urbanist-doctrine

[urbanist-doctrine]

Open World Design and Why I didn’t like Kenshi very much

The primary reason I didn’t like Kenshi was that it was too aimless. I didn’t feel that there was any point to playing, no goal I was working towards. It felt like the only thing there was to do was wander around the map a bunch getting beat up by random enemies. I understand that that’s part of the point, but it just doesn’t appeal to me. Why would I spend a bunch of time wandering around lost when I could do literally anything else and have it be more meaningful. The game would benefit from a hook to get the player invested. That hook could be narrative, for example, an introduction to a wider story. Or it could be gameplay, completing some early game objective.

One common strategy that open world games use to create a hook is to put the player in an enclosed space and give them the objective of escaping. This has the dual purpose of giving the player motivation and having a very natural tutorial. There are 2 types of beginning enclosed spaces: Linear and non-linear. Some examples of linear spaces are Tears of the Kingdom, Hollow Knight, and Fallout New Vegas. Some examples of non-linear spaces are Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3, and Underrail.

For this essay, I want to analyse Breath of the Wild’s opening and compare it with Kenshi. In Breath of the Wild, the player starts on the Great Plateau. The Plateau is a mini open world which has many of the mechanics that the rest of the game has in a digestible form. It has combat, open exploration, resource gathering, cooking, shrines, temperature, climbing, and swimming. This makes it ideal for tutorialising the player without it even feeling like a tutorial. It is also physically above the rest of the game world. This means that the player can see many locations off in the distance. This makes the player want to go there. But in order to get there, they need to get off the Plateau. This gives the player their first objective/hook: get off the Plateau.

Compare this with Kenshi. In Kenshi the player is dropped into the middle of a town. The player can then immediately wander off in any direction until they are either beaten up or they hit the edge of the map. In other words, there is no beginning enclosed space. Now this isn’t an inherently bad thing, Skyrim and Fallout 4 both start without a beginning enclosed space. However there’s a reason that games like Breath of the Wild do have them, and that’s that they make it easy to both tutorialise and hook players. If you choose a different path, you need something else to give them to the player. Kenshi does not have any system to replace the benefits of a beginning enclosed space.

In terms of tutorials, Kenshi uses a text dump whenever you do an activity for the first time. This isn’t particularly engaging and feels like homework, but it’s not the worst way to do tutorials. At least it’s relatively brief. However the game completely lacks a hook. As mentioned at the start of this essay, Kenshi expects you to wander around for hours and to find your own hook, your own reason to play. Maybe this works for others, but for me, if you want me to play your game instead of going outside and touching grass, you’d better give me a reason to play.

[urbanist-doctrine]

A Comparative Review of Virtue’s Last Reward and 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors

Let me start by explaining why I think the prisoners’ dilemma is so conceptually great. From a mathematical/game theory perspective, the prisoners’ dilemma is not complicated. According to the rationally self-interested person model that game theory uses, the optimal decision is to betray. Finding the Nash Equilibrium of the prisoners’ dilemma is not difficult. So then, if it’s not particularly mathematically interesting, why is it such an interesting concept? It’s because humans do not conform to the rationally self-interested model, within every human is a strong desire for altruism, to do the best for the community. The problem of course is that people who choose the altruistic option get punished. This is why the prisoners’ dilemma is so interesting, it gets at a fundamental tension within human nature: the conflict between doing what’s best for yourself and doing what’s best for others.

Whoever came up with the idea to put the prisoners’ dilemma into VLR cooked hard. Unfortunately they couldn’t follow up on it, they didn’t fully capitalise on the potential that the prisoners’ dilemma creates. For instance, only one of the characters have the dilemma between doing what is best for them personally and what is best for someone else. That person is Tenmyouji. His tension is between his desire to see Akane again vs his desire to protect Quark.

None of the other characters have such a dynamic. Sigma and Phi’s theme is about learning to control their ESP abilities. Zero, Akane, and Dio’s theme is about doing what you believe is best even if takes immense sacrifice, all three have fundamentally altruistic motivations and all three are willing to sacrifice their own life to achieve their goals. K’s theme is about finding out who he is. Quark spends most of the game asleep or missing and is mostly just there to facilitate Tenmyouji’s character. Alice’s theme is about dedication to her mission, which could play into the theme of conflicting interests but her mission never conflicts with any personal goals she has. Clover’s theme is loyalty, but just like Alice, it doesn’t conflict with any of her personal goals. They almost do something really interesting when Clover has 9 points but Alice has less points and is alive, but they resolve it immediately by having Alice just telling her to leave. Luna is the second closest character to have such a dilemma. Her dilemma is between her desire to save the humans participating in the Nonary Game from harm, and her desire to save all of humanity from the Radical-6 pandemic. While this is an interesting dilemma, it is not the prisoners’ dilemma because both of her desires are altruistic, rather than a conflict between altruism and selfishness.

VLR lacks a relationship as compelling as the Junpei-Akane relationship from 999. That relationship made the player care about escaping. Both 999 and VLR are excellent at motivating the player by presenting a mystery that they want to solve; you want to know what the fuck is going on. But 999 is also able to motivate the player with the desire to give Junpei and Akane a happy ending. VLR does not have characters with the chemistry required to motivate the player in the same way. Phi does not have as compelling a relationship with Sigma, and by the end, you get the sense that they’re more like co-workers than friends. Where as at the end of 999, you know that Junpei would go to the ends of the Earth to find Akane.

And on the topic of worse characterisation: My bro Clover got robbed. First they put her into a skimpy outfit for no reason. Then they make her a ditz. She was not this stupid in the first game. 999 Clover would have instantly recognised the poison pill and not let Dio eat it. All this is especially bad considering that she’s supposed to have had secret agent training between the games.

The vibe of VLR is also less deadly than in 999. In 999, you almost drown in the first room, then almost drown in floor 4, then you’re told that there’s a bomb inside you, then the 9th Man dies, then you’re constantly reminded of death because of the timer to tap your bracelet after you enter a numbered door. Snake and the captain also die. So when you get a bad ending and everyone is killed, it feels like the climax to what the story was building up to. In VLR the threat of death is gone for the first half. You immediately find out that Zero 3 was bluffing about falling down the elevator shaft, and it’s easy to forget that there’s poison in your bracelets because the process of entering a chromatic door is much more peaceful. This means that when the murders do start happening at the end of the game, it feels like it comes out of left field. I understand that this is because of meddling from the higher ups who wanted a lighter tone, but it’s still jarring.

Aesthetically, 999 is more cohesive. The whole game being set on a replica of the Titanic meant that every escape room tied into a central aesthetic. But at the same time, the ship is big enough that every escape room still feels like it has it’s own unique aesthetic. VLR trades cohesiveness for uniqueness. The underground laboratory doesn’t really have an aesthetic through line, but it does allow for more unique levels, like the garden.

Sticking with aesthetic, the 3D models don’t look as good as the 2D sprites. They’re less expressive in general, and the ones in VLR have a particularly bad case of sausage fingers. Also Clover has a glitch where she’s smiling in situations that she clearly shouldn’t be. (Yet another way they did Clover dirty).

Both 999 and VLR have a problem with a midgame that is repetitive and has very slow pacing. VLR has this problem worse purely by virtue of it being a longer game. I’ve definitely seen Quark and Alice get the suicidal symptoms of Radical-6 a half dozen times. This seems to be just a pacing problem that these game have, strong openings and endings, but weak midgames.

I’ve been very critical of VLR thus far but I really did enjoy it overall. I really like the way they used the timeline aspect and retaining memories from different routes. It builds a strong sense of ludo-narrative resonance as Sigma has the same knowledge as the player. It feels like a natural progression from 999. Where as in 999 it happens once at the end of the game, in VLR it happens 10 times. Sigma’s persistent memory really feeds into this game’s strongest aspect, which is its mystery.

[urbanist-doctrine]

Review of 999: Zero Escape

999 is kind of a pogchamp video game. I will now critique it. Pacing is the immediate first issue. During your first run, the game has a nice slow-burn pace, where information is slowly revealed to you and you make your way through the escape rooms. During the ending, the game's pace is wonderfully frantic. But in the middle, the pace kind of grinds to a halt as you have to redo content and see scenes you've already seen before. This did get better when I realised how to use the flowchart fully, but there was still a grind.

The puzzles were never too difficult but they did make you feel smart when you completed them. A lot of puzzles were fucking around with non base ten numbers, which as a (former) computer science student, I was familiar enough with.

Characters had distinct designs and varied personalities, you enjoyed spending time being trapped with them. I normally don't like romance, but Akane and Junpei's relationship was cute. I can't believe my friend got me to play a dating sim.

The ending slaps so hard. I like how it completely contextualizes some scenes, like when June asks Santa what happened to his sister in the engine room, knowing full well what happened.

[urbanist-doctrine]

Why the Statistic “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions” annoys me so much.

On 10 July 2017, The Guardian released an article titled “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says” and since then the internet has used it in the most annoying way possible. But to understand that, we first have to understand the article and the report it’s based on. The article is reporting on the Carbon Majors Report by the Carbon Disclosure Project. The Carbon Majors Report was a novel (in 2017) way of calculating who is responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The traditional way of calculating responsibility is to base it off of the pollution produced by each country. The advantage of this method is the ability to see the location where pollution is being produced. Another method of tracking pollution responsibility is by the pollution caused by the consumption of each country. The advantage of this method is the ability to see where pollution ends up and which countries are ultimately benefiting from pollution. The Carbon Majors Report’s innovation was to track GHG responsibility by the institution that was doing the polluting and all downstream pollution caused by their activities. Downstream pollution means all pollution caused by other individuals and institutions using the product that the institution sells, eg: someone buying petrol and burning it to drive their car would be accounted as caused by the oil company that extracted the oil.

So what were the results of this method of tracking polluting responsibility? They found that between 1988 and 2015, 100 economic institutions were responsible for 70.6% of global industrial emissions. This is where the Guardian headline came from. Except there’s one discrepancy. The headline left out the word industrial. That might seem like a small omission, but it changes the meaning of the whole sentence. Industrial emissions are emissions from energy use and industrial output and as explained by the Carbon Majors Report on page 7 “Non-industrial GHG emissions consist of carbon dioxide relating to land-use change, and methane from sources such as farming and landfills.” Industrial emissions account for 78.4% of total emissions over the period while non-industrial emissions account for 21.6%. This means that the Guardian headline should have said that 100 companies emit 55% (70.6%*78.4%) of emissions.

So is that all that annoys me about this statistic? That the Guardian got a statistic wrong on a technicality? No. What annoys me about this statistic is the way people use it to shirk their responsibility for stopping climate change. People will often say “why should I have to use my car less? 71% of emissions are from 100 companies.” So why does that annoy me? Well, let’s look at who these 100 companies actually are. Chinese Coal, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, National Iranian Oil, Exxon Mobil. All 100 of the companies are fossil fuel companies (often state owned) that extract either coal, oil, or methane gas. So the statistic could be reformulated as 55% of emissions come from coal, oil, and methane gas, which is just like no shit. So when someone brings up this statistic to avoid personal responsibility what they’re actually saying is “I shouldn’t have to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions because half of emissions are caused by fossil fuels.” Not a coherent argument.

But, I hear you object, “Personal responsibility is not enough to solve the climate crisis, collective action is necessary.” And I agree, collective action is necessary, which brings me to the way that people use this statistic that annoys me the most. Which is when people use it to deny collective responsibility. The most common form this takes is saying “Why should I have to pay carbon tax, 100 companies cause 71% of emissions.” This boils my blood. Why should you have to pay carbon tax because you contribute to the 55% of emissions caused by fossil fuels? Why should you have to be slightly inconvenienced for the pollution you caused? Because if you’re going to benefit from polluting the atmosphere, then you should pay the costs of your actions.

And that’s why the way people use the statistic “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions” annoys me.

Bibliography

Guardian: Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017

Fact Checking the Internet’s Favourite Statistic by hazelisonline

Corporate Greenhouse Gas Protocol

Sector by sector: where do global greenhouse gas emissions come from?

[urbanist-doctrine]

Person who has never heard of traditional marriage: Oh so it's just like a 24/7 D/s relationship with a breeding fetish and findom.

[urbanist-doctrine]

Beneath the Mask from Persona 5 is a song about Autism

The first verse: Where have you been? /Been searching all along /Came facing twilight on and on /Without a clue /Without a sign /Without grasping yet /The real question to be asked Where have I been?

This is about growing up autistic but being undiagnosed. There's something different about you. Something weird. You know this, everyone knows this, but you don't know exactly what. "Came facing twilight on and on [...] Without grasping yet, The real question to be asked."

The first chorus: I'm a shapeshifter /At Poe's masquerade /Hiding both face and mind /All free for you to draw /I'm a shapeshifter /What else should I be? /Please don't take off my mask /Revealing dark

Here the concept of masking is introduced. Autistic masking is when autistic people hide their autistic traits to try to pass as neurotypical. It involves suppressing one's authentic self in order to more easily fit into society. It provides security at the cost of connection. As you can imagine, this has negative mental health outcomes. "Hiding both face and mind, All free for you to draw." This line shows us that the author is masking to fit in with society. "Please don't take off my mask, Revealing dark." This shows that the author is scared of unmasking being their authentic self.

The second verse: Moments of calm /Nothing left to be found /A mirror right in front of me /That's where I find /An empty glass /Reflecting the sad truth /It's telling words not to be told /I need the mask

This verse could represent the author discovering that they're autistic. Another interpretation is that they discover that they won't be accepted by society if they don't mask.

The second chorus: I'm a shapeshifter /At Poe's masquerade /Hiding both face and mind /All free for you to draw /I'm a shapeshifter /Chained down to my core /Please don't take off my mask /My place to hide

The author feels trapped in this verse. "Chained down to my core."

The third verse: I can't tell you /How to see me /Just a cage of bones /There's nothing inside /Will it unleash me? /Burning down the walls /Is there a way /For me to break?

In this verse, the author really wants to break free and be their authentic self, wearing the mask has taken its toll. But they're struggling to unmask. "Will it unleash me? Burning down the walls." The author is worried that being themselves would ruin their life and relationships but also acknowledges the possibility that things could get better. "Burning down the walls" could mean destroying the things they've built so far, or it could mean tearing down the barriers between them and others.

The third chorus: I'm a shapeshifter /At Poe's masquerade /Hiding both face and mind /All free for you to draw /I'm a shapeshifter /Have no face to show /Please don't take off my mask /My disguise

The author has masked for so long, created so many different personalities for different people that they don't know who they really are any more. "I'm a shapeshifter, Have no face to show."

Do you agree with my analysis?

[urbanist-doctrine]

that post about kim kitsuragi only looking cool because he's standing next to harry seriously changed my read of his entire character. like he actually is just a weird nerd who finally gets to experience being cool because his partner is the most fucked up guy alive

[urbanist-doctrine]

A comparative analysis between Tunic and Hyper Light Drifter

Tunic and Hyper Light Drifter(HLD) seem very different on the surface with very different aesthetics, but dig a little deeper, and they're very similar games. They both have similar gameplay, atmospheres, and narrative techniques. I haven't seen any comparisons between the 2 games, so I thought I would write something on it. Also this will basically spoil both games.

Gameplay: Both games have isometric hack and slash combat where the player must learn the enemies' attack patterns to find openings to attack. Both games place an emphasis on being nimble and dodging attacks rather than blocking them, although Tunic has a shield, so does this less. Both games have secrets strewn about their levels for attentive players to find, although HLD is more linear and combat focused while Tunic is more non-linear and exploration focused.

Atmosphere: Both games are what I'm going to call "lofi post-apocalypse" where society has long since collapsed and we're existing in it's ruins, which are now beginning to host new life. They both have moments of incredible calm where the player is just walking through and soaking up the environment, which is contrasted with a burst of energy with the fast paced combat. There is a loneliness in both games, but not a depressing loneliness, it is a freeing loneliness where there are no others to constrain you anymore.

Narrative Technique: Both games have little to no dialogue or writing. In HLD there is no text outside of the tutorial and all dialogue is done through pictures. In Tunic most text is in the game's unique script meaning that most people won't be able to understand it. Although some words are in English, there are no NPCs in Tunic until the last section of the game. As a result, both games use visual and environmental storytelling to convey their narratives. The player often has to piece the story together by studying the level design and enemy placement. One particular moment they have in common is in the structure of their major reveals. In HLD, in the southern area, the player walks in on an underground factory where the titans were constructed. Similarly in Tunic, in the Rooted Ziggurat, the player sees an underground factory which shows how the monoliths are constructed.

To conclude, Tunic and Hyper Light Drifter are 2 games that I very much enjoyed and I enjoyed them for many of the same reasons. I haven't seen many people compare the games, so I thought that it would be interesting to compare them. Tell me what you think of my analysis.

[urbanist-doctrine]

i forgot to post this when i read it but god this took me out like just chilling reading dune flick to the next page BOOF slur jumpscare

[urbanist-doctrine]

The Red traffic light is for the cyclist

[urbanist-doctrine]

I genuinely think @staff should give us an official Bot Kill Count where it ticks up every time a bot you reported is officially taken off by the tumblr team and when you hit a certain number you get gruesome little trophies. Gamification can be of the devil but in this particular case I need a little treat for doing my daily chore of taking out the trash

[urbanist-doctrine]

Bleach is a magical girl anime that turns into an isekai

Futurama is an isekai

[urbanist-doctrine]

Futurama is an isekai

[urbanist-doctrine]

RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris but im different. and better. maybe even better than the gods

[urbanist-doctrine]

I truly despise NIMBYs

Irish people will be like "I HAVE to drive everywhere, the bus takes too long, the government should just improve public transportation" then throw a fit when the government tries to improve public transportation and cycling infrastructure by removing lanes for private cars or on-street parking spaces to add cycle and bus lanes.

The simple fact of the matter is that some people support public transportation infrastructure in the abstract but as long as it doesn't personally inconvenience them, because they want OTHER people to take the bus so they personally can continue to drive to work with less traffic and without having to interact with the poors.

Some people do genuinely have no choice but to drive but that is simply not the case for most of the people who complain about these things and whether you like it or not we cannot adequately reduce emissions without allocating large amounts of space away from private vehicles in favour of public transportation and bikes.

[urbanist-doctrine]

Sexist memes but you replace women with bottoms

[urbanist-doctrine]

new ideologies we've been testing internally for release in 2023:

ecostrasserism

anarcho-taylorism

islamic juche

carthaginian irredentism

cyberba'athism

astrology girl race science

cryptoliberalism

furry nationalism

fully automated luxury space catholicism

jungian psychocommunism

discord server syndicalism

ted kaczynksi thought

kennedy family neofeudalism

direct theocracy

whatever the fuck cybersmith believes

flat earth centrism

ohio independence