It's a fantasy novel in which our characters start out in the normal world and then discover a magical gateway to a world beyond our own where blah blah blah. It sounds like the plot of the worst teen fiction potboiler ever. But this one's written by Gene Wolfe, and he manages to turn it around. Maybe because he reminds us that there's a power in kindness, while at the same time working in some rather snarky jokes.
In this talk, Ian Tullis talks about puzzle design; in general and in the puzzlehunt style. He talks about what makes puzzles interesting in general; and the weird areas that the puzzlehunt community's been exploring for the past few years. If you read my 2-Tone Game write-up, you might remember where I said:
I had a halfway-brilliant idea: since this game wouldn't be a one-time event, since it would be this persistent thing, it would be a way to introduce new folks to puzzlehunts... I don't think I followed through well on this idea.
This talk gets into some ways that I could have followed up: remembering to include "fun" along with the "wow". Including what the Anonymice call a "crank" for the player to turn while they wait for inspiration to strike. Anyhow, some notes:
GC Summit 2010: Ian Tullis "Reflections on Puzzling"
It's a thriller/mystery, so you wouldn't expect me to like it. But the main characters are Game Control for some big Alternate Reality Games a la I Like Bees. So along the way, there are diverting musements upon the nature of games, crowdsourcing, and the like. If you don't like thrillers, you might prefer all of this material in a series of essays. But it's nevertheless OK. I bet if I liked thrillers, I would have liked this book a bunch. I don't like thrillers, but this was a fun bit of fluff.
If you've played through the 2-Tone Game and emerged, thinking Wow, that was strange; I wonder how it turned out that way?—you're in luck. At long last, some rambly essays about how the game came to be, how it was received, and why I stared fixedly at a window in the Stonestown mall for a couple of minutes while muttering to myself.
Source code? Yeah, sure, there's source code, nerd.
How did I choose things to write about? The topics are based on questions that people asked me. If there's something you want to know that's not covered, you know what to do.
Go read 2-Tone Game notes GC notes.
Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for act two of the Games of Nonchalance a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful is that, once your in the game, you know what you have to do; It's obvious that you're supposed to do this unethical thing. But if you want to go through the experience with no idea of what to expect, then you should play that game before you read this.
Also, this blog post even less coherent than the drivel I usually spew.
First, a rambling intro for folks who don't know what I mean by ARG, LARP, and only have the vaguest idea of how a role-playing game might differ from these...
There is a power in an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), but maybe it's pointing the wrong way. So in these Alternate Reality Games, the world is the "game board". You play a character in the game; that character is probably basically you.
The layers of abstraction between you and the game are very thin. Chess is very abstract; in theory it's a desparate battle between two kingdoms, but it doesn't feel like one. A "tabletop" role-playing game is less abstract. You say "My elf knight steps forward to battle the goblin horde." You're playing a character; the character is not you. The character probably has a place in the game world. If the game is a swords-and-sandals barbarian axefest, the rules make it easy to create a barbarian; they nudge you away from creating that noir detective. As in a chess game, you might move a miniature figure around on a map to represent your movement. It's still pretty abstract.
In a Live Action Role-playing Game (LARP), you walk around in some area, carrying out some of your character's actions. Your actions represent your character's actions. Things are still abstract; you're not really a wizard, you can't summon lightning, so maybe you just throw pieces of candy while yelling "Lightning Bolt!".
In an ARG... your actions are your character's actions. The line between you and your character is so thin... Most people play the "character" of themselves.
Why is this on my mind?
So I played through those Games of Nonchalance. And at one point in this game—last chance to stop before the spoiler—you need to open up somebody else's mail. You pick up a sealed envelope containing a personal message from one character in the game to another. To make progress in the game, you need to read that personal message and get some information.
Reading somebody else's personal mail is wrong, of course. Oh, if it's on a postcard, maybe it's not so bad, there's no expectation of privacy. But at around the time you open up a sealed envelope to read somebody's mail, you know that you're heading into evil territory.
And this game makes you do that... well, it doesn't make you. You can stop, stop making progress. You can quit the game. You have that choice.
The thing is—it's that physicality, that physical breaking of the seal. That makes it awful. Nerving myself up to do that, that was dreadful.
I read plenty of fictional characters' private stuff without worrying about it.
I read epsitalor... epistolarr... I read those novels-in-the-form-of-letters things. I feel no qualm. But those are pretty abstract; the letters have been rendered in type; they are bound up in a book.
In the McGuffin game, I read those journal entries. No qualm. Would I read your private journal without your permission? No. Would I read a fictional character's journal? Handwritten? Well... it was photocopied. Someone else had taken the physical action of opening that journal, copying those pages out. It helps that he was a fictional character. And... maybe it helped that I only knew him through the journal; until I started reading it, he was basically an abstraction with no more personality than a rook on a chessboard.
But... in the Games of Nonchalance, I held an envelope. No abstraction to shield me, just a physical envelope to open.
In the end, I opened it.
I reminded myself: the envelope's sender, the recipient, they weren't real. They were fictional characters. Unfortunately, the Games of Nonchalance develop their characters. There's so much story, so much backstory. I felt like I knew something about one of them; I was pretty darned sure she would not appreciate me reading mail to her from her mother. It's all very well to say "it's just a character in a game." If you know something about them, you don't want to be mean to them. Being mean to real people isn't fun.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I've shot my share of Space Invaders. I had a fun time doing it, too. But I'm not a stone-cold murderer. If that game had started by giving me a sympathetic biography of each invader, and then told me that my mission was to shoot them... That would not have been a fun game.
Violating a character's privacy... Not fun.
Of course, I worry more about privacy than most people do. I work at a large internet company; the company has a lot of private user data. I've trained people in how to work with that data in a secure way, to avoid exposing private user data. I.e., I have spent hours, days of my life thinking about my responsibility to not violate people's privacy.
I don't think that the designers of the Games of Nonchalance thought about the ethics of opening up a fictional character's mail. They're artists. I think at least one of the designer likes combinations of mail and art. Later stages of the game are in the form of an otherworldly stamp collectors' club that does stuff with mail art.
I think they got that envelope into my hands beause they thought it was kinda neat.
I reminded myself that, in the ARG, I wasn't exactly me. I was kinda playing a character. In the Games of Nonchalance, I'm this guy named "Judge". He's a lot like me, though. He basically is me. After all, it's not like I knew ahead of time "oh we're playing a space opera game, so my character should be a Space Ranger with a Mysterious Past". You just start playing the game. It's not clear what traits "Judge" needs to make sense in the game world.
So I was holding this sealed envelope. I was nerving myself up to open it. I told myself, "They're fictional characters," but still couldn't bring myself to open the envelope. I told myself "You're playing a character. The character's like you, but he's an asshole who's willing to open up somebody's mail."
And then I could open the dreaded envelope. And it felt awful and horrid. And I read through the personal letter inside, found the password I needed to continue in the game.
Back when I was in middle school, I played table-top role-playing games. One day, one of my fellow players said "I'm tired of playing good characters all the time. Let's play chaotic evil characters." I tepidly argued against it; but he really wanted to try it. And so we formed a trio of evil folks. It wasn't much fun. He thought it was going to be fun because he figured we'd all go terrorize a bunch of villagers and feel powerful. And we did a little of that. But he forgot that evil folks shouldn't trust each other. And soon my evil wizard made a series of sneaky maneuvers—and enslaved the rest of the party. Then folks were pretty happy to go back to playing good characters.
I can shoot abstract Space Invaders and enjoy doing it. I can play a character who's not like me, doing horrible things. But if you take away too many of those layers of abstraction, if it feels too much like me doing these terrible things, it's not fun. All that power of reality, turned towards making you feel like you've done something awful.
(Acts 1 and 3 were fun, though.)
I ran into Mahlen and he recommended this book. It turned out to be pretty good. It's about the place of museums in society. Yeah, I know it sounds awful, but hear me out. It's sufficiently interesting such that I didn't throw it across the room even after it mention Habermasian publ%&*@
Sorry, I had to throw this laptop across the room when I noticed that this blog post was in danger of mentioning Habermasia... uhm, mentioning that. What was I talking about? Oh, right Museum Legs. Uhm, she points out some interesting things about the economics of museums. Like, we folks of the public trust the museum bigwigs to pick out art for us. We trust them to not just buy things from cronies. We trust them to pick out art that we should see, not necessarily the art that we'd naively choose.
She points out that when a museum offers art lessons, those lessons are popular. And she lobbies for the idea of educating museum-goers about making art. We'd appreciate art better if we had some idea of how to make it. Those frickin' Rothkos are more impressive when you start thinking "Whoa, wait, how did he do that?"
And there's some noodling and philosophizing about the role of art in society, what it could be. And that museum in Philadelphia, yeah that one. And the history of museums as instruments of temperance and... and other stuff I'd heard already.
But the economics and the art-lessons were new to me. Good stuff. Special bonus: this Kindle book said "em" when it meant "span". E.g., instead of saying "Spanish", it said "emish". Since <span> and <em> are HTML tags, I wondered if Kindle format is somehow related to HTML format. And maybe that "emish" is the artifact of some search-and-replace gone wrong. Anyhow, fun read.
I'm not sure whether this blog post turned out as a report on Giant Robot or as a report on the difficulty of buying content online from Amazon if you're totally flummoxed by the slightest obstacle. Anyhow.
It's been a glum time at work lately. A co-worker was sick for a long time. Last week, he passed away. In our department, we could count on him to cheer people up when things went wrong. So now we miss him all the more.
I'm in no mood to write a book report, but of course I already have plenty of them saved up. Here's one that's appropriately glum: Whole Earth Discipline.
This book told me that we're doomed.
In another 20-30 years, our climate will have snapped into a bad state. Droughts will hit some areas; floods will hit others. We won't be able to grow food.
If we stop burning so much coal and switch to nuclear, then maybe we can last 50 years instead, and maybe we can create some more resilient food sources... so maybe our civilization will just have a soft crash and we can come back in 500 years. But we'll also leave around buried piles of radioactive waste, which will be bad news for that nascent civilization.
So... this book told me that we're doomed. I hope it's wrong. It's pretty well-written, and talks about a few interesting topics for folks who want to save the world:
It also talks about Jimmy Wales' fable of the steak knives, a way to think about our tendency to concentrate on the wrong security risks.
SnoutCast #25: "Puzzled Pint #1 Debrief" (around minutes 17-19 or so) talks about folks who say "I could never do one of those puzzle-hunt things; the puzzles are too hard." And if you're a BANG enthusiast, you'll say "Aw c'mon, it's not too hard. GC, like, playtested this thing. We'll get it, don't worry." But, as DeeAnn points out in that SnoutCast, those folks don't exactly mean "That puzzle is too hard." They mean something more like "I don't want to do that."
I've dragged some of my in-real-life friends along on puzzle hunts. Some of them had a good time, but they didn't all have a good time. If I had to choose a moment to guess whether one of these people would have a good time, I would...
Look at their face when you first pull a puzzle out of an envelope. The puzzle shouldn't look like a "classical" puzzle. At that moment, the puzzle makes no sense and nobody knows what to do. Look at the players' faces. How do they react?
Me, I get a thrill in that situation. Curiosity; adrenaline rush from getting in "over my head"; some lizard-brain reflex to attack things I don't understand. I don't know where the thrill comes from, but I know it's there. I like these games because they force me to stretch; sometimes I won't be able to stretch far enough, but overall I'm having a blast...
Some folks seem to retreat, though. Here I attempt to put words in their mouth thoughts in their brain: There are already so many situations in life where you don't know what to do but have to act anyhow; opportunities to fail. Why on earth would I voluntarily put myself in such a situation?
It sounds like I'm insulting these people, saying that they're dummies who can't handle a challenge, but that's not what's going on. Some of these people are smarter than I am, and they still react to these puzzles as "too hard". (Maybe because they're smarter than I am, they're not accustomed to being in situations where they don't know what to do?) They can handle the confusion, but they don't enjoy it.
"Too hard" can be a shorthand for one of several things. People aren't going to tell you exactly what they're thinking when they bow out. We don't really know what's going on in our own heads. Language can't express it that well. And our friends don't want to hurt our feelings; "too hard" is more polite than "not fun." But out of all the polite things they could think of to say, "too hard" is probably trying to express something. I kinda think it's trying to say "I don't enjoy being confused."
