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Uncategorized

Making Up for Lost Time

Happy Halloween! Happy Thanksgiving! Happy holidays! Happy New Year! Happy Et cetera!

Remember when I used to post articles here? Good times. It’s been something like four or five months since I last posted, so I have a lot of lost time to make up for. I don’t have any nice big article for you, but I do have a number of small asides that I’ve thought of over the months, some of which have to to with games. So here’s some thoughts on virtual reality, shocking things, and whatever else I can think of.

Virtual Reality is Dead, and We Killed It

By “we,” I mean Oculus and HTC, but also game developers. When VR was new and tasty

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Social

Experience Point 2/3: What it Means to Be a Gamer

Hello again, after the long delay.  I was moving in to my college place. Then I was being in college for my sophomore year. Now I’m not. The first two sentences of this paragraph show how long since I’ve started on this draft.

There are really two meanings behind being a gamer – a boring, mundane one, and one that’s actually worth thinking about.  Let’s save the best for last, and do the boring one first.

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Uncategorized

I’m Back.

Hey.

As you may have noticed, I have bad habit of stopping updates once school get back in. I guess you should start expecting that, since it happens so reliably, though I will try to see what I can do next time. Anyway, I’m not dead. Just wanted to let you know that.

Ideally, the next regular post will go up some time around this Sunday. It’ll be longer than this one.

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Social

Experience Point 1/3: The Context of Violence

Here we are with the age-old discussion of violence in video games.  The problem is that violent video games may or may not cause violent behaviors; this Crash Course Games episode describes it well in a nutshell.  And I am here to say that maybe we have been looking at the problem incorrectly.

In one corner, we have many people, especially parents understandably, who believe that violence in video games influences people to enact violence in real life.  They reason that

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Difficulty Uncategorized

Level Up: Difficulty

This will be the title for these wrap-up sections until I end up with legal trouble from someone else’s publication called “Level Up.”  Well, anyway, these passed few weeks have been a rough ride, so let’s get started.

Difficulty Does Not Imply Quality

This article was the sole reason I wanted to do this subject.  I have no problem with knocking off some points from a game

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Difficulty

Experience Point 3/3: Difficulty Curves and Spikes

I decided to write this one in light of the recent Pokemon Go’s difficulty slope beginning at level 20.  Everybody has a fairly common conception of the ideal difficulty slope which, naturally, looks like y=e^x for 0<x<1 on a graph (pun totally intended).  But as we all know, difficulty curves don’t always actually happen that way.  As we don’t all know, there are sometimes good reasons, or at least understandable reasons, for this.  Oh, and if the math joke didn’t tip you off, I’ve been watching way too much Numberphile lately, so things are going to get mathy.e_x graph

All graphs were made in Desmos.

Back in the bad old days of the arcades, many games would begin easy,

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Difficulty

Experience Point 2/3: Artificial Difficulty, What We All Know and Hate

This article is a bit shorter than usual for three reasons:

  1. Rather than actually making an argument (other than the obvious one: Don’t do artificial difficulty, kids!  Artificial difficulty is not cool!), I’m mostly providing a definition.  This is informative, not persuasive.
  2. This is practically an addendum to last week’s article, Difficulty Does Not Imply Quality.
  3. Currently, I write these on the day that they’re published, and I’m tired of them always going up at 11:59:59.999 p.m. every time.  Sometime in the future, I will probably start writing these the day before, like I should be doing now.

So, what is artificial difficulty?  Sometimes, a certain mechanic will be flawed in a certain way:

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Difficulty

Experience Point 1/3: Difficulty Does Not Imply Quality

There is one fallacy that I tend to hear once in a while. It goes something along the lines of “It’s not that bad; it’s actually pretty difficult.”  The problem that we have here is that this argument assumes that a game’s difficulty is always proportional to fun (including fear or rage-inducing, for horror or rage games, respectively), and that the relationship is causal (not casual) where difficulty always increases fun.  That isn’t always true. 

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Ambition

Rando Follow-Up: Ambition

To begin with, this subject overall went (relatively) quite a bit better than education did, despite its somewhat misleading title.  For recap, the subject was about when young people want to become game makers.

Rando Post No. 4: You Can Ce Whatever You Want to Be*

I forgot to mention how there are reasons other than parents implying otherwise that this isn’t true.  For instance, I used to want to be a fighter pilot, thanks to Ace Combat 5.

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Ambition

Rando Post No. 6: Seriously Though; Game Making Isn’t For Everybody

Last week, I wrote about how children shouldn’t be discouraged from getting involved in making games when the popular opinion is that they shouldn’t, and how people shouldn’t actively discourage them.  However, some people would find this a rather naive argument.  So, here I consider their side.

It’s alright for a kid to try it out, but not every kid who does is really cut out for making games.  In fact, most of the time, they aren’t.