smaller graphic, stretched to the same physical size, but as the cube is now further away, the graphic is smaller on your screen. One of the reasons for this is because when large textures are filtered to very small sizes, they can produce artefacts, and so filtering a texture already closer to the desired size looks better.
Lower resolution textures are blurrier, because, well, they're lower resolution. So one of the side effects of mipmapping is that textures in the distance become blurry.
I'm short sighted. Not particularly short sighted, I have glasses but don't wear them much and I don't need them to drive, but it does mean that things in the distance are harder to focus on. It took quite a long time before I finally got my eyes checked and found this out, too. Which meant that when mipmapping was first introduced in games, I simply assumed it was another realism technique designed to emulate the way things got fuzzy in the distance, since that's what things did!
I was shocked when I realised real life trees were supposed to have leaf detail both when close and far away.
-Tim
[will continue to edit]