Animal Husbandry

"I always hear women say 'you know, married men live longer' - ah, yes, and, an indoor cat... also... lives longer. It's a furball with a broken spirit than can only look out on a world it will never enjoy, but it does technically live longer."

 

Bill Maher - Victory Begins at Home (2003)

"Married men live longer" ranks one of the rankest true lies that just won't die. Every couple of years the media rediscover this totally shocking "scientific" discovery and morning shows ring far and wide with men's insufficiency unto themselves. It fits our "man bad, woman good" preconceptions beautifully, declaring males to be both inherently defective and beholden to female benevolence in a single statement.

Correlation is not causation however, the most effective lies are half-truths, and a quick reference of our animal nature suggests the opposite interpretation. While sexual attraction is based on many factors, a basic and usually unspoken one for both sexes is physical health. We subconsciously evaluate everything from infection susceptibility to metabolic and anatomic fitness based on skin condition, bone structure, musculature, fat reserves, hair maintenance, scent, etc. Men do it too (and arguably more actively) though the standards for female ability are less stringent. As long as the chick looks like she won't keel over for a few years (i.e. she can carry a foetus to term and nurse it to foraging age) go ahead and stick it in, worry about the rest later. Women, however, benefit from their mate's long-term value as a protector and provider. If the wimpy, jittery guy doesn't look like he can down a wild boar, much less beat other men away from the carcass to bring you home the bacon, then screw him... or rather, don't.

For once, I won't even bother looking for references, because this should be our starting point for the discussion, both intuitive and logical. That sexual partners might become emotionally attached and care for each others' health, eh, fine, it's a valid argument; yet nonrandom mating, sexual selection, mate preference, call it whatever, it by several orders of magnitude an older, more pervasive and entrenched instinct. Married men don't live longer. Men with the potential to live longer, healthier men, are more attractive and more likely to be permitted to mate by women. Females are less likely to bet on a lame workhorse. They desire one they can bleed for as long as possible. You are as attractive as you are potentially useful.

 

Never mind that at an even more basic level, reproductive contest in the majority of species without paternal investment hinges on the male's health as guarantee of offspring viability.

And this is all before we even reach the quality of life issue. Domestic animals can indeed live longer than their free counterparts, as a resource to be husbanded.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

And I would've finished this game too if it wasn't made for middle-school kids!

 

Exactly what the world didn't need: a Tiny Toon version of the Zone.

 

Granted, given my soft spot for old-school titles like Heroes of Might and Magic, I'm not one to be deterred by a "cartoonish" visual aesthetic alone, but in this case (as is too often the case these days) the book's cover speaks true.

Speaking of cartoons, does everyone remember Scooby-Doo? The "mystery" show where the monster was always fake and the villain always turned out to be the last person you'd expect - <exactly> the last person you'd expect in a fake monster suit, unveiled with mathematical precision, every single time? Remember how proud you felt at nine years old "solving" a "new" "mystery" every week? Do you think giving snot-nosed little dimwits an undeserved feeling of accomplishment might've been part of Hanna-Barbera's marketing strategy? Well, that's Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden in a nutshell.

I'll admit its fanboy praise is not completely undeserved. Visually, the post-apocalyptic, overgrown industrial environments are scenic and laudably detailed, as are the fluid albeit overextended animations. I also found the combat mechanics impressively taut at first, fine-tuned to the point where (at least on the medium "hard" difficulty) you'll often find your damage output matches your enemies' health to the last point. However, while that's exciting for the first few levels, I rapidly began to wonder at everything thrown by the wayside in return.

Speaking of waysides, you'll be spending a lot of time there, not looking for specific objectives or exploring interesting spots, but mindlessly combing every single indeterminate square meter of terrain for "scrap" loot, your currency. While I approve of the scarcity of money, rare in cRPGs which tend to shower you with piles of cash and healing potions, pixel-hunting as a game mechanic should have been scuttled back in the '80s. The variety of loot you get is also unimpressive. 18 guns, 8-9 helms / armor the entire campaign result in sideways leveling: you get precisely the loot you need to remain on the edge of survivabilty at every turn, especially as the game world opens up one area at a time, usually with a loot-farming sidequest-zone attached.

Speaking of combing every patch of land, you'll also be forced to kill absolutely everything, as your character progression is based on kill EXP. Speaking of speaking, you won't be doing much of it, as by level 40 I've found almost no roleplaying choices. As far as storytelling goes, the trite old "we wrecked the world, boo-hoo" setup might as well compose a single paragraph of a Mad Max script, and the less said about the generic robots and brain mutants, the better. Neither is the inherent body horror / comedy of humanoid animal mutants ever given its due. There was potential there, but it just goes nowhere. Your character options are similarly limited, with five pre-made mooks to choose from to compose your three-man band for each encounter. Don't expect skill trees to be any more complex... or even tree-like at all. Your only choice is between linearly allocating active skills for utility or HP / DMG buffs as you go, and even there you'll find an inordinate amount of redundancy between your five characters. Level design might have been interesting, but ultimately boils down to the same routine, area by area. As seen in the screenshot, you circle around the map's outer edge alpha-striking adds with silent weapons to thin out the overabundant and redundant enemies, one by one by one by one by one by one by one, until inevitably reaching one fight per zone against a group of three or four which cannot be separated, which is where you'll be using up your medkits and grenades. Every. Single. Zone. For weapons you have a choice between silent direct-fire guns for ambushes or higher damage boomsticks and grenade spam for your one big fight per map.

OK, so this is a simpleminded, linear, combat-focused game with no strategic, roleplaying or economic depth. Did they at least build a multifaceted combat system?

No.

At first it seems great. Each of your characters can slot one particularly useful ability whose proper deployment allows you to overcome encounters which otherwise seem impossible on paper: entangling roots for dogs and other melee combatants, mind control for humanoids, a stun for mechanical enemies, a guaranteed crit or a knockdown for ambushes. Too bad you'll be relying on those same abilities every single fight, cycling through them constantly as they require kills to recharge.

Road to Eden makes a selling point, and is praised in user reviews, for its difficulty. However, difficulty, for a tactical RPG, implies the player must build up some sort of coherent framework and adapt to shifting challenges. Here instead your choices in party composition, character progression, path through the game world, items, skill usage, moral or stylistic impact, are either absent from the start or simplified into irrelevance. It's even less interesting than Fallout Tactics or similar titles which at least honestly admit their linear mission structure but offer breadth and depth of character / party / gear assembly.

It gives me the same impression I got from Battle Brothers: a dimwit's impression of a more interesting concept, a Scooby Doo mystery sold to an audience which must have heard of strategic / tactical cRPGs with gripping narratives and massive worlds to explore but don't want to put too much thought into one, and therefore settle for something charming but painfully shallow, finding one winning formula then endlessly repeating it mission after mission, pulling one rubber mask after another off the villain of the week and congratulating themselves on knowing the monster would turn out to be fake. By level 40-ish, 2/3 into the campaign, even spicing up fights by lobbing more grenades has worn thin. Even if one were feeling generous enough to excuse this repetitive little chore as a "children's game" it would only be an insult to min-maxing munchkins.

We're done here. Next trainwreck please.

The Corsair Demographic, Part 5: With Ruthless but with Open Hand

"Seyd is mine enemy: had swept my band
From earth with ruthless but with open hand,
And therefore came I, in my bark of war,
To smite the smiter with the scimitar;
Such is my weapon—not the secret knife"

Lord Byron - The Corsair

 

 

The second and insurmountable impediment to the establishment of a persistent virtual world game is fairness. One might easily find escapists enthusiastic about homesteading, production and all the interstices of a fully functional constructed landscape, provided one markets MMOs not only to FPS gamers but to fans of managerial, survival or simulation genres. Implementing the interface tools for practical leadership is largely a matter of development time investment. It would be a lot harder, though not unthinkable, to assemble enough daring pirates capable of laying down life and several sets of limbs for their vessels instead of merely "farming" for self-aggrandizement. Finally, though it seems highly improbable, it would not be out of the question to cater to both the wider mass of social gamers and the more dedicated core of antiheroic corsairs.

But, from every quality or lack thereof observable in the naked ape, you simply will not be able to sell fair play. Game companies discovered decades ago that selling games rakes in nowhere near as much profit as selling cheats. MMOs were from the start plagued by gold farmers, a practice long subsumed into companies' own marketing practices. Even companies which shunned the microtransaction trend found other ways to capitalize on human dishonesty, like selling multiple accounts. For the past generation of online gamers, cheating has always been an unquestioned core feature. Outside electronic games, real world sports are so rife with steroid abuse and bought referees than only the dumbest (a.k.a. the majority) could imagine any contest to have been carried out fairly. It becomes obvious at a glance that while justice may be a fundamental, universal ethical principle, so's cheatin'.

The magnitude of the problem scales with risk and investment. In single-player games, most of us can tolerate blatant imbalance so long as it's not forced upon us. Just don't use it. Half-hour multiplayer matches can still be mitigated by the prospect of moving on to another, hopefully more balanced encounter. But what's the point of devoting a thousand hours of character advancement in a persistent world only to lose all your effort or even just be out-shone by some dipshit who simply bribed the developers? Is it any wonder that only the lowest human detritus bother buying into MMOs anymore?

I suppose there is simply no way around it: MMOs require a hefty critical mass of participants to remain functional, and the vast majority of humans will eschew any activity in which they're judged by the quality of their thought. They demand cheats, and more than any other genre, a persistent world is invalidated by unfairness with every passing virtual day.

For all we fantasize about imaginary lives as Romantic Age corsairs, Byron knew well enough that Conrad's chivalry would stand out in a crowd.

The Corsair Demographic, Part 4: To Lead the Guilty

"Yet was not Conrad thus by Nature sent
To lead the guilty—guilt's worst instrument

[...]

My very love to thee is hate to them,
So closely mingling here, that disentwin'd,
I cease to love thee when I love mankind"

 

Lord Byron - The Corsair

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"They were driven enough to excell, but relaxed enough to socialize. And they were crazy enough to want to leave Earth forever, but sane enough to disguise this fundamental madness [...] They had to be alienated somehow, alienated and solitary enough to not care about leaving everyone they had known behind forever—and yet still connected and social enough to get along with all their new acquaintances"

 

Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars

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About three months ago I ran a series of four posts on the sort of clientelle which would necessarily populate a persistent virtual world game, a true MMO, in light of our escapist fantasies' heavy slant toward romantic adventure stories like The Corsair. For the last two posts, I'd like to propose two reasons why such a pirate crew cannot be reliably recruited.

First, the problem of independence. Multiplayer games intuitively appear more social than single-player variants because... well, yeah. However, a persistent world's persistence does not necessarily include player associations. Each individual must plot one's solitary long-term course, mingling periods of direct cooperation with long stretches of independent exploration, adventuring, character customization / advancement, moving from guild to guild through their inevitable declines and falls. The intrepid pirates best suited to building up a virtual hearth and home and living much of their lives in imaginary worlds are those who hate reality enough to abandon it.

Paradoxically, the most social of game genres must root its communities in individuals who, regardless of their prosocial ambitions and self-delusions, must carry a fundamentally antisocial streak.

A compromise could be found by formalizing more and more interactions through the game interface instead of the chat box, eliminating the need for discussion, bartering, pleading, motivating, etc. - but that in itself might alienate even more of the more casual target audience. In fact, this very series of posts started with the observation that even as online games have lost more and more functionality, lost all purpose for players to associate with each other, lost even the last traces of interesting conversation, guilds have been retained in name only, as chat boxes in which participants may find verbal validation for their existence. The rabble, the vermin, will not admit to being only set pieces in each others' personal fables; they desire each others' vacuous company. They want to haggle, flatter, plead and cajole each other where formal rosters and automated economic interactions would be faster, clearer and fairer.

And of course, the more you allow the vermin to impinge upon their betters' perception, the more of your best customers you will lose. Why should I put up with their stupidity when my fleets in Stellaris are so much more cooperative, allowing for such grander schemes? How can you disentwine my love of immersion and novelty from my hatred of the rabble?

"Kill Ten Rats" Adjusted for Inflation

"Melko marking his hardy frame believed him, and was willing to accept him as thrall of his kitchens. [...] therefore now he gave orders for Beren to be made a thrall of Tevildo Prince of Cats.

[...]

he set Beren to a test, and he bade him go catch three mice [...] a very wild, evil and magic kind that dared to dwell there in dark holes, but they were larger than rats and very fierce"

J.R.R. Tolkien / Christopher Tolkien - The History of Middle-Earth

Oh... no. Nononono, please say it ain't so!

Dire mice in Middle-Earth? As targets for a "kill ten rats" newbie quest?

*sniff* I can't... I can't even...

Et tu, Tolkien?!?

So yeah, I've been screwing things up in real life so I've retreated to the safety of hobbit holes and last homely houses. Instead of re-re-re-reading the main books I've started slowly working my way through The History of Middle-Earth, the compendium of early versions of what eventually became The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. As a collection of rough drafts, narrative dead ends and overanalysis of minutiae, it's a bit of a slog... and also kinda trippy. I mean "Teh Devil-o, Prince of Cats"* and Beren and Lúthien scrubbing Melkor's dishes and pages of wonder-dousing descriptions of the trim and rigging of the vessel of the sun or moon? Can this be the glorious intersection of folklore with modernity which launched a thousand fantasy settings?

Well... sort of. While it can be jarring and entertaining to view such fumbling as a primitive version of Fantasy Fiction's crown jewel, try thinking of it from the other direction. See the layout of Mordor inherent in Melko(r)'s kitchen. Much like the fantasy game writers of today, Tolkien started with "kill ten rats" - but unlike them he advanced beyond such tripe. We remember the re-written, more ambitious versions, not those rough drafts which still treated escapist fiction dismissively as children's stories.

"Kill ten rats" was insufficient in 1920 and by no means should be considered sufficient in 2020. This might explain, to those of you who wonder at our outrage, why so many nerds fume at "kill three dire mice" scenarios. We see hints of how the narrative might mature yet feel, every time, as though trapped in a primitive, antiquated rough draft to a better world held out of our reach.

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*Possibly the freakiest aspect is that Tevildo never entirely disappeared as Tolkien refined his storytelling. He remained Melkor's lieutenant and gradually metamorphosed into... Sauron. Yes, Sauron, The Enemy, The Necromancer, The Deceiver, The Lord of the Ring, Lugbúrz, Gorthaur, The Dark Lord, the lidless eye wreathed in flame, the far-seeing, unseen, unspeakable, looming menace clad in a tower of "wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement"... started out as a talking cat with a golden collar (!) who liked to chase magic mice.

How does one even process such information?

P.S.

Also, I cannot escape the vision of a sleepy-eyed Morgoth shuffling around in bunny slippers at 3 a.m., bumping into kitchen cabinets trying to make himself a sandwich.

Wait, can Morgoth even make a sandwich or can he only pervert pre-existing sandwiches? Does he have to steal Iluvatar's BLT and dip it in licorice sauce?

Mayhap the rest of the Lost Tales hold the answer.

 If I were over, how many seconds would you pause before you just kept browsing?

Outmodemoed

Lately I've been running across a word unheard since olden days in gameademic circles: demo.

 

Y'see kids, back in times of yore momma when the floppiest of di(s)ks battled the slick seedy-ROM for control of the world (wide web) game publishers would release free product demos to give their customers a taste of the good stuff before sinking fifty dollars into what may or may not have been shovelware. It was a risky way to advertise onself though. Give too little of a free sample and you may not be showcasing your strong points. Give too much and you may be showing your weaknesses. In some cases companies included so much in a demo that even well-impressed potential customers would feel no need to play the full version. The demo for Heroes of Might and Magic 2, for instance, was basically The Game, with the full purchase feeling like a glorified map pack.

So publishers gradually moved on to preorders, glitzier teaser videos, microtransactions, years-long "beta" versions a.k.a. selling vaporware, and other marketing strategies. Particularly, since the late 2000s, old school expansion packs gave way to the unwholesome trend of titles releasing as skeletal, content starved visions of what might be, only to spawn verminous, dozen-strong broods of five dollar DLC packs. By a couple of years ago, this trend had progressed to the point where, Paradoxically, games at their official launch date became little more than $50 demos.

 

I have to wonder at the true success rate of this strategy. After all, a paid demo can run into the same pitfalls as the freebie version: giving customers so little as to disgust them into cutting their losses (sunk cost fallacy aside) or so much as to display the extent of your more irrevocably noxious design choices rendering further development moot. In addition, as you gradually condition your public to expect your products to remain incomplete until two years after release, you merely train them to hold off on buying anything until after you go bankrupt - completing the work of the old "wait until it's patched" caveat.

In such a climate, releasing free demos may once again become viable. If customers will assume any first showing to be a mere demo of itself anyway, you may as well beat your competitors to the punch.

Bernard Bobs His Knob

"Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stem rose
Everybody knows"

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

 

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"For lack of a better term, I would say, that the feminine values are now the values of America. Sensitivity is more important than truth. Feelings are more important than facts. Commitment is more important than individuality. Children are more important than people! Safety is more important than fun!"

Bill Maher - Victory Begins at Home (2003)

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For anyone lucky enough never to have heard of Alex Jones, he's an American lunatic / con artist "shock jock" peddling conspiracy theories to the yokel fringe - to the tune of twenty thousand fringe yokels hanging on his every word daily. His "turn the freakin' frogs gay!!!" sound bite, for sheer self-contained insanity value, still ranks among modern pop culture's most ludicrous moments in a very crowded field. However, half-truths make the most effective lies, and his insane ranting had latched on to a very real phenomenon. Contemporary Western society has become increasingly feminized over the past few decades. It's been particularly evident in online games, which back in the '90s and early 2000s were infamously the realm of overcompensating, hyperaggressive adolescent males. How did we get from that to games filled with adorable little girl characters?

 

The difference, rest assured, is real, and intrinsic to our nature as a dimorphic species. Several years ago, after I'd already been blogging here for several years, I ran across Geoffrey & Elizabeth Loftus' 1980 book on video gaming Mind at Play at the library. Elizabeth Loftus has in the intervening decades grown slightly famous mostly for her work on the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases, and also dealt feminism an unexpected blow by debunking "recovered" (a.k.a. fabricated) memories of childhood sexual abuse, one of the many means by which modernity has demonized men in our public unconsciousness. Mind at Play was written as a more sedate counterpoint to the immediate and recurring paranoia against video games which has been springing up every few years since the '70s... and being forty years old on the topic of electronics, is hilariously dated in some aspects. No matter how much computers might have changed since 1980, though, human nature has hardly changed since 1980 centuries ago. On the topic of human interaction with interactive media, I found Mind at Play echoing many of my own conclusions from the past couple of decades. To the point here, they cited Thomas W. Malone's experiments on manipulating video game elements to gauge player interest. Malone's 94-page dissertation can be found here but I'll be citing the Loftuses' summary of one experiment on fifth graders for the sake of brevity:

"In the game of Darts, a number line is presented with specified numbers defining the ends of the line. There are three "balloons" protruding from the line, and the player's job is to decide which numbers correspond to the positions of the balloons.

[...]

Malone [...] created a version in which, after each incorrect try [...] the player was given "constructive feedback" such as being told "A little too high" or "Way too low." In other variations, the balloons were broken, but not by the darts. [...] other versions had no music

[...]

The most intriguing result to emerge from the experiment was that boys and girls differed substantially in terms of which features determined their preferences. [...] Girls liked music, whereas boys disliked it. Girls liked (and boys disliked) being told (verbally) how they were doing, whereas boys liked (and girls were relatively indifferent to) having a visual, or graphic, representation of how they were doing. Finally, boys liked having bursting balloons and especially liked the version in which the balloons appeared to be burst directly by the darts. Girls disliked both of these balloon representations, and especially the latter."

 

Precisely because it dates from the dawn of computer games, this observation caught my attention. One of my own oft repeated gripes over the past decades concerns their shift away from doing various things for the sake of the result itself to straightjacketed activities with no options or effect on the in-game environment, in which the main reward is praise. So how did we get from shooting rockets at each other for the sheer pleasure of seeing brains splatter, seeing those skull balloons pop, to being told how speshul we are, chasing codependence in the form of shiny, friendly Steam achievements for nonsensical non-tasks like... walking.*  Is this a conspiracy? Who turned my toads all femmy? Are there estrogens in my data packets? Did someone reload my plasma crossbow with ovaries?  There's certainly some truth to the top-down influence coming from game developers trying to tap the female market's fine assets. One can't underestimate the justified fear of career-ending feminist lynch mobs, should one fail to glorify women at the expense of men. The decline in quality also coincided with a larger proportion of females in games than before, especially in so-called MMOs with social elements. But correlation is not causation, and as someone who played through this shift from the late nineties to the present, I can't stand by those who claim it was some chick conspiracy (chickspiracy?) which ruined games.

We did it ourselves.

We, the dudes, the bros, the nerds, the hayseeds, the he-men and the me-hens.

The proportion of females in games through the 2000s when online game culture (guilds, achievements, rock/paper/scissors teams, etc.) went mainstream, was still much too small to exert measurable pressure on its own merit. What it could provide was an example of personally advantageous behavior. We, the twenty-something young men who had spent our teens with horns locked in vicious and futile competition, looked to our new sisters in imaginary arms and saw... a better option. Cutesiness. Umbrage. Favor-currying. Emotional manipulation. We saw a magical world in which expressing pain might draw sympathy instead of mockery, where one's ignorance and failings might elicit tutelage instead of ostracism and lowering the bar might be considered a virtue, and gifts were received instead of given. Where all one had to do was show up. No performance anxiety.

We wanted us some of that.

And so, even if we didn't hide behind female avatars, we often unknowingly began aping feminine mannerisms and stated preferences, the infantile, facetiously deferential neediness and hollow mutual social reinforcement and holding praise or decorative fluff more important than hard-won victories. Histrionics which might have placed us as males in Richard Simmons' uncanny valley in real life held more sway in a medium of stilted inter-avatar interactions. It was a way of cheating our assigned masculine station in life as workhorses and cannon fodder. By the time "bronies" intersected the world of online games a decade later, the degeneration into whiny, sniveling brats was already well under way, tanks had replaced healers as the least popular RPG option, and "tryhard" had long replaced "carebear" as a go-to cheap slam.

 

Of course, personal dishonesty and cognitive dissonance aside, no system can consist predominantly of cheaters. Someone has to be first over the wall, across the plank, bringing home the bacon for others, and as trying hard went out of style so have team games, difficulty decreased to kindergarden levels even in single-player, and strategy given way to idle games.

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* No, I'm not joking; No Man's Sky as one example praises you based on walking distance. It's a $50 Fitbit for your middle finger!

 

P.S.

Note, very little observed in this post is unambiguously good or bad... except for InfoWars being a pile of steaming manure. The hyperaggressive l33t-d00d mentality of '90s online games was itself unbearably stupid, trying hard in games becomes meaningless when it devolves to endless practice makes perfect to nail that last space invader and some degree of feminization was warranted especially in American society where chest-thumping machismo reigned supreme in the post-9/11 BushJr.-era jingoist mainstream. But being a walking caricature of anti-masculinity is no better than being a walking caricature of masculinity.

Seriously, the hell with bronies already.

Did you hear about the wellness product manufacturer who got put away by the IRS?

He had overstated his wellcome.