Cutting Corners... and corners, and corners, and corners...

"'cause you know I'd walk a thousand miles if I can just see you"

 Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles

 

I seem to have acquired a handful of new visitors, so to drive them away my next post was going to rag on retards... but since it also explicitly deals with American politics (interpret that as you will) I'll save that for July 4th and instead close off this month with an anecdote prompted by my previous post's exasperation at free-market fanaticism and the naive claim to self-adjusting capitalist efficiency to minimize costs.

I ordered a webcam recently from a certain Swiss-based multinational. It came wrapped in a cardboard holder twice its size, itself packaged in a retail box twice the size of that, which in turn was cushioned inside a shipping box twice THAT size, so that it occupied at least an order of magnitude more volume than necessary. Never mind the retail box, deliberately oversized to prevent shoplifting, is itself superfluous since apparently consumer electronics companies haven't heard of online shopping yet.

 

I ordered it through a certain infamously monopolistic online distributor. Previously they had shipped all physical packages to my location through the government mail without any issues, but now they used a certain monopolistic multinational shipping service based here in the states. Their initial arrival estimate of two weeks was retconned to one week by an automated e-mail. On the Friday in question, the tracking system declared the package delivered... which it was not... with no information on where it might be held locally if not delivered, except for a facility 80 kilometers away.

No, they can't possibly be that stupid, I told myself.

So I called their automated info line which confirmed the package was supposed to be delivered to a local office.

Called them.

Check back next business day, they said, which is Monday, because they only get it the business day after.

Meaning someone drove those fifty miles, 80km, to my apartment building, then drove back 80km to store the tenfold-oversized package.

But wait, there's more!

I skipped Monday, opting to give them more time for any other shenanigans.

On Wednesday I found a "sorry we missed you" note on my door. So I drove to the local business... which told me, no, they only get the package on the next business day...

Which means someone drove all the way to my door and back, 80km, A SECOND TIME, with the stupidly oversized package wasting space in a gas-guzzling delivery van, for a webcam that fits in your pocket. After storing it on their own premises for an extra week. To fit some internal bureaucratic rule regarding what counts as "next day" for their own local shipping office.

Now that I have it, the best use I can conceive for it would be to send each and every one of these moronic wastes of oxygen a picture of my pert little hairy wolfman posterior.

And you're probably wondering why I'm making such a big deal out of such a mundane little story.

Because it's mundane. Each of you probably has dozens of stories like this. This is every day of our lives. Multiply this story by three billion people, a hundred times a year, and you're barely scratching the surface because we haven't even gotten to businesses' inefficient dealings with each other or the fact most of the cash they rake in isn't spent on production but on market manipulation and bribes to implement more neoliberal deregulatory policies.

We're being taxed for this capitalist "efficiency" out of our own pockets with every single product, and don't even dare try to claim you can switch to these companies' competitors, because the simple fact you can easily guess which "certain" business giants I'm talking about means you have no more choice in using their services than you do in paying taxes to the official "government" ... less in fact, since you can't vote Imperator Jeff Bezos out of office!

 

And you think national governments or the E.U. or the U.N. are stifling productivity?

Querulous Questor Quentyn Quinn

"Another foggy day in this old town

Hidden by the mist that's all around

[...]

I sail through clouds and float on silver skies

The world's a nicer place from up on high"

 

Oi Va Voi - Foggy Day

 

 

I've been perusing various of Ralph Hayes Junior's comics over the past weeks (there are quite a few of them) and at least the newer ones are worth a mention. As for the older ones... well, given the author officially introduces himself as a Christian from Ohio, you can more or less guess at their sophistication.

Tallyho, basically a lot of Mr. Magoo jokes in dog form, looks strictly inspired by newspaper comics, with the dull, conventional humor that implies.

Goblin Hollow starts with the idea of an arcade inhabited by goblins, but after only two dozen pages abruptly shifts into reactionary rambling against a goth teenager, and from skimming the next hundred pages it mostly just kind of... stays there.

Camp Calomine fares better as the adventures of children's summer camp counselors whose camp has been taken over by politically correct fanatics, with quite a few cathartic jabs at the past decade's moralistic fads. Still, it ignores the more important context that children's camps and youth groups have always been used for indoctrination, whether officially or just because certain segments of the population are motivated to abuse them as such. Officially your kneebiters are going to learn some survival/crafts skills, have fun in nature or spend their Sunday playing. Really, they're going to be used as unpaid manual labor and/or be indoctrinated into a bunch of superstitious garbage about national exceptionalism, the glorious proletarian utopia, or some sadomasochistic eschatological cabal touting bimillennial visits from a zombie rabbi.

Or then there's The Probability Bomb, a crossover between his newest comics (and abandoned before them) which appears to have rapidly devolved to a confused, foaming-at-the-mouth screed against infidels as space nazis out to destroy the universe... or something.... which is obviously far worse than worshipping an imaginary magic sky-daddy who's out to destroy the universe and torture almost everyone (except those "better" people who obey him) for all eternity...

Still, with time, R.H. learned a few tricks of the trade and the strips loosely defined as currently "active" (within the last year) can be counted among the internet's better fare. Tales of the Questor has young Quentyn, son of Quinn, an adolescent magic raccoon in a generic fantasy world, take up the mantle of adventuring hero. The spin-off Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger is basically that IN SPAAAACE! as a slightly more grizzled version of Quentyn spoofs and deconstructs a few SciFi staples like space pirates or Star Trek's monolithic Federation culture or its draconian Prime Directive and murderclonomat abuse, and manages a couple of more original plot elements in the process.

Both versions earn much of their charm by the protagonists' earnestness. Whether interacting with his family&friends, rooting out crime or injustice, saving innocents, solving historic mysteries or braving the great unknown, Quentyn is always so ingenuously given unto the task he's chosen for himself that he can't help but infect the audience with his heroics. The same attitude carries into the larger story, as RH is one of the few remaining authors not to take phrases like "I cast fireball" for granted, and tries to work through the cognitive and sensory implications of various scenes involving magic or industrial era "magic" tricks, helping a great deal to expand upon otherwise simple characters intrepidly braving their odd little fantasy realm rendering even trivial episodes rather visceral. Some of the scenes pitting the core cast, with their core values, against modern-style fad worship and the excesses of social science can be downright cathartic.

Other scenes... well... RH, though evidently not particularly stupid by nature and despite all his hard-won storytelling aptitude, is also a prime example of the brain damage inflicted by a conservative upbringing. He builds up each story rather sanely until overtaken by some spastic need to re-affirm his flyover deadhead credentials and starts shouting BRING BACK THE GOLD STANDARD! Or, you're accelerating through an otherwise well-executed dramatic scene until BAM! - full-page psalm! Or here's a ten-page glossy digression about a random bullshit merchant for no particular reason. Or an anti-evolution argument so primitive (random atoms spontaneously coalescing into dinosaurs) that any third-grader with a sedimentary pet rock and geologic era timeline chart could correct it effortlessly.

 

Like other libertarian pamphleteers the sheer heft of naive conviction he throws into his anti-socialist rants is a thing to behold, as on page 136 of Space Ranger: "even the most corrupt robber baron must, at least, stay profitable or his empire perishes" but "a government bureaucracy [...] when the decision makers neither pay out of their own pocket for their ideas, nor suffer any consequences when they fail" is the only "place where incompetence can flourish indefinitely". Anyone who has worked for a large company can confirm it is its own government with its own bureaucracy, every bit as inefficient as those of nations. I myself can cite examples of being raked over the coals as a temp whenever something went wrong, because my bosses preferred to waste half a shift every time interrogating me rather than risk bad blood among their peers by asking even a single uncomfortable question up and down the supply chain. Let's not even mention the endless inter-department squabbling over who signs for what box and who get an extra cartridge of printer toner next quarter. Incompetent managers do persist decade after decade for not threatening their peers' status or simply kissing ass and as for staying profitable, well, you have to ask profitable to whom? The wealthy as a rule do not pay out of their pockets for mistakes. They pay out of their customers' and employees' pockets. Even in case of catastrophic failures, golden parachutes have been standard equipment for some decades. Even if they manage to collapse an entire economy, the rich can easily bail on their private jets to their private islands to prey upon the next economy, being always more mobile and able to weather bad times out of their accumulated fat while the lower classes scrape and starve to rebuild a region until they become profitable enough to be harvested once again.

 

How can cowboy fetishists have completely forgotten Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary?

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

- and while we're at it -

RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Yet still, even if you're not just flipping through for the freakshow value of the author's bouts of reactionary mania, there's something undeniably charming about Quentyn Quinn, that primitive/primitivist naivete clinging to the blind belief that if only given a chance heroes will arise, wrongs will be set right, the truth will out and better days shall dawn.

Pluck, baby, it's all about the pluck!

Ingrown Heir

Three squares in four walls on the third, fifth second rea-ch uns-een travertine glint in the eye of the behold him dimmed to scorching indigni fool unlit dampened smothered smoother's more his moodier he hearse this curse discoursed in your veigled is you keeper look age hag gainsaid hissy scape goaded predeceased ache rose to the challenge alls Yaga da doom me's trust fool oaf woe ruled owed sighed the four on the third containing the three for the one half here half three lopes a head of the packed off atta young aged you prima tour leeway to go until you didn't breathe just breathe unjust a pause took leerier headed bye twenty-three revvin anti so shall ten then sees the light in the night bite one sin a while you failed is rage six teen years laid to rest is outsider purview oh few fouls' play bow wow you've grown older but not any why sir I resent my gift lupined a way for so long in the tooth being locked in the mouth I was howling the nigh to weight if you had the years, foe writ.

Ancestors Legacy

I've spent a few hours trying to get into Ancestors Legacy recently, and by trying I mean alternating between groaning at its failings, laughing out loud and finally bemoaning what could have been a better title... if it were designed for gameplay instead of cutscenes. Here's yet another case study in wasted potential, a small-time company which seemed incapable of deciding what game is was developing.

Remember: this is actually a top-down game.

Its attempt at solving the RTS genre's main problem (the lack of S; button-mashing) consists of organizing units into ten maximum squads which can be replenished cheaply and quickly instead of rebuilding unit by unit, and streamlining base building. You get one main base with production facilities, and the rest are moneybags, with a preset number of fixed building spots on each map. Also, unit motion fakes a bit of inertia preventing you from "jiggling" troops around for manual hit and run tactics, as does melee engagement which can only be broken by retreating a screen away. The rest is fairly solid if limited in scope, with non-redundant upgrades for both stats and abilities/stances and balanced resource spending.

 

Too bad none of it ever gels.

The rapid squad replenishment results in a lot of inconsequential back-and-forth with no incentive to commit, the limited base building feels completely perfunctory, and units' awkward movement makes it damn near impossible to see who's hitting what or react in any way other than by retreating entirely to replenish for more confused skirmishing. That catapult above took literally minutes to navigate the roads across a tiny 1v1 map due to having to stop in order to execute even the slightest turn. All of which is probably why, four years after its release, Ancestors Legacy is selling for <$10 with zero matches showing in its multiplayer lobby. 

But wait! It has a campaign mode!

And that, in fact, seems to have killed it. While quite a few players enjoy pre-written campaigns, strategy genres in general thrive on open gameplay, and a disproportionate amount of effort here went into painting lush vignettes of war-torn medieval landscapes. Seriously, did you even realize that's a damn millstone above? Don't see that every day. The visual crew obviously modeled their little hearts out, judging by the well-proportioned and lovingly detailed buildings and soldiers, or their many, many idle animations hefting their weapons, striking poses, looking around, drilling at the barracks while being recruited, coughing and spitting and so forth. Buuuuut... the writing and audio backing up those graphics falls so far short that I'm ready to scrap my playthrough with the tutorial. I doubt the dialogue sounds good even in Polish, given how indecisively the English version wavers between roaring tribal warrior cliches and anachronistic colloquialism.

 

"There! you are. come. with. us. We needj - your help."

"Affirmative!"

Wait, "affirmative" - ?!? Am I listening to a viking from the year 800 or that robot from Lost in Space? Factor in every line being delivered as though painstakingly sounded out SYL-a-ble by syl-A-BLE via teleprompter by some guy who doesn't even know what he's reading, and I was ready to call it quits even before my hero started bragging he's "ratty as always!" The game went as far as to include a jitterbugging over-the-shoulder camera when zooming in on a squad... except it's still a top-down RTS, so the only ones putting that functionality to use are no-name bloggers looking for an illustration the better to bash you with for FORGETTING YOU'RE A TOP-DOWN RTS!

Look, as far as I'm converned, scripted campaigns are for RPGs, and wasted on strategy genres. But I'm willing to accept that waste of money in, say, Planetfall or the like. I can forgive their idiotic writing and cheesy notions of drama, so long as the freeform strategy aspect holds up on its own. Ancestors Legacy paid so little attention to its core appeal that in the worst late-'90s fashion its AI resigns itself to constantly sending the same squad to attack the same base until you build up your army to flatten it.

The End.

Because with that you've even killed skirmish mode, your last hope for relevance. Your product is now 80% off but you've given everyone 100% cause to skip it.

Some say a statement has been implied

I've been clicking through a webcomic called Tamuran on and off these past months. Fairly standard sword and sorcery routine, not terrible but not really inspired enough to inspire a full archive binge. There's some wood elves and magic gypsies and a vaguely medievalish kingdom of indeterminate technological level. At least the shapeshifting empaths stand out a bit, and I am partial to a bit of shapeshifting myself. (edit 2024/11/03: The story did improve as the heroes made their way out of newbietown)

One scene on page 197 struck me as exemplifying one way in which we take poor worldbuilding for granted. The elf starts a phrase with "my people believe" and honestly, that's just not how different tribes talk to each other. Does noone remember professors telling you to stop saying "in my opinion" because yes, obviously, if you're the one talking then yours is the opinion? No one presents the dogma inculcated from birth as a "belief" unless speaking to authority and therefore forced into a defensive, apologetic (fine, call it diplomatic) posture, or making some other socially manipulative play on the target's sympathies. The forced facetious equanimity of modern discourse is a product of disinterested higher authorities throwing different tribes together while mandating coexistence. Those talking about "my people" in such a society are really just hiding behind two authorities at once: the people in question and the overarching social structure. You might as well write all your characters padding their statements with "sources claim" or "they said on the telly..."

Honest beliefs are taken for granted.

And, y'know, we didn't use to be so gosh-dingledangled insecure that we need even our fictional characters with fictional beliefs to constantly pad their dialogue with trigger warnings to each oher. Conan: what is best in life?

"My people say it might be to crush your enemies and perhaps if it's not too much of a bother to see them driven before you and unless it hurts anyone's pwecious fee-fees, to hear da lamentations of der womyn."

Elemental, My Dear Conventional

"the construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind, and the Silmarils are in my heart. So that goodness knows what will happen. Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional Grimm's fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge. And what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set among things more elemental."

J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937 letter to Stanley Unwin on the topic of a Hobbit sequel, as cited in The History of Middle-Earth

 

 

I just realized why I've never particularly liked superheroes: they're hobbits!

Wait, let's back up a bit.

I recently commented elsewhere that a dungeoneering webcomic overlaps with adventuring in general, be it high fantasy, urban fantasy, SciFi, anything outside our plains-ape dating dramedy lowest common denominator, but looking back I conspicuously omitted horror or superheroes. And I still would.

 

While superheroes owe their (now almost forgotten) distinction from old-timey demigods and other magical heroes to their 20th-century superscience origins, they remain a representation of the daring prince or plucky small-town lad who finds magic <ITEM> and defeats <MONSTER> to reinstate the status quo. They so unequivocally dominate pop culture precisely for reassuring the brain-dead majority in their inertia that they deserve to be protected by their betters or that mundane desires somehow go hand-in-hand with transmundane ability.

Adventuring though (and especially Science Fiction in its better moments when it's not caveman science fiction) has inherited another take on heroics from industrial era exploration stories. Here the gentleman adventurer, the independent scientist of peerless intellect, has discerned a wondrous <NOVELTY> which he will risk life and limb to unveil. The status quo was never truly in peril... but it is insufficient.

Hobbits' comically exaggerated parochialism lends itself to neither avenue. Both Bilbo and Frodo's company are called to adventure by outside forces and their charm comes from their status as unlikely heroes. They mostly act the part of everyman viewpoints among larger than life forces, suburban comic relief dotting a more elemental drama several ages in the making.

Superheroes tend to stop at the suburban part, and not particularly comic at that.

Even X-Men's supposed message of embracing change, couched in the larger theme of "acceptance" boils down to "we just want to be beer-swilling, sitcom-watching deadheads like the rest of you" and the less said about mad scientist villains and treating any scientific achievement as world-shattering malice, the better.

It's an old observation that anyone with at least half a brain tends to identify with the villains in superhero stories, the thinkers who analyze, plan and invent, not the dumb jocks who win out every time by punching the problem, or in newer versions by squinting real hard and defeating those threatening outsiders by sheer force of will.

I suppose I always liked Middle-Earth partly because it allowed me to honestly root for the nominal good guys despite its luddite undertone and conventional saving of the conventional day. Bilbo's "Tookishness" leads him over the misty mountains cold and long before bearing a ring Frodo studied elvish, unlike any of the woolly-toed schlubs around them. They transcend their hobbitude. The proudful Noldor, for whom paradise itself was not good enough, recall the gentleman scholars of past ages, diminished and weary of their exile as they may be after having struck outward into the primitive Great Lands. Probably most importantly, Frodo's climactic battle with himself shows simpleminded force of will (important as it was) as ultimately insufficient. Wheels within wheels, plans within plans, intellects far beyond that of the plucky small-Shire lad, outmaneuvered the villains into LotR's Pyrrhic victory.

How often do superheroes win via strategic positioning?

Gaming Imperfect

"But please, you know you're just like me

Next time, I promise we'll be - perfect"

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect

 

 

If you've ever played an MMO (or even some single-player open world games) you've run across the mindless beachcombing vulgarly touted as exploration achievements. In theory "exploration" should mean taking stock of your surroundings, finding paths, shortcuts and secretive nooks and crannies or alternately scenic or significant landmarks.

 

Worse: it's past another marker, so you probably stopped searching the area.

 

In game designer jargon though, "exploration" means tagging indistinguishable patches of dirt with the idea that exactly 3.91km outside of town on the highway counts as exploring that road - but not 3.90 or 3.92! City of Heroes ranked the worst offender for its coin-sized markers you literally had to step on, because finding lost pennies on a sidewalk is the equivalent of discovering Vinland. Compounding the problem, you must usually find absolutely every last marker to complete the achievement. Obviously Marco Polo didn't truly visit China because he never hit madam Wang's noodle steamery on 35th street. Without that, the whole trip's void.

 

We could comb every step of every map just fine when Doom consisted of twenty pharmacy-sized levels of featureless corridors with predetermined demon spawns for your shotgunning pleasure. But in the era of hundred-square-kilometer virtual worlds, asking players to find the exact ten spots where your dog shit last week might as well come with HUD markers, because nobody bothers doing that without cheating off a wiki. The only way to keep such challenges playable without rendering locations too obvious is to stop demanding full completion, which would also address another issue of the absolute faceless lack of player identity in modern games. It might be quaint to compare notes with someone else and find the 10/13 spots I found to complete an achievement aren't the same 10/13 he did, that he likes beaches while I prefer hills, and neither of us thought to crawl up a troll's ass to find the exploration marker it swallowed.

 

But this is just a small manifestation of a larger, older issue. Mammalian play is supposed to be explorative, and as a heavily neotenized species we enjoy that feeling of rifling through grandma's kitchen cabinets for the sheer hell of it. For anyone with more brains than a hamster, it stops being fun when grandma just orders you to take out exactly five forks from the second drawer on the right. Playing games should be an inherently creative endeavor, an intersection of your personal style with novel challenges, not fucking cookie-cutter builds, "meta" team comps, enforced min-maxed optimization and completionism!

 

I've probably logged hundreds of hours in RimWorld without ever bothering to pursue the supposed win condition of escaping the planet. I'd rather see how cyborg cannibals fare against giant ants. My current gimmick is technophilic primitive nudists in the taiga. One colony some time ago started with Labrador retriever pets. Properly trained they made passable if unimpressive combatants, but the economic angle proved more interesting.

 

Their larger litters give them twice the population growth of mightier beasts like cougars, but their nutritional requirements soon had me considering sterilizing them all to stem the voraciously adorable beige tide. Turns out they sell well though. Lacking any other tradable commodities (sculptures, couture, beer) during the early, dirt-farming years of my colony's development, my colonists' lives began revolving around Labrador breeding to such an extent even when they did get around to sculpting, it was all about the damn mutts. I organized their schedules around properly timing trade caravans to rid myself of each new sackfull of puppies before they eat me out of house and home. Thus planet <whatsitsname> acquired its first dedicated puppy mill.

Am I winning at RimWorld?

Maybe not officially, but anything with that many puppies sure feels like a win.

The stars can wait. Why would I ever abandon puppy-farming?

 

Albeit hardly games' biggest problem at the moment (that would be microtransactions) the fixed idea of "winning" by completing the game is holding back more promising genres, and it's rooted in the industry's beginnings. The early success stories like Space Invaders or Frogger were by necessity limited in their interactivity. Getting the high score was a worthy endeavor in a context which never stretched beyond strafe/shoot/strafe/shoot anyway - but we have more options now.

Take a Stellaris playthrough in which I outlawed robots. Normally, the machine uprising event (if you research sentient AI but don't give them their rights) is a mid-game challenge, with individual fleet strengths on the order of tens of thousands. Mid-game came and went, late game saw me polishing off some of my more threatening or profitable neighbours... one of which had AI-driven ships... which tech I inadvertently acquired from battlefield salvage. I was nonplussed when the unprompted machine uprising warning signs began to pop up here and there, decided it must just be a little glitch... and another one... and OH, SHIIIIIIT !

Turns out the event scales.

When the robot mafia spawned from my galactic frontrunner, late-game empire, it spawned with individual fleets of 1.5 million and more in strength, for a total of ~15mil, when my combined fleet strength, matching the whole rest of the galaxy put together, could barely take on one at a time. And I did take on one at a time, traded for alloys, retreated and regrouped at citadels, and eventually managed to recover thanks to the skirmish/attrition-obsessed AI never massing against me, wasting its superfluous strength on undefended systems.

That should count as a win right there.

A single one of those fleets would trounce the entire Contingency which spawns as the official end-game artificial intelligence crisis faction. Anything after the terminator swarm stretching across whole systems can't but come across as a firecracker echoing a nuke. After surviving the Robot Mafia, telling me I won by outscoring the Lokken Mechanists in energy credits or whatever comes across as an insult... butchoo gotta beat the game, right?

To their credit, Paradox have started experimenting with more nonstandard endgame scenarios like blowing up the galaxy for the win. Such alternate victory conditions (the classic example being Civilization's spaceship launch) are currently lacking in the recent TBS which started this whole train of thought, Old World.

In one recent playthrough, I found myself putting quite a bit of effort into breeding Labrador retrievers... errr, I mean, inter-breeding with the Vandals, securing an alliance and wedding new heirs into the tribe. But, given Old World's emphasis on dynasties as principal selling point over Civilization and its copycats, I'm a bit disappointed at the absence of some kind of victory condition relating to inheritance. Y'know what? Scrap the "victory" part. Winning by completing achievements is decent, but give me more ways to deliberately finish the game without just outscoring everyone, maybe legitimize the Vandals by my imperial authority and parentage, install my mostly-Vandal grandson Abdosir (isn't he cute?) as their god-king, turn them into a divinely sanctioned rampaging horde and set them loose upon an unsuspecting Fertile Crescent, ending civilization as we know it. Cue credits. You don't win. You don't lose. But you played it your way to the bitter end.

This is MY sandstorm.

I criticized plenty about Shadowrun: Dragonfall after my playthrough, but applauded its setting, characters and especially its stellar reinterpretation of a "bad" ending as simply your character's choices taken to their logical conclusions, without beating you over the head with a bunch of shallow moralistic posturing about how you should've played the hero. And, just as city simulators have a lot to teach other genres about decentralizing the action, we should remember grand strategy is just a way of saying roleplaying on a civilization scale. Not every campaign should be measured against an arbitrary perfect win, ticking all checkboxes on the achievement list, chasing down every last monster in every last zone for 100% completion, marrying the prince for a golden ending. Instead of advancing toward ruling the world, merge the ideas of strategy tech/culture/military victories with RPGs' "where are they now" end-game slideshows. A little good. A little bad. So it goes.

On the flip-side, cRPGs themselves almost invariably get easier as you advance, sometimes to the point you can one-shot the final boss. Justified, to a large extent, because a late-game unwinnable state would cheat the player of a lot more invested time than getting eaten by the first giant spider in the prologue. This can be addressed by implementing more "bad" endings without treating them as losses, without propping up a single "golden ending" as the goal of the entire campaign. Yes, building the Civilization spaceship means you'll never rule the Earth. So what? Screw you guys, I'm going home... to Alpha Centauri. Start legitimizing pyrrhic victories, desperate last stands and glorious resistance movements instead of merely ranks on a podium and "second place is another word for loser."

Sure, games have rules and goals, otherwise they disintegrate. If you want complete creative freedom, buy some art supplies and paint your way to victory, compose some music, scribble disjointed short stories and post them to your blog, whatever. You don't need fifty space marines and a gluon gun for that. But there must be a middle ground between everything and nothing allowing for interactivity in an interactive medium instead of just practicing Mario's jumps. Whether it's imposing a victory condition on a sandbox, 100% achievement completion, golden endings, nominal victories dwarfed by preceding gameplay, anticlimactic but mandatory final boss fights, we have got to distance ourselves more from the idea of perfect scores, first place or complete domination as the only goals worth pursuing.

And if you don't see any social commentary in that yet, I'll just leave you to it.