Don't Starve

Don't Starve is set to be released in a week.  This is strange because you've been able to buy it and play it for some time now.  I guess it's good of them, though, to call the initial release a beta.  It would have been nice if the recent Sim City release was called a beta considering that it didn't work.

For those of you who were Glitch fans, Don't Starve hits some similar notes.  The biggest difference is that there are bees and you get honey from their nests.  Well, I guess the biggest difference is that the game is unforgiving and intensely lethal.  And when you die instead of going to purgatory and returning you are simply dead.  You can start another game, that one is over.

The similarity is that Don't Starve is very much a game of exploration.  You click things to see what will happen and combine items to have interesting effects.  It's just that sometimes what happens is that you go to a screen that says, "You survived 0 days."

I think that death really helps the exploration part of the game, though.  When you explore it is exciting.  Finding out new things has a real cost.  The better you get at the game the less there is to find out but the most costly it is to try since you get to a point where you generally spend the first part of the game doing the same thing as last time.

I unlocked three characters, each of which has their own advantage.  One of them is immune to fire, one grows a beard, and one is visited by the ghost of her dead twin sister at night sometimes.  It is a game where these three advantages are relatively equal - though very different.

I haven't played in a week or two now, I think ultimately it may have been a passing phase.  But I did put in more than 50 hours of play and I think I'll go back to it in a while to see what has been added to the game in the release version.

I don't like to give advice about this sort of thing because I don't have any reason to think that you enjoy the same things about games as I do.  So instead of making a suggestion, I'll just say that I enjoyed playing the game without doing any external reading about it, just discovering everything on my own.  This is a game about a journey, not about a goal.  In the end, you are just going to die, might as well get the most out of the experiment.

Women in Gaming and Very Narrow Arguments

I read an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about why they intend to keep talking about sexism in gaming.  I don't normally read that site, so I can't tell you whether anything else they write is worth reading, but I understand that they write a lot about video games.

What I found particularly good about the article is that it ends with a list of arguments that you should not bother making if you don't like a gaming site talking about sexism.  The article points out that the majority of these arguments are crafted to attempt to sideline any useful discussion, or to call into question the validity of the discussion to begin with.

In particular, I was very happy to see, "People are exaggerating on both sides," on that list.  That's a good argument to be aware of because it comes up in arguments about all kinds of controversial subjects.  Someone trying to sound very smart or very grown-up says that the whole argument is nonsense because people only ever take extremist positions.  Of course in reality on any controversial subject the people who take extremist positions get too much attention and the people who are trying to talk things over and understand them get too little.  That doesn't mean that the latter group doesn't exist.

I did think that something was missing from the list, though.  Unfortunately when you are trying to defend your position from jerks it is often necessary to fill your argument with all kinds of acknowledgements and disclaimers so that you don't give them anything to hold on to.

If you make an argument that people don't like, what you'll hear back is that in  one sentence in one paragraph what you said wasn't exactly true.  Or that one analogy you made isn't really a strong analogy.  Or that one fact you sited is from a source of questionable reliability.

So the discussion of the actual issue - in this case that women in gaming are too often insulted, dismissed, valued for their appearance instead of their accomplishments, etc. - has to be sidelined by endless acknowledgement of obvious truths.  John Walker who wrote the piece even included the parenthetical comment, referring to how he has been abused for talking about sexism: "I’m not going to fret about saying, 'But of course not as bad as…', because of course it’s not as bad as…"

So even though he does not want to spend time talking acknowledging that we shouldn't get into a who-suffered-more contest, he basically has to give a nod to such contests in order to exclude himself from them.  If he were instead writing an article about oranges he would not have to specifically comment that he didn't want to make his article about which professional wrestler he liked best when he was a kid.  The article is full of this and so it ends up being fairly long-winded and cumbersome.  The very direct message of the article doesn't get much space.

But all of this elaboration and clarification end ups being ineffective.  He brings up a book that I think I would like to read entitled, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria."  He brings the book up specifically to borrow one analogy from the author of the book.  If the comments were enabled, one person would criticize him because "his analogy" (an analogy he didn't make between female gamers and black high school students) is flawed - girl gamers aren't segregated from guys - and another person would criticize him for comparing the abuse suffered by a group of attractive, white, middle- and upper- class women to the abuse suffered by blacks during segregation (the fact that the book is not about segregation, and that this is not an accurate description of the population of female gamers wouldn't matter).

There is always room to attack some narrow point, and those arguments always seem to derail the discussion.  So what I'd really like to add to the article is not another message to people making bad arguments, but a message to people who read them.  Whenever someone takes a long article or comment and argues with select sentences from it, the first thing you should ask yourself is not whether this person has a legitimate beef with those particular sentences, but whether it makes any difference to the overall point.  Rather than sidetracking the entire discussion into fact checking the seventh sentence of the third page, we could just say, "I'm not sure if you are right, but even if you are I don't see how it affects the overall point of the article."

Also, this article is another great reason to miss Glitch.  I don't think I was ever part of a discussion in Glitch, even on the forums, where I felt like someone was dismissed or belittled for being female.  I'm sure such discussions happened somewhere in Glitch, but in the forums for many games the only threads that _don't_ contain abuse against women are the ones in which everyone assumes that all speakers are male.

Going Crazy, Playing Diablo 3

Have you ever felt like your brain, in a desperate attempt to explode forth from your body, is going to smash into the front of your skull so hard that it will cause your back to snap and your entire body to fold up and implode in on itself leaving only a pale sphere hovering where your stomach used to be?

I've been playing Diablo 3 recently.  Diablo 3 is a fairly good game that was very nearly ruined by the auction house (the one for in-game currency, not the real money one) and the goal of incorporating competitive PvP.

The PvP thing is not mentioned as often as the auction house thing.  Something that is actually very disappointing about Diablo 3 is that there is almost nothing to analyze, numerically speaking.  More than any other game I've ever played it really highlights the tension between "balance" and fun.  By tension I mean that balance isn't fun at all.  Forget about balance, just make everything awesome.  Basically balance is only important for PvP.  When you play against a computer you can just set the difficult how you like it, or use console codes in single player mode if you really want to, or use mods.  Of course you can't do those things in Diablo 3.

People talk a lot about the auction house, but essentially the biggest problem it created is that the most efficient way to make your character more powerful is to log out for several months.  The endless recycling of items on the auction house means there is rapid deflation of prices on everything other than the very, very best gear.  Right now if you have a few hundred thousand gold you can buy yourself a set of equipment that will easily beat inferno difficulty, but months from now you'd be able to buy better things, and then even better months from that.  In fact, once you've levelled a character to 60 you can just never play again, knowing that you are improving your character about 80% to 85% as efficiently as you would if you were playing 10 to 20 hours a week.

The story also goes completely off the rails in act 2.  It makes no sense whatsoever.  Belial is the lord of lies, but the only thing he seems to be actually lying about is being good at lying.  In reality he is the lord of smashing you to bits with his gigantic arms.

Ultimately Diablo 3 should be seen as an exercise in living in the moment.  If you can manage to live in the moment then you have have fun as your cute little wizard drops meteors on hundreds and hundreds of zombies and demons.  But while you try to do that, your attention will be constantly tugged at by all of the facts about the past and the future that should add up to ruin your experience.

Because of the problems with the game I can't see myself going on with it much longer - I've played and quit before.  But I'm sure that even if I leave it behind again soon, a few patches from now I'll start another level 1 character and play for a while.  Go little wizard!

The Funeral

The announcement that Glitch was ending came with a very well-written FAQ that focused almost entirely on answering the question, "Isn't there some way we can stop this?" with various forms of "No."  We couldn't stop it and we couldn't save Glitch.  Now that the site has gone into archive mode the forums and groups have left our lives as well.

I've never experienced the death of a game before.  Games are mostly ideas, and the ideas are still out there.  Even when the hardware that ran games is long gone, computing power allows us to easily replace that hardware with software.  It's weird that I can't go play Glitch right now, the way I can go play Space Invaders or Zork 2.  So instead I am remembering the good times I had with Glitch and imagining how much fun we might have had together if Glitch were still here with me.  It's like imagining how happy my mother would have been to see her granddaughters.

Glitch was a game that was known as non-violent and quirky, but that was just a simple view of its public face.  It was a game where you could find holes in the world that led you to places you shouldn't stand or that let you stand in the air.  It was a game where you could access parts of the code and guess at new locations and badges through URL manipulation.  It was a game you could play with a sleeping baby on one arm and with virtually no sleep yourself.  And it was especially a game where you could find support and caring from other players.

Glitch may have closed but it is not really gone.  Its remarkable art is still available in the creative commons.  Communities of glitchen still interact on the web.  Glitch has inspired several successful projects in the real world since its death, and it may inspire more.  Having played Glitch has inspired me to create, and to learn to create.

Glitch.com helpfully has a photobook from the life of glitch, and memorials to the many, many glitchen who lived in Ur.

It's hard to write a blog about the math behind Glitch when Glitch doesn't exist, but I've decided to do it.  I'm sure there will be purists who observe that the things I post will not be about Glitch at all, and will also perhaps not be about math, but I think I will continue to blog about the math behind Glitch, even if I objectively do not do so.

Please leave a note in the guest book for the family,
Humbabella

I Keep Dreaming About This

I have a recurring dream where I visit the Glitch site and mysteriously (tantalizingly) there is a button that says "Enter World."  The button has no explanation or fanfare.  There are no posts explaining what is going on.  So I click it and see where it takes me.

Each time Humbabella finds herself somewhere new.  Sometimes there are the familiar inhabitants of Ur - piggies, rocks, trees - and sometimes it is something completely different.  Once the Scion of Purple greeted me at an endless tower stretching into a fictional sky.  Once I was in a desolate northern region like those adjacent to the ancestral lands with no features or Glitchen to be found.

A few times someone else has been online to greet me.  I've asked them what is going on.  Explanations vary.  Sometimes they don't know what is going on either.  Sometimes they tell me that the game has come back up but only for a small number of players, that I have to keep it a secret.

I miss watching Humbabella walk around Ur.  I've started to work on little animated .gifs so that I can watch her walk and jump and nod off to sleep again.  But more than that I miss not being alone.  I'm not really alone, not in real life.

If life were as it is presented in news articles, we would think of someone as lonely if all of their friends were online, and they had no one in real life.  But there is a part of me that only exists through my connection to the internet, and to people I don't know.

I miss the small pleasure of fictional daily chores, and I miss you, strangers.

Farewell

I had this big post about gardening that was almost done, but it looks like the value of a plot hour of a crop garden isn't terribly important anymore.

Thanks for reading, perhaps I will see you in game before the end.

Sno Cones

I've been posting very rarely in the past few months, mostly because I'm currently on parental leave and it turns out that spending all day with a baby makes it very hard to think about (or to want to think about) anything.  So when I finally sat down to do this post I was somewhat concerned about the complexity I was approaching.

We can finally make our own sno cones, and even gather our own ice to make them.  I thought I was going to be analyzing a lot of things.

Scraping Ice

Scraping ice is not a highly productive activity.  It is pretty similar to scraping barnacles except that there are no upgrades to make it faster or give better bonuses.  You spend four energy to get between one and three ice and four imagination.  This takes four seconds.  Since ice has been upgraded to a 6 currant value, this would put scraping ice continuously from a never ending ice nubbin at 3.5 currants per second.  Pretty much the worst productivity of any activity ever.

But you can't stand at an infinite ice nubbin.  Instead you have to run from place to place hunting the 145 ice nubbins in the world that refill every six minutes.  That means that in order to get that 317 rainbo sno cone badge - if you are making the cones yourself - you need 1 hour and 45 minutes of the entire world's ice production.  Assuming there are others competing with you, that's going to be a very expensive product.

Elements

Elements are the hardest thing to put a price on in the game.  The in game price doesn't reflect their value at all.  You can't solve for the real value based on their inputs because it's a system of three equations with four unknowns.  It would seem like one of the elements should effectively be worth nothing but all of them are the limited factor in making one useful product or another.  Of course there is also the fact that you have to mine to get them, and that mining is poor productivity.  So even if I could resolve the equations, I'd still end up with a large number of different values to work with based on whether you mined yourself, or you bought rocks and then did the grinding yourself, or whether you bought bags of elements.  Of course because elements can't be listed at auction or put in SDBs determining the cost of buying them directly is nearly impossible.

Saved!

Yes, it was going to be a lot of work to figure out the real value of sno cones but I've been saved from doing all that work by doing one very simply calculation.  Add up the value of all five colours of sno cones: 75 + 150 + 300 + 600 + 1100 = 2225.  But a rainbo sno cone is only worth 2200!

When you make a sno cone you lose value.  Since there is no way that any of these calculations are ever going to work in such a way that losing value from the base products is worth spending time and energy on, I don't really have to do any more work than that.

The final verdict: If you want the badge, it will cost you 634,951 currants at the sno cone vendor, plus about just south of 5k worth of paper (though I imagine most people interested in this badge will be able to pull the paper from their overstocked SDBs of more paper than they will ever use).  Just pay the bear.