The Cesspit. - I am in here.

Wildstar - a game design lesson

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:30:55 -0700

Wildstar is an upcoming MMORPG by NCSoft. From the look of it, it seems they sank in it quite a pile of money.

It ultimately represents what's truly wrong with the game industry, especially in the MMORPG branch: piles of money burnt on stupid game design (and stupid management as consequence).

Look at this video, showing a feature apparently well received: http://kotaku.com/wildstars-path-system-might-be-the-coolest-mmorpg-feat-509265563

This must be some comical failure of game design. It appears as a very nice thing but if you think about it for more than two minutes it's revealed as totally stupid (and apparently the game designers only thought about it for 1 minute 59 seconds).

At the time we called this type of stuff "gated content/permeable barriers". In the case of this game they decided to make something like the Bartle test into a CLASS SYSTEM. So that if you are an "explorer": you're given tasks to run between places or find hidden areas, or if you are a "scientist" you can examine stuff to learn about the lore.

So if you actually want to enjoy the diversity of the game you have to REROLL different characters.

I mean, the goal should be the EXACT OPPOSITE: letting the player enjoy directly all the game offers, and especially let one CHOOSE on which particular aspect to focus instead of forcing the experience into a linear and obligatory path (hint: Guild Wars 2 tries to reward different playstyles without shoehorning them into classes).

And at the end their idea is so ridiculous that in order to balance it, all these "custom" activities will be limited to silly trivialities, and in the end the system is pushed back to being irrelevant. That's its potential: oscillating between irrelevancy on one side (because you need players to enjoy the best of the game fully, and so keeping the "gated content" as minor extra) and frustration on the other side (because every time you bump into something interesting BUT not "for your class" it's like the game force you to log out and relog with a different character).

I mean, really, what's wrong with letting players pick their favorite activities instead of shoehorning them into tightly defined boxes?

--
Since I have 5 minutes here's a lesson on GOOD game design:

Game design is about being able to provide the HOWs and WHYs. That's all. Good game design's goal is maximize the good aspects, and minimize the suck.

Every idea usually has some of both, so let's examine what we have here:

The good: the game offers interesting/varied side activities that don't simply focus on boring and repetitive combat, and so possibly appealing different players enjoying different playstyles.
The bad: for some absurd reason they decided to shoehorn the playstyle into a forced choice at character creation, so putting a limit to the freedom of choice of the player. All the while without acquiring any other positive thing. It's just masochistic (or clueless) design. Hence the "bad" is entirely removable.

The bottom line/design principle: players come in different types. MANY types. Different players enjoy different stuff. Your best interest is to accommodate the majority of them, and so give everyone something they enjoy. This also means that a variety of players require a variety of gameplay.

Now I can unfuck the system without even require a major retooling of the assets they have:

You remove the class "path" choice at character creation, enable all this content for all characters.
Within the game you add to the "character sheet" a "Path" tab. Under this tab you show all the paths available to the player.
Let the player check checkboxes corresponding to each path, which simply "hides" in the game content that isn't selected (so that you can select all of them, or none, or whatever mix you enjoy).
Create a global "Paths" currency system, so that experience you gain in one path still goes into the same pool. Which means that you gain experience regardless what you decide to do.
Optional: add "perks" (special skills, gifts, or other bonuses) for players who especially gain their path experience in one path area.

That's all. Applause.

Dragon Quest 1

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:00:11 -0800

I've taken a break from programming activities while also contemplating a possible split. The roguelike game on one side, and a reworked program that I could use simply to draw maps (even to use with old-school games that need mapping). Both of these need a programming component I still have zero knowledge about: how to read/write stuff to a file, so that I can save/reload (including the possibility to draw a dungeon instead of simply generating it randomly). I'll get to it, eventually.

In the meantime I made a scheme of popular/classic JRPGs. Leaving aside the most recent entries on consoles. All the stuff in the chart can be emulated well on PC, so this is a list done for long-term preservation of these games, even if their respective hardware goes obsolete. The first number is the vote the game has on Gamefaqs (the site with enough votes to make them relevant), the next two numbers represent "hours of gameplay", giving an idea about how long on average each game requires to complete (goes from main story to main story + some extras), and the last number is the number of votes, useful to consider how popular the game is.

Then I considered the mad plan of playing all Dragon Quest games in their order. I like setting up similar Epic tasks. They can range across all media. Like burning through the Battlestar series (I did this in December) or all five seasons + movies of Babylon 5, reading the whole Solar Cycle by Gene Wolfe, or all the ten Thomas Covenant by Donaldson, or the Dune cycle by Herbert (or Malazan, obviously), play the whole Shin Megami Tensei series across the various titles, read the HUGE, continuous storyline that unified all Marvel comics from 2004 to 2010 (starts with Avengers Disassembled), read the DC-side of Epic task, all the Crisis starting from the first, including all tie-ins (like 52), or reading the Morrison epic long cycle on Batman, play the Amberstar/Ambermoon epic duology of games on the Amiga (or the insane "Fate: Gates of Dawn"), or play World of Xeen, or Wizardry VII on PC, read Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow, watch all movies by Charlie Kaufman, study the Kabbalah (without spending one dollar), read the Chinese Epics like Three Kingdoms, or the five-volumes set of Dream of the Red Chamber (or the Japanese The Tale of Genji, or the Chinese erotic Jin Ping Mei, also in five volumes), or the historical 14 book cycle by Dorothy Dunnett, watch the critically acclaimed samurai trilogy of movies by Yoji Yamada (The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade, Love and Honor, for a total of 6 hours and 20 minutes), watch or read all Once Piece, read Berserk, Eden, watch all Gundam and Macross series, or all Evangelion, watch all Haruhi Suzumiya in chronological order, learn to play the most hardcore wargames, watch all Kamen Rider series, watch in order the whole mytharc of X-files, or rewatch all Twin Peaks, or watch all Buffy, or Frasier, play/read the Nasuverse (includes Kara No Kyoukai series of seven animated movies), or the Muv-Luv series, or all of Umineko (80+ hours of "reading" on average), or better, first Higurashi and then Umineko, read all Sandman, play the Arkania trilogy of RPGs. And do not think this is even close to a complete list, I just got tired of adding stuff as I remember it.

Or study a programming language from zero and write a roguelike that consolidates 20 years of gaming in one game... All this just to say I enjoy setting up gargantuan, long-term tasks, and that's way it's absolutely required that I'm granted more than one life in order to do all I've planned. Just a reminder.

So last added to the list is playing these Dragon Quest games in sequence. The first three can be played on a SNES emulator and available in English thanks to some fan translations. The following three (4-5-6) make their own trilogy and re-released on the Nintendo DS, the 7th (probably the longest JRPG in existence) is on Playstation 1, the 8th on the PS2, and the 9th back on DS.

Putting some hours into Dragon Quest 1 has been quite interesting, and rather useful in the perspective of my roguelike. Playing old western RPGs is usually more annoying due to technical problems, glitches and general lack of ease of play, whereas the old JRPGs are technically "flawless" and essentially impossible to improve. The only difference with the modern ones is that their design is "scaled down". And this makes them extremely interesting because it's like seeing the building blocks directly. All following generations of JRPGs are simply about dressing up and adding parts.

Dragon Quest 1 plays flawlessly and is at the same time elegant and simplistic. There's no party, just a single character to manage, you are given a bland mission, exit the first castle made of an handful of rooms, and are already on your own. The basic formula of the game is built as an economic system. Most of the game is played right on the world map, divided into zones, where you fight random encounters while you gravitate around towns. The most important "currency" the economic system is based on is the Hit Points. The more random encounters you go through, the more HPs go down, obviously. If you have Magic Points and an Heal spell then you can restore the HPs, but they are just two layers of the same thing, since sooner or later you'll be out of MPs as well. The only way to restore both is to sleep at an Inn, and so go back to a village. During the fights on the world map you gain Gold, and with Gold you buy better equipment, pay the Inn, buy health potions. The difficulty and gameplay rises from the tension that is created by the need to be able to backtrack to a village (where you can restock), and the need to explore the world, so reach the next village, or go through a dungeon.

It's actually extremely easy to find oneself in a bad situation because those random encounters are extremely frequent and in order to reach the places you are meant to reach you have to travel far away from the safety of a town. This means you could frequently realize you're deep in a dungeon, lost (because dungeons are hard to navigate and the visibility extremely limited) and not likely to be able to backtrack quickly enough to a village. This economic system based on dwindling resources and the need to push further to reach a goal or find a new town instead of going all the way back comprises all gameplay the game offers. In villages you find a number of NPCs you can talk to, but they mostly offer a couple of lines of "flavor text", or some bland lore, or tips. But you don't have choices or quests being offered. The story doesn't go beyond the classic "save the princess, kill the bad guy". So what remains is going through the virtual tiers, leveling up to increase the HPs and MPs, gain enough gold to improve the equipment, which means being able to travel further away, so entering more dangerous areas that obviously scale along the player's own progress. Eventually you'll find a village where you can get special keys that open special doors in some dungeons. This is Dragon Quest 1.

What's interesting for me is that I could implement all of this, almost an exact copy, with my current programming skills in my roguelike. I could make an exact copy of this game because the mechanics are straightforward and easy to grasp. This is already a skeleton of a game. When it works you have a structure and the rest of the work is about adding detail and depth. Seeing it work as a simple economic system reveals what truly makes the totality of the game. What you play with. The rest is flavor and dressing up.

When you plan and write a roguelike you have millions of ideas and complex things you want to do. But planning this from the top down makes it look utterly IMPOSSIBLE to achieve, and discouraging. Instead if you look at it from the bottom up, then it will be revealed as simple and linear. You need to know where things are coming from, dig in the archaeology of games to understand how things worked, and then you can quickly ascend to reach those places that are in your goals.

I'm only a few hours into Dragon Quest but it was a revelatory and constructive experience. At some point I couldn't believe what I was seeing on screen:

I mean, finding a girl at a public bath that offers a "puff puff" for 20 gold? I had to search online to confirm my suspicion... And yeah, it's more or less how it looks. This thankfully preserved by the fan patch, since the original Dragon Warrior games in the west had that dialogue cut. You don't want kids asking their parents what's a "puff puff". I would have missed one famous and recurring gag of the Dragon Quest games ;)

By the way, I choose "Yes". I got a puff puff, and wasted my 20 gold. Then I did it again.

(Mis)adventures in roguelike development:: I made this far

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 12:30:14 -0800

I've been silent here because the "coding diary" is over here.

(Mis)adventures in roguelike development: why old-school RPG rules

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 05:59:33 -0700

I'll briefly explain here why the roguelikes are the occasion for the renaissance of old-school pen&paper ruleset. Why I believe this match is perfect.

The fact is that with the latest generation of games we moved toward the "analog". The evolution of the Elder Scrolls games makes this fairly obvious to notice. The biggest failure of Morrowind's combat (as well as Daggerfall) was that there were to-hit rolls. You swung your weapon and the game would roll to figure out if you hit your target or not.

This way of resolving combat is an heritage of classic pen&paper RPG rules, but the problem is that they do not make sense in a game like Morrowind. Those rules were made to simulate the entirety of combat. AD&D rules, for example, were abstracted to simulate an entire minute of combat with just one die roll:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition
A round is approximately one minute long. Ten combat rounds equal a turn (or, put another way, a turn equals 10 minutes of game time).

But these are just approximations--precise time measurements are impossible to make in combat. An action that might be ridiculously easy under normal circumstances could become an undertaking of truly heroic scale when attempted in the middle of a furious, chaotic battle.

When making an attack, a character is likely to close with his opponent, circle for an opening, feint here, jab there, block a thrust, leap back, and perhaps finally make a telling blow. A spellcaster may fumble for his components, dodge an attacker, mentally review the steps of the spell, intone the spell, and then move to safety when it is all done. It has already been shown what drinking a potion might entail. All of these things might happen in a bit less than a minute or a bit more, but the standard is one minute and one action to the round.

So during one minute a lot could happen, many attacks, feints and moves. But you can't simulate all that, so you abstract it and concentrate it in one to-hit roll, leaving aside the details.

But in a game where you control your character in first person and decide how to move, circle the enemy and swing your weapon, then all those details ARE PART OF gameplay. It's not anymore an abstraction of combat as if you controlled your character from a overhead perspective and moved in combat turns. The in-combat time is analog. Finely grained. And so it's not a good idea, design-wise, to mix abstract combat rules with analog combat gameplay.

That's why in Oblivion and Skyrim the to-hit roll was discarded. If you are in range and swing you weapon, your weapon always hits. And then think that if technology was advanced enough that it could simulate a full body, with internal organs and everything, then it would render the abstraction of "hit points" also unnecessary.

A roguelike is a different type of game, almost entirely "digital" and abstracted. The game-world is made of discrete cells, space and time are stricter. Your character is just a single letter printed on screen. All this makes abstraction required. You can't manually swing your weapon, dodge and parry with precise timing as in Skyrim or Dark Souls, so you need game rules that simulate all of this internally. You need statistics that define your character and what it can do, options as decision at a higher level.

That means that a roguelike is much closer to the nature of old-school RPGs than how modern, "analog" games can be. It's not an issue of "new VS old". The old-school way is not surpassed. It's just that we deal with two different genres, kinds of games. Cultural trends simply made one more popular because abstraction is always a barrier to accessibility (and that's why first person shooters are popular too: as little abstraction as possible, no layers between you and the simulated world).

And that's why I believe that rediscovering those old-school rule systems is the interesting thing to do, for roguelikes, instead of writing roguelikes that also hide mechanics behind layers of complex math.

If you STILL think this only applies to old games, then I point you to Project Eternity. At this moment they are right about to hit $3,500k. That's a lot of money and people involved. One of the ideas sitting at the foundation of this project is to go back at party-based, top-down fixed camera of Baldur's Gate. The consequence of that choice is making all I wrote here relevant for that game too. We'll see if their game design is savvy enough to properly deal with it.

P.S.
Even the just released XCOM has overhead perspective and to-hit rolls.

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(Mis)adventures in roguelike development: Rule System

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:55:17 -0700

I've been silent here because I actually spent time doing stuff. I'll eventually recuperate the "diary" but for now it already exists in a form: here.

That became a long thread.

In the meantime I wrote down some first high level design consideration that will direct toward the "system" I'll use for the ruleset governing the game.

--
Following are a number of RPG classic systems that I consider interesting and whole mechanics I'm planning to integrate into my roguelike. So before moving on, I wanted to compile a simplified list of a standard type of attack in each of these systems. Just one attack, so not a whole combat turn.

DANGEROUS JOURNEY
(surprise roll d100)
- Initiative 1D10, subtract related speed component, add speed of action
- TO HIT: skill %. Succeeds if less than skill level. If lower than 10% of the skill -> critical. (plus modifiers due to cover/movement)
- (target can parry by spending one attack)
- Check for location. Roll another %. If under 40% multipliers to damage apply.
- Roll damage dice dependent on weapon. If critical, it does max damage the weapon can do, without rolling.
- Armor value is subtracted from damage (armor is locational and has values for different types of attack: cut, blunt, pierce, fire, chemical, stunning, electrical).
Note: if total damage exceeds a certain Wound Level (75% of total hit points), the target is dazed.

Considerations: two weak points. The first is I don't like parry using attacks, since if you fight to win you'd rather try to kill the enemy as fast as possible instead of wasting attacks to parry. The other weak point is that location is random and can push damage quite a bit, so a bit too driven by chance.

WARHAMMER 40k
(surprise, DM decides)
- Initiative 1D10 + agility bonus. Initiative is rolled only once for whole combat, same order for every round.
- Can set a "stance", like all out attack, or defensive stance, that affect hit rolls.
- TO HIT: skill %. Succeeds if less than skill level. (some environmental variables may apply)
- (target has one "reaction" slot to use to parry or dodge)
- Check for location. This uses the same to hit roll, but with reversed order. so a 15 to hit, becomes 51 for location. Location is just location, doesn't affect damage.
- Roll damage dice. If roll a 10, roll to-hit again, if successful, roll a 10 to add to damage. If you keep rolling 10s, they all add up to damage.
- Armor value is subtracted from damage.
Note: if damage surpassed a certain level, it's a critical with consequences.

Considerations: it's more streamlined and has a free slot to use to parry or dodge, instead of wasting attacks. Has the nice trick to use only one dice for both to-hit and location, though it won't matter in a computer implementation.

PATHFINDER
(surprise happens after initiative, may need perception rolls)
- Initiative 1D20? + dex bonus. Initiative is rolled only once for whole combat, same order for every round.
- TO HIT: 1D20. Succeeds if above armor class of target. Base 10 + armor + other bonuses.
- Roll damage dice. Armor only counts for to-hit and doesn't absorb damage.
Note: a to-hit of 20 is critical if another to-hit roll is successful. Weapon type says how many times to reroll damage, usually 2x.

Considerations: it's fairly simple. It has the usual realism issues of D&D. There's no "skill" since you only get bonuses through stats and new levels. Armor doesn't absorb damage, which means that if you fight a guy in full platemail with a knife and hit, you do as much damage as if the guy was naked. If you fight the same guy with a knife or a long sword, there's also no difference in being able to hit him. There are a few combat maneuvers, but parry doesn't seem to exist.

ROLEMASTER
- Initiative is fixed. No dices being rolled. It depends on various bonuses and conditions.
- TO HIT: % dice + attacker Offensive Bonus - defender Defensive Bonus. You check the value you get on a table with the defender armor value. Rolls are open-ended, so you keep rerolling and adding, as long you go above 95.

Considerations: that's it basically. It all depends on HUGE weapon-specific tables that tell you if the attack fumbled, was critical, and how much damage it dealt. The good aspect is that attacks consider the defensive bonus of who is attacked, and before a turn you decide how to redistribute your Offensive Bonus to the Defensive. So there's a granular type of defense where you decide how much to focus on defense and how much on offense. So "parrying" is just about relocating your bonus from offensive to defensive, and is not an active "action".

HARNMASTER
(surprise, the DM decides)
- Initiative is a skill value. No dice rolls required.
- Attacker declares: target, weapon, (optionally) aiming (high, mid, low, -10 penalty), weapon aspect (if you want to exploit an armor weakness).
- Defender declares: Block, Counterstrike, Dodge, Nothing.
- TO HIT: BOTH parties have to roll % dice, and result is mapped on a simple chart. Simultaneous strikes are possible.
- Roll % dice for specific location (this can be slightly rigged by declaring a general aim above).
- For damage you usually roll 1D6 (regardless of weapon), add result to the fixed weapon damage, subtract armor absorption, and, if result is still positive, see on the Injury Table what kind of injury you get matching the value for the location.
- Injuries directly and immediately apply penalties to stats and skill checks.
- Death essentially comes from the target getting disabled or fainting.
- Healing, after successful treatment, is dealt for every single wound. Every wound has a chance of going down one level every five days.

Considerations: This is an odd beast. Armor not only just absorbs damage, but also makes one easier to hit. There are no hit points, and only wounds treated separately. Weapons can be used for different types of attacks, blunt/edge/point, and armor has different protection values against each. Which also opens the possibility to "Compound Layers", meaning that you wear armor in overlapping layers and they all add up to the protection of that specific location. You could even attempt wearing a DOUBLE PLATE, this has some diminish returns, but would also give pretty huge penalties to attacks and defense. Classes are not restricted to certain weapon types. No levels. So it does a lot of things I like as a system.

--
After all that I'll probably go with an hybrid system. I actually like Dangerous Journey general system as it seems well organized. For example every skill falls under some attribute. The attribute not only provides some basic value for the skill, or eventual bonuses to skill checks, but it also sets a maximum of expertise in that skill. So for example if you have Strength of 60 and use an attack based on strength, your skill won't exceed 60. You can't get better than that, if Strength is not improved first.

The hybrid I could make would be the character system of Dangerous Journey plus the combat system of Harnmaster. Since they both use % skill they integrate smoothly. I'd then have to simplify a lot the wound/healing system, since I can't make a player wait idly for days for every small wound.

I was also considering a party system. Initially the idea was to have it abstracted. So you'd still only see one "@" on screen representing the whole party. Instead I thought that a real party isn't much harder to do. The idea is: you still control one "@" normally, but as a monster is sighted you enter a combat phase. As the combat phase starts you get to "deploy" all your party characters in a small area around your main character. And during the whole combat you move the party members individually. Optionally, you can initiate combat even if no monster is around, and so you could split your party and move party members individually. So it's a rather flexible system. I'm aiming to have up to four party members in total, including the main character.

I also started to deal with how progress happens. No levels. The characters earns XP points for successful actions like dispatching monsters, finding loot, completing quests, the usual. But there's no level and XP points are used as "currency" (this is just one of the many mechanics I'll borrow from Dark Souls). By spending these XP points you get chances to improve various aspects of your character (stats, skills). If the dice roll used to improve a stat is unsuccessful, you get no improvement but XP is still used up. If the dice roll is successful you get the improvement BUT the XP requirements across the board for further improvement go up. Still undecided about how to handle death, no permdeath, but there will be probably a way to lose XP, Dark Souls-like.

Only stats and skills that the character actively used can be improved, but you only need to use a skill once to be able to improve it (so you get enough flexibility to improve whatever you want, without having to "grind" skills).

In order to prevent save cheat mechanics, to avoid that one could reload the game if an improvement roll is unsuccessful, the game already rolls these improvements when an action is first made. And when the player decides to use the XP the game only "reveals" the dice roll it made long before. That way, reloading a game would only produce the same result. :)

(and there would be some time limits so that you need to wait at least a day before spending XP again to improve the same skill. Which means that the fasted path is to play the game normally instead of saving/reload scumming)

On iterative design development it is very likely, essentially guaranteed, that "wasting" XP on unsuccessful improvements is a frustrating rule that would be erased and the process streamlined. But we'll see.

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(Mis)adventures in roguelike development: Why now?

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 01:26:52 -0700

If you don't know what's a roguelike you can start here, or even go straight to play one of the most sleek and recent games in the genre: Brogue.

The definition usually covers a wide range of games but usually a roguelike is associated with the idea of an ASCII RPG where you generate a character and then go exploring randomly generated dungeons. Why should you care, tho? What is that is good and unique in these prehistoric-looking games? Is it just nostalgia?

My interest in this is because I don't believe that it's just about nostalgia. This interest was sparked a few months ago, when I spent several weeks going through old and magnificent Amiga games, and then more weeks on roguelikes. It was almost a frantic search. I do believe that something of value is lost and that those games had aplenty, and a roguelike is an opportunity to mess with that stuff directly. Mixing old sensibilities with the new. But nowadays roguelikes are a lot more than that. The lack of graphic let these games focus on very deep and complex mechanics that you simply cannot find in other genres. So roguelikes aren't just old looking games with unintuitive interfaces, but also offer a kind of gameplay and complex interaction that is extinct in other games. These games are pioneers, not rearguard.

The other side of the medal is that you can mess with this stuff. Some 14 or so years ago I started in C and under ancient MSDOS an attempt to write a RPG from scratch, using the Allegro library (that is still around) and DJGPP (the Gnu compiler for dos). I wanted to build a simple foundation like the first Final Fantasy games, and then roll into that kind of engine a more deep interaction with NPCs and environments. Without the internet to look stuff up it was an incredibly hard task, even setting up the environment with the IDE, compiler and all the rest. After messing with this for a while and creating a rudimentary skeleton of a game that showed a sprite moving on a tile map (and then getting completely stuck when I tried to convert it to interrupt-based timing so that it wouldn't run at different speeds on different hardware), I figured it would take me more than a year JUST to write the engine, and then I could have started, maybe, actually making the game, design and content, the stuff that I actually considered interesting. I realized that you either dedicate yourself fully to such a project, in a totalizing way, or it's just impossible to make something even barely worthwhile. That's where I stopped. I just couldn't afford to plan things so long term and sink into that all my time. It just couldn't be realistically done, even if I only wanted to make my own project without any intention of selling it or whatever.

If I'm back attempting a similar project is because I see in roguelikes (and in the different context, because of the internet offering so much material you can look up) the possibility to quickly get to the "meat" of the game. All the standard roguelikes build the whole game by reusing a few output functions, so the "engine" is almost directly covered. It's like the possibility to quickly write prototypes the way you want, without the baggage of graphic. So a possibility to remove as much as possible the overhead and busywork of engine programming, and do instead game programming, design, content.

Programming is actually one of the most addicting experiences you can have. More than playing a good game, once you are in the groove. But it is also immensely frustrating if you hit a roadblock and have no way to get over it. That's when projects usually fail. This time I've got the illusion that the path is viable. Because there are good libraries that cover most of the stuff I need, specifically for what I need, because the internet overflows with documentation that you can use, because I can purchase good books on programming, and game programming, and because there are plenty of roguelikes out there that are open source, so you can go into them and see how they work. Pilfer hundreds of games of their good ideas, and put them in your game. The accretion of these parts, and the original, odd mix I want to make is what I'm looking for. I will go back playing those Amiga games and classic RPGs, parse their game design, as well as taking stuff from modern, perfectly designed games like Dark Souls, and then cross-breeding all that with pen&paper RPG rule systems and classic modules. I have already a feature list planned that will take me several centuries to implement, but that's what makes it fun ;)

I can't say how far I'll go, or if I'll be even able to start. I'm essentially learning programming from zero, starting from the very bottom. My mathematical skills are also abysmal, so the perspectives are bleak. But whatever. The intention is to keep some sort of diary to document my (lack of) progress. An anti-tutorial on top of a tutorial. Whatever I make, in the short or long term, will be open source. Though it will likely take me years before my source is of any interest to someone beside me. But again, I'll write even the diary for myself, so I can see what I'm doing and all the stuff I get wrong. The thing I hate the most is when I bump into a problem I already solved before, but can't remember how I did it.

Obviously it all depends on how much time I can allocate to this, and with how much continuity. That's not entirely in my control, but given the chance I'm extremely stubborn and so I'll keep going at it.

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Guild Wars 2 and ass-backwards game design: why we have lived and fought in vain

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:28:28 -0700

This is a leftover. I already ranted well before Guild Wars 2's release anticipating the problems about overflow servers, long queues in PvP and difficulty for social play in general. My point: this was not only obvious to see ahead (which mmorpg doesn't have launch issues?), but also avoidable for the most part, if they rearranged the game spaces.

The post where I wrote about this at that time is here.

What drew my attention is this:

During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it's common for players to be directed to overflow servers. To play with a friend on a different overflow server, form a party together, then right-click on the friend's portrait in the party list and click "join". We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.

The interesting part to me is how bad game design has a naturally tendency to surface on its own. Guild Wars 2 was designed (deliberately AS OPPOSED to Guild Wars 1) as non-instanced PvE.

The game launches and the norm is: instanced PvE. Because overflow servers are the norm, and overflow servers are an instancing mechanic.

When in practice you get (instanced PvE) the opposite of your ideal (non-instanced PvE), then it means your design is quite broken. I say it surfaces on its own because it just won't take the form you wanted. It misbehaves. Why? Because the patterns you designed are wrong.

Now the line I underlined is also a wrong assumption. Players' activity will never balance on its own. It doesn't happen with linear progression games. At the game's start all players swarm the starting zones and the rest's empty. Six months down the line there's no better balance: the end zones are crowded and the rest of the game's empty. It's the exact same situation but upside down.

So their assumption (that the use of overflow servers subsides BECAUSE players spread out) is WRONG. What actually happens is that the use of overflow servers subsides, but simply because it's the high concurrency that also subsides.

This is not nitpicking, because the problem is that you're designing a PvE that relies on large public events, that will be essentially broken when six months down the line those zones will be almost completely empty (the right answer here is "who cares" since these days mmorpgs are designed to make money fast and become irrelevant in less than a year, as disposable as single-player games. And in GW2's case players' retention is actually a THREAT since they don't have a monthly fee).

The analysis and consequence about GW2 PvE is this:

- RIGHT NOW: lots of problems for people trying to play together. Public events are popular but PvE is instanced.

- SIX MONTHS LATER: PvE is finally non-instanced but there are not enough players to enjoy the public events.

This is what I call "ass-backwards design". It's when PvE is finally non-instanced that you want it instanced. Why? Because instancing can be used so that if there are a few players they are put together. And when there are too many, they are split so that gameplay is always optimal.

Guild Wars 2 realized only the first part: that instancing is essential to avoid overcrowding (overflow servers), but they haven't realized that instancing is also essential later on, to avoid the depopulation of players outside the endgame.

When you realize also that point, you arrive to a simple conclusion: if instanced PvE is a good thing both early (to avoid overcrowding) AND later (to avoid depopulation), then instanced PvE = good.

It's that simple.

But Guild Wars 2 designers think game design ass-backwards. They try to design PvE non-instanced. And they try to design PvP instanced. Result: queues EVEN on PvP because their PvE server structure doesn't actually allow to load-balance PvP. They have the WORST in both worlds.

See the post I linked above for a scheme that solves both problems (by putting players into non-instanced PvP server first, and load-balance PvE through instances).

This is the stuff that was being discussed in 2005 and before, try to search the blog for "mudflation" if you want more. Or see Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid and Scott Jennings go at it. Not to say that things at that time were gloriously good, but the fact is that these problems were being at least discussed and today mmorpg game design has seen an enormous decline that is only offset by the technological progress.

Hence, we have lived and fought in vain.

P.S.
I wanted to add some of the reasons why I won't buy/play Guild Wars 2. Beside all the above:

- I prefer a consistent personal style (like Dark Souls) to the rainbow colored and theme park oddball settings of GW2 or WoW.
- Zone design looks once again as elaborate cardboard cutout scenery instead of focusing on content that you use and usability in general.
- The combat I've seen in videos is overblown with effects of all kinds, from particle effects that obscure your screen to heavy highlights. Whereas I prefer a combat system with tactical transparency (where you can see what happens and can strategize appropriately, even when it gets crowded) and UIs designed to be subtle and unobtrusive.
- PvP in Guild Wars 2 sounds more like enhanced Alterac Valley than enhanced DAoC. No thanks. Too late, not enough.

Mentioning Dark Souls, that's a game with almost perfect game design on shameless display. Western game design has gone the way of ding, bling, DLCs and trivialities, and looks, honestly, pathetic and unrecoverable.

loopingworld.com

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:47:51 -0700

As the header says I'm now using loopingworld.com as the main site.

This means that the site here won't be updated and I'll eventually copy all of book-related posts over there. The rest of the stuff will stay here for as long the site stays up (not planning of pulling it down for the foreseeable future).

UPDATE: There's a possibility I'll reopen the blog, but it will be for writing about roguelike development, tracking my own (lack of) progress.

Kabbalah VS other religions

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:50:13 -0700

This post has no answers and only doubts, but reading it you'd see what is that Kabbalah is (or wants to be). This is an "answer" to the 12th self-study lesson (a introductory study) and it contains my doubts about it. To see the self-study you'd have to register here, for free. There are 14 lessons in that self-study.

I've also included the 12th lesson (about 25 minutes) if one doesn't want to go through that registration, but I actually encourage you to register and watch the rest as it's all quite interesting and at least enriching.

--
I was rewatching lesson 12 of the self-study and got some doubts. I know that Kabbalah can't be understood simply logically, but as long I'm not "there" I still have to relate to it with my own logic and the ideas I get from the lessons.

It seems to me that the difference between Kabbalah and other religions is not the one described in that video. The difference I understand is that Kabbalah is entirely about spirituality, so it isn't interested about the physical world. This marks a true difference with all other religions as all religions (as far as I know) do have systems of rules that apply to corporeality. From what you can or can't eat to when and how you should pray. Even anthropologically all religions were "meant" to regulate the corporeal world and build a certain society.

But instead I can't stop my doubts about what is explained in the video. I only know well Christianity since it's where I'm born but, while the people could certainly believe that it's about "bribing God", that's not a good representation of that religion, and the real one isn't very different from how the Kabbalistic model is described.

The part that gives me the doubts is that one could say that the Kabbalistic process is equally "delusional". As long the upper light is invariable and the events also invariable (so what changes is solely the self), then it means that the pain itself can't be stopped or diverted. The pain is instead "understood", as one, through bestowal, would perceive the "long range", so the wider purpose beside the egoistical self.

Which essentially would lead one to "endure" the pains of life in the name of a greater purpose that says: there's indeed a purpose, and it is good willed. One could see his sons killed in front of him, or go through great pains, but always knowing that there's a "meaning", and that life is eternal.

So it is true that the suffering is always relative to a perspective, and if one shifts the perspective a momentary suffering becomes bearable. Through life eternal all suffering is bearable as it is momentary. But both these ideas are essentially "consolatory" and Kabbalah would be defined itself as consolatory, as it is all based on two principles that regulate the rest:

1- That life is eternal (and so suffering momentary)
2- That God is good willed, and everything happens for a purpose

If one had the CERTAINTY of those two points, then it is true that pain would be bearable. But isn't this perspective consolatory and delusional? As you can't change what happens to you (invariable upper light and events) you have to "endure" it, hoping there's a good willed purpose even when everything looks very bleak.

The other difference between the Kabbalah and religion is that in religion the salvation or the enlightenment, more often than not, happen after death. So they are "promises" of salvation or enlightenment, and one lives with the "hope" that they are true, clinging desperately to these ideas as they can only justify the pain of life, and give life a sense.

Kabbalah is different as the promise of attaining the "upper world" is here and right now. You say it's a "science" as it has to be experienced and attained personally, first hand. It's not a theory or an abstract idea. But the skepticism here is about "when". One listens to the video courses, reads the books and slowly understands what is Kabbalah, but what's that ideal point that brings back up to that "tangible certainty"? The distinguishable certainty that Kabbalah is a science and not a consolatory delusion?

I'm explaining the subjective point of view: one comes to Kabbalah trying to learn, but learning leads me to define these ideas of life eternal and purpose as "consolatory". This can only be solved through a certainty. In other religion you achieve that certainty through "faith", but in Kabbalah faith is not required, as having doubts and asking questions is encouraged (as in science). I am right there.

A fairy tale escapism

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 07:15:24 -0700

Some quotes from a randomly found article.

What does cultural materialism do? It seeks “to allow the literary text to ‘recover its histories’ which previous kinds of study have often ignored” although the “relevant history is not just that of four hundred years ago, but that of the times (including our own)

The cultural materialist is likewise “optimistic about the possibility of change and is willing at times to see literature as a course of oppositional values”—oppositional, that is, to the “structures of feeling” that are the “dominant ideologies within a society” (Barry 183-4). This creates a need to consider “ALL forms of culture” (183), or in other words to climb deeper the way Oedipa does.

Oedipa’s paranoia could well be called optimism, faith that she is not crazy, but that a structure exists in which she CAN find answers. In fact, she can hardly afford NOT to believe it, with so many showcases of that structure materializing around her.

This cultural materialist optimism about “the possibility of change” would suggest, in both cases, that the disinheritance serves the characters for the better, directing them toward a more enlightening epiphany of their place in the world.

In fact, this theme persists in many examples that find room in those branches of that tree. This theme is better defined as a fairy tale escapism, the classic stepping into another world in hopes of a higher understanding. Could it be that, for example, THE MATRIX of the Wachowski brothers has more in common with LOT 49 than just postmodernism?

Like Neo of THE MATRIX, she seeks an escape from isolation and ignorance into a Wonderland where if nothing else she might feel free.

Everything from a rabbit hole and a looking glass to a wardrobe and a vision becomes a doorway into an underworld, or simply ANOTHER world in which the characters at least hope to find clarity.

Wonderland, the Matrix, Never Land, Narnia…these are only advantageous to their guests so far as they can provide a better way for them to see themselves.

This is an escape and indoctrination into a world to the extent that the visitors become “aliens” to their own original setting, no longer contributing to its dominant morality. Alice cannot forget Wonderland, Neo chooses to remain separate from the Matrix, and Oedipa, apparently, cannot continue unless as “unfurrowed, assumed full circle.”

The cultural materialist would best identify with the question Oedipa asks herself: “Shall I project a world?”

In this case, the theory and the texts do not simply validate each other, but instead confirm the structure to which they belong. This structure, in its very essence, seeks to “project” in a variety of ways new worlds by which to interpret reality.

A "key" to unlock the mystery of Fringe's Observers

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 08:42:54 -0700

This will have spoilers for Fringe, that you should watch if you haven't already.

--
One point that Fringe seems to underline is that the Observers observe the flux of time, as from an external position. Looking from the outside in. What triggered the whole disaster is the fact that the Observers observe "time" without perceiving themselves in it. That's why September messed everything when Walter(nate) saw him and was distracted from finding a cure for Peter. This intervention from the Observer was accidental (and everything else was an attempt to try to "fix" it). And again this is because the Observers can observe everything but make mistakes because they don't perceive themselves (and so the impact they have on reality). This is again confirmed (episode 1, season 4) by how naively the Observer replies to the guy asking him for what he needed those TV parts (to make the machine needed to erase Peter from time).

Now bring all that within our reality, take Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: "observations affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer's hope of prediction. i.e. his uncertainty is absolute"

"Given these changes in scientific thinking, we are now in possession of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes (observes it)."

"Implies" as: in the picture. A kind of recursive loop (for more on this read: "Godel, Escher, Bach"):

So the Observers in Fringe are like a metaphor of what is going on in our world. Those Observers are incapable of seeing themselves in the picture and so make an "objective" observation. With the point being: we also are observers who are incapable of perceiving reality for what it is.

There's actually an "happy end" though, as these theories seem to ultimately lead to an amplification of freedom.
--

I mean, these Observers are fucking retarded. It wouldn't be that hard to put on a wig, or even make an invisibility cloak.

P.S.
About this and everything below on this blog. I found out that Bakker is miles ahead of me. As I should have expected. Maybe I'll write about that next.

Something bordering the impossible just happened

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:57:06 -0700

Nope, not about neutrinos breaking the speed of light. As you can see from previous posts, while watching Fringe I noticed some books ideally belonging to William Bell that I recognized. Between these, there was "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and two of Castaneda's books. Now, it's Fringe writers that put these two together, because these books are ABSOLUTELY NOT RELATED. One is about math and logic, also having won the Pulitzer, the other is about spiritualism and considered by many a fraudulent anthropological study. It's the TV show that took elements from both to build its own science fiction mythology. So, the two are unrelated in the "real world".

Now, while reading some reviews of the GEB on a Italian internet book shop, I found one that said that the book was a fundamental read on the nature of knowledge to put right next to "Observing Systems", by Heinz von Foerster, another must-read classic. Since I'm curious I went on to research this other guy and realized that his fundamental ideas were similar to Niklas Luhmann, that I studied and appreciated during university. So I put an order for that book.

Today I receive the book. I flip the first pages and I find an introduction written by some Italian guy. In the very first page Castaneda is mentioned.

That's the sort of "coincidence". Not coincidence as in supernatural "sign from above". It simply means that the links I see between these ideas are not my own hallucinations. These themes have a lot to share and you'll find often that they recall each other even when not consciously. In this case the link was repeated three times, each concretely unrelated. One by Fringe writers, one by me in the previous post (before receiving the book), and one by the book's introduction.

This was a mention of Castaneda in relation to the GEB in a Italian Preface, so not directly part of the original text and its purpose. In a book I bought because it was mentioned in a random review on the internet that was on a completely different argument. So we have this relation repeated twice, where each instance of it is UNRELATED to the other. One instance is about Fringe writers that have their own ends to fill, and put the two works together (GEB and Castaneda) as their own personal creative effort in making a fictional TV show. The other instance is an Italian Preface to a von Foerster book mentioning Castaneda, whose (the book) link to the GEB was because it was recommended in a review.

The spurious element is von Foerster. It never entered the picture in the TV show, its mythology, or, likely, the writers' mind. Yet it marks the link between fictional creative/speculative needs AND actual scientific studies.

And so the objective proof of the outward expansion of culture countered by the inward force that determines that ideas eventually "return home" and reveal the same origin. Or this, probably consolatory and delusional, idea of mine that all these are pieces of a puzzle that is up to me (or whoever else) to put together, to reveal the Grand Design.

Beyond Post-modernism

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:55:45 -0700

Chasing red herrings in the hope they lead somewhere. But the number of overlapping analogies and returning ideas is quite amazing. As usual, when things make TOO MUCH sense, I label them as "consolatory", and so unreliable and most likely false.

The journey through Post-modernism led me beyond, then back in, as in a loop. Another starting point was again provided by mass-entertainment, Fringe (the TV series). This time it was a frame, specifically episode 12 of the third series. It briefly shows some books belonging to William Bell (a character in the series). The first and last are too out of focus to recognize, but the others are explicitly shown and one of these two is a recurring book, as it was also shown in LOST. The curious fact is that I also owned some of those books:

- A Separate Reality - Carlos Castaneda
- The Second Ring of Power - Carlos Castaneda
- In the Wake of Chaos - Stephen H. Kellert
- Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Capra

I own "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and a book of Castaneda not on that list: "The Art of Dreams". The interesting part is the links between these books and some of what I wrote in my previous post. Chasing after magic, spirituality and metaphysics means getting lost very easily, waste a lot of time and get sidetracked without gaining anything really useful. I've always been a curious skeptic, and so I've dabbled here and there with these kinds of studies in my life, without getting a whole lot out of them. Often they are empty lures. This time I think I have a better orientation system I've built. I know where to place things and I can separate better between the garbage and something that has some deeper relevance.

I discovered that "Gödel, Escher, Bach" has now a preface by the author done for the anniversary. My copy of the book is very old and doesn't have it, but I've figured out it can be read online. Amazon preview has it, but it misses some pages, but by mixing the amazon.com preview with the amazon.co.uk one it's possible to read the whole of it (which now resides complete in a folder on my desktop, in the case they decide to "fix" it). This preface is extremely useful, as it explains concisely "what the book is about", and its purpose is far more important and pivotal than the title may suggest. It's a research on consciousness, and perception as consequence (bringing back to the essence of postmodernism, as way to read and portray the world).

This book sits right beside some other studies of mine that are at the very foundation of my (scientific) "beliefs", and they earned this position. One is Niklas Luhmann, the other, that I discover now, is Heinz von Foerster. Both build a logic system that works like math. It explains the world outside through rigorous rules that are meant to be unassailable, still very close to the original methodology of GEB (the book above). They deal directly with the partiality of the observation. They know human limits and so their systems have to exist wholly within. Systems that recursively observe themselves (which is, the recursion and "strange loops", where the GEB believes the consciousness emerges). Two books of Heinz von Foerster I have already on the way, another I found online.

A step back to Japanese Anime. Relevant quote:

"How about I observe. Therefore the universe is. Therefore, we can say if the human beings who observe the universe hadn't actually evolved as far as they did, then there wouldn't be any observations and the universe wouldn't have anyone to acknowledge its existence. So it wouldn't really matter if the universe existed or not. The universe is because human beings know it is."
— Itsuki Koizumi, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

This will recur. Now follow the trail to this, skip to page 37 (this book was published in 1865 and about the ideas of a philosopher who lived at the end of 1600, someone truly postmodern then):

Everything exists in the mind that perceives it; and apart from the perceiving mind nothing exists. The real place and form of existence is in the idea. The desk I write upon, the paper I feel - they exist in my ideas, and nowhere else; and they may exist in the ideas of all others, if they only saw and felt them, at the same time. If the perceiving ego did not exist, the desk and the paper before me could not have existed. Ideas are objects of perception, and their existence is in the fact that they are perceived. Ideas are different from the mind, and yet they exist in the mind.

[...]

If it is not perceived by anybody, it does not exist; for its real existence is in the fact it is perceived by some intelligent mind.

Now something more recent. "Radical constructivism: a way of knowing and learning" By Ernst von Glasersfeld.

What is radical constructivism? It is an unconventional approach to the problem of knowledge and knowing. It starts from the assumption that knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience. What we make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in. It can be sorted into many kinds, such as things, self, others, and so on. But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective, and though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may not be unlike yours, I have no way of knowing that it is the same. The experience and interpretation of language are no exception.

Heinz von Foerster follows similar ideas:

''Objects and events are not primitive experiences. Objects and events are representations of relations. Since 'objects' and 'events' are not primary experiences and thus cannot claim to have absolute (objective) status, their interrelations, the 'environment' is a purely personal affair, whose constraints are anatomical or cultural factors. Moreover, the postulate of an 'external (obective) reality' disappears to give way to reality that is determined by modes of internal computations.''

Only he clings more to mathematics and sometimes the (my) brain can't compute:

Assume a finite universe, U0, as small or as large as you wish, which is enclosed in an adiabatic shell which separates this finite universe from any “meta-universe” in which it may be immersed. Assume, furthermore, that in this universe, U0, there is a closed surface which divides this universe into two mutually exclusive parts: the one part is completely occupied with a self-organizing system S0, while the other part we may call the environment E0 of this self-organizing system: S0 & E0 = U0.

Bu lets keep it to ideas that the brain can try to grasp. This from another book (whose name fits: "The Dream of Reality"):

The constructivism of Heinz von Foerster is concerned with the convergence of two central themes: 1) how we know what we know, and 2) an abiding concern of the world and its humanity. For the constructivist, the dreams of reason denote a common denominator running through our language and logic, manifest as a wish for what we call "reality" to have a certain shape and form. The wish has several dimensions.

First we wish reality to exist independently of us, we who observe it. Second, we wish reality to be discoverable, to reveal itself to us. We wish to know its secrets, i.e., how it works. Third, we wish these secrets to be lawful, so we can predict and ultimately control reality. Fourth, we wish for certainty; we wish to know that what we have discovered about reality is true.

Radical constructivism challenges this wish, thus taking on the unpopular job of shattering the fantasy of an objective reality. Constructivists argue that there are no observations -- i.e., no data, no laws of nature, no external objects -- independent of observers. The lawfulness and certainty of all natural phenomena are properties of the describer, not of what is being described. The logic of the world is the logic of the description of the world.

Constructivism identifies, for all who care to look through the lens of its epistemology, the limits of what we can know.

But is this "bias" just the result of subjective, limited perception (and so the impossibility of breaking the shell and see what's outside), or there's a method to it, a purpose? That's exactly the point that divides science from metaphysics. But it is the science itself leading to that edge and then leaving you alone. Science has a direction, it leads there and then surrenders. So I make this leap and cross to a less orthodox book: Initiation Into Hermetics, by Franz Bardon.

Man is the true image of God; he has been created in the likeness of the universe. Everything great to be found in the universe is reflected, in a small degree, in man. For this reason, man is signified as a microcosm in contrast to the macrocosm of the universe. Strictly speaking, the entire nature manifests itself in man.

It forms itself a loop, a recursion. Bringing back to that pivotal idea of conscience revealed by the GEB. The "strange swirl". It is in nature and it is in us.

Kabbalistic ideas essentially rely on the same tenet.

These ideas can even be brought to their limits. For example by von Foerster himself:

''At any moment we are free to act toward the future we desire. In other words, the future will be as we wish and perceive it to be. This may come as a shock only to to those who let their thinking be governed by the principle that demands that only the rules observed in the past shall apply to the future. For those the concept of 'change' is inconceivable, for change is the process that obliterates the rules of the past.''

And while I'm unsure to what extent he intends this, there are some (tapping from Kabbalistic ideas, that are at the foundation of reality as a "fake" illusion) that intend it literally: Neville Goddard.

The Power of Awareness

I AM is the self-definition of the absolute, the foundation on which everything rests. I AM is the first cause-substance. I AM is the self-definition of God.

I AM hath sent me unto you.

I AM THAT I AM.

Be still and know that I AM God.

[...]

Can man decree a thing and have it come to pass? Most decidedly he can! Man has always decreed that which has appeared in his world and is today decreeing that which is appearing in his world and shall continue to do so as long as man is conscious of being man. Not one thing has ever appeared in man’s world but what man decreed that it should. This you may deny, but try as you will you cannot disprove it, for this decreeing is based upon a changeless principle. You do not command things to appear by your words or loud affirmations. Such vain repetition is more often than not confirmation of the opposite. Decreeing is ever done in consciousness. That is; every man is conscious of being that which he has decreed himself to be. The dumb man without using words is conscious of being dumb. Therefore he is decreeing himself to be dumb.

When the Bible is read in this light you will find it to be the greatest scientific book ever written. Instead of looking upon the Bible as the historical record of an ancient civilization or the biography of the unusual life of Jesus, see it as a great psychological drama taking place in the consciousness of man. Claim it as your own and you will suddenly transform your world from the barren deserts of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan.

But in his own thinking this omnipotent "free will" is not everything. Beside "The Law" (what I've quoted), there's another part: "The Promise". "Not one shall be lost in all my holy mountain." Meaning that there's a purpose that drives all things. In the end God is waiting at the end, waiting that you learn and go through that path, however long it will take you (another idea coming from Kabbalah).

And this idea, of two kinds of perspective (and realities), one short term, the other long-term, recurs into that wonder that is The Red Book, by Carl G. Jung (this requires youtube).

The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology.

Jung:
If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you. Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical.

To note that Jung was convinced that what he wrote and drew was not a product of his own conscience and imagination, but that it was some kind of alien or external knowledge that seeped in, to the point that he questioned his own sanity.

In 1913 at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia." He decided that it was valuable experience, and in private, he induced hallucinations, or, in his words, "active imaginations." He recorded everything he felt in small journals. Jung began to transcribe his notes into a large, red leather-bound book, on which he worked intermittently for sixteen years.

In the end, he believed that this book came out of the "collective unconscious", or Akashic Record. Make of this what you will, but it is interesting how many ideas in it recur and resonate with the rest.

All this oddly brought me back to Malazan and Erikson's work. Because that's not truly "fantasy secondary world", but more an internal, symbolic landscape. Something of the mind. And in particular, it is not "alien" or fabricated as we may naturally intend it. It mimics and reflects more our world than what one assumes. One tenets of that work is about the disparate number of mythologies and beliefs specific to each population. "Systems" that seem quite hard to conciliate with each other. Appearing contradictory. And often things reveal a common root, that was disguised by limited, blind perception. More often than not, those branches are revealed having shared origins.

Without thinking how all this applies to the Malazan world, lets think to how it applies to ours. We also have as many "mythologies" and belief systems as different populations. As this blog post makes a meager example, culture develops outwardly. It ever expands, seemingly limitless and infinite. The more you know, the more you perceive how much you miss. But counter to this outward expansion there's another force. Which returns. You can study Castaneda's spirituality, Yoga or other eastern philosophies, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah or whatever else, and there are often ideas that essentially recur and are only slightly refracted and distorted from one mythology to the other. A sort of common root that gives me the illusion (or possibility) that there's a "point". That consolatory sense of "purpose", or idea of "God" ordering the world and having a "plan".

The patterns of culture move outward, following an idea of progression, ever expanding knowledge. But in the end they have to return, as this Grand Design has a center, and that is "man". We cannot transcend ourselves (as illustrated above). And through ourselves we perceive everything. Sometimes I imagine the world as an endless loop. It (itself) recurs. And every cycle is some desperate attempt to reach a "solution". I have this idea that if God created the world, then there are essentially two possibilities. The first is the cynical one. The aquarium. The world is created to amuse. A quirk. The other is that if God created something, it is because he wished to be surpassed and not simply obeyed. That what he created could be better than himself. As a father hoping his son will have something more than he had. And so this idea of the looping world set in motion by God, trying to find the answer, and carefully programmed for that task.

Which brings back to Fringe. One theme is how the "wounded", broken Walter is a better man. Because he's vulnerable and so is able to better weigh his choices and their consequences. This leads to another general idea about the pains and difficulties of the real world. Without them we would all live in stasis, because there would be no stimulation (Infinite Jest also uses this theme at its core). The rules and boundaries are needed to give things a structure and establish a reaction. Relationships that bring you forward, sometimes forcefully.

I was reading Proust yesterday and this particular idea was strong. What Proust became and what made him write "In Search of Lost Time" was the product of "wounds" and weaknesses. He was suffering for the death of his mother and for his illness. But that "heightened awareness" is what gave him his sensibility and why we remember him today. Something similar could be said about David Foster Wallace. They were both great men because they were broken. Neither of them feeling privileged because of this, obviously. But this leaves also this consolatory idea of progress. That the world outside hurts so that we can eventually be "aware" and learn. It seems there are infinite paths through this kind of journey, but it is also possible they all lead to the same destination.

Proust's work is also a world, an internal landscape with incredible complexity. Itself a microcosm explored through involuntary memory.

(here I'm doing a translation of a Preface and Proust's words, so excuse the suckyness)

He was then choosing isolation, after his life deemed to leave him alone; he was withdrawing from the world, so that another, the internal one, would freely take shape; he was shutting himself, like Noah, inside an ark, to save himself from the Great Flood outside, but also to be able to observe and understand better what was outside. He was examining obsessively a number of themes about his soul and his body, memory and oblivion, waking life and dreams, will and inactivity.

[...]

He had to cohabit with his illnesses. After all, if that intermittence of death, presented to him as suffocation, was stealing from him the hope of life, it is also true that it was giving him a kind of second sight that let him see what others couldn't. "Only pain lets you observe and learn and break down those structures that otherwise you wouldn't understand. A man that, every night, would fall asleep like a stone on his bed and wouldn't live till the moment he had to wake up, would that man think of making, if not big discoveries, at least some small observations about sleep? He's barely aware of the act. Some insomnia wouldn't be useless to appreciate sleep, to throw a ray of light in such darkness. A memory without flaws wouldn't be a powerful stimulant to study the phenomena of memory."

So seclusion and sickness, freeing him from the world and social life, offered Proust the occasion to analyze his life and the human passions. And the moments of oblivion, the emptiness, the confusion of the past, far from thwarting the memory, would infuse it a new impetus and a rare expansive strength.

Descent into Post-modernism

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:15:20 -0700

In general, postmodern writing involves a blurring of boundaries.

I've been quiet but I haven't been idle. This post is going to be more like a personal agenda so that I can track stuff without getting utterly lost. The point is I have a point, or at least trying to chase it.

This "post-modern" thing is fascinating, but also elusive. The real question is to get a grasp of at least what it does mean on a very general, but shareable, level. I had ideas but I wasn't sure they were correct and fitting, and they were also too blurred to offer a good grasp.

In the end I discovered TvTropes and that offered a concise, pragmatic guide (especially how it applies to the variety of the media of today). Many of my ideas were proved sound and could be better positioned.

This kind of journey is across mediums. I've been moving through TV series, movies, games, anime, books and more. There's a reason and it is relevant. A few months ago I was looking into Jonathan Lethem after watching a documentary and this excerpt from the wikipedia is fitting:

Nowadays, I've come to feel that talking about categories, about 'high' and 'low', about genre and their boundaries and the blurring of those boundaries, all consists only of an elaborate way to avoid actually discussing what moves and interests me about books—my own, and others'.

A lot of what I like is innately postmodern, so discovering what the term refers to is like discovering what's the rule I answer to. It is so wide not because empty of value so that you can fit in whatever you want. The patterns are specific, and the patterns are what interests me.

This habit of "tracing" stuff through the wikipedia or TvTropes is typical of the superficial glance at "everything", but that superficiality isn't the important trait. The important trait is to recognize patterns that link the most disparate stuff. For example I'm watching Fringe. A TV series I recommend, very similar to X-Files yet better on certain aspects. It sits well with the postmodern angle as it plays quite blatantly with perception and "frames" (two things that are at the core of what I look for in Post-modernism). Its mythology is extremely straightforward and that's not what draws my attention the most. What's in the show is quite blatant and often clumsy, but there's an extremely fascinating "dark side of the moon", of ideas suggested but not played. So I watch it with interest more for those ideas suggested but not played with directly. What is not shown. That part of the mythology that is not canon.

So looking at the frames of things, not the details within. The relationships between the frames, relative positioning. You recognize patterns that maybe aren't "true" (like the ideas that a Fringe episode may suggest you, but that aren't really part of the plot in any explicit way) but that help move you closer. An idea close to another trope, the Death Of The Author in its more extreme and postmodern definition:

Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you have the slightest idea what it's about?

Take a little leap of faith, and it leads to Not in Heaven. It's our right and even duty to take up the thing and understand or interpret it our own way.

This summer I have enjoyed quite a bit going through Final Fantasy XIII's plot. It's quite awesome (despite the actual game being rather subpar) and filled to the brim with those kinds of reveals and reversals I love. I'm not even sure I "read" the story the same as everyone else. For example Vanille is the typical FF airhead character. Utterly naive, clueless, cutesy, high-pitched voice to the point of annoyance. Not much clothes on her because she has to fit that male-titillating role. Oddly enough, they give her the narrating role, and this introspective voice she gets is already quite a bit different than the Vanille shown in the rest of the game. One wonders why they picked her this kind of role. At this point the plot is about a bunch of disparate characters who don't know each other and are brought together by events. They are completely clueless about what to do, so they merely stumble along in their blindness. Some 15 hours in there's one image. A sudden reveal that puts, without even using words, Vanille as a pivot and origin of the whole clusterfuck. Not the hapless victim, but the one who started it all. Suddenly all appearances are overturned, the reveal is enough to change everything literally. That flimsy, naive character was all a ruse, because SHE KNEW. She faked being ignorant like everyone else so that she could manipulate them and push them along as required (it's a female Kruppe!). The airhead had been the master manipulator, so that the others were doing exactly what they were expected to without even the slight suspicion. This is a rather great pattern that then reiterates and escalates a number of times. I love this stuff because every loop doesn't just overwrite the previous, it just... expands (like what's good in Fringe, every season adds a whole new layer that BUILDS on the previous and contains it). In the end Vanille was only a small piece, herself being also manipulated in a much wider picture. Add in dreaming statues, inner worlds, manipulative gods, the end of the world and the deceit of deceits and this becomes pretty much Malazan, the game.

Within there, the themes I'm chasing. Awareness, the perception, manipulation, the distinction between dreams and reality, the possibility of choice, the place of god, revelations, delusions, and so on. Postmodernism is all that, plus the bending of the medium. The fabric itself where you write your pattern of meaning, that can also be twisted and manipulated. Where's up? Where's down? (look at Evangelion, episode 26). One of the most representative writer dealing with stuff is obviously Philip K. Dick, especially the latter works (quoting TvTropes):

When the novel begins, Dick opens by saying that it is a fictionalized account of his own encounters with Gnosticism/his schizophrenia, and he is writing the book to get a perspective on himself. The fictionalized version of himself is named Horselover Fat ("Philip" being Greek for "horse lover" and "Dick" being German for "fat"), and the book begins from Fat's perspective. Over time, however he begins to write in the first person including excerpts from his unpublished Exegesis. Eventually, Dick becomes the main character of the story and he interacts with his own fictionalized clone.

From there I discovered a writer I had never heard of despite he's been around from quite some time: Christopher Priest. He and David Cronenberg go hand in hand.

I managed to order an used copy of A Dream of Wessex, whose plot is a distillation of what I'm looking into:

A Dream of Wessex can be read as a straightforward story about a group of twentieth-century dreamers who create a consensus virtual-reality future. Once they enter their imaginary world they are unable to remember who they are, or where they are from. On another level, the novel is itself an extended metaphor for the way in which extrapolated futures are created.

The obvious link here is to "Disciple of the Dog". Bakker is a writer that fits perfectly into all this, including the root of his fantasy work:

If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?

Is a call for "awareness", it reminds me of DFW commencement speech, also, in its own way, a call for awareness. And here we cross another medium and we arrive to Japanese Visual Novels: Steins;Gate. The Prologue (you could then also watch Fringe, season 3, episode 3 for another of those links).

For some reason Japan is the cradle of Post-modernism applied to popular culture, and the Visual Novels are possibly the most suitable medium for playing with mind screws (and so symbolism) and perception. Another "frame" with so much good stuff that you can lose yourself within (and I will).

Steins;Gate opens its own category. The Visual Novel (30 hours total playtime according to ErogameScape) is finally being translated and imminent. It has the reputation of being absolutely awesome and one of the best Visual Novels ever made. The Drama CDs are also being translated (γ, α, β, about one hour each). The anime was completed a few days ago and received many praises despite adaptations from VNs don't usually turn for the better. Steins;Gate also exists in the same Verse of another VN, also available in English and considered quite good on its own: Chaos;Head (20 hours playtime). If you are a completist like me you'll want to go through the whole thing even if these stories are unrelated.

"Mind Screw" is basically synonymous of Visual Novel, so there are a number of more titles, thankfully available in English through fan-made translations, that are worth looking into. In the end an handful of titles dominate the genre. One is the Nasuverse. Specifically the most known title (among all VNs) is Fate/Stay Night (53 hours playtime), preceded by Tsukihime (35 hours playtime). Tsukihime is interesting in its own right, especially a kind of sequel, Kagetsu Tohya (25 hours playtime), that is a crazy dream sequence that loops over and over till you are able to find a way to escape it. I love just looking at the flowcharts. Even here, for the complete journey beside Tsukihime, sequel, fan disk, and Fate/Stay Night (they tell me to stay away from the anime adaptations of all these), there's also a series of seven anime movies, considered to be quite excellent. Kara no Kyōkai, being actually the first piece of the three-parts creation and worthy in its own right: "While considered by many to be the prototype of Tsukihime, it is much, MUCH more complex, sometimes to the point of being Mind Screw."

Between that and Chaos;Head (and later on this post, Lain), I'm also reminded of this (director: Sion Sono).

Another chunk of relevant Visual Novels is represented by another writer, Romeo Tanaka. Whose only two main works are available in english: Yume Miru Kusuri (15 hours playtime) (whose subtitle fits well with the theme: "A Drug That Makes You Dream"), and especially CROSS†CHANNEL (25 hours playtime). The latter, along with another title, Ever17: The Out of Infinity (30 hours playtime), being the signature "mind screws".

What's left? Umineko. An 8-parts Visual Novel (about 10 hours every episode, so a total of 80 hours, the script is HUGE) that thrives on mystery and speculation. A kind of detective story heavy on supernatural elements. This got quite a big following and only the last chapter is waiting an english translation. As a whole is one of the hugest works (it passes easily the million in wordcount), "epic" in its own right. And finally Muv-Luv. Considered the greatest of the VNs along with (the ancient) YU-NO (44 hours playtime) (with another insane flowchart and also with an imminent english translation). Muv-Luv being a kind of special case as it is a product of "genre shift". Divided into three parts (consider 30 hours for the first two, and 40 for the last) where only the last is where it builds its reputation, and going from harem comedy to hardcore mecha. The trope "Anyone Can Die" is a synonymous of Muv-Luv. This, and other stuff, is being translated by the excellent Ixrec (where you can also find other very good reviews). Other good reviews I found on The Escapist. Especially Deskimus Prime and NeutralDrow (check their posts for more).

There's another mecha series with an high reputation that's still untranslated (it would be another huge effort) and that even has some insane gameplay included. This pretty much closes the chapter "Visual Novel". Playing five minutes of Chaos;Head would give a very good idea why these all righteously belong in Post-modernism.

Stepping slightly aside, I'm now watching Serial Experiments Lain. A Japanese anime that again fits perfectly, including stuff I previously mentioned on the blog, from the wikipedia:

Likewise, the series' Deus ex machina lies in the conjunction of the Schumann resonance and Jung's collective unconscious (the authors chose this term over Kabbalah and Akashic Record).

Enough keywords in there to find more stuff and more interesting links. The anime is packed with symbolic meaning and it will be fun to parse (and to watch alongside Fringe).

This reminds me I've just ordered Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which also has a companion book, like The Gravity's Rainbow (that I own already). Also sitting, if not leading, righteously in the Post-modern genre.

Another book to look into is Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut:

Breakfast is a personalized account of the phrase “perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” Pontiac salesman Dwayne Hoover becomes obsessed with the work of sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, eventually spiraling into acute eruptions of anxiety when he believes that he is the sole human combating a world of reificated humanoids. Black satire at the peak of its powers.

Or TvTropes:

It's taken to it's logical extreme in Breakfast Of Champions, in which the author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., appears at the end of the book, is attacked by a dog from a previous novel and apologizes to one of the two main characters for making his life so miserable.

But I was talking about anime and forgot to mention the pinnacle of Kabbalah and Post-modernism. Not Evangelion (that is so blatant that it's implicit in the list, like Infinite Jest) but The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It's so sublime (and postmodern) that I refuse to spoil. This just has to be experienced. Trying to find a correct watch-order for the anime is already an impossible task (all episodes are "scrambled" chronologically, and then across two series). And it goes to extremes (Endless Eight) that are utterly unbelievable and masochist.

Then, maybe, watch π (the guy best known for Black Swan). I haven't yet seen The Fountain, but they are closely related. In a certain way The Tree of Life too, but of that I already written on the blog.

I was forgetting, I found Christopher Priest because Adam Roberts reviewed his recent book (whose link to ergodic literature is another fascinating discovery).

And to cap this journey, another movie: Synecdoche, New York.

For thousands of years, fiction made no room for characters who changed. Men felt the need for an explanation of their baffling existence, created gods, and projected onto them the solutions for their enigmas. These gods of course had to be immutable, for they stood above the foibles of men

Rogert Ebert thinks it's the best movie of the last ten years. It's Charlie Kaufman directorial debut and he's known for penning the scripts of some utterly crazy (and awesome) works, like: "Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (these all movies being great). Working often with Spike Jonze, but also Michel Gondry, whose The Science of Sleep deserves to be on this list (including the Dream Argument).

Last namedrop is Richard Linklater, probably best known for Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", but it's Ebert review of Waking Life that draws my attention.

To not have the answers is expected. To not ask questions is a crime against your own mind.

This is The Malazan Book of the Fallen

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:51:29 -0700

After I wrapped up "The Curse of the Mistwraith" I went back to read "Midnight Tides". Brew green tea, sit down. Read ten paragraphs or so, then... think for the following hour and half without reading another line.

That's what it does to me. More and more characters give voice to my own thoughts and feelings. Blurring, because I can't say anymore if I developed a line of thought on my own, or sparked by something I read. Often I find characters say something I thought a moment before, and often I go to reread some old page and find again some thought I believed my own.

Seren longed to hold on to that long view. She desperately sought out the calm wisdom it promised, the peace that belonged to an extended perspective. With sufficient distance, even a range of mountains could look flat, the valleys between each peak unseen. In the same manner, lives and deaths, mortality's peaks and valleys, could be levelled. Thinking in this way, she felt less inclined to panic.

From Deadhouse Gates:

What see you in the horizon's bruised smear
That cannot be blotted out
By your raised hand?