So I found out in the last month or so that I'm no longer in the top 100 in Florida on 3x3x3, the standard regular Rubik's cube. Also, I didn't get to sign up for a competition in June that I kind of wanted to go to because I was being distracted by life. But, competitions aren't really my everyday focus at this point. I think that I have more to say when I'm showing someone about cubing, and making it more accessible to them from an intellectual standpoint.
I managed to make it out to one of our local Mexican food places with the wife just the other night. We hadn't been out to dinner in a while, and I thought maybe I could do better than Taco Bell. They make guacamole right at the table. When he asked us if we wanted mild, medium, or spicy, we're joking about whether or not he means authentic medium or chardonnay-drinking-housewives-listening-to-Coldplay medium. We're seated outside, and it's warm enough out that we're enjoying the fact that we have both Mexican Coca-Cola and water to drink because we're sweating just sitting there. Some random guy showed up around the same time as our guacamole technician with a large Labrador and just wants to have it sit with someone while he goes in and gets alcoholic beverages. The people next to us who were just finishing seem to have enough room near them to accommodate the dog, and our guacamole tech commented about how the dog is being good. I turn my attention to the cube I have on the table for a moment, and since I was looking down I saw a person walking a dog on the other side of us, and predictably the Labrador was no longer just sitting there, but charted an intercept course to find the other dog. The Labrador reappeared, and then went to have a word with some people at the other tables about what it was that they were having for dinner. One of the servers had enough sense to bring the dog some water, and it sat back in its original spot, but now the people sitting there were really looking to go at this point - both because of the dog awkwardness and because they had been finished with their food for a bit already. Thankfully the gentleman whose dog it was reappeared, and talked with everyone again. He even asked how old our guacamole tech was, and said how proud he is of him for being a 16-year old with a job.
We went on to enjoy our guacamole and chips, ordered some tacos, and the couple watching the dog can now leave, and the servers went about the business of rearranging two tables so that a somewhat larger group could sit there. The group of six was an older man, and his wife, and a collection of twenty-something children and perhaps a girlfriend. or My wife and I enjoyed our meal, talked about how customer service is supposed to work, and talked about how we are both readjusting to how our jobs have changed over the last couple of months. It isn't until the check was done and we're about to leave, that the one person sitting in the group of six that can see (the presumed father of the family) that I have a cube at the table mentioned it to the person that's closest to me but has his back to me. So, I brought the cube over, and the father mentions that the person closes to me, a bearded college-age person, could solve it.
At this point, my focus went to the college age person. I asked him how long it takes him to solve it, and what method he uses. Since he does something that's between a beginner's method and what we now refer to as CFOP, and takes around a minute and a half, I showed him the 80's corners first method that I do. I talked through most of it, and I probably wasn't that fast. He was intrigued, but he wasn't exactly impressed that I could tell. I was concerned that I had flubbed my demonstration, but was ready for followup questions. I did not get to do followup questions, because the young woman diagonally opposite him at the table immediately reached for the cube to scramble it again. Perhaps I had impressed her more, or she had seen it less. I try to nonchalantly stand around while she's scrambling it and not watch her scramble it, but I'm still trying to stand close enough to listen to make sure that nobody's hand-twisting corners or popping the cube apart. Thankfully there were no shenanigans. So now, I usually for a second demo try to do CFOP, and show how it's different because of looking for more than one piece at a time during the first two layers. This solve went noticeably faster, even despite me talking through it. The young woman got to watch the solve up close this time, and the bearded young man was more impressed this time. Then, while I'm still standing at the far corner, I do a silly cube trick just as comic relief. All it is you do R2 U2 R2 U2 R2 U2 to a solved cube, and you will see that you have two pairs of edges swapped. If you grip the cube properly, and only are touching the unsolved edges, you can perform that same move again without letting go of the cube and so it goes from unsolved to solved and it seems like your hands are exactly where they started (but they aren't). She even had me do the silly cube trick again so she could video it. (No, I don't know where it ended up yet.) So as I'm walking back around the table, I turn the cube a few times in my and ask the bearded young man if he had heard of Steven Brundage, which he had. I showed him the scrambled cube in my hand, explained a little bit about what it was that Steven Brundage does, and using the cover of the high back chair next to him, I then was able to fix the cube quickly and produce it for the group solved again. So, now, I didn't have to worry if he was impressed or not because I think he definitely was by then. We definitely had to go at that point, because I can't really take questions after doing the Brundage trick.
I also got to do a little bit of a demo for my corner gas station/vape shop/convenience store the next day, and I think I learned from the night before not to end with the tricks, but I also had enough time to show off a Roux solve. So that one went 80's - CFOP - Roux - What is an Inverse?. I told them that there would be a quiz next time, but I think that's an idle threat unless they start selling cubes there.
This is what I like to do, though. I really enjoy doing these small demos for people. Honestly, I hope that the fact that I've been doing it is why I'm not in the top 100 in Florida any more. I hope that enough new people have gotten into cubing as a byproduct of people like me making it more accessible that the pool of people competing has grown in size.
In other cubing news, I finally purchased a Rubik's Tactile Cube which means I can now finally say that I've solved a cube without looking at it. I was very happy with the choice of shapes on the opposite sides. I was also very happy that even though it's the modern Rubik's mechanism that's harder to pop, it was set up just loose enough that it was a delight to turn the first time out of the package.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Sunday, April 14, 2019
A new reflection on The Nature of Difficulty.
Having recently played the new Devil May Cry game from Capcom, and watching my older child play the even newer Sekiro:Shadows Die Twice by From Software made me think about the nature of difficulty in games, its purpose, and the types of difficulty that we encounter. Devil May Cry may not be that hard to play - but it may be hard to play well, and Sekiro is difficult to play at all.
When I think about what I enjoy in a game, typically what I like is a game that is easy to get into but allows for many levels of skill and improvement. I think that is the essential formula of most of the widely popular original arcade games. Pac-Man and Centipede are great examples of this. The things that we are required to do are clear and obvious to us, and are simple to perform. If we as players are able to keep up with the game as it slowly increases in difficulty, then we are able to succeed in the game. It does not start so difficult as to discourage play (hey - they're trying to get you to put a quarter it, aren't they) and gets more difficult at a reasonable pace.
This can also be done in a game by having a wide range of available game mechanics or a more open path of progression, although this method is more popular for home console games than arcade games. The game can allow a player to proceed at their own pace, and still be able to proceed through the game using simple techniques, but also allow for higher scores and rewards by being able to adapt to more sophisticated techniques. Katamari Damacy is a great example of this. One can get through the levels easily enough, but as one becomes more familiar with the level layout and figures out better and better ways to complete a level, the possible score that one can finish a level with increases a lot, and is indicative of one's mastery of the level. The newest Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild is another good example - if you are really skillful, you can take on challenges sooner, but if you want to take your time and gain resources to do levels in an easier fashion, that's good too. The most common way for an adventure game to get more difficult is for the enemies to increase in health in comparison to the character, and to be able to dispense more damage to your character. Most of the time you can also offset part of this by gaining rewards that at increase player health, improve weapons, add armor, etc. The 'stylish action' games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising Revengance all do these sorts of things, and then also make sure that the enemies have more additional and more complicated attack mechanics as the game progresses. Bayonetta takes this even one step further by removing the tactical advantage of the dodge mechanic on the hardest game difficulty. (Normally, dodging at the last possible second would activate "Witch Time" mode where all of the enemies would be slowed down.)
Some games are simple and straightforward but their difficulty only comes from consistency of performance. This is a thing that carries over from some real sports - golf, bowling, and darts are all exactly like this. The objectives are clear and obvious, and not so difficult as to be impossible, but perhaps they're not going to go easy every time. In the video game realm, racing games are the most likely candidates for this formula. Some "Runner" games, which might as well be side-scrolling racing games, operate similarly.
However, this is often not enough for some gamers, or even some designers. Often, a game wanting to be more challenging takes a number of different routes in being more challenging. An obvious way to be more challenging is to just be rather difficult from the beginning, either internally or externally. In the old days of the arcade, Defender (and its sequel Stargate) were rather challenging on both fronts. Not only did they use one of the most difficult joystick-and-button interfaces ever constructed, but the game was inherently difficult, could go into a mode drastically more difficult if the player failed certain conditions, and using the Hyperspace button too often to attempt to escape a sticky situation could randomly cost the player a life. The early Resident Evil games used tank controls and a fixed camera perspective as an interface-based way to make the game difficult, and this became all too obvious once Resident Evil 4 started using an over the shoulder camera, and then the version on the Wii allowed players to use the Wiimote to target enemies on the screen directly. It went very quickly from being a slowly paced game full of jump scares to a more action-based game because making the controls easier drastically lowered the initial difficulty and made the game more accessible. The From Software games - Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro - have fantastic, responsive controls and are just purely difficult, offered as a challenge to only the best players and as an antidote to the usual array of bored teenagers complaining that they beat a game in a weekend. Other games in that challenge level include the Ninja Gaiden games, Super Star Wars SNES, Battletoads, or some of the shmup games by Cave .
Another way to be internally difficult is to present the player with challenges that they have no way to predict the first time, and then force incremental memorization of sections of the game as a result. This is probably my personal least favorite way of a game being difficult, and good examples of this are the original laserdisc arcade games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.
Another interesting mechanic that can be used to create difficulty in a game is to create expectations about how tasks should be accomplished, and then use that expectation and intentionally subvert it. This can backfire if used too often, as the player will just resort to being more cautious even when it isn't warranted and slow down the narrative pace of the game. The Evil Within comes to mind as a good example of this, but probably most horror games do this to one degree or another as it is a common horror trope.
Part of the reason that I am writing about this is that I am still trying to finish The Evil Within, and contrasting it to my initial experience with the first Devil May Cry game.
The first Devil May Cry game was built from a failed attempt at making a fourth Resident Evil game. I got stuck on a fairly early level in Devil May Cry, after amazingly making it through earlier parts of the game that I thought were harder. The control scheme was not typical for American games*, (DMC used the Triangle button for jump which is more typical of Japanese games) and I could not pass the first close-quarters battle with the aptly named Death Scissors. I tried starting the game over, spending more time failing secret missions on purpose so I could continue to collect Red Orbs to level up Dante's moves, and still could not pass it. As a result, I would stop playing the game for months at a time, play other things, and hope I could come back to Devil May Cry and make sense of it. As it turned out, I just needed to refine my technique and find which specific attacks were effective and which were not. Once I passed that particular level, the rest of the game proceeded normally enough. *(Re-releases of the game included a control system that more closely matched the subsequent games, and also allowed for changed in the control scheme if desired.) This is markedly different from the current Devil May Cry game - DMCV, where the game isn't so difficult that you will miss out on the story, but the difficulty comes in getting good scores at regular difficulty and then playing the higher difficulty levels.
With The Evil Within, the game is much more generous with mid-level checkpoints that it automatically saves. The Evil Within was the first game that Shinji Mikami worked on with Tango Gameworks, and much more of a 'survival' horror game than the later action-based Resident Evil games. Thanks to the checkpoints, I play a tiny bit of the game at a time. Early in the game, you can see quite a number of stylistic similarities to Resident Evil 4, the last Resdient Evil game that Shinji Mikami worked on. I also think that some of the conventions that the game intentionally subverts are from Resident Evil 4 - as if it's a little bit of a 'gotcha' to people that are playing this because of his work on previous games. Unlike Devil May Cry 1, I haven't abandoned the game entirely for months at a time. I just work on slowly inching through the game.
I just hope that the game's story is worth my effort. It seems funny now to say that, since narrative was not as an important feature of early games.
When I think about what I enjoy in a game, typically what I like is a game that is easy to get into but allows for many levels of skill and improvement. I think that is the essential formula of most of the widely popular original arcade games. Pac-Man and Centipede are great examples of this. The things that we are required to do are clear and obvious to us, and are simple to perform. If we as players are able to keep up with the game as it slowly increases in difficulty, then we are able to succeed in the game. It does not start so difficult as to discourage play (hey - they're trying to get you to put a quarter it, aren't they) and gets more difficult at a reasonable pace.
This can also be done in a game by having a wide range of available game mechanics or a more open path of progression, although this method is more popular for home console games than arcade games. The game can allow a player to proceed at their own pace, and still be able to proceed through the game using simple techniques, but also allow for higher scores and rewards by being able to adapt to more sophisticated techniques. Katamari Damacy is a great example of this. One can get through the levels easily enough, but as one becomes more familiar with the level layout and figures out better and better ways to complete a level, the possible score that one can finish a level with increases a lot, and is indicative of one's mastery of the level. The newest Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild is another good example - if you are really skillful, you can take on challenges sooner, but if you want to take your time and gain resources to do levels in an easier fashion, that's good too. The most common way for an adventure game to get more difficult is for the enemies to increase in health in comparison to the character, and to be able to dispense more damage to your character. Most of the time you can also offset part of this by gaining rewards that at increase player health, improve weapons, add armor, etc. The 'stylish action' games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising Revengance all do these sorts of things, and then also make sure that the enemies have more additional and more complicated attack mechanics as the game progresses. Bayonetta takes this even one step further by removing the tactical advantage of the dodge mechanic on the hardest game difficulty. (Normally, dodging at the last possible second would activate "Witch Time" mode where all of the enemies would be slowed down.)
Some games are simple and straightforward but their difficulty only comes from consistency of performance. This is a thing that carries over from some real sports - golf, bowling, and darts are all exactly like this. The objectives are clear and obvious, and not so difficult as to be impossible, but perhaps they're not going to go easy every time. In the video game realm, racing games are the most likely candidates for this formula. Some "Runner" games, which might as well be side-scrolling racing games, operate similarly.
However, this is often not enough for some gamers, or even some designers. Often, a game wanting to be more challenging takes a number of different routes in being more challenging. An obvious way to be more challenging is to just be rather difficult from the beginning, either internally or externally. In the old days of the arcade, Defender (and its sequel Stargate) were rather challenging on both fronts. Not only did they use one of the most difficult joystick-and-button interfaces ever constructed, but the game was inherently difficult, could go into a mode drastically more difficult if the player failed certain conditions, and using the Hyperspace button too often to attempt to escape a sticky situation could randomly cost the player a life. The early Resident Evil games used tank controls and a fixed camera perspective as an interface-based way to make the game difficult, and this became all too obvious once Resident Evil 4 started using an over the shoulder camera, and then the version on the Wii allowed players to use the Wiimote to target enemies on the screen directly. It went very quickly from being a slowly paced game full of jump scares to a more action-based game because making the controls easier drastically lowered the initial difficulty and made the game more accessible. The From Software games - Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro - have fantastic, responsive controls and are just purely difficult, offered as a challenge to only the best players and as an antidote to the usual array of bored teenagers complaining that they beat a game in a weekend. Other games in that challenge level include the Ninja Gaiden games, Super Star Wars SNES, Battletoads, or some of the shmup games by Cave .
Another way to be internally difficult is to present the player with challenges that they have no way to predict the first time, and then force incremental memorization of sections of the game as a result. This is probably my personal least favorite way of a game being difficult, and good examples of this are the original laserdisc arcade games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.
Another interesting mechanic that can be used to create difficulty in a game is to create expectations about how tasks should be accomplished, and then use that expectation and intentionally subvert it. This can backfire if used too often, as the player will just resort to being more cautious even when it isn't warranted and slow down the narrative pace of the game. The Evil Within comes to mind as a good example of this, but probably most horror games do this to one degree or another as it is a common horror trope.
Part of the reason that I am writing about this is that I am still trying to finish The Evil Within, and contrasting it to my initial experience with the first Devil May Cry game.
The first Devil May Cry game was built from a failed attempt at making a fourth Resident Evil game. I got stuck on a fairly early level in Devil May Cry, after amazingly making it through earlier parts of the game that I thought were harder. The control scheme was not typical for American games*, (DMC used the Triangle button for jump which is more typical of Japanese games) and I could not pass the first close-quarters battle with the aptly named Death Scissors. I tried starting the game over, spending more time failing secret missions on purpose so I could continue to collect Red Orbs to level up Dante's moves, and still could not pass it. As a result, I would stop playing the game for months at a time, play other things, and hope I could come back to Devil May Cry and make sense of it. As it turned out, I just needed to refine my technique and find which specific attacks were effective and which were not. Once I passed that particular level, the rest of the game proceeded normally enough. *(Re-releases of the game included a control system that more closely matched the subsequent games, and also allowed for changed in the control scheme if desired.) This is markedly different from the current Devil May Cry game - DMCV, where the game isn't so difficult that you will miss out on the story, but the difficulty comes in getting good scores at regular difficulty and then playing the higher difficulty levels.
With The Evil Within, the game is much more generous with mid-level checkpoints that it automatically saves. The Evil Within was the first game that Shinji Mikami worked on with Tango Gameworks, and much more of a 'survival' horror game than the later action-based Resident Evil games. Thanks to the checkpoints, I play a tiny bit of the game at a time. Early in the game, you can see quite a number of stylistic similarities to Resident Evil 4, the last Resdient Evil game that Shinji Mikami worked on. I also think that some of the conventions that the game intentionally subverts are from Resident Evil 4 - as if it's a little bit of a 'gotcha' to people that are playing this because of his work on previous games. Unlike Devil May Cry 1, I haven't abandoned the game entirely for months at a time. I just work on slowly inching through the game.
I just hope that the game's story is worth my effort. It seems funny now to say that, since narrative was not as an important feature of early games.
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Everything is Television.
So, it's Super Bowl Sunday. I know who's playing but I don't actually care who wins.
I was a Pats fan when they were bad, but that was 1975 and I was young and I lived in New England and you rooted for them anyway.
I'm in Walmart this morning and I see a young kid with his father, probably as young as I was when I was really aware of television. As they're walking towards me on the same aisle and the dad and I acknowledge each other, the kid points to a television and says "That's a television. We don't have a television!"
His father is pretty quick to remind him that yes, they did have a television. I look down at the kid and tell him "Dude, if you're America, your house is littered with televisions."
The kid is quizzical and I couldn't gauge the dad's reaction as they walked off. It was probably something like "That's a weird thing to say to a kid" or "Oh, wait, he's totally right".
American households have an average of 7 screens. If you figure the suburban scenario of:
So, most of those screens aren't connected to what old people traditionally think of as "television", but that's no longer relevant. With the rise of YouTube TV, PSVue, NetFlix, Hulu, AmazonTV, lots of traditional TV content has made it to regular TV screens. I even got ads for the first two from my game consoles trying to get me to watch the Super Bowl via a free trial of their service.
The Nintendo Switch now even has a YouTube app. Facebook has original shows now.
That is only part of the story. We're at a point now where this is only a fraction of the video content that's out there. People on their own generate lots of their own video content. That's what YouTube was built on (an average of 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute), and that's what streaming services like Twitch are built for. Facebook and YouTube also allow for streaming. Twitter got in on this action by acquiring Periscope.
So, if you're not up for the Super Bowl but the couch is too comfortable today, just remember there's lots of other things out there to watch. (Including my channel, SuperMonkeyCube, and my dog's channel, Kal and Friends.)
I was a Pats fan when they were bad, but that was 1975 and I was young and I lived in New England and you rooted for them anyway.
I'm in Walmart this morning and I see a young kid with his father, probably as young as I was when I was really aware of television. As they're walking towards me on the same aisle and the dad and I acknowledge each other, the kid points to a television and says "That's a television. We don't have a television!"
His father is pretty quick to remind him that yes, they did have a television. I look down at the kid and tell him "Dude, if you're America, your house is littered with televisions."
The kid is quizzical and I couldn't gauge the dad's reaction as they walked off. It was probably something like "That's a weird thing to say to a kid" or "Oh, wait, he's totally right".
American households have an average of 7 screens. If you figure the suburban scenario of:
- TV in the living room
- TV in the master bedroom
- Computers
- Mobile phones
- Kindle/Nook/iPad
So, most of those screens aren't connected to what old people traditionally think of as "television", but that's no longer relevant. With the rise of YouTube TV, PSVue, NetFlix, Hulu, AmazonTV, lots of traditional TV content has made it to regular TV screens. I even got ads for the first two from my game consoles trying to get me to watch the Super Bowl via a free trial of their service.
The Nintendo Switch now even has a YouTube app. Facebook has original shows now.
That is only part of the story. We're at a point now where this is only a fraction of the video content that's out there. People on their own generate lots of their own video content. That's what YouTube was built on (an average of 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute), and that's what streaming services like Twitch are built for. Facebook and YouTube also allow for streaming. Twitter got in on this action by acquiring Periscope.
So, if you're not up for the Super Bowl but the couch is too comfortable today, just remember there's lots of other things out there to watch. (Including my channel, SuperMonkeyCube, and my dog's channel, Kal and Friends.)
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