Thanks, Syl!

You might have noticed that this blog is a bit less ugly.  That's thanks to the urging of Syl of Raging Monkey's, a great deal of profanity on my part (code is hard, especially when you know next to nothing), and Syl making the nifty new header image, based on a wallpaper from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

European-Style Civilization V

In the world we have seven continents: North and South Americas, Antarctica, Australia, Africa, Asia, and Europe.  Within Europe there are between ten million and one hundred gazillion countries.  Or about 50, but I cannot count past 41.  After that things just get fuzzy and I start to panic.  Within those countries are various ethnic and cultural groups which often seek to divide their countries.  But of course division spawns division so you know they'd just form new groups to hate each other.  It's a fractal of division.

And a breeding ground for war between small countries.

Lately I've been using this as the inspiration for my games of Civilization.  Rather than having a half-dozen civilizations and a dozen city-states, all with room to comfortable build a half-dozen cities, I instead have no city states, replacing them with civilizations, and use a map too small for them.  The result is a lot of civilizations of 1-3 cities, with barely any room at all.  And of course, a lot of war.

The effects can be strange.  While war is generally destructive, having so many civilizations also means a lot of research agreements, so science can move ahead quickly.  The constant war, and constant need for war, means that diplomacy isn't going to keep anyone alive, because no one trusts anyone enough.  Odds are, they've been at war before and will be at war again.  With only a couple cities these aren't big wars, but enough skirmishes to keep everyone nice and angry, but without the nice, so just angry.  City placement is even more important, since if you're only going to get a few, they'd better be great.   While there is temptation to try to get every single tile covered, there is a limit to how close cities can be built and borders can expand far enough that these cities tend not to add much and don't work at all due to the happiness mechanic in Civ V.

Have you found any settings to dramatically change the way you play your games?

Girls are scary

We're all familiar with the shy, nerdy, awkward guy who can't talk to girls.  He stammers and sweats and mumbles before escaping.  It's a bit sad to see, or experience, on either end.  He has a problem with girls.

Then there's the guy who also has a problem with girls, but of a different sort.  He also has no clue what to say, but says it anyway.  Rather than a total lack of confidence, he has an excess, a failure to recognize that given how he acts, he should have a lack of confidence.  Perhaps a lack of reproductive organs as well, but somehow eugenics always focuses on ethnicity rather than fraternity.

These two share a common thread in that they get lumped into a "gaming culture" dominated by men which causes all manner of problems for women who attempt to do weird things such as take part in a hobby which they enjoy.  Perhaps I should do a survey: "Of these undesirable reactions, would you rather be greeted by awkward stammering or by a demand to see your tits?"  Ideally it would be neither, but I write the questions so I get to make the false dichotomy.

Maybe what is needed is "Objectification Separation", which is the ability to objectify and also not.  Porn: objectify.  Not porn: don't objectify.  This would require the highly complex mental task of recognizing that some women at some times wear nothing but those some women most of the time wear clothes and most women even more most of the time wear clothes.  So sometimes there are women whose job at the time is to be stared at, but not always and not all women.  Can you imagine going to a friend who designs websites and demanding, right then, that he break out some code?  Or on an even greater level of absurdity, insisting that all male friends be able to, and have to, hand over a flashdrive of templates, on demand?  That would be ridiculous.

Someone should make a gay MMO and bring it to E3.  Have "Booth Beef", hot, shirtless men who sit and stand around looking hot and having no other purpose.  Have women wandering by and gawking and then laughing at their male friends for not looking as good.  Spread the phrase "dicks or it didn't happen."  At first men might think it's great, being demanded pictures of their penises (by which I mean, one per man, multiple men, not the other way around).  That is, until they start getting mocked.  Laughed at.  Measured by nothing else.  Not even their epeen.  So what if you've gotten every achievement, you're ugly and tiny!

On Twitter I found a link to a developer talking about the new Lara Croft.  She's more realistically proportioned and the developer kept going on about how she'll be in these terrible situations and we'll want to protect her because she'll be so vulnerable and helpless.  This confused me.  How does her being less ridiculous in appearance make me want to protect her more?  I'm just not seeing any link at all unless they made her a child and triggered the "save the children" instinct.  Even stranger, unless I misunderstood, we're still playing her.  We're not heroes leaping in to save the damsel in distress (which is its own problem), but are the damsel in distress, who despite being "helpless" is, I'm guessing, still going to survive and successfully taking things from tombs or other scary places.  Why would I even want to see or play as a helpless female character?  I much prefer female characters who can hold their own, as in Half Life 2 or Fallout: New Vegas.  Not that they're unemotional, but that "being female" doesn't mean "being crippled by emotion and utterly helpless until a male hero or at least male player saves them."

I also don't get the "get back in the kitchen" nonsense.  It might just be the family I grew up in, but cooking wasn't a woman's job (though due to various circumstances they did tend to do the majority).  Why shouldn't a man be able to cook and if a man is able to cook, why wouldn't he?  Of course there's the Barbeque Loophole, but that's not what I'm referring to either.  We'd use actual stoves and ovens.  Except me, I don't use ovens because I can never seem to time anything properly for it.  My brother frequently has my family and his in-laws over for dinner and often, he's the one scurrying back to the kitchen to check on food while my sister-in-law can keep chatting (because she'd done the baking earlier in the day).  It's not gender roles, but family roles: people doing what they are best at and what needs to be done.  Maybe certain chromosomes give some innate tendency toward particular activities (they do), but that's more of a tendency and not a natural order of the universe.  It's too bad more people can't recognize that.

Watch me ruin my blog IN REAL TIME!

If anything goes wrong, blame Syl.  If anything goes right, it's because I'm a genius.  In the meantime, entertain yourself by watching random elements change and periodically, break.

Or watch paint dry.

[edit] I've changed the columns a bit so the posts are wider.  Now the lines that used to divide the columns are in the middle of nowhere and I have no clue where they even come from. If anyone has any suggestions on that, I'd be grateful to see them.

If 2 > 1, then I can play Civ V

It's like a backstab, but right in their face!

Now and then there is the hullabaloo about stories and narratives and the player's story and the developer's story and how these don't go together and how lame it is to have the developers making paths that we have to follow.  And so on and so forth.

Well call me a middling middler because I want both, a bit!  I like having overall narratives: background and events that are set up to happen.  I don't mind that a game inevitably takes me toward the standoff with the Big Bad.  It's good, actually, helps wrap things up and push me out the door to go play another game.  It also gives some sense of purpose, of a plan, that these game worlds we inhabit are not mere chaos given form by pixels.

I must first talk about Minecraft.  That is a game with no story, no plan, no given goals.  That's great!  I can't imagine Minecraft would be any fun at all if it instead consisted of a series of Building Challenges in which you were told to go dig up sand and bake it to make a glass castle.  The player story vs. developer story seems to me to be a matter of genre, of which type of game best fits each narrative type.

A game could put those together a bit: bring in developer stories, but let players have some flexibility when working out what to do.  Maybe they'd side with the other group.  Maybe they'd sneak in rather than shoot in.  Maybe they'd convince the enemy that violence is not the answer, leading them to disappear into the mountains and form a monastic order of peace.

And so there is Fallout: New Vegas, my latest world in which I wander around killing people who dress funny.  Some of them are drug addicts.  Some of them are thieves.  The worst of them all speak Latin.

Thanks to the open-ended design, I can follow along with the stories of the developers, but in my own way.  With my own alignment, which I like to call Chaotic Lawful Good.  Essentially I am aligned with the Lawful Good faction/government, but I do things in the less lawful way.  I run off on my own and kill the bad guys without orders.  Though I'll gladly follow orders too.

It all came together wonderfully in Cottonwood Cove.  It was there that the Big Bad of the game was offering me a second chance at evil.  All my crimes against evil were forgiven and I could take the raft up to his Fortification and even join his Army of Evil.  How nice of him.  I was planning to work with the good guys, but hey, this was quite the honor!  So up the river I went.

Of course they exhibited some minor degree of intelligence, in that they were letting me in, but confiscating my weapons, but missing the silenced pistol I'd stashed away... somewhere.  Things were looking good.  I'd finally found a way to the Fortification, which as you can tell from the capitalization, is a very important Place.  And I had a weak gun.  And sneaking skills.  So I snuck away a little, shot a guy in the head, stole his weapon, killed a couple more people, stole their weapons, and finally got the key to the boxes hold my good guns, good armor, and invisibility devices.

I proceeded to go through the entire Fortification, killing everyone with the help of my cybernetic dog and girl voiced by Felicia Day who likes to punch things.  This included the Big Bad Caesar himself, because why not?  I mean, he went to all the effort to allow me into his Fortification; it would be rude to not stop by and kill him.  I am Good aligned, after all, with a bit of Lawful as well, so I have good manners.  Not that I'm stuck up or anything.  I can't stand stuck up people.  I found an entire casino full of them.  So I killed them.  They wore stupid masks too.  That was reason enough.  Also they were cannibals, but that was just icing on the cake of me hating them.

I don't recall any quests telling me to slaughter the casino of elitist mask-wearers, but that's the great thing about the semi-sandbox game: you get to do your own thing when it really matters.  There also didn't appear to be a quest directing me to kill the Big Bad, but that sort of thing seemed self-evident.  I blew up a robot army too.  I don't think I was supposed to do that, but again, I was in the area.  It's important to see all the sights and blow up all the sights before the trip is over.

See, all Lawful Good.  Sort of.  And that's just the way I like it.

Quit if it's so bad

Something in a game is bad.  Maybe your class was nerfed.  Maybe the new raid is too easy.  Maybe there is a strange ad campaign which has resulted in Family Guy doing the development for a month and consequently, every quest is interrupted with fart jokes and understated yet still highly disturbing mother-son incest love triangle given a third vertex by a dog that is in love with the mother.

Are you going to quit?  The ever-present trollosphere says you should.  If you don't like something, quit.  If you're unhappy about anything, quit.  If you don't quit, that just means you don't actually care.

Or it means that there are gradients of dislike between "annoying" and "game-breaking disaster".  The first example is probably of the first sort.  The last example seems like something worth quitting over.

There is also the thinksitsreasonablesphere, of people who think they are being reasonable and serious by responding to all complaints with troll message with a new spin: "put your money where your mouth is."  Of course that makes perfect sense.  5% reduction in voidwalker health?  Quit.  Show Blizzard that you're not bluffing, that you're the Most Serious Warlock and a Very Reasonable Person.

Or maybe these are actually the exact same people and they really just have one goal: to make stop expressing negative opinions about things they like by using ridiculous reasoning to demand extreme reactions.  You didn't follow their rules on how to react to anything bad, so clearly you don't actually think its bad, so you should shut up, useless whiner.

Perhaps the great irony is that I'm writing this after years of pent-up frustration with people saying this about WoW, that any complaint about any change (and I've had plenty) means someone should quit, and I'm canceling my sub again.  I have no specific complaints, no single game-breaking change; I just don't care anymore, which is what happened last time I quit.  There are things to do, it's not as if I've run out of quests and raids, but none of them interest me much.  Though maybe I should finish up the goblin area, just so I can write about it.  If I do, I'll try to remove the effect of my lack of interest, so it won't be "this quest was boring and that quest was boring."

No Double-Negatives! (unless you're using them usefully)

My thoughts on language generally follow this rule: I'm saying it correctly.  Everyone else is either failing to get with the times or rushing off pointlessly to destroy language.

However there is more philosophy to it than that.  More analysis perhaps.  I believe that language is mostly arbitrary (not to suggest that it is purely accidental, but that the particular rules don't matter much), with a few stable rules.  Words we use often should be short.  Words should add meaning (so for example, only describe something as fucking-something if that is different than just something, such as if you're really mad, in which case, take full advantage of the ability to make any profanity into a noun, verb, adjective, or one-word soliloquy). And finally, when in doubt, steal the word from another language rather than making our own.

That last one is why I think English is superior to every other language, especially French, where they have the ridiculous notion that words have to be approved.  This from the people who the Romans found to be barbarians barely capable of speaking Latin.  We don't call them the Romance languages because they're romantic, but because they're what happens when you try to say "Roman" but slur and trip over the words and add syllables that aren't supposed to be there.

In light of all this, I want to propose one applied rule (the others were more like guidelines subject to interpretation): Don't use double negatives unless the added negative adds meaning.  For example, "I haven't got nothing."  Contrast that with, "I haven't got anything", and "I have got nothing."  And contrast that last one with "I haven't gotten anything."  The first one (the double negative) indicates that the person doesn't have anything, but might be putting emphasis on it, or is just talking wrong, since adding "at all" after anything would achieve the same purpose, or if we're using spoken words, putting emphasis on anything would emphasis the total lack of it.  The last sentence is clearly indicating a different situation: Not only does it say whether they have anything, but also indicates a lack of receiving anything, such as if they'd just come from a Soviet breadline.

However, if someone were to say "I haven't go nothing" and we were in a world in which double-negatives were not used frivolously, then we could interpret it as "I have something" but the speaker is being defensive: they may have been accused on having nothing or it has been implied and rather than merely trying to make a positive statement about having something, they must also refute the claim of nothingness.  Alternatively, they could be acting sly, as if their boss told them they are out of inventory but since they've been skimming they still have some extra to sell on the side, so the store might be out, but that doesn't mean that the speaker has nothing.

By now you're probably thinking something like "Klepsacovic, your complete disregard for grammatical convention makes you unqualified to propose any rules" to which I say "fuck you!"  Or maybe you're thinking "Why did you keep using have got when merely saying have is sufficient?"  I did that because we don't usually say "I have not anything", despite that seeming to make sense.  Maybe I'll start saying that and drop the gots.

Before I leave you all to argue with me, I want to add one last rule: Oxford commas should be strictly enforced, under penalty of removal of the offending body part, whether tongue, fingers or brain in the case of new telepathic computers.  Oops.