A Battle Lost Before It Has Begun

Still plugging away at the Guild Wars 2, so if you are on the fence or looking for something fun to play on your PC, pick up the game and play with me! I started playing with a few friends this fall, all of whom now appear to have dropped the game entirely, so for the past couple of months, as I have been logging in to complete my daily quests and get some alt-characters up to level 80, it's just been me running about by myself.

This past week I also tried out the free PvP tournaments for the first time. These are 5v5 matches where you can either form a team in advance or solo queue and be thrown into a PUG (pick-up-group) and then you compete in either 1 or Best-of-3 rounds for big cash and prizes (note: the big cash and prizes are a lie). This mode taught me a few things: First, I am apparently a total scrub at PvP. Like many players, I can often score top of the charts in the hot join, regular PvP matches (talking about SPvP here, in case this was not clear). But the tournament matches are another beast entirely. I am blown up easily, frequently, and often with little clue as to how. I get stunned, rooted, and downed in a brilliant shower of particle effects from who-knows-where.  My PvP level is only 12, and from what I've seen, I am often up against level 50+ players or teams, so I do expect to improve over time, but still. Not so fun to be shouting "WTF!?" at my screen.

Second--and really the point I want to write about--is that I notice that after the match starts, I am restricted from changing out my weapon sets (and maybe my slot skills too, I will have to check this). For those who may not know, in Guild Wars 2, half of your character abilities are tied to the equipped weapons. In regular, non-tournament PvP, these can be changed anytime you are not in combat, so that you can dynamically adjust your skills, either in response to what other players are doing or for any other reason.

Removing this functionality from the high-level PvP play is, I think, a mistake, for very similar reasons as I've written about before. I don't want to rehearse that entire argument again here, but locking players into pre-game decisions or strategies seems like a generally bad approach to competitive game design.  To draw on the basketball analogy again, it would be like forcing a team to stick with a man-to-man defense (which they had practiced all week, say) despite an obvious advantage of switching to zone after the game is underway.

I suspect this functionality is removed to place greater emphasis on the pre-match strategy and coordination. Indeed, this was the bread-and-butter of the original Guild Wars' guild-versus-guild (GvG) system: You had 8 players on your team, none of whose skills could be swapped after the match had begun, so you needed to construct a slick team build that balanced specificity--that is, the ability to execute a particular victory strategy--with adaptability--the ability to respond to a variety of possible opponent strategies. Although I cannot speak to the ultra-competitive, top-tier GvG matches, my experience with this locked-in system was mixed: Some matches you had simply out-built your opponent and so you would steam roll them. Some matches just the reverse. But the most fun and exciting, were, of course, those games where the two teams had appropriately balanced builds and the victory was due to dynamic decisions and execution, rather than pre-game strategic decisions.

In other words, good matches were those when the pre-game strategy became largely irrelevant. And this brings me to the material point: A good game emphasizes the decisions made while playing, not the decisions made before the game begins. As a rule, it is simply less fun to have lost a match before it has really even begun; far better to have teams start on equal footing (or close to it) and structure the game such that victory flows to the team that actually plays the game better.

Egan's a Goon

Just finished reading Jennifer Egan’s rock n’ roll “novel” (term used here loosely) A Visit from the Goon Squad.

As I waded through the first few cut-and-paste vignettes, my mind warped into painful sync with Egan’s polyphonic study. One moment, I was hanging with a burnt-out record exec, the next with a burnt-out family on a disastrous vacation, and the next still on crazy night with some college burn-outs. I was flipped through time, across space, and into the minds of young and old, crazed and half-sane. It was cool and entertaining. 

Yes, this is a book where "Modernist" (I place the word in quotes because Egan seems almost to be using the movement as a grab bag from which to pick and pick and pick) stuff abounds. Yes, we get stream of consciousness, we get flashbacks, fragmentation, entropy, alienation, and so on. Let's just put it this way, Derrida would be proud. (Ooomph, a Derrida reference?!)

If there’s a Modern Lit. thesis written about some technique (by a coed going to Columbia while living in Williamsburg and riding a 1950’s Schwinn bike to-and-fro), Goon Squad uses it.

Halfway in, Goon Squad began to wear on me. These modernist shifts in voice, character, and style began not only to annoy me, but to "take me out of it". I wasn't reading a series of interconnected stories with which I could somehow relate and connect, I was seeing a clever writer hunched over a typewriter (Egan certainly uses one in lieu of a modern day computer) coming up with these shifting angles and tones. I wasn't immersed. I was merely critical, not emotional. And this was, frankly, a little bothersome. 

The neat thing about the great Modernists (Woolf, Joyce, et. al.) is that, despite their attention to (usually) flowery distraction and technique, they manage to connect with you in some way if you're willing to put in a little effort. The jarring shifts distract while simultaneously attracting. You look on as a critic and are sucked in like a fan. You watch in horror, you smile in fascination. Like how Beckett can weirdly bore us to death with stories about nothing while keeping us riveted. 

A Visit from the Good Squad failed to keep me in this state of awesome paradox. I was simply looking at the technique. It was as though I could see Ms. Egan saying "Oh! Now I can do this! Or, how 'bout this!"

...and then she throws in a chapter that's a PowerPoint presentation.

fin.

Reviews, reviewers, and meta-scores

Some friends and I were recently discussing music reviews in general, and how they are all but useless.  I believe Pitchfork was mentioned by name as a place for particularly terrible and useless reviews. But the point I made then, and will make here, is that rather than focusing on the content of the review, I focus on the reviewer. If I am familiar with the reviewer's perspective, and enjoy reading their writing, then I typically enjoy the review. But that's not to say that I necessarily accept their opinion as indicative of what my own will be, but rather that I can use their opinion to help me think about how I am likely to respond.

For example, I no longer read any of the TV reviews over at the AV Club. I just never really found a reviewer whose experiences seemed to align with my own--with one exception: Nathan Rabin. In particular, his series "My World of Flops," which is somewhere between a review and a story about all sorts of different pop-culture entities (not just TV), hits all the right notes for me. If you have not already read it, I highly recommend his latest, on Paula Abdul's short lived reality show. Funny, sad, and glorious all at once.

Victor Lucas of Reviews on the Run is another example of a reviewer whose opinions I do not share, but feel as though I understand him well enough that I can adjust for what is likely to be my own opinion. Victor is a notoriously generous critic, so I do not put much stock behind his 9's or 9.5's. But the flip side is that when he says a game is awful, you can be sure that it is really awful. Or pretty much any time he gives a game less than an 8, I interpret that as a fail.

What's nice about his reviews for Reviews on the Run is that he is balanced by the curmudgeonly Scott C. Jones, who holds games to, if not a higher standard than Victor's, then certainly a stricter standard. Happily, this pairing works, by and large--with Victor's scorn and Scott's praise carrying the most weight--and when they both give high marks to a game, it typically means that we can be confident that the game is good and worth a purchase--adjusting for personal taste in game genres, of course.

An interesting consequence of shifting the focus from review to reviewer (one that hadn't actually occurred to me until just this moment) is that it undermines the supposed value of meta-critic or other kinds of review-aggregating scores. If what matters is the reviewer and whether their opinions usefully intersect with mine, then averaging their score with a bunch of other reviewers'--whose opinions do not intersect with mine or of whose tastes I have no understanding--only diminishes the value of the review.

Morning mixtape

Some time in the future I want to try and write down my "laws" for what makes a good music mix, but for this first entry, I thought I would just share a couple of mixes that I made for my wife. Specifically, I wanted to put together a few 1 hour mixes that she could listen to as she gets ready for work in the morning. I did this for myself in my undergrad and found it a nice way to structure my morning. Get up, press play, and use the music as a rough guide to where I should be in my getting ready. For anyone who has a pretty regular morning routine, I highly recommend this practice.

Below are the playlists for the two mixes. Themes should be pretty clear, so if these genres are ever to your taste, I encourage you to give them a try!

1. "The Kick," Erik Lind and the Orchard
2. "What Would You Say," Dave Matthews Band
3. "Shiver," Coldplay
4. "One Evening," Feist
5. "Interstate Love Song," Stone Temple Pilots
6. "All These Things That I've Done," The Killers
7. "Do You Realize," The Flaming Lips
8. "The Con," Tegan and Sara
9. "Your Beauty Must Be Rubbing Off," Hawksley Workman
10. "Baby Did A Bad Thing," Chris Isaak
11. "Lonely Boy," The Black Keys
12. "Do What You Want," OK Go
13. "Down By The Water," The Decemberists
14. "Someone That I Used to Know," Gotye
15. "Home," Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
16. "Dog Days Are Over," Florence + The Machine

1. "This is How We Roll," Blackstreet
2. "Gold Digger," Kanye West
3. "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)," Beyonce
4. "Party and Bullshit," Notorious BIG (Ratatat Remix)
5. "The Seed (2.0)," The Roots
6. "No Scrubs," TLC
7. "You Make Me Wanna," Usher
8. "Gettin' Jiggy wit It," Will Smith
9. "Only You," 112
10. "B.O.B.," OutKast
11. "Daydreamin'," Lupe Fiasco
12. "Forgot About Dre," Dr. Dre
13. "Pretty Girl Rock," Keri Hilson
14. "Sexyback," Justin Timberlake
15. "Telephone," Lady Gaga
16. "G Funk Intro," Snoop Dogg

Guild Wars 2 Expansion and Story

While I hesitate to send anyone to Forbes, some time ago Erik Kain posted some thoughts on what a Guild Wars 2 expansion should contain, almost all of which I wholeheartedly endorse. In brief, these are: (1) More weapon types; (2) playable Tengu [this one very much please!!]; (3) new ways to gain experience points and level up; (4) more movement boosts; and (5) more storylines.

In general, I would agree with his fifth recommendation--how could more story be bad?--but in this case, it hits on what is by far the worst aspect of Guild Wars 2: The story and writing.  I have now leveled three characters to 80 (the current level cap) and have not yet bothered to play through the main story missions for any of them. The only time I do play these missions is for the huge chunk of experience I get at the end and I always skip the cut-scenes. For a while, I had the vocals in French (since I am trying to learn), but even this was too painful.

The abysmal writing and scripting is particularly surprising given (a) the polish apparent in so much of the game's design, and (b) the number of promotional videos or blog posts that ArenaNet has put out hyping their story and writers. The latter was definitely a case of the lady protesting too much. When your story is actually good, it speaks for itself. But now, because of this sad campaign to try and convince us that their work is good (when it obviously isn't) I know the names "Jeff Grubb" and "Ree Soesbee," and know to avoid any of their work.

Complete Fail.

Happily, the main story is entirely avoidable (except for that nagging green star on my HUD) and the ambient dialogue and dynamic events are all pretty fun and entertaining.  The designers have definitely succeeded (I think) in creating a virtual world that is just fun to play around in.  Particularly once a zone's repetitive "quest hearts" (or whatever they are called) are either completed or eliminated (as in the higher level zones) there is a great feeling of open exploration and the power to make this game be what you want it to be.

It is sort of unclear if ArenaNet is really planning to do expansions, or just micro-transact new stuff on a rolling basis. But however they roll out new content, I definitely want to see more weapons and more skills, some playable Tengu, and also re-work the elite skills. These were the centerpiece of player builds in GW1 but are practically irrelevant in GW2. Be nice to bring these back in a meaningful way.

What's in a name, anyway?

I've been teaching English to Thai students for going on three months now. These students, with barely pronounceable, hitherto-before-unheard-of names like Supaporn, Pirote, Sutamas, and Korranis, do us poor American teachers the favor of inventing nicknames that are less than six syllables and with no more than two consonants in a row. Their choices struck me as unusual, when I first heard them.

Examples, followed by my immediate thoughts when they introduced themselves to me: Supaporn="Milk" (low fat, skim, or whole); Karranis="Doi" (pronounced like a twelve-year-old's response to someone when they say something oh-so-obvious); Sutamas="Toy" (Ninja Turtle); Pirote="Kook" (for the first two weeks, I thought his name was "Goo", which I called him until I read his actual nickname written somewhere). The names are unique, yes, but I was baffled and amused each time I used them. At first.

A couple of months have passed, and a strange phenomenon has set in. Milk is now just a sweet girl whose English is improving. Doi has become a kind-hearted chap who likes to study with his shoes off. Toy is a girl whose dream job is working at an airport. Kook is a cook who I hear makes a mean yellow curry. These odd names have ceased to be odd names. The millions of random and hilarious associations that initially filled my mind have dissipated. The names have transformed now into simple names, words that somehow signify a human being, but also fail to embody the facets of any human person.

At this point, for some reason, I can't help but think of W.G. Sebald's ghostly masterpiece of a novel, Austerlitz. A novel of World War II, in which World War II, the event, is hardly mentioned. A Holocaust novel in which the atrocity is a looming shadow, a cloud that never achieves solidity. What isn't stated seems to mean more than what is.

Jacques Austerlitz, the eponymous main character, fails to mention or recognize the many complicated connotations associated with his name. Austerlitz is filled with haunting silences regarding a name so rife with heavy meaning -- from a major Napoleonic battle to the original surname of Fred Astaire to the eerily close spelling to Auschwitz.

The man's name, and all that's carried with it, just sits there, in your mind. So much, unnamed, allowed to simmer in your head uncomfortably -- the reminders, the history, the ghosts...

...all the while, my students seem not to know the sometimes off-the-wall meanings of their English nicknames, and that's okay. They are happy. And their names make me happy.

Maybe it's best, Austerlitz might argue, to know the meanings of our names, the histories. At the same time, we must simply just be. For our names are meaningless without a soul with thoughts and actions to embody them.

Drink your milk. Read Austerlitz.  They will do your body, and your mind, good.

Lunching solo

Last year there was a period of months where I was travelling a lot. When you travel alone, you inevitably have to face the moment when you must eat, and you must eat alone. For some, this might not be a big deal - but for me it was - and is. (My discomfort prompted my husband to send me this pithy comment from The Onion.)

Why do I care? Upon reflection, I think it has to do with leftover anxiety borne of the ruthless hellscape of the middle school lunchroom. Having people to sit with was crucial. Sitting alone was not an option - in fact, if it came down to it, one would prefer to eat lunch hiding in the bathroom. This attention to the lunchroom social scene is an effect, I think, of the highly regimented environment of school in general. In class, we need to sit beside who we sit beside, we need to do group work, we need to exist with everyone else in the room. This situation is beyond the scope of the students' power. But at lunch, there is much power to wield. You can choose who you think is worthy of lunching with you and who deserves to be ignored. Not being seen fit to sit next to for the consumption of a sandwich and a juice box is indictment indeed. The 90 minutes between the end of morning classes and the beginning of the afternoon can seem an eternity.

The sting of such schoolyard snubbing sneaks back into my subconscious when I find myself in a situation where I am alone and I am hungry. How to demonstrate to the world that, despite the evident fact that I am currently eating my lunch alone, I do have friends! I do have people who care about me! I am not a loser! I am eating alone because I want to! Perhaps one brings a laptop, and, typing while eating, attempts to look too busy to even contemplate eating with a friend (of which I have many, all of whom would be more than happy to eat with me). I am always careful to time the last sip of coffee with the words, "cheque please."

SNL - The Timberlake Effect

I like watching SNL. But I almost never like it. The writing is often terrible.  So much so that even a game host can't save the episode. But still I watch because every once in a while buried in an awful show, there is something really funny. Like, the 'Crystals' bit, coming in at the very end Jamie Foxx's most recent hosting gig. But for the most part, the watching leaves me with a resounding 'meh' at best and, at worst, actual discomfort on behalf of the players. 

Last night's Justin Timberlake episode was no question the best of the season.  But why? Timberlake is not a good actor (see Social Network, Bad Teacher, etc.). But he is a good musician and he seems to do well  in the short, silly sketch format. But what does he bring that the other hosts do not? 

One thing he brings is familiarity. They worked to highlight the fact that this was his fifth time helming the show. He has established characters - more, in fact, than many of the cast members. He brought back some beloved former cast members who between them shouldered much of the air time. While the episode was enjoyable, looking back at it now, there was nothing new that was done -- it was the same old stuff with the same old people. The reason it works so much better, it seems, is that Timberlake is not so much a host as a cast member who only joins in once or twice a year. It doesn't seem like the writers are stretching too much to write to Timberlake's strengths - for his strengths seem to be pretty much on par with those of the permanent cast. He is comfortable on stage, comfortable with the cast, and able to improvise and not be thrown when there are slight variations from the script. In fact, Timberlake's turn last night brought to mind Will Ferrell at the top of his game in the early 2000's - the go-to cast member for central roles in new sketches and for reprising popular previous sketches (Timberlake's duo with Andy Samberg is in some ways an update of the Ferrell sketch with Rachel Dratch: hyper-sexed middle-aged professors, creeping out a different host each time they appeared.)

So, the reason why Timberlake's episode worked so well, is that, in some ways, there was no host -- just an extra, skilled, and well-versed cast member. But, of course, part of SNL's appeal is the perverse excitement of seeing a famous person potentially crash and burn in a very public way. And Lorne Michaels certainly trades on this perversity - booking, for instance, Linsday Lohan in the midst of one of her many scandals. (She was, predictably, absolutely terrible.) 

This seems to be SNL's perennial dilemma: either they attract viewers with big names but for whom the writers have trouble writing and who, very often, cannot deliver, or they put on a good show with people who are comfortable in the milieu. Timberlake is a rare draw where both the star appeal and the skills coincide. But if the show was interested in consistently good comedy, they might think about changing their format  - featuring a celebrity in one or two sketches where they can really shine and performing solid group sketches with the cast for the rest of the episode. But as the years go by and the embarrassing and horrifically bad episodes far outweigh the good or even decent, I wonder about the vision Michaels has of the show. Like so many aspects of popular culture, it seems that the perverse is weighted much more heavily than the skilled, the good, and, what's saddest of all in this context, the funny.

Leveling and Lame Ducks in Competitive Video Games

A lame duck in a competitive game is a player (or team) that cannot possibly win, but nevertheless remains in the game. Being the lame duck is usually not fun. Yet, the frequency of lame ducks and the experience of being the lame duck in a game can differ dramatically. In this piece, I will argue that the mechanic of leveling in a competitive game amplifies the negative experience of a lame duck, using League of Legends (LoL) and Team Fortress 2 (TF2) as two contrasting examples. I should begin by acknowledging that in a strict sense, there are no lame ducks in either LoL or TF2. Until the game ends, there always remains the possibility of player drops, disconnects, or some other deus ex machina. That said, anyone who has played these games will know that there are plenty of times when the chance of victory has shrunk close to zero long before the game or round is over. Your team is just feeding or fodder for the enemy, and if there no penalties for doing so, you would rather quit the game than keep playing.

Despite the fact that LoL lets you surrender anytime after 20 minutes, there are a couple of reasons that the lame duck situation is much better in TF2. When your team is far enough behind in LoL, there is almost nothing that can be done to recover---and this is by design. The “snowballing” effect of a team or player that gets ahead in gold, equipment, and experience is intended to translate directly into team superiority and eventual victory. This is great fun if you have the advantage, but not fun at all if you fall behind. Once the team is behind, even a skilled will have a difficult time contributing anything positive.

In TF2 there are a few snowballing mechanics---e.g., shorter re-spawn times, nearer spawn points, or control of key defensive points---but players or teams in the lead are no less killable then they were at the start of the game. This makes it much more likely that a trailing team can still rally and mount a comeback (or at least a counter-push). So while it is still good to have the advantage in TF2, the punishment for a trailing team is less severe. A skilled player on a losing team will still get kills, capture points, and feel that they are contributing.

TF2 is also designed to foster “last stand” scenarios, where the lame duck team has an opportunity to fortify their final control point and really make the dominant team work for their victory. Most TF2 players will have played a thrilling finish to what may have otherwise been a one-sided match: The final point is under assault, turrets are firing like crazy, sticky bombs and rockets are exploding everywhere, as you rush from the spawn to try and stand on the point before the capture bar is completed. These are some of the game's greatest moments!

This kind of furious last stand can happen in LoL, but it is rare. It is possible for one team to destroy their opponents’ nexus turrets, but nevertheless fail to take down the nexus. The other team then respawns, wins a team fight at their nexus, pushes back, kills Baron, etc. However, the plausibility of this scenario in LoL actually assumes that it was not a lame duck to begin with. Any team that can successfully repel a nexus assault must still be close in gold and experience. Indeed, the end of a long LoL game---after all the players are at max level and have purchased their final items---is no longer about leveling and snowballing. It becomes a lot more like TF2. So long as a LoL team can (with sufficient strategy and teamwork) hold their nexus and kill the enemy champions, there is still an incentive to keep playing---not simply to troll the enemy team and prolong the inevitable, but because playing and winning a team fight is one of the most fun parts about LoL.

Which brings me to the material point: Leveling in a competitive game amplifies the negative experiences of being the lame duck. Or to put it another way: When your attacks or abilities or whatever choices you might make to try and improve your position in a game lose consequence, because you are underleveled and underpowered, the fun and incentive to play is severely reduced. Eliminating the entire possibility of a lame duck scenario would require some extreme rubber-banding. Therefore, the preferable design strategy for promoting and maintaining fun player experiences in a competitive game---for the losing side as much as the winning side---is to eliminate (or at least mitigate) the effects of leveling and snowballing. This places the emphasis for a team’s superiority on their consistent skillful and coordinated play, not simply their ability to get the early lead and then roll downhill, so to speak.

I’ll close with a funny analogy: Imagine a game of basketball where every time you scored, the other team’s basket was lowered by four inches and your basket was raised by four inches (we can also stipulate a minimum height of 8’ and a maximum of 16’). As long as you trade points and the game is close, this approximates a normal game of basketball. But if the other team builds up a lead, you can no longer dunk or layup. Now your only way to score is rainbow shots of decreasing probability. You are now more likely to fall further behind. This is great fun for the winning team, who can relax and laugh as you throw up wild airballs. But this is not fun at all for the losing team, who may just as well resign.

The fundamental assumption underlying these ideas is that a competitive game should still be fun for the losing side. It should not be as much fun as it is for the winning side, but still fun enough that even when you are the lame duck (or something close to it), you would much rather finish the game than simply quit.