captious-solarian

[captious-solarian]

Empirically it seems fine: my marriage is happy; we saw a couples counsellor for a bit and he didn't say anything like that.

But even if it's true, it'd be worth it! I'm not doing this for my health!

[captious-solarian]

On this blog we are anti:

transcendence

enlightenment

inner peace

Everyone is a discrete individual SELF. Ego death is an ILLUSION. The DMT elves are figments of your imagination and meditation is just sitting there.

On this blog we are pro:

inner monologue

self-criticism

dukkha

Striving and struggling in pursuit of what you want is GOOD. Material attachments make LIFE WORTH LIVING. The physical world is ALL THERE IS. Having an identity is PRETTY COOL ACTUALLY.

[captious-solarian]

Best I can go is enormous solid gold asteroid.

hanging out at -33.881969,151.201410 right now if anyone wants to destroy me with an orbital laser

[captious-solarian]

You're very good at identifying the main thing behind our disagreement!

the person cheated on has come to think of their spouse as an extension of themselves, someone over whom they should have complete rights, body mind and soul. When their partner cheats, they don't just see it as a betrayal, they see it as a violation.

That's exactly it.

I want — I only even bother to be in a relationship at all — to give myself as fully as possible, and receive the same in return. Phrases like "becoming one", "one flesh", "better half" get at this, I think.

(Ok, not literally complete rights, I can't sell the spousal kidneys.)

Now sure, that has risks. It makes cheating not just hurtful, but so utterly devastating that it can send someone into blind rage or despair. It makes breakups not just painful, but akin to amputating a gangrenous limb. (On the other hand, it does prompt people to fix the relationship or end it, rather than dragging it out for decades of misery.) It comes with more risk of abuse.

But it's hard to argue without against closeness in general:

For example, a parent seeing someone trying to hurt their child will often see red and try to kill. In that state, not many are responsive to "Wait, you can subdue them non-lethally, there's no need to kill"; very few are responsive to "Human life is precious, murder is wrong". But I don't think that's a good reason why parents should love and protect their children any less.

Having a relationship — a marriage — even a happy and close one, but always as two separate agents making a mutually beneficial deal, where I can't give my spouse rights over my complete self, feels… sad. Cold. Lonely. A shadow of what I want it to be.

Thank you for this, BTW: it's made me understand attitudes I often see towards cheating, e.g. in the characters in Dykes To Watch Out For. I couldn't understand why they reacted the way they did; "a betrayal but not a violation" captures it well.

Less crucial but to address your other points:

I think that what you're seeing as inherent to human nature (jealousy to the point of intense grief over romantic betrayals), I see as primarily a result of culture. You say "human nature" is on your side, but I say we both have anecdotal evidence here, and different cultures have different perspectives.

I've been dancing around this a little — I think culture has large but not total influence on this, but mainly I think:

We are already who we are, whether by nature or culture, and can't be re-shaped. So in the short term, it doesn't matter which caused it.

Our culture is producing people who deeply care about cheating, but has weak norms against it, so that's a bad combo either way.

(I would like to also point out that people being deeply upset about cheating is far, far more visible than people not being that upset about cheating, which may skew your perspective.)

True!

One thing you might want to consider […] We don't live in a society where it's as simple as that, though.

I agree those are evidence that, once the underlying problem is solved, they're unlikely to cheat again. I agree that they are often extenuating circumstances. But they don't sway me much, because of our basic disagreement: I think cheating is a much bigger deal than you do, so they're not enough to mitigate it.

The "communicable diseases" question was a trick question, btw.

Got me :) I was imagining more serious diseases than the sniffles, but sure, "sleep on the couch until your cold is over and wear a mask at home, or pay me $50 damages if I catch it" also works, assuming perfect cost-free enforcement.

if the consequences you want for cheating are "people have a lower opinion of you," that is abso-fucking-lutely one hundred percent already the case.

Yeah, I'm asking if you see that as undue interference and would like it to stop being the case.

I think part of my being so aghast at this is I've these days seen having friendships considered "emotional cheating," and a horrifying increase in the idea that your partner should be your One Everything, replacing the need for all human connection anywhere else.

Ugh yeah those are the worst.

[captious-solarian]

Honestly calling cheating a "large harm" is crazy to me!

Yep, that's pretty much the disagreement I expected. I think the rest is downstream of this, not disagreements about the role/competence of courts etc.

You betrayed the trust of an intimate partner, hurting their feelings. I don't mean "hurting their feelings" to be a snide comment, here; that is genuinely harmful.

That pretty much it — though it's about the trustworthiness, not about the feelings themselves (if they die without ever catching you, that makes it worse, not better). It's a particularly deep and intimate betrayal.

Everyone in this conversation is a very weird person, but I feel like typical human psychology is on my side here. People who just shrug off cheating certainly exist, but aren't typical. Lots and lots of people are devastated by cheating and take years to recover. It's not rare for people to catch their partner cheating, snap, and kill the cheating partner, the third party, or themselves — a sad failure of self-control, but not a surprising one.

especially by parties other than those directly involved

I'm confused by that. Isn't it just a matter of caring about harm to other people?

Should lying to a partner about your eating habits be illegal?

No: I can think of people who care strongly about that, but never to a comparable degree of betrayal.

Should eating your partner's special food that they were looking forward to be illegal?

Probably should be technically petty theft, but I don't expect charges to be pressed often at all.

Should exposing your partner to a communicable but non-life-threatening disease be illegal?

I'd have to think more about realistic enforcement, but sounds like it'd have to be extremely invasive (even more than for cheating) so leaning no.

If I had a perfect magical legal system (of the kind I'd be comfortable using against cheating), sure.

Should using an emotionally hurtful insult or assertion in an argument be illegal?

It's actually illegal in all jurisdictions I've lived in! But enforcement is non-existent, and nobody tries to charge a current/ex-partner with it (it can be brought up as part of a larger abuse case, but won't be crucial either way). So no, because making it illegal doesn't do anything helpful.

Should breaking up with your partner without telling them why be illegal?

Absolutely not!

I see a lot of arguments of the form "people should be encouraged to make their relationships work rather than treat as disposable, so breakups/divorce should be harder" — and, for the average relationship, I'm actually pretty sympathetic to that idea. But bad relationships can be extremely bad, so the need for an easy escape hatch trumps everything.

What if you do it kind of cruelly?

That sounds like it'd be, at best, extremely fiddly to define and enforce.

I'm not totally opposed in principle to having to pay some smallish heartbalm-style damages to your ex if you broke up with them on their birthday or something, if the criteria are easy to understand and avoid, and if you can claim an exemption (e.g. you had to run off quickly because of abuse). But even in the best case, I don't see it doing much good.

Should throwing away a piece of furniture that your partner liked, but you didn't, be illegal?

It's theft, right? Realistically, I'd expect it to be brought up as part of an abuse case, rather than suing specifically over the furniture when the relationship is otherwise okay.

What part of cheating that makes it a Big Deal is so serious that you think it's actually a good idea to make it socially or potentially legally punishable outside of the relationship*?

Wait, you don't even want it punished socially? Not even on the level of "you hurt my friend, you jerk"?

Is it the lying? Why allow any lies, then? Is it the part where emotional hurt is done? Why is this emotional hurt greater than any other?

Er, I have hypotheses about why it's greater, but they're about how the psychology works, not justifications.

When I think about trying to justify it, I get the same reaction I get to "Why is sexual assault bad, even if it has no health risks and you're unconscious and never know about it?" — makes me want to go "I care about it, I don't need to convince anyone that I'm allowed to care." But I started arguing about it on the Internet so ok, it's on me, I'd better produce a justification.

It's difficult to explain by analogy, because other harm to a partner tends to be part of an escalating pattern of abuse. A partner destroying my stuff in a fit of rage would, in itself, be a much much much smaller deal than cheating, but would very likely not stop at one fit of rage.

I guess it's about — the essence of the relationship? If I promise to do the dishes on my turn, it's mostly about having clean dishes. If I promise sexual/romantic exclusivity/other limitation, it's because this is what humans with sexual jealousy in our culture give to each other to form a relationship. Someone betraying that is throwing away this foundation, and hitting a very deep and fundamental feeling that only they are able to hurt. Or something along those lines.

I don't want to snap out of control, or to be a wreck for years, but I also don't want to simply not mind a betrayal this deep: that's not being strong or forgiving in the face of adversity, that's being a doormat.

Does this help at all?

punishing someone you're in a relationship with isn't illegal but is an absurdly bad idea

Strong agree. Relationships I've seen that have healed from cheating involve actually forgiving the cheater and rebuilding trust; punishing the partner while staying together is worse than breaking up.

[captious-solarian]

Yeah that came off too… vengeful. I don't think punishment is the goal in itself, I just mean the obvious stuff about how it's a bad idea to make cheating more rewarding than not, to make trying to hide it more rewarding than coming clean (if the worst consequence possible is getting dumped, this is the natural result), and above all to have weak social norms against it.

I think you might be neglecting the social-norm part? The point of applying a (social or legal or whatever) punishment as opposed to "oh ig don't date that person if you want monogamy" is to create a legible norm that it's actually big-deal bad, not just a small foible.

The reason I'm malding at cheaters and not at, say, copper thieves, is that the norms against stealing copper seem pretty well established: it's bad, don't do it, if you really need the money then at least try to find some that's abandoned and not the cables powering a hospital. Me getting mad would not add to this.

(cc @saltedweather who had a similar question)

[captious-solarian]

Some of them! "Someone took my stuff", "my neighbour moved the property line markers", and "someone tried to violently attack me" are all grievances between people. We don't usually call them interpersonal grievances because we think the law should get involved rather than letting them stay interpersonal.

My reason for wanting the state outside this one is that the state does much more harm than good for this kind of problem. I think cheating on a partner is a much bigger deal than a property-line dispute, but I don't think a court can help with it.

I feel like you, and a lot of people who answer no, don't think cheating a big deal — that you think it's roughly as bad as neglecting the dishes when it's your turn, nowhere near as bad as anything that should be a crime or tort. I feel like calling it an interpersonal grievance is about the gravity of the harm, not about, say, the delicacy needed to address it. Am I wrong here? I may be misinterpreting you.

[captious-solarian]

I see a really strong argument for "yes": it's bad if large harms go unpunished, and worse to condone a "teehee it's not actually a big deal" attitude to them. The court of public opinion is not working.

But I simply don't trust any courts, as currently exist, to address it. Any realistic implementation would come with complete inability to handle any unusual situations (such as cheating in non-monogamous relationship), destruction of privacy, and distorted incentives to bring a case.

In ancapistan, where partners can write realistically-enforceable contracts about what constitutes cheating and what the penalties should be, I'd be less pessimistic. (Probably? Ancapistan has a lot of room for abuse and leonine contracts, could be even worse.)

[captious-solarian]

It has now been a few weeks, and it is time to check the wiktionary entry for niobium.

when you see a quote on wiktionary and think to yourself "why did they choose this quote of all things" do not rule out the possibility that they did it because it was funny. for example, i am currently reading "Responsa In A Moment" by Rabbi David Golinkin, and collecting quotes for wiktionary along the way, mostly Jewish terminology. However, I noticed that this book uses the word "niobium", so if you check the wiktionary page for niobium in a few weeks (once i've finished the book and added all the quotes) you will see that the example sentence is from "Responsa In A Moment" by Rabbi David Golinkin.

[captious-solarian]

Guillaume de Machaut and Christine de Pisan and Kalonymus "ben" Kalonymus wrote some good posts

was there any aspect of fourteenth century France that wasn’t completely fucked

[captious-solarian]

excellent daydream concept: ACOUP posts from the alternate history timeline created by your playthrough of Crusader Kings (a game you started playing because of how it was described in ACOUP posts)

[captious-solarian]

Must a song be good? Isn't it enough for it to be dorkily whimsical and yet sad? Can't I pretend a generic love song is deep just because it's gay? Is an enjambment or a magicians' duel worth any less than "quality" or "music" or "not sucking bad"?

I wish the magnetic fields had a higher percentage of good songs

[captious-solarian]

finding the human body uniquely repulsive may be the shadow of finding it uniquely beautiful -- placing the ideal human form as the standard of beauty, and then noticing how real human bodies fall short of the ideal

Not for me. To me, the ideal form, which humans fall short of, is anthro animals. Humans look stupid and ridiculous because we're bald like sphynx cats instead of covered in fur like we should be, we have round wrinkly ears like treeshrews and we can barely move them at all, our tails are missing entirely, our nails are absurd flat shovels.

humans are obviously, in some meaningful sense, special among the animals. but we are special because of our hands, our mouths, and our brains. i suppose our eyes too, if you want to be generous. everything else is not particularly distinctive, among the animals. i will, seemingly at random, experience a repulsion to the human form. im not sure how common this is...very? but hands are never repulsive

[captious-solarian]

The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.

A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.

“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”

The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”

“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”

The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.

She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.

“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”

She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”

The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.

“I have so many questions,” she said.

“I figured.”

“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”

“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”

“But the quest is just — done?”

“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”

“My parents?”

“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”

The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”

“I’m aware.”

“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”

“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”

The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”

Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”

The knight frowned. “What do you do?”

Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”

“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”

She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.

“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”

“We aren’t?”

“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”

[captious-solarian]

Game Review: Underhill

Note: This review contains no screenshots, because this game doesn’t actually exist.

The dwarves are mining, the bugbears are lumbering through the mushroom farms, the imps are scurrying to and fro, and all the traps at the entrance to the dungeon are armed and ready. From a bird’s eye view, it seems as though everything in the underhill is humming along, but that’s only because the problems are invisible from far away. The dwarves have found a new vein of moonmetal, which they’re taking to their infernum foundries to melt down and make better tools and weapons. Unfortunately, the moonmetal has a waste product, and the imps have been transferring that to the midden rooms. Normally there’s a garbage troll that loves to feast on all kinds of scraps, but the moonmetal byproduct is toxic to him, and in another two days he’s going to wind up in the infirmary, which will cause the middens to overflow. That, in turn, will result in general disorder and work stoppages, and the dungeon will find itself on the verge of collapse.

This is Underhill, the newest and most ambitious game from Kyle Mormont. He describes it as ‘a left turn from Rimworld’ and claims heavy inspiration from Dungeon Keeper, though anyone who goes in expecting their experience with those games to help might find themselves frustrated.

Take the case of the poisoned garbage troll. In a Rimworld knockoff, you might expect that you would designate a midden zone and assign a garbage troll to it, then check a box to make sure that the moonmetal byproducts are sent somewhere else. In Underhill, there’s nothing like that level of information or control, and trying to avoid the poisoning, if you even know that it’s coming, takes a much different sort of work.

Excavation

The game starts with a single ability, ‘Dig’, and gives you a side of a hill to dig into. The UI is essentially non-existent, with only two small Diabloesque orbs in the lower left and lower right to show your mana and power, and a very small selection of powers that accumulate over time, but which stay very small throughout the entire runtime of the game. While the UI is minimal, it’s clearly had a lot of work put into it, particularly in the way that new buttons are added: when there’s a new power, the UI shifts to accommodate it, making it feel slightly uncomfortable, like a mole that you weren’t sure was there the day before. At every stage, it looks as though that will be its final form, but it’s always difficult to be sure if you’ve seen everything there is to offer.

The game is also cagey with the information, especially at the start. You’re not told what to dig, though the hill is the only thing in front of you, and you’re not told why you should dig. But unless you’re particularly stubborn, you’ll dig, and once you have a tunnel dug out, you’ll get your first visitor poking their head in, almost always a goblin, the most basic and least specialized of the dungeon inhabitants. If he finds things to his liking, he’ll make it a home, and the first trickle of power will start coming in.

“The game is meant to be played blind,” explained Mormont, who flagged me down when I joined the game’s small but vibrant Discord. “You’re meant to come in knowing nothing and experiment to figure things out. That’s supposed to be the joy of it. The goblins come in, and you don’t know what they want, so you have to watch them and figure it out. It’s a watching game, a learning game.”

Goblins like tunnels that aren’t much bigger than they are and rooms that are about three goblin heights across. There are no rulers or grids, at least not when you start the game, but the initial option to dig has a standard width, and that’s just about as wide as a goblin tunnel should be. Nothing in the game communicates that this is what a goblin likes except watching what the goblins do. On my second playthrough after an untimely collapse of my dungeon ecosystem, I understood the game a little bit better and did some of the research work that it seems to want, which meant creating eight different rooms of various sizes to figure out which ones that goblins would go to. They prefer to be close to the things they need, which in the beginning means being close to the dungeon entrance, but my notes eventually filled up with details on the proper height, size, and shape of a goblin room.

Mad Scribblings

Underhill loves that sort of thing. There’s an in-game book that’s unlike any I’ve ever seen before, a blank journal that fills in with drawings and details, especially with regards to the ecosystem components, but is completely idiosyncratic. One of the design goals for the journal was that it look like a real journal, something that someone was slowly filling with their own observations, rather than being an encyclopedia with lost pages. For that reason, the journal is dynamic, filling up as you go, the notes stretching across pages. I’ve only had a few hiccups with it when the unseen writer wrote down a detail or two that I hadn’t figured out on my own.

“It’s messy, it’s organic,” says Mormont. “That the aesthetic. There are numbers in the background, but you should never see them, and they should be very difficult to intuit. I want people to be thinking on the non-number level.”

This is one of the reasons given for using a system without a grid, though the trade-off is that it gets difficult to get anything looking nice and ordered. Digging out a goblin home in a square that’s three goblin lengths across is an exercise in frustration. In theory this encourages messiness and a ‘let it be’ approach, but in practice it can be hard to embrace the organic mess that the game is trying to encourage.

Once the goblins have settled in, you can watch them go about their lives and see what they need. The process of discovery is one of the game’s main selling points, and as you watch, you’ll see that goblins form themselves into families, which form into clans. Goblins have biological needs in the form of water, food, and waste, and also seek shelter, which is why they move into your dungeon in the first place. If the dungeon is cramped with goblin families, they’ll throw their trash just outside the dungeon, but if there are enough rooms, the goblins will designate one of them as a ‘midden’ and start throwing their food scraps, broken tools, and other waste there.

The game doesn’t tell you that the room is a midden, just as it doesn’t tell you most things. The midden is one of the things you’ll learn about over time by watching. And it’s from one of those early middens that I got my second dungeon denizen: the garbage troll.

The Age of Discovery

I don’t want to spoil everything in the game, because it’s a game of discovery, but it would suffice to say that the garbage troll took care of one problem and created another. The garbage troll has his own needs and wants, and if those needs can’t be satisfied within the dungeon itself, he’ll either go out into the wider world where he might create all kinds of problems, or conversely, create problems within the dungeon by eating things that aren’t trash — an example being goblin possessions.

The game rolls on like this, with more monsters slotting themselves into place as it goes on. The ability to dig is your only tool for what seems like slightly too long to me, but as more creatures come to occupy your dungeon, your power slowly grows, and new abilities do eventually make themselves manifest. Water is one of the early ones, and comes up more than I had expected from the start, being one of the primary tools you have to shape the dungeon and its inhabitants. There’s a dungeon species that can’t cross running water, which means that it can be kept to one side of the dungeon and out of trouble by having a small stream trickling through. Similarly, water is one of the main ways to keep a dungeon clean, and helps to automate the movement of sewage down into somewhere a colony of garbage trolls are living. When the dwarves move in, they use the water for their own fastidious cleaning.

Part of the joy is in watching all the elements interact with each other. Even right at the start, there’s joy in seeing the goblins go out hunting beyond the range of your vision and come back with food, which they clean and prepare before eating. The animations are crude but evocative, done procedurally, and the game has a lot of clutter even when the dungeon is still developing, whether that’s fast-growing moss that creeps over the rock walls or the tiny mushrooms that grow in the midden (and can be cultivated by a druid later into a permanent food source). Surprisingly, everything is procedurally driven, even when it doesn’t feel like that would be necessary, and this is used to full effect to allow different varieties of creatures to have different motions to them. The goblins come in different sizes and body types, and can even grow from children to adults.

Obsessing Over the Depths

Sometimes, all this work leaves me scratching my head. One of the later game creatures, the nibbler (named after pen nibs, not a Futurama reference), goes around your dungeon and counts things, which are recorded in its notebook and exposed to you through a special button in the UI. In a different game, this would just show you the internal count of everything that the game knows the dungeon contains, but in Underhill, the creature has his own modeled understanding of the dungeon, and will only report on things that he can directly count. If you want to know how many goblins there are, and don’t want to count yourself, you have to wait until the accountant goes to take a peek into the goblin warrens. If the number of goblins changes, you’ll have to wait until he checks again to get the updated number.

I was watching the nibbler take stock of one of the dungeon storerooms, and noticed that he was using his finger to count the boxes, which was a fascinating detail. What was more fascinating was that he apparently lost count and had to start over while in the middle of this. It was such an immersive detail that it seemed like few people would ever notice, and had to have taken a lot of time. But as I watched more, I saw that he was losing his place while counting far more often than I thought he should, sometimes twice a room.

When I asked on the discord whether this was a bug, Mormont responded within a few minutes asking me whether I had dwarves in my dungeon. When I replied that I did, Mormont had an answer ready to go. “The dwarves like to brew alcohol, and if you have nibbler, you’ll see him drink some ale when he stops by there doing his count. If he’s drunk, he has a harder time counting. There aren’t that many mitigation strategies for that yet, since it’s hard to restrict the nibbler’s movement.” When I suggested that the behavior could be triggered a little less often, Mormont had a rant ready to go.

“That’s not how it works,” Mormont wrote. “There aren’t triggered actions. There’s not some variable in the game that passes a certain threshold and says to play a confusion animation and restart the count. The nibbler is actually counting. I had wanted to do a full vision system for all the creatures, but there’s too much overhead, so it’s just simulated instead. It counts with its finger because that makes the process go faster. It gets lost in the counting when it’s a bit tipsy because it can’t see its finger as well and its internal count of how many objects there are is more likely to be wrong.”

The obvious question was why you’d choose to do it that way when you could just have the nibbler report the actual numbers.

“Because it’s funny,” said Mormont.

There was a long pause where I think I was supposed to agree that it was funny, and then Mormont started typing and posted a wall of text five minutes later.

“One of my formative memories in gaming was when I was playing Oblivion,” he wrote. “I was trying to steal from this woman, and she saw me, and that was fair play, but then she started attacking me, so I thought to myself ‘wait, I can just kill her’, and so I did. I went out of the house and into the countryside, then to a major city, where a guard stopped me and asked me to answer for the crime. He had no way of knowing that it was me, and I found it really frustrating, because it didn’t make any sense. Obviously what was going on behind the scenes was that there was some kind of hasMurderedSomeone flag that was triggered, and it instantly went to every guard in the whole world the moment the murder happened. As a game designer, why do you implement things that way? Because it’s easy. But it has an impact on how the game plays, and I think you either have to make that a part of the story the game is trying to tell — psychic guards — or work to make sure that all the little moving parts work together. This is a game of moving parts.”

These are the kinds of rants that Mormont likes to go on. He’s more of a preacher than a game developer sometimes, and it’s the small things that seem to get him going.

Does this make for good gameplay? I think it does, with the right mindset. There’s a risk with the opaque approach to information that a player might not be able to tell quite why something is happening or how to stop it. If you view your job as being that of an investigator and scientist, the oddities are engaging rather than frustrating. However, if you’re trying to build the perfect dungeon that has all the creatures working in concert with each other, it can hurt to have it all spiral out of control and not be able to diagnose the problem after the fact.

The Secrets, Cataloged

After I had put in twenty hours, I opened up a channel on the Discord for veterans of the game, which turned out to be a mistake. I won’t spoil it, but there were entire aspects to the game that I had been missing out on simply because there were some conditions for attracting certain dungeon denizens that I had never thought to try. From reading through the different comments people have, that’s not an uncommon experience, and “there are witches in this game?” is a common sentiment. Much work has been put into cataloging all the game’s secrets, and there are three different spreadsheets that seek to track the interrelations of the different elements.

“I don’t like the spreadsheets,” Mormont says in a post below each of the pinned spreadsheets. “Making your own notes and discoveries is the game. Understanding and watching is the game. The game isn’t about making a perfect dungeon from instructions that someone else left you, it’s about being surprised and seeing what happens, using the scientific method to get an intuitive understanding of what’s actually going on. As soon as it’s all numbers and figures it becomes dead, like a butterfly nailed to a corkboard. This isn’t meant to be a team game. It’s not meant to be a game that you watch someone else play on Twitch. It’s a personal journey of growth and discovery. It’s balanced around a regularity of discoveries, so the average person keeps on hitting them. It’s digging in the science mines and continually hitting new veins.”

I didn’t delve into those documents. Instead, I did as was suggested and added to my notebook, both the one in game and the one that I kept beside my mouse. When Underhill hits, it really hits, and there’s something immensely satisfying about understanding these little creatures that move around in your dungeon, going about their business. By itself, that might almost be enough, but aside from the note-taking and investigation, there are the fresh injections of newness that come with new denizens, deeper depths, and new materials.

(Never) Ending

The dwarves were a turning point in my game, but apparently they come much later for most people. Their habitats need to be square, and they’ll spend a lot of time with chisels making sure there are as many right angles as possible. Dwarves will take over if you let them, because unlike goblins, they can dig on their own and see to all their own needs. They want to live in the dungeon and seal themselves off from the outside world, and so long as you don’t get in their way, they’ll develop their own city that meets its own needs.

My first reaction was that this defeated the whole point of the game, but after some time sitting there watching them work, I realized that it was just another way of underscoring what the game had wanted me to get from it all along: I was supposed to be learning from the dwarves, learning about the dwarves. Eventually, I was learning all the things that dwarves won’t do for themselves, all the ways that they would naturally make a society that was worse than the one I could help them make. It was a variation on a theme, in a way. As it turns out, the game is full of those.

I’m fifty hours in now, and still seeing all the ways that the game is developing its core ideas, stumbling through different lessons and trying to figure out the inner workings of all the creatures, materials, and substances. But if I were a goblin, this would be a hole that was just the right size for me.

[captious-solarian]

Has anyone sent you the snake fight post yet?

Two weeks to finish and hand in my PhD thesis, and also to make a presentation about it. Pray for me to the little gods of protistkind.

[captious-solarian]

The worldwide consensus is that people would rather let foreigners die horribly than tolerate seeing them at the grocery store.