Yomi on G4TV Tonight

For the first time ever, the X-Play television show on G4TV is covering a card game rather than a video game. Fittingly it's Yomi! The coverage airs tonight on G4TV (on X-Play) at 6:30pm Eastern/Pacific.

As you probably know by now, Yomi captures the mind games involved in high level fighting gameplay in card form, along with several mechanics such as dragon punches, fireball traps, and even Guilty Gear's "burst." You can get it at www.sirlingames.com, find the rules at www.sirlin.net/yomi/rules, and you can play it online completely for free at www.fantasystrike.com.

Yomi won Game of the Year from The Dice Tower.

EDIT: Here's the web version of the segment.

Portal 2

I was with a group of game designers and I said, "Probably I'm in the minority here, but I was really disappointed with Portal 2." To my surprise, everyone there (about 10 game designers) agreed, and not a single person was willing to take up the contrary position. I'll explain the complaints, but first I'd rather say what is great. This is all about the single player mode, by the way.

Mechanics Spoiler

I think the mechanics are great. SPOILER of mechanics. I'll just casually mention some here, and you can skip this paragraph if you'd rather not know them ahead of time, in a strange world where you have somehow not played this game yet. Anyway, there are beams that you redirect through portals, bridges made of light you can extend through portals. There are three kinds of liquid goo that you can spatter around the world, each with different properties. I really liked the kind that let you portal off of otherwise unportable material. There are force fields beams that carry you over pits, and you can redirect those through portals. All of this stuff is great. My letter grade is A or A+ here.

Good Stuff

The beginning of the game was probably pretty difficult to design. It has to kind of feel like the old game, also it has to have easy stuff that's like the beginning of the old game so new players know wtf is going on mechanics-wise. It also has to introduce some sort of story and tell us where and when (and who!) we are, relative to the last game. I think it succeeded on all these fronts. Another A grade.

The end (not like the last minute, I mean the last 20% or something) has to put together stuff we learned and give challenges that are more complex than the earlier ones. There's a lot of mechanics here, so it might have been hard to figure out just how to put these together for us in the last several puzzles. I think this was done very well, too.

Subtractive Design is Needed

What's the damn problem then? Everything sounds pretty great! Well, there are three things. The first is that there's this pretty long middle section of the game that kind of throws away what is good about Portal. Instead of small environments where you can portal off of almost anything, it's large environments where you can portal off of almost nothing. These environments look great, so whoever implemented them did a great job, but their very existence makes for a worse experience, in my opinion. Sometimes these parts felt more like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle of just finding the tiny thing that I'm allowed to shoot a portal on.

One designer raised the point, "Whether the environment is large with few portable surfaces or small with many portable surfaces, it's solving a puzzle either way. In both cases, there is usually going to be one correct solution to the puzzle, so does the objection really matter?"

We were all quick to say, "Yes, it matters." The best articulation of this point was that in a small room with nearly all portable surfaces, you are surrounded by choices that are wrong. It takes thinking to figure out what would be a right thing to do. But the feeling is not the same in a large environment with very few portable surfaces. There, you have very few choices and you can solve a puzzle by performing the only real legal moves, not even knowing exactly why it worked. Sometimes not really having to think about it.

Why do these large areas even exist at all? My guess is that there was an executive decision to sell a boxed $60 game, and that game design should just figure out what to do. I hope I'm wrong in that guess. A more sensible approach would be to make the best game possible, and sell it for whatever price made sense. At $60, I am guessing Valve thought people needed to feel a more grandiose experience. And further, that the game needed to be at least a certain length and a series of small test rooms would feel too monotonous for $60's worth of length, whatever that means. So to vary the experience, maybe they thought, "What if you could portal around a Half-Life-like environment?!" Nice idea maybe, but I think some subtractive design would have removed that, for the better. There's something pleasing about the idea that the Portal 1 world is all portable, except for specifically marked black material. The long middle section of Portal 2 teaches us that any old random material is not portable, only the white texture is portable. It just feels sad, like it's not following through with the really bold concept of "if you can portal off everything, how is there still a game?" Portal 1 answers that, but Portal 2 is like afraid to fully embrace it during this middle section.

Objection 2

The above was my strong objection. There were two other objections by other designers. One was that the game is just too easy. I hadn't thought much about that, but when he said that...yeah it did seem pretty easy overall. You could say the market has spoken, and they want easy games. That's not a very satisfying answer to me though. A game like Rez shows how it can be hard (score attack, trying to get 100% shot-down), easy, or even zero difficulty with "traveling" mode. What if I wanted a harder Portal 2? Why can't I have that?

I'll tell you why I can't have it. Because if a puzzle is too hard, it will stop all progression. There is no way around it, given the structure of the game. I think this is where Portal can learn something from Braid. Braid faced that same design problem, but it had a different solution. In Braid, you can progress past a puzzle you're stuck on, you can just skip it basically. Maybe something will click for you later, and you'll go back and finish it (you want credit for all those puzzle pieces after all!). This type of structure allows the designer to make harder puzzles and get away with it. I kind of wish Portal 2 had done this.

Objection 3

This brings us to the last objection I heard, and it's the most subtle one. The objection is that Portal 2's underlying goal is sort of the wrong one. The design goal appears to be to give the player that "aha!" moment (ok, great) but to not care too much about how he got there. The claim is that a better goal would be to primarily care about the transmission of an idea from the designer to the player. This is a pretty interesting point, so let's look at what's really being said here, and how it differs in Braid and in Portal.

Jonathan Blow has said publicly several times that Braid is not about making the hardest possible puzzle. He isn't afraid of having a hard puzzle, and as we discussed earlier, giving the player a way to skip a puzzle, keep going, then come back later allows the puzzles to be harder than they'd be allowed to be in a strictly linear game. Anyway, he says the point is to have INTERESTING puzzles, which is a different concept than hard ones. Braid is trying to communicate ideas about time to the player. When a new mechanic is introduced, the puzzle is usually something that makes the player realize the logical consequences of whatever time-thing is going on. By realizing that, the player can solve the puzzle.

Let's go back to Portal now, and use some more concrete examples. One of the very first things in both Portal 1 and Portal 2 is situation where you see the orange portal in front of you, on the other side of a pit. You have the blue portal gun, but not the orange gun. (Or maybe you do have the orange one in the Portal 2 version of this, I forget). Ok so you shoot a blue portal right next to you and this lets you come out the orange portal, on the other side of the pit. Yay!

But now there's a left turn and another pit between you and the way out. The very first moment I saw this in Portal 1, there was a split second where I thought, "Ok, so I need the orange portal gun." I was thinking that I just came out of an orange portal, so I need to put an orange one on the far wall. But of course after just a moment, I realized that's not true. All I need is the blue portal gun because I can go *in* the orange portal I just came *out* of and it will lead to the room's exit as long as I put a new blue portal past the second pit.

Another way of describing this is that in this moment, I learned the concept of using one central portal to go in and out of, while you move the position of the "satellite" portal. This is almost too easy of a concept to write so much about, but it's an example of the right kind of thing. I don't think this first "puzzle" had any challenge whatsoever, but it caused me to think something and understand something, so it was a very good thing to have in the game.

A more complicated example is concept of momentum through a portal. At some point, Portal 1 shows you that if you put a portal way down at the bottom of a pit and fall into it, then you can come out of some other portal somewhere else really fast. Maybe fast enough to fly across some other pit. Again, that puzzle isn't really about it being hard, it's about communicating that idea to me. That idea is a tool, and I can now use that tool in my arsenal as I progress through the game.

Portal 2 does have moments like this, but I almost think they are a side-effect rather than the entire point of the game design. There are so many other moments that are more like shooting around at whatever available where's-waldo surface, and somehow progressing. Progressing in a situation like this can be "wow, it worked!" and it seems Valvle polished up those moments to be all they can be. But "wow, it worked!" is just not the same depth of experience as "wow, I get it now!" Portal 2 does have those moments, but I think it has way too many of the "wrong" kind of wow.

To put it another way, I felt Braid was trying to educate me, in a way. Portal 2 seems more concerned with entertaining me. Being an entertainment product, it's hard to fault a game for being entertaining, but the worst parts just feel...more shallow or something than the experience from the education moments. In both Braid AND Portal 2, the education moments are are very satisfying, so it seems that should have been more of the goal.

Despite all these complaints, I still recommend the game. It's highly polished, has great mechanics, and is...well...entertaining.

Men and Women

This is an interesting paper about the differences between men and women. You might set aside some time to read it.

It addresses the delicate point that there seem to be more men of ability in some areas (science, Chess, genre-creators in music, etc) with a much more plausible explanation than the conspiracy theory that throughout all cultures and times, men have kept women down. The author explains that the entire notion of "men vs. women" is a screwed up way to look at it, and that the actual evolutionary issue is "groups (that contain men and women) vs. other groups (that also contain men and women)."

The author suggests three main reasons we see such a disproportionate number of men at the top of so many fields. My summary is as follows:

1) Nature plays dice much more with men than women. Men are at the top of a lot of things, and they are also at the very bottom of a lot of things. Most people in prison are men. Even with height, it varies more with men in BOTH directions (meaning there are a lot of men way shorter than the male average, moreso than women way shorter than the female average). Though there appear to be more men at the top levels of IQ, there are more men at the BOTTOM levels as well. In the set of people who are mentally retarded, the more severe the case, the more likely the person is to be male, and below a certain point, it's basically all male. Though the average in IQ and many other things can be the same in both sexes, it's males nature takes chances on and ends up with more extremes in both directions. Also, I thought his notes about how deceptive the stats for minimum wage and grade point averages were interesting.

2) Evolutionarily, men need to stand out. The author presents a staggering statistic about how many of our ancestors are female as opposed to male. Twice as many are female! Although half the people who have ever lived were female, that's not the same stat. 80% of females who have lived passed on their genes (passing on genes means "ancestor" here), while only 40% of the men who have lived passed on theirs. Men are in a tough situation, and would do well to separate themselves from the pack, perhaps by accumulating wealth or power or skills, or something. The author says the number of times a group of 100 women have gotten together to build a ship to sail to far-off-lands is basically never, though men have done this many times throughout history. If you have an 80% chance of reproducing, it's just a better strategy to play it more safe and pick amongst the many men who are available to you. No need to build a ship or conquer some other land. And so evolution gave men a REASON to peruse all the crazy things they do, and to be passionate about them. To put it another way, the set of women geniuses who are just as able to be great at science as men contains fewer who WANT to devote themselves to such things.

3) Men's "relationship spheres" are different than women's. Women care about deep 1-on-1 relationships, and lucky for us, this has allowed our species to actually survive. Having families and raising young is pretty central to carrying on the species, so this preference of women's is not "worse." Quite the contrary, it's mission critical. Men's preference is to have a larger sphere of more shallow relationships. If you look at violence in the home, women actually commit it more. If you look at violence amongst "shallow relationships" such as going to the mall and getting into a knife fight, men commit it radically more. In each case, it's just the sphere that gender cares about more.

While the woman's sphere has allowed us to perpetuate the species, it has mostly stayed the same over the centuries. But the men's sphere is what enables science, trade, corporations, and so on. The men's sphere over time allows a culture to accumulate knowledge, wealth, and power. When your group of men+women is competing against other groups of men+women, your group is going to be in great shape if the women are great at their sphere (necessary for survival) and the men are great at theirs (not necessary for survival, but bring power to your group overall).

Given these three points, it's not hard to imagine that most CEOs (and even Chess players) would be men, even if the average intelligence of a man is exactly the same as for a woman (which is does appear to be). I know it's a delicate subject, but I think the author does a great job of not even mentioning any morals about what "should be," only looking at what is, and explaining how evolutionary forces created these specializations. To any particular man or woman who wants to excell at the other's stereotypical sphere: go ahead! Anyway, if you have comments, better to aim them at what the paper says, rather than my imperfect summary.

Mac OS X Lion

Apple's new operating system, OS X 10.7 Lion came out yesterday. Today I got a new Macbook Air that comes with Lion, and my first impression is that it seems like a computer from the future or something. It's so slim and light, so solidly constructed--the body carved out of a single piece of aluminum. The "just works" concept really did "just work." The computer comes with a fully charged battery, and about 15 seconds after opening it for the first time, it was ready. I got on the net and could access the files on my other local computers and also print, without having to do any setup. Not caring about pritner drivers, sound drivers, video drivers, and no need for anti-virus software.

The new OS has a lot of changes. I haven't followed it that closely until now, and I'm kind of surprised how wide and deep these changes are, on both a technical level and usability level. Regarding UI, practically every UI element in the OS is slightly different now. It's all slightly more understated with less color, less contrast, and less contour on just about everything. The idea being to let content stand out more and UI elements be as low key as possible. I think it worked out. Here's one page of a arstechnica's absurdly long review that covers that:

You can also read about the new document model and process model from that same review. The short version is that you never click "save" on anything in iOS (which is great, I never ever said "if only I had to click save more often on my iPad"), and now Lion is moving toward that model as well. Fairly sophisticated auto-save combined with automatic document versioning means the computer keeps track of that for you. The author of that review mentions something that is a very real problem to me: you want to restart or logoff and there are a billion things open, all of them asking if you want to save changes or not. Half the time I don't know if the changes it's asking about are the ones I really did, or if I accidentally deleted some selected text and that's what I'd be saving, or what. Lion's new direction means logging off doesn't bombard you with any such questions, it's very fast, and can all be restored to just how you left it. At least with programs that support these features (Dear Adobe: get on it). The process model is also playing tricks, basically managing memory of programs better than I could manually, and giving the impression that programs sometimes open instantly.

The thing that interests me the most in Lion, at least so far, is the UI (or UX) involving Spaces and Expose, both features that existed in the previous OS, Leopard. These (along with Quicklook) are some of the best things about the OS from a usability standpoint, in my opinion. Expose lets you see all your windows at once, so you can find the one you need. It's like a way better version of alt-tabbing. I use it dozens of times per day. Spaces lets you have other virtual desktops that you can switch between. I use it over 100 times per day. In Lion, these features are integrated into a new thing called Mission Control.

Three finger swipe up (or 4 finger if you prefer that setting) gets you to Mission Control. It's basically a super Expose. Not only does it zoom out to show you all your windows, but it also organizes them by app, and shows the icon and name of the app those windows belong to. It zooms out enough that you can see "beyond" the desktop, and above it is a horizontal bar that shows all your desktops, the ones from the Spaces feature. You can swipe 3 fingers left or right while on a desktop to go to the next or previous desktop space. If you're in Mission Control (so you swiped up to get there) you can 3 finger swipe left or right from there to see the Mission Control (Expose) view of each desktop.

There's a lot of new support for making apps full screen now, and if you make an app full screen then it automatically gets its own space. The way the app animates to do this and the way the desktop underneath slides away as it does create a clear visual message to the user about what exactly is happening, so good job on that. It's helpful that this happens in the first place because if you didn't get a new Space when making something full screen, you'd just be covering everything else up. Oh, and if you press the escape key, a full screen app returns to the space it was previously in and automatically deletes the space it created as it went full screen. Very nice.

Snow Leopard added a feature to Expose that let you use it JUST for the windows of a particular app if you want. So that let's you see all your Safari windows (across all desktop Spaces) or whatever, without seeing any of your other stuff. That gives you a clearer view of the windows for a particular app, if you're looking for something. Oh and you can press spacebar to Quicklook from here to zoom in on a window, just like you can press space bar on basically any document to see what's in it without opening it with a real program. Anyway, I bring this up because now swiping down with three fingers from the desktop gives you THAT kind of Expose, the one that shows all the windows of whichever app had focus when you did the motion.

To summarize, if you're on a desktop, you can swipe left/right to get to other desktops. Swipe up to get to mission control (super Expose!). Swipe down to get back to a desktop. Swipe down from a desktop to get application-specific Expose. The whole thing is really slick, fast, and makes me feel like I can do as much work as if I had a couple extra monitors. A couple extra real monitors would be even better, but having the ability to organize and manage several monitor's worth of stuff on just one physical monitor is quite a thing, especially in a < 3 pound, extremely light and portable computer. It's really interesting to see how they approached the design challenge of letting the user manage all these windows and desktops, how the corner cases are handled, how the animations and UI are carefully chosen to tell the user the "right" things about what's going on. Even though it's not a video game, the same kind of design issues still apply, so I think designers would do well to closely and carefully study such polished UIs as this.

The Theory and Practice of Happiness

The subject I've researched the most and written about the least is the happiness. Instead of putting off the version of this that reads like a research paper with sources cited and so on, I will just tell you a rambling story. And for full disclosure, my own level of happiness from 1 to 10 is about a 7. I am currently below the US's average answer of 7.4. (Note that Switzerland, Iceland, and Denmark are all above 8.0 averages).

A Crash Course in Happiness

For 100 years, the field of psychology was concerned with fixing problems in people, and the study of "happiness" was considered not a topic worthy of study. You couldn't even say the word happiness in an academic paper, you instead needed a jargony term: "positive affect." In more recent times, we now know that happiness is NOT the absence of misery. The absence of misery is being kind of neutral at best. People who have misery can simultaneously be very happy, even (more on that in a bit). The point is, even though last century's psychology was highly successful at curing various mental ailments, we now know that actual happiness requires more than that.

Happiness is in many ways a trap. It's evolutionary biology's way of making sure we keep going, and keep seeking. That is why happiness is so elusive; by its very design in our brains, it's something out there beyond our reach, something to strive for. Those of our ancient ancestors that were completely satisfied with what they had were less likely to go over that next hill in search of the greener grass and more resources, and thus less likely to win the competition of survival of the fittest.

Money is a big trap for many. One of the most consistent findings in this field is that money has zero correlation to happiness, except for the poorest people in the world. If getting more money will help you meet your basic biological needs for food, water, and shelter, then yes it will make you more happy. Beyond that, it won't, but it damned sure seems like it would, doesn't it? There's a corollary here that is especially relevant to American culture. Americans tend to work more hours than workers in other countries. Let's say you make enough money that you live comfortably. You get an opportunity for a promotion at work which means more responsibility, more hours, and more money. We are conditioned to believe this is a no-brainer of a choice: of course you take the promotion because more money is more happiness. But it isn't. If the job would be more personally fulfilling to you APART from the money, it could increase your happiness. But if it's not, then you're trading away more of your personal time in exchange for money that won't make you happier. You'd actually be happier if you worked LESS, rather than more, if it's a job that you aren't passionate about. 

More money lets you buy more material goods. A new TV would be nice. And a new clothes. And a new car, and so on. When you get that awesome new TV, the awesomeness of it wears off after a short time. You are going to be very bad at predicting that ahead of time (we all are). You're bad at predicting how much happier the TV will make you and for how long, at how a political election will affect your happiness, at how the death of a family member will affect you, your favorite sports team losing, winning the lottery, and just about anything else. In all these cases, the feeling you predict may very well become real, but it lasts a much shorter time than you would expect. The TV becomes just another thing very quickly. You bounce back from the death of a loved one, even if takes a month or a year, but when it happens the sadness seems like it will be permanent. One study compares the happiness levels of people who won the lottery with people who became paraplegics (can't use their legs) because of an accident. Although right after these events, the happiness levels are what you would expect, after one or two years they level out to be exactly the same across both groups. Yes, really.

The term "hedonic treadmill" is

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