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.