Game vs Metagame

Tam's recent post about solved games really crystallized something for me with regards to why I do and don't like certain games.  In particular why I will sometimes really like the concept of a game and yet end up absolutely loathing it in practice.  In a word, metagame.

...game

I've come to realize that the existence of a codified metagame for something is a pretty good sign that I won't want anything to do with it. If there's a way of doing things that is the way, the truth, and the light, then I get to choose between following the crowd or trying to go my own way knowing that I'm actively not playing optimally. The former tends to lead to me getting bored quickly, particularly since the one right way rarely ever syncs up with the way I want to play, and often relies on degenerate strategies. The latter puts me in a spot where I don't get to take joy in improving, since I'm aware that I'm actively not playing 'the best way'.

Beyond that, I'm being forced to spend time figuring out how to play the game 'properly' rather than actually playing the game.  Part of the problem with metagame for me is that it is, by definition, external to the game.  So I end up having to look for FAQs, wikis, or even *shudder* official forums to even begin to figure out what I'm 'supposed' to be doing.  And then, without fail, I learn that I chose the wrong class, hero, skill set, or whatever and I can either start over completely or bull on with the knowledge that I'm 'doing it wrong'.  At least if it's a single-player game I can take comfort in playing the character I want to play even if it isn't optimal.  In a multi-player game there's the added joy of other players more than happy to tell you that you're stupid and wrong if you dare to step outside of the accepted orthodoxy.

My roots in tabletop role-playing, where metagaming has long been viewed negatively, may also enter into this. For me playing a game is about working within the bounds of the assumptions that are made by the system. Avoiding use of out-of-game knowledge as much as possible is part of this. If a game is well designed and things are messaged properly, I should be able to figure out everything I need to know to play well without having to resort to outside information.

Ultimately, the more time I'm having to spend playing the metagame instead of the actual game, the less I tend to enjoy myself. I want to do my learning as a part of playing, rather than as a prerequisite to even getting started.

Return of the Flumph

It was recently decided that the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign I've been playing in will be switching to 5th edition for our next session.  On the whole, I'm excited since 5e feels much more like Dungeons & Dragons should, in my opinion.  My stance on 4e has always been that it's a perfectly good system for strategic combat, but it's not D&D.  I am , however, disappointed that I won't get to debut my rebuilt warlock who never lets his opponent stand up, ever.

With a 5th edition session in the near future and needing to port my character over, I went ahead and picked up the core books as well as the two adventures that have been published so far.  I had leafed through a friend's Player's Handbook and determined that I liked the system, so I figure there's a reasonable chance I'll want to run some games in the future.  I also figure the adventures will be useful in getting an idea of how the creators of this edition think the game should play.

So anyway, I've been reading through those books and in the Monster Manual I found something amazing.  The flumph is back.

The original flying spaghetti monster

For those not in the know, the flumph is a perennial entry on lists of weird, crazy, or useless D&D monsters (along with such luminaries as the flail snail and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing).  The flumph is one of the rarest of D&D monsters, a lawful good aberration.  It's also basically a floating telepathic jellyfish that is helpless when knocked on it's back.  Flumphs are awesome.

The fact that the flumph is, for the first time, among the initial set of monsters published for an edition of D&D says a lot about the design team's willingness to try and recapture the feel of older editions and marry it with a cleaner ruleset.  The Dungeon Master's guide is full of the sorts of random tables that made the first AD&D books so much fun.  Example artifacts have DM chosen (or randomly generated) minor benefits and flaws, just like AD&D.  One of the example traps is the classic Tomb of Horrors sphere of annihilation trap.

Ultimately, D&D is a game about creating stories.  A little weirdness and a little randomness can go a long way towards making a story memorable.  5e seems to have been created by folks that realize that, and that brings me great joy.  I'm sure the flumphs are happy too.

Farewell Uncle Pterry

Terry Pratchett has died, and the world is a little darker for his passing.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that Sir Terry had on me over the years; his writing has been a near constant in my life since I really began reading fantasy.  It would have been around 1990 or so that a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Guards! Guards! and from there I was hooked.  Not that Discworld novels were easy to find in America at the time.  For a few years they were out of print here with only used copies and the like available.  Most of my copies of the books before Small Gods! are book club editions I picked up used.

There's one last Discworld novel to be published, the 41st in the series.  I have that last bit of Pratchett to look forward to, and then it's over.  I'll reread the series, have no doubt of that, but for the first time in 20 years I won't be avidly anticipating the next book.  I'll miss that.

Building Puzzles is the Hardest Puzzle

I picked up Hexcells recently on the basis of Kodra and Rae's talking it up, and have enjoyed it quite a bit. I've always been a big fan of logic puzzles of any sort, so it was right up my alley.  The basic gameplay is much like Minesweeper, where each cell is either part of a pattern (blue) or not (black). Yellow cells are of unknown status and must be marked by you. To solve the puzzle you must successfully mark all of the cells. Unlike Minesweeper, however, each puzzle gives you some information to start with and can be solved with no guessing at all.

As you graduate to more and more complex puzzles, additional methods of providing information to you are introduced. You'll be told how many blue cells are in a particular line of cells, or that all the blue cells in a particular line or around a cell are contiguous. Eventually you start getting cells that contain a number signifying the number of blue cells within two spaces of that cell. Ultimately you find yourself having to combine information from multiple sources to identify cells properly. It's very difficult by the end, but extremely gratifying when you successfully solve a puzzle.

There are 3 Hexcells games, each with 36 puzzles of increasing difficulty. The difficult also increases more quickly in each successive game, so you're quickly solving puzzles harder than the previous games hardest.  By the end they're downright fiendish and I found myself having to take a break and come back with fresh eyes on multiple occasions (thankfully the 3rd game saves your progress on partially completed puzzles).  Ultimately though, I made it through and finished the final puzzle.

My wife saw me playing and asked "Are you a bee?"

The third game, Hexcells Infinite, introduces Infinite Mode, which boasts 100,000,000 computer generated puzzles.  Put in a numerical seed, get a puzzle.  Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, they're just not as good as the set puzzles you get up to that point.  The game's main puzzles contain a paucity of information, forcing you to determine which of a very few existing clues your latest moves will combine with to identify your next move.  The generated puzzles I've tried, on the other hand, are overrun with numbers from the very beginning and are mostly a matter of scanning through the puzzle for the next obvious move.  Occasionally I'll have to stop and think a bit, but it's mostly just click click click done.

The problem is that programming a computer to build interesting puzzles is difficult.  Much more difficult than writing a program to solve puzzles; that's generally trivial if the puzzle is based on pure logic and intended to be human-solvable.  Building a puzzle requires you to develop explanations for what make a puzzle good that can be expressed in code.  I have no way of knowing how the Hexcells puzzle generator works, but if I had to guess I'd posit that it generates the field of hexes and assigns them each blue or black based on an algorithm that uses the seed as input, creates all the possible clues the puzzle could have, then starts hiding cells and removing clues while checking that the puzzle remains solvable.

With a million possible puzzles, I'd guess that from sheer happenstance some clever ones will show up, but Sturgeon's Law appears to apply in this case.  That said, it's still a great game and would have been well worth my time if the Infinite feature didn't exist at all.

I Am Not the Demographic

The recent announcement about the impending changes to the Marvel Universe has served to drive home something I've known for a while, but haven't truly unpacked and considered until now. For those not following the state of Marvel comics, it was announced last week that the primary Marvel continuity (the 616, as it's commonly referred to) will be destroyed at the beginning of the upcoming Secret Wars event, and a 'Battleworld' will be stitched together from chunks of that Marvel Earth and dozens of alternate Earths. Supposedly this change is intended to be permanent and will be the setting for Marvel comics going forward.

It's possible, of course, that this will end up going the way of Heroes Reborn and the changes will be walked back. I fully believe, however, that Marvel really is intending to try and make this the new status quo especially after DC's linewide reboot a few years ago. Either way, come May neither of the main super-hero universes I grew up with will exist any longer. Both will have been replaced with newer, 'fresher' versions.

This serves to really drive home the message that I am no longer the target demographic they're after, and I haven't been for a while now. At 37, I no longer qualify as a young adult, and my habits aren't what's driving the decisions big media companies are making. You see the same thing with movies, where properties like Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been re-imagined in ways that are utterly unappealing to me. Why should I expect them to appeal to me? They're not for me; they're for the teenagers and young adults of today.

This isn't to say that no one is making media for me. Certainly nostalgia has been big in recent years, and there are plenty of cool Kickstarters and indie projects aimed squarely at us children of the 80s. But the big companies, the Disneys and Warner Brothers, the EAs and Sonys, they've moved on. Any interest of mine in their products is now a happy bonus for them, not the goal.

It would be easy to become bitter and rail against the perceived injustice of this abandonment, but that would hardly do me any good, and it certainly wouldn't be healthy. Thanks to the internet, niche products can survive and thrive, so there will always be new things for me to read and watch and play, I'll just have to look a little harder to find them. And I'll have to learn to let go of the things that are no longer for me. I'm going to continue reading Marvel's books at least until Secret Wars, and then I'll have a decision to make. It's possible I'll decide that this new direction is something I enjoy and want to follow, but I don't find that likely. If it's not, I'll have to close the book on Marvel and move on. It's good to know when to let things go.

Doing Well By Doing Good

Ever since I've had a for-real grown-up job I've made a point of donating to Heifer International each year.  Not only is it a local charity in my case, it's model is one which I whole-heartedly approve of; providing people with knowledge and assistance that is useful long-term and ultimately asking them to pay forward in the future when they are able.  I also like the idea of giving someone the gift of baby ducks.  I haven't always been able to give a lot, but I always at least give someone ducks.

Quack

Patrick Rothfuss agrees with me enough to have started a yearly geek-centered charity drive called Worldbuilders.  Every year around the holidays, Worldbuilders solicits donations to Heifer with various nerdy things occurring once certain totals have been raised.  This year, as an example,  Neil Gaiman recorded a video of himself reading Jabberwocky once $600,000 had been raised.  In addition, every $10 donated is an entry in a massive lottery of all sorts of geeky goodness.  Books, board games, and so forth.  Since Worldbuilders began, I've made my yearly donation to Heifer through it; I figure a chance at something neat is a nice little added benefit, so why not?  If anything it encourages me to give a little more to up my chances.

I've never actually won anything in the lottery.  Until this year, that is.  Saturday I found a package from Worldbuilders at the door, and inside was a copy of the board game Amazonas!

Ohmanigotaparrot!

It's a pretty interesting looking game, with a short enough playtime and straightforward enough rules that I might be able to get my wife to play it (She hates complicated fiddly games with lots of different actions to choose from and hours-long play times.  Sadly this includes most of the board games I own).  Perhaps this weekend I'll shanghai a friend or two and play a couple games.  If so, I'll try and write a review once I've seen how it plays.

Hello there, Ladies and Gentlemen

Welcome to any new readers that came from Massively to check me out!  I'm actually double glad Syp linked to me, as he mentioned the post that he made some years back that was my inspiration for my ability identification post!  For some reason I was misremembering it as something I saw on the LotRO forums.

I don't know how many folks might stick around and keep reading, but I've been considering a state of the gaming post in any case, so what better time?  Here's what I've been up to recently.

FFXIV

The 2.5 patch came out Monday, and for the first time I was entirely caught upon the various questlines.  I didn't really have time last night to try running any new group content, but I got everything unlocked and am ready to give some of it a try.  The Hildibrand questline continues to be the best thing ever, and I'm especially looking forward to the new Gilgamesh fight.

Apart from the new stuff, there's still plenty of existing goals that I'm still working towards.  I've leveled all my crafting and gathering classes to 50, but I still have plenty of better gear to work on so I can craft 3 and 4 star items.  I've been in a bit of a conundrum where I didn't want to spend a lot of gil melding materia into gear that isn't best in slot, but working on desynthesis has opened up my ability to craft the best jewelry for gathering and crafting, so that should help me move on up the chain.

I've also been working on my battle classes and have 3 of those at level 50.  Bard remains my main to which I've added Dragoon and Warrior.  I'll probably be focusing on White Mage or Scholar/Summoner next so I have a healer job available, but I haven't decided which yet.  I suspect I'd actually be better tanking as Paladin than Warrior, but I won the most absurd axe in the game off Titan a couple months back, and I've been wanting to use it ever since.

Dat Axe

Marvel Heroes

I've honestly not done much in Marvel Heroes recently apart from try to log on once a day to collect daily rewards.  I'm sure I'll swing back around to it again before too long, but for now FFXIV and occasional single player games are dominating my PC gaming time.

Shadow of Mordor

Among my Christmas presents this year was Shadow of Mordor, which I have been enjoying the hell out of.  I absolutely love Arkham City, so the basic gameplay is right up my alley, and the orc captains are a great element.  I had one poor idiot come back a total of 4 times, jumping me out of nowhere each time and looking rougher and rougher as it went along.  I do have trouble focusing on the story at all since I keep running into captains that need killing and Power Struggles to deal with.  I need to at least get to the point where I can brand captains so that getting them promoted actually benefits me.

FFX

Finally, I picked up the FFX/X-2 remaster recently and have been playing my way through Spira again.  I'd forgotten how dark that game is underneath the surface once you know what's actually going on.  So many things that were relatively innocuous the first time through have a whole new level of sad attached to them.  Really though, I guess Final Fantasy games have a history of darkness. mass genocide in VI, the whole Cloud/Sephiroth thing in VII, and Tactics, man don't get me started on Tactics.  It's like a Shakespearean tragedy told with Precious Moments figurines.

In any case I just wrapped things up in Luca and am headed out on the Mi'hen Highroad.  X is one of the Final Fantasy games that I not only beat but pretty much burned to the ground content-wise the first time around, so it's interesting seeing what all I remember and deciding how in depth I'm going to go.  I have a hard time not collecting all the things, but I don't know if I'm going to be willing to put forth the effort this time around to, for instance, get Lulu's final weapon.