Category Archives: Video Games

More weekend venting about video games

Yesterday I talked about the first case in the second game of the “Great Ace Attorney” duology. Today I’d like to talk about the third case from that game. Yes the second case was also good but I don’t have my thoughts in order about it yet.

Once again, this is my thoughts about a murder mystery game, so total spoilers ahead!

I liked this case, 9/10.  The first day of the case built up to be better and better as it went along, although there were a few moments in this case as in case 2 where I didn’t know what evidence to give people in order to succeed.  They developers of this series have slimmed down everything in the game to give you more hints (Iris will directly tell you when you still have shit to do) but it can still be very illogical what things you have to show to which people to progress.

The investigation section for this case was incredible though.  Both days’ investigations built up so expertly to interweave so many competing threads.  Even though I guessed a lot of it early, I still had a wild ride and I didn’t guess everything.  The character work was also top notch, I found Van Zieks (the prosecutor for this series) a lot more boring during the game that preceded this one, he felt like a sub-par Godot (the prosecutor from Ace Attorney 3: Trials and Tribulations).  But getting to chat with Van Zieks face to face and hear his side of things really rounded him out, even if it’s a bit cliche that they gave him Ace Attorney Prosecutor Backstory A: dead family. 

I also think case 3 was a case where the writers sort of learned a lesson of what NOT to do from previous Ace Attorney games.  This case featured a defendant who helps the prosecutor (like Wocky Kitaki in 4-2) and a completely impossible “murder” (like Max Galactica flying away in 2-3).  And yet both of them are handled very well.  The defendant has a much better reason for “helping the prosecution” than Wocky Kitaki ever did, since this defendant truly believes his “teleportation” machine worked and that the murder that occurred was all just a tragic accident. Although he is “helping” the prosecutor by saying his machine worked, and that fact implicates him for the crime, his reason for sticking to his story are understandable. 

And although teleportation obviously isn’t real, pretty much everyone in this case knows that and it’s clear that they are sort of just humoring Van Zieks, who also at least presents genuine evidence of the defendant committing the crime besides “your machine did magic.” In this way we have an “impossible” murder mystery that doesn’t stray into parody territory with genuinely impossible plot points.

I do want to say that on day 1, the only underwhelming part of the story was Herlock Sholmes (the obvious Sherlock Holmes expy).  They’ve made him a lot more like a classic Ace Attorney protagonist, in that he has money issues. 

Ask Apollo, ask Phoenix, ask Athena, the Wright Anything Agency is always going on and on about how they have no money.  In the first game I thought Sholmes was absolutely loaded with dosh. He has a massive house filled with valuable trinkets and machines, and a partner who is constantly publishing his exploits in serialized form.  He has steady income and a lot of wealth, so why would he complain about money problems?  In this case though he’s a poor scrounger and on Day 1 that made him a lot less “fun” to be around, he was less bombastic and more pitiable.  I even thought the Day 1 “Great Deduction” was underwhelming. 

I think his Day 1 great deduction should have gone differently.  The first part of the scene is proving that Tusspell smacked a man over the head with an arm when he tried to steal, the second part is proving that what Sholmes thought was a real policeman was actually wax and what he thought was wax was a real policeman.  The two contradictions together demonstrate that a famous waxwork called “the professor” was stolen from Madame Tusspell’s waxwork museum. 

But… the deduction doesn’t flow to me.  It should be flipped: the first part should be with the policemen, and finding out that the wax one has a missing arm sets up a mystery of where the arm is, while finding out the other is on the case looking for something sets up another mystery.  Then part 2 solves both mysteries, she used the arm to KO a guy and she called the cops because “the professor” was stolen.  As it stands when we saw the wax cop missing an arm, I wasn’t surprised because I already knew where the missing arm was.

Day 2’s deduction on the other hand is the single best “anything” in Ace Attorney I’ve ever played. 

Ace Attorney usually doesn’t do these kinds of scenes well, I remember in GAA1 Case 5, where Gina gives you the disc and tells you not to give it to Eggs Benedict.  Both of them are yelling at you then the game just zooms out back to investigation mode.  The whole tension of the scene is lost because you now have to click on Sholmes to progress with the Great Deduction. 

But in this case the scene worked perfectly.  You bust down Drebber’s door and see a time bomb and upturned furniture.  Everyone’s scared but Sholmes’ deductions is that the bomb isn’t real.  Then you solve his deduction and use the crossbow to find the head of the “professor.”  But the deduction isn’t over!  For the first time we get deductions part 3 and find that Drebber is in the safe.  But it still isn’t over because the bomb was real!  And Sholmes disarms it and everyone says funny stuff.  I’m not describing it well but honestly this was the best Ace Attorney anything I’ve ever played, better than using the metal detector on Von Karma, better than using the Mood Matrix on Blackquill, this was just A++++++

This case was allllllllllllmost perfect.  I think my biggest quibble besides Day 1 Sholmes was when Ryunosuke had to name the accomplice to Drebber.  It was Courtney Sithe, but she was such a minor character that by the time I got to that point I had straight up forgotten what she had done up to that point.  When I finally named her I vaguely remembered the “500 scalpels” bit in her notebook, but that was not the part of the investigation that stood out to me.  If we’re going to make her part of this case she needs to be more involved, otherwise in such a broad ranging case like that she faded into the background of my memory and I was floundering to remember who she was and why she was in this case. 

We had focused a lot on Asman (who was a con artist) and Harebrayne (who had been duped).  Either of them could have fit the description of “accomplice” with  a little tweaking.  Maybe Harebrayne was told to do things and didn’t realize he was accidentally moving the body?  Maybe Asman set up this whole get-rich-quick-scheme with Drebber but Drebber double crossed Asman at the last minute?  We had focused on them so I picked them before picking Sithe, about whom I remembered absolutely nothing aside from her short blurb in the court record. 

I feel although there isn’t anything totally illogical about who you’re supposed to finger for the crime, but I just had so little to go on that there isn’t a compelling reason to pick the character you’re “supposed” to pick.  Sure it works as a shocking swerve, but it isn’t as compelling in a narrative sense.

I also find Sithe as the accomplice incredibly lazy.  I’ve noticed a trend in AA games (and other mysteries) wherein making one of the cops or lawyers part of the guilty party gives carte blanche to explain away any and all inconsistencies with “well the people investigating the crime covered up their own misdeeds.”  My challenge to mystery writers (and Ace Attorney writers in particular) is to make an entire narrative where the law enforcement is never part of the crime. 

Using them to upend the entire mystery isn’t out of the realm of possibility, there have been real detectives who used their position to cover up their own crimes, but narratively it lets you ignore all the “impossibilities” that had been driving the case up to the point the law enforcement is indicted.  GAA1-5 was a great case, but it also did this.  As did Rise From the Ashes, which this case in some way mirrors.  It starts to get a little predictable when at least once a game they need to make law enforcement be the villain so as to allow themselves to change up the evidence of the case half-way through.  There are other ways this can be done, law enforcement wasn’t evil in 1-3 (Steel Samurai case) but the facts of the case changed naturally as the thing built up, without ever contradicting themselves or needing to bring in “someone changed the evidence.”

Final thought: this is the ONLY time so far that I have truly liked the Jury in these cases.  In GAA1-5 I thought they were acceptable, but this is the first time I’ve LIKED them.  On day 1 at least.  Day 2 they again just get in the way, but on day 1 they actually add to the trial in a dynamic way.

Weekend venting about video games

Ace Attorney is a wonderful series of murder mystery games that I’ve enjoyed for years now. A while ago they brought their “Great Ace Attorney” duology to Steam, with 2 games set in Victorian London/Meiji Era Japan. I really really liked the games overall and I urge anyone who’s a fan of murder mysteries to pick them up. But the first case of the second game really really bugged me and so I’d like to write about why.

Note: total spoilers ahead! This is a mystery game so read only at your own risk

The day after I finished Great Ace Attorney 1, I started Great Ace Attorney 2.  I really loved GAA1 and wanted to dive right in, but the first case of GAA2 was just so damn frustrating, that I left and didn’t return to it until months later.  I’ve pulled up the notes I wrote on this case, both months ago and today.  I enjoyed the characters, the main character (Rei) and her friend (Susato) had a great dynamic going, and I think Susato is a great character to play as, perhaps better than Ryunosuke (main character from the first game).  Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut…

I predicted this entire case from about minute 1.  The moment I saw the photographer taking pictures of the writer, I blurted out “are you the fucking killer?!”.  The moment I was allowed to inspect the fountain pen, I knew it had been used to administer the poison.  The moment I saw the first picture of the hut, I knew the victim was stabbed from outside it. It’s just that I felt a lot like this awkward zombie comic, which I never have felt much like before.

Normally I do not do a good job predicting these cases.  I get taken for a ride by the story and am as shocked as the characters when twists happen.  So I’m perfectly fine with being misled in a murder mystery story.  What I do not enjoy is being punished for being correct.  As soon as you are allowed to examine the fountain pen, you need to use it as evidence make a contradiction about the facts of the case. 

I tried to use the pen as a contradicting piece of evidence because I knew it was used to administer poison. However, because the game wasn’t ready for it to be used as evidence, I was punished for being correct even though I was correct.  I haaaaaaaaaaate when mysteries punish you for being correct, it’s one of the big reasons I hate LA Noire and do not at all consider it a good mystery game.  All mysteries want to have that moment like in the very first Ace Attorney game with the metal detector, where you go “aha!  this seemingly useless piece of evidence turns the whole case around!” but when the evidence is too obvious, then the player realizes what is happening long before the game is ready for it, and the players’ attempts to honestly answer the game with their knowledge turn into the game saying “no you’re wrong.”

I ended up playing this game in such a way where I always second guessed what I was saying, not because I thought I was wrong, but because I wasn’t sure if the game was ready for me to be right yet.  “This contradiction seems obvious, but the last obvious contradiction gave me a penalty, so is the game ready for me to be right yet?” is not a fun way to play. 

Finally I just didn’t think the mystery in this case logically flowed.  A lot of the contradictions they used to meander around (before finally letting us use the fountain pen) weren’t actual contradictions, and at one point I’m pretty sure the game contradicts itself.  It says that the victim in the case mentioned the poison while visiting a University, and the witness Soseki then demanded to see the poison.  Another witness, Professor Mikotoba said ok and showed the poison to them, but the reporter Menimemo was not allowed to go in and see the poison since access to it was restricted.  However later in the case it is necessary information that Menimemo DID go in to see the poison, because that was when he stole it in his fountain pen.

So in the end I was correct, the photographer killed her, he used his fountain pen for the poisoning and the characters were all great.  10/10 characters, -5 for case logic and general gameplay flow.  5/10 overall.  When I put down the case I would have said it was the worst case I’ve ever played, because no case before has ever made me put it down in frustration like that, but after replaying and finishing it, it’s ok just really clumsy.  A shame since as I said I really like Susato as a lawyer, and this is probably the only time we’ll see it unless Ryunosuke gets Maya’d (kidnapped) in the final case.

Update: I’m learning Unity

I’ve always enjoyed video games and wanted to create my own.  I may never actually make one but at least this is a way to exercise my creative side.  My wish is to make a game called something like “Build the Biggest Boom.”  It would be a game all about the chemistry of fire and explosions.  It would start by teaching the player how explosions work, how they can be shaped to send their force in a specific way, and why some compounds explode while others don’t.  There would also be an element of simple engineering to create the devices which would how explosive charge and to detonate.  The game would proceed similarly to Kerbal Space Program where instead of trying to build rocket ships to go to the moon, you build bombs to create the biggest boom.  You do simple research which teaches you the basic chemistry of explosions and then put parts and molecules together in such a way to create bigger and bigger booms, both by creating better explosive materials (for instance nitroglycerin instead of gunpowder) or by making things explode more effectively (ex the shape of the bomb).  There could also be an element of designing explosives to fulfill a specific purpose, such as proximity fuses to only explode when near something or waterproof fuses to explode underwater.

That’s all well and good, but so far I’ve done only the following:

-Make a cube that goes up when space bar is pressed

-Make a box that creates cubes when return is pressed

-Spawn a bunch of going-up cubes with return, then send them up with space bar

-Created a ceiling to stop things from going up too far.  Turns out that to create a ceiling, you have to create a floor upside down.  Who knew

So I want each “cube that goes up” to eventually be a particle in an explosive reaction.  Instead of just going “up” I want them to gain a force proportional to all the other particles near them (as an analogy for every molecule releasing explosive energy) and therefore “explode” outward when the space bar is pressed.  From there I can do the stuff of having different particles have different explosive energies, and having shape charges and stuff.

Game design: should AIs play to win, or play for the player to lose?

I’ve been playing a lot of Sid Meier’s Civilization recently and have thought about this conundrum: should AIs in video games play to win, or just play to make the player lose?  These are two different strategies mind you, if each AI is playing to win they will act in their own rational self-interest to pursue their own goals.  But if they are just playing for the player to lose, they may instead act against their own self-interest in order to hurt the player.  I feel like I see this “play for the player to lose” strategy a lot in games against the AI but I don’t know if it’s accurate or just my imagination.

Consider for instance the early phase of the game: settling.  The player and AIs all are scouting and settling in an attempt to claim as much land as they can to grow and become stronger.  I often appear to see AIs make baffling settling decisions, settling on terrible land with zero fresh water, and their decisions only seem to make sense if they are simply trying to box the player in, not actually win themselves.  Settling is an expensive process requiring a lot of food and production, so you want to settle as good a city as you can.  On the other hand giving the player a lot of land for themselves lets the player grow stronger and be more likely to win as a result. 

The compromise seems to be that in games I have played, the AIs nearest the player will settle on marginal lands in the direction of the player, boxing the player in and preventing them from expanding.  Other AIs will then have more room to settle good land and actually attempt to grow stronger and win the game.  In this way the game becomes more difficult for the player, even though some AIs are making choices that aren’t actually in their own rational self-interest.

To be blunt, I don’t like this.  I think AIs make the most sense when they act in their own self-interest, rather than having a secret alliance against the player in particular, I think it makes the most sense and more accurately represents how a player would play as well.  But like I said I don’t have any hard evidence that the AIs act this way, maybe they settle bad spots because they’re just poorly coded in general.  But it sure does feel like they’re all in on it.

I can tell you a game that DEFINITELY has an anti-player bias and that’s the Total War series, which is part of why I stopped playing them.  In the Total War series, every AI that borders the player in any way is just a short step away from war.  This was fine and fun in Rome and Medieval Total War, where the economics of the game made world conquests like this fun, but in Empire and later Warhammer Total war it just gets tiring and unfun. 

To give an example: Empire Total War takes place starting in 1700s Europe.  France and England both have colonies in North America, and there’s a Native American tribe, the Huron-Wyandot in central Canada.  If the player plays as Britain, this tribe will inevitably attack Britain and stay peaceful towards France.  If the player plays as France, this tribe will attack France and stay peaceful with Britain.  This again isn’t so fun.  Like I said, the economics of this game make world conquest a boring slog rather than a fun romp like in previous interactions, but also this is a historical strategy game that in certain ways does attempt to model diplomacy and agency of historically relevant peoples and nations.  Shouldn’t it be possible for France to attempt an alliance with Native American peoples to counter Britain, just as France did in real life?  I think the game would be a lot more fun that way instead of being railroaded into an “everyone against the player” scenario no matter what country you play as.

Anyway those are my thoughts on AIs, anyone else know of a game that seems to have a strong anti-player AI?

I’ve been playing Pillars of Eternity, and I just wanted to tell someone about it.

Pillars of Eternity (1 and 2) is a fantasy RPG duology made by Obsidian.  Now everyone I’ve known always tells me Obsidian always has the best writing, but honestly I’ve never seen it to be true myself.  I remember booting up Fallout:NV (seen by some as their magnum opus) and thinking “THIS is the bad guy factions?  A bunch of technologically illiterate spear-wielding Roman cosplayers is supposed to be a scourge of the wasteland?”  And the game never did enough to justify to me that these cosplayers were indeed deserving of their status as world-conquerors in a universe where GUNS are plentiful. Instead the game just wants to go into excruciating detail of their evil deeds like it’s written by an edgy teenager, and then I read afterwards in interviews and the like that Fallout:NV was supposed to be “morally gray,” like wtf? 

So I’ve never played an Obsidian game for the writing, the way I’d play an Atlus game for the writing or a Bioware game for the writing.  Obsidian to my mind is best at making interesting systems and gameplay loops that I want to interact with, OR by using someone else’s assets to make a follow-up sequel. They’re good at those, but I don’t expect them to be the best writers.

So with Obsidian’s first wholly new IP since Alpha Protocol (criminally underrated and overrated simultaneously) I jumped into Pillars of Eternity.  How would Obsidian fair when they don’t have a publisher breathing down their neck? 

It turns out publishers aren’t evil and all Obsidian’s bad habits reared their ugly heads.  Let me start by saying I do like this game (I’m replaying it) but I don’t think anyone besides me would ever like it and I can’t think of a single person I know who I’d recommend the game to.  I like it because it is an extensively deep Dungeons and Dragons-type game with real-time-with-pause combat.  I LIKE that. 

But there’s FOUR different saving throws and EIGHT different damage reductions, plus about two dozen weapons and a hundred different status ailments that can occur to your character.  Are you charmed?  Confused?  Dominated?  Those are all different.  Are you hobbled, dazed, dizzy, sickened, weakened, fatigued? The list goes on and on and each one does a different thing using a different skill targeting a different saving throw. 

You can specialize in 1-handed weapons, sword n board, two handed weapons, and dual-wielding and they will all force you to build your character a little different.  And if you want to play a barbarian I hope you know that Intelligence increases the range and duration of ALL abilities meaning a dumb barbarian will rage for mere seconds and then get slaughtered while a barbarian with a PhD in Barbarity can rage for days slaughtering his enemies before him.  Obsidian doesn’t like dump stats so every single stat does something for everyone, a wizard needs high Strength or his spells do no damage, a priest needs high Strength or his heals heal almost nothing, etc.

With all that said it’s the type of game that takes hours just to understand the combat systems and if you’re not the type of person who will read every tool-tip and check both the in-game manual AND the forums to understand how everything fits together, then you are going to have a rough time of it and won’t even know why you’re losing battles until you’ve already replayed them a dozen times. So while I like the combat I can’t imagine how most people would.

But the writing in this game is just not good.  There’s too much of it and every character will talk your ear off at the slightest opportunity without saying much more than “our village of Schitzville is so morally gray that by solving all our problems you’ve just creating new ones.”  The game is a lot less smart than it thinks and that runs through both the first game and it’s sequel. 

It also feels like a game written by teenagers that is so desperate to show you how mature it is that in the sequel half the characters will end every one of their sentences with a sex joke or innuendo.  I’m an adult, most of my friends are adults, sex has not been a common topic of conversation since we were teenagers (or when most participants are blackout drunk).

Finally it makes me sad that although I like Pillars of Eternity 1, Obsidian basically made me never want to play another Obsidian game when they released Pillars of Eternity 2. 

For as long as I’ve known them, fans of Obsidian have said that Obsidian makes the best games but gets screwed by publishers and forced to release buggy, unfinished messes.  Well Obsidian was given a big crowd-funded budget with no publisher to answer to, and they were tasked to follow up on their own IP. And in the end, they made a buggy, unfinished mess.  Combat just didn’t work, the story went nowhere and was a blatantly unfinished sequel hook to drum up interest for a third game that will now never come.  I remember getting to the end and audibly said “that’s it?” when the credits rolled.  Nothing happened and nothing mattered, and now I just don’t care to play new Obsidian games.

Random thought: I prefer real-time-with-paused to turn-based in my party RPGs

It feels like the world has passed me by on this one.  I have always held Baldur’s Gate up as being basically exactly what I want in the feel of a party-based RPG, and yet every discussion online I’ve seen has been the opposite.  When Pillars of Eternity 2 came out, it sold terribly.  I have my own opinions on that but one explanation that was making the rounds was “turn based is a far more tactical feel for an RPG, real time with pause is outdated, that’s why Divinity 2 sold so well and Pillars 2 sold so poorly.”  The devs even seemed to believe this, as after I left Pillars 2, they patched in a turn-based mode for the game.  Well I played some of Divinity 2 and I have to say I truly truly wish this were real-time with pause.

Divinity’s system relies a lot on the minute positioning of spells.  One pixel off can mean the difference between incinerating your enemies vs your allies.  The maps contain plenty of pillars and Line-of-sight blockers to force you to consider positioning, and yet I feel like the positioning is just not fun to engage with.  There are two archers and a warrior at the end of the hall,I want to hide my mage so they can hit the warrior but not get hit by the archers.  How far behind the pillar do I need to be?  I sit in a spot that looks good and… nope.  A little off, I cannot hit the warrior.  Well now I have to spend more AP in order to finagle my positioning just right.  In Real time (Pillars), this would take about a second, which is nothing in the timescale of the battle.  I unpause, move a bit, check, and yep it’s fine.  But here that 1 AP is 25% or 20% of my total for this turn, which can easily mean the difference between getting the spell off or not.  The worst is how intuitive it can sometimes be, a lot of iron stuff lying around has big gaping holes in it (think like the iron bars of a cell).  Can I fire stuff through or does this count as solid so I should instead hide behind it?  Infuriatingly it depends.

So while position matters a whole lot, I generally ignore it because it’s not fun to engage with.  When you’re trying to get something just right, the difference between success and failure is very minuscule, and the AP system means those minute adjustments cost action points, so while a mistake in positioning in Pillars costs me a couple of seconds to fix, a mistake in positioning in Divinity can cost me my entire turn.  And because the mistakes are so punishing, the system is opaque, and I’m not yet feeling any situations where a perfectly executed fireball won the battle, I feel no compulsion to “get good” at this system, and I don’t have much fun trying.

Faulkner is disappointing in Pokémon HeartGold

I’m playing through Pokémon HeartGold and I have to say I’m kind of disappointed with Gym Leader Faulkner. 

So I played Pokémon Gold on a gameboy color back in the 90s, and I remember thinking Faulkner was a kind of clever gym leader.  He used flying type Pokémon, which are weak against both rock-types and electric-types.  Funnily enough Pokémon of those types are available within a short walk of his gym, so it seems like he should be easy to beat, right?  Just catch a rock-type (geodude) or electric-type (mareep) Pokémon and you can waltz in and beat him.  But Faulkner had a trick up his sleeve, his Pokémon knew mud-slap, a ground-type move that was super effective against both rock-type and electric-type Pokémon.  So you’d walk in with a geodude and a mareep and he’d completely demolish you.  In-universe I’m sure a lot of 10-year-olds ran out of his gym crying.

It was cool to me because it makes sense why he would have that move.  He wants to win but has to use flying-types which are weak to rock and electric moves.  So he devises a way to turn the tables on anyone using those types against him.  But apparently the move mud-slap wasn’t actually any good, because in HeartGold he no longer uses it.  Now you *can* beat Faulkner easily with a nearby mareep or geodude, and it just makes him seem less clever to me, even if the move that replaced mud-slap is probably a better move overall.

Capitalism 2: A game that makes you appreciate loans

I’ve played a lot of video games in my time, and let me tell you Capitalism 2 is a doozy.  You can get it on the Steam store for about 10 dollars and that’s about what it’s worth because it’s decades old and the UI is painful.  Still, I’ve played a lot of it and it does help you appreciate some nifty real-world concepts.

For those of you who have never played it (ie everyone), Capitalism 2 is a game in which you take control of a large corporation with nothing more than a few million dollars and a dream of riches.  You then use that money to try to turn a profit by manufacturing and selling one or more of the games 50 or so unique goods.  There’s food items, furniture, electronics, cars, and they all have their own production chains and sales strategies for you to manage.  Food items are all about quality and price so you just need to invest a lot into your farms and try to outcompete your competitors.  Designer clothes are all about branding, so you need to spend millions of dollars on advertising to gain market share.  While electronics require investment into R&D before you can even begin to try making them.  It’s kind of fun to throw down with a few AI companies and compete to turn $1 million into $1 billion, but if the game has taught me one thing it’s that loans are overpowered.

A loan, both in game and in real life, is a way to get money now in exchange for money later.  While the total amount you’d have to pay back is greater than the face value of the money you get loaned to you, you can do a lot of things with money now to make that be a net gain.  You can invest it, start a company, build a factory (if you’re a corporation), and all those things can net you a bigger gain than the interest and principle you will need to pay back.  The difficulty is of course that the real world is a world of uncertainty, you don’t know for sure if your investments will pan out or your factory will work, you’re taking a risk and that risk includes a downside.

In Capitalism 2 however there is near perfect information so most of the risk doesn’t exist.  You know instantly what the price of every good on the market is and how they will change in the future.  You know exactly who your competitors are and usually you know what they’re building.  With perfect information there is almost zero risk, and with zero risk there is never a reason not to max out your available loans to build new factories to make new profits.  The AIs in this game by the way don’t seem to be programmed to ever take loans, they wait until they have the cash in hand before ever buying something, so this is a technique only available to the player.  But as I said pretty much any investment is a certain success, so loans are just free capital for the player.  And that’s why they’re so OP in Capitalism 2.

Can you gamify science?

Let’s start with one of the oldest and most popular games: Super Mario Bros for the NES.  In it, the player controls Mario past a number of hazards, through a number of levels to rescue the princess.  Young children in the 80s and 90s would spend hours upon hours playing, beating and (important for today’s topic) *learning* this game.  See, beating a video game is a learning process.  As kids play, they learn to play better and better until they play well enough to beat it.  Then they keep playing and learn to play better and better to beat it faster, more consistently, more stylishly or what have you.  Some of this learning is physical, you can train your reflexes to work faster, but a lot of it is actually learning how the game works and what you need to do to complete it.

On the surface, learning how the game works seems kind of basic, but is it?  The game has a large number of enemies with their own patterns, and those enemy patterns can combine in a large number of ways to challenge the player.  The player has to learn how to approach each situation, and how to adapt to a situation that isn’t going how they expected it to.  They may even plan ahead and devise multiple strategies before testing each one out in turn and going with whichever is best.  The player might also be memorizing the map layouts of the levels, the locations of secrets, and all sorts of other things.  It’s safe to say that a lot of real learning is taking place, even if it isn’t “school learning” like what we’re used to.  

Kids do a lot of work learning to play video games, and thus since the very dawn of video games parents and teachers have wondered if that energy could be more productively transferred towards academic learning.  This eventually morphed into a “gamification” push, where many modern schools will put at least some effort into having gamification elements in their teaching in order to motivate students to work as hard at academic learning as they do at gaming learning.  Now, gamification is an INCREDIBLY broad topic and it doesn’t just cover video games that try to teach you things.  I can personally remember playing cheesy point-and-click video games that tried to teach me the parts of the body or the planets of the solar system, but video games themselves are only a small facet.  Gamification can also be as simple as having class leaderboards to encourage students to do well and get good grades, badges or points for completing certain tasks, there are all sorts of ways to gamify a learning task.

But this brings me to today’s question: can you gamify science education?  Now first off it’s very clear that you can gamify *early* science education (thinks like elementary or middle school) since we’ve had those sorts of things for years.  Teaching a student about the human body, or the planets, or the teacher creating a whole Jeopardy! setup to help them learn the parts of a cell, these are all gamification aspects that were used to teach me and many others about science over the past few decades.  But post-secondary education is a different beast and often entails learning things on the cutting edge that aren’t always fully accepted by the entire community.  Science does have its internal struggles, and if a student learns by reading papers (which is necessary to study topics on the cutting edge) they will by necessity be learning about at least some ideas which will later be proven false.  That’s ok, science isn’t a set of facts, it’s a process for discovering the truth, but that does make it harder to “gamify” since you can’t just program a game with right and wrong answers, because on the cutting edge *we don’t have all the right and wrong answers* and we’re learning new things every day.

I thought long and hard about this question: can you make a video game (or something like it) that would allow students to study a cutting edge topic like proteomics?  I pick this topic because it’s one I know a lot about, and I came away thinking the answer is “no.”  A proteomics game would either be highly simplistic and thus not very useful for cutting edge studies (high school studies perhaps), or would be so complex that you were really studying someone’s protein simulation and not proteomics itself.  Let me explain.

A video game for proteomics would have to have certain limitations.  The first limitation is the pre-defined actions that the programmers allow.  Mario can’t climb walls in Super Mario Bros because the programmers didn’t program that, they only programmed certain actions.  As far as I know, all proteins are biologically synthesized in an N-to-C direction.  So presumably the program would only allow synthesis in this direction, but what if we discover some organism that can synthesize C-to-N?  What if we discover organisms that synthesize or modify their proteins in ways we did not expect, and what if those proteins become scientifically or economically relevant?  A programmer can’t exactly predict every possible action that biological proteins could take, and so can hardly program every possibility.  

OK, so they can’t program every possibility, but what about creating an open-ended system that would allow the “players” to create their own actions?  That brings limitation number two: the approximations used.  An open ended proteomics game would by necessity need to employ certain approximations in the code to allow for proteins to be synthesized and moved around at will, it isn’t feasible to create a perfect simulation that can calculate the effects of every atom and bond in a protein.  So a game would have to use a number of approximations to allow for this open endedness, but then you end up with the problem where students may not be studying anything real but studying only an approximate model that doesn’t work in the real world.  My most notable reminder of this is the game Kerbal Space Program which is a fun little astronaut simulator that, due to computer limitations, has to use a set of heavy approximations for gravity that make it very inaccurate with the real world.  This leads to some fun but physically impossible creations such as perpetual motion machines and giant mecha.  

It’s not just the scope but the scale.  You can do so many things with proteins, there are 20^10 combinations of 10 amino acids.  All those possibilities can’t be programmed in.  The best molecular dynamics currently has is the ability for super computers to roughly approximate the actions of proteins by simulating all the atoms and bonds, but even those simulations require heavy approximations.  So if you try to make more and more approximations, you end up with a program where students aren’t studying proteomics but rather studying the approximations that are built into it.  

The final, most important piece of this is: how would you make such a thing fun?  Science, as in actual science, is fun to me because I get to learn and discover new things.  As said before, a video game would necessitate such approximations that nothing “new” could really be discovered.  Games like Kerbal Space Program are fun because they give you the means to perform some of humanity’s greatest feats for yourself like going to the moon or launching a robot to Mars, but what are the equivalent actions that could be done in a proteomics video game?  I honestly can’t think of anything proteomic that makes me think “man I’d like to do that for myself!”

So yeah sorry to be a debbie downer but I think the idea is unworkable for now.  Stick with fun little games for early childhood education and then read papers when you go to college.

I just need to get out of my system how weird Pokémon Conquest is

You all know Pokémon, right?  That game about cute animals battling each other that’s so popular with kids and young adults.  I’ve been a fan all my life and recently got into the DS game Pokémon Conquest because it was described to me as Pokémon meets Fire Emblem.  So far so good.  The game is set during an alt-history warring states period in which all the warriors of Japan use Pokémon to fight each other.  The “Kingdoms” of Pokémon Conquest are all elementally-aligned and so take the place of the traditional Pokémon gyms.  There’s the fire kingdom, the water kingdom, the grass kingdom, and our heroes have to defeat them all to reunite Japan.  

The moderate amounts of insanity begin early on, however when we find out that Nobunaga is also a Pokémon trainer and is trying to conquer Japan himself.  In Japanese culture Nobunaga was once described to me as “George Washington Hitler” due to the complex and often contradictory role he is seen in.  On the one hand he was the Great Unifier who’s successes in uniting Japan lead to the direct predecessor of the modern Japanese state and the end of the Sengoku period.  This characterization can lead to positive portrayals.  On the other hand he is often viewed as needlessly, even gleefully cruel and portrayed in some media as a diabolical schemer taking pleasure in the pain of others.  So when I saw him in a Pokémon game I did not know what to expect.

Insanity ramps up when the game reveals that your assistant, an unconfident girl with a Jigglypuff named Oichi, is also the secret sister of Nobunaga.  Nobunaga reveals that his signature Pokémon is the Gen V legendary Zekrom, so I guess that’s how he conquered Japan, by using a legendary Pokémon.  But I couldn’t get over my laughter at how the game decided that the shy assistant girl would be the sister of the main antagonist, like sure that’s storytelling plot twist #1: have a secret relationship.  But it seemed so out of the blue and didn’t really add much to how I saw either character.  It didn’t add dimensions to Nobunaga because we barely see him, and it didn’t add dimensions to Oichi because she barely has character and neither she nor anyone else acts differently because of this revelation.  It felt like a twist for twist’s sake.

The highlight of this game’s weird and wacky insanity was when your main character evolves.  Yes that’s right, in this game Pokémon aren’t the only ones who evolve.  After a bunch of events happen the main character evolves into a cooler version of themselves, with all the evolution sound effects and music that you’d expect from a Pokémon evolution, and they aren’t the only ones that can do that.  Oichi herself can evolve too, as can some of the other main characters if certain conditions are met.  I wonder if this power will ever carry over to the main games?  I should ask my friends if anyone ever evolved in Pokémon Legends, Arceus.

The finally hilarity for me was the finale where you reveal that the continent you’re on bears more relation to Arceus (the Poké-God) then to historical Japan, and Arceus itself comes down and basically says that your main character should be the one to defeat/catch it.  OK sure, whatever, catch ‘em all.  But God himself coming down and saying “catch me bro” just put the final pin in the corkboard for me, I think this game is a comedy and I wish it had gone all out on it.  Maybe it’s because I’m not 10 anymore, maybe this would feel like a stirring epic if I’d played it as a kid, but I couldn’t keep a straight face through any of it.  There are some things that are just instantly hilarious to me, and mixing Pokémon with history is one of them.  I still giggle at how Lt. Surge apparently fought in wars with his Raichu, and now we can add him to the long list of war-fighting trainers from this game.

Pokémon Conquest: how Eevee and Jigglypuff reunited Japan.