When the Pattern Leaps Out

The trick to Portal 2 community chambers is to make needless complication look clever and obvious in retrospect.

The computer game Portal 2 is a three-dimensional puzzle game that relies heavily on a well-established physics. The player's character has a portal gun, which allows the player to create two linked wormholes on solid surfaces and pass from one to the other. As you pass through, you maintain your momentum, but gravity acts differently on your body, so you can do a variety of interesting things with these facts alone: you can launch yourself great distances by leaping from a raised platform onto a lower horizontally-placed portal which is linked to a portal on a vertical surface. Gravity increases your momentum on this side of the portal; on the side of the portal gravity now starts pulling you in a direction orthogonal to your trajectory, but momentum carries you pretty far. However, there are a number of other devices in the puzzle chambers with you: lasers and laser catchers (which can trigger other devices), bridges made of solid light, lethal turrets with friendly and forgiving artificial intelligences, platforms on moving pistons, and so on. (Sixty Symbols has some videos about the Portal physics.) There is a single-player narrative arc (which is excellent, but I won't get into it here) and a cooperative narrative arc (which I haven't played), but what I want to discuss is are the community test chambers: players can design their own stand-alone chambers and allow others to play them.

Screenshot of part of the solution to one of the puzzles in the Portal 2 game.

Although the portals, gravity, momentum, and whatnot are all functionally analogue, the other gadgets are often binary. They are either on or they are off. Triggers are either triggered or not. A laser stream is either obstructed or it isn't. And most devices can be triggered by another device: light bridges can be switched off, swinging panels can be opened or closed, moving platforms can be activated or deactivated. These consequences are also all binary. As a consequence, you can make elaborate systems with these devices.

You could, for example, make a computer.

You couldn't make a terribly fancy computer. You have a limit to the number of devices you can place in a chamber. But user TtHsa-1 has made a computer. First, some background. TtHsa-1 has always made interesting systems: for instance, in Test Cycle - Concept the player can place a weighted cube on a button, which triggers a series of reactions that ultimately remove the cube from the button and then puts a new weighted cube on the button, starting the system over again.

That chamber is the one that got my attention because I was working on a similar chamber at the time: having seen this video about iodine clocks, I wanted to make a Portal 2 chamber that repeated itself but with some remainder that eventually absorbed the entire process. In other words, I was planning on making a cycling process which degraded with each cycle. But I could not figure it out; what I did figure out in the meantime was how to make a puzzle which ran in part on an automated system. Unlike TtHsa-1's, mine started automating as soon as you entered the room. (It involves a system I just called "the engine," which involves buttons, weighted cubes, and tractor beams.) Once the cycle begins, the chamber has two states which alternate automatically, and the player needs to learn what each states looks like and incorporate those states, and their alternation, in her solutions to the puzzle.

So I was surprised to see TtHsa-1 working on a similar project, though he makes systems, as I said, and not puzzles. But then he started working in another direction: logic gates. With the devices Portal 2 provides, logic gates are actually fairly easy to make, though some of them are device-expensive. And TtHsa-1 must be far cleverer than I am, at least about this sort of thing, because he made then made a 6-bit adding machine. It's pretty slick: you get twelve cubes and two rows of six buttons. Each row represents a line of binary, so you can make two numbers by placing the cubes on the buttons: a pressed button is a 1 and an unpressed button is a 0. The output display is on the wall, made of seven flipping panels: the black (unportable) side of each panel is a 0 and the white (portable) side of each panel is 1. Yet again, it reads as a line of binary. Between the buttons and the panels is a very complicated system of lasers and laser catchers which make the necessary logic gates.

TtHsa-1's chambers are very clever and they're also quite clean and beautiful. And I appreciate all of those qualities in a puzzle, so much so that most of my pleasure comes from those qualities. But there's something his systems don't have that puzzles do: the retroactive delight of finding out that a complicated system makes sense after all. A good puzzle is much like a detective story: what appeared to be meaningless unconnected pieces are in fact coherent, but only once that coherence is discovered. It's the moment the pattern leaps out at me, in its cleverness and efficiency and beauty, that I really love. The fact that I worked for the pattern helps on a psychological level, I'm sure. Some of these puzzles are very relaxing, because the pieces just sort of fall in place as I interact with them; others are much harder and require quite a lot of mental modelling in order to work out what I'm going to do before I start doing it. I enjoy both, but with the first kind I enjoy the creator's cleverness, while with the second kind I get to enjoy the creator's cleverness while also feeling clever myself. TtHsa-1's systems can't offer any element of the latter, though it offers quite a lot of the former pleasure.

I've been trying to think of ways to use his inventions in a puzzle. The most obvious is to create a 6-bit calculator and then hook up the exit to a particular answer, which you can show (in Arabic numbers) on the ceiling. But I've tinkering with a set of rooms which rely on manipulating the logic gates, or actually the same logic gate over and over again; the final room would require you to have figured out how the logic gate works, because you would have to build one using movable pieces. It's...not going so well.

Two parting, not entirely related, thoughts:

1. The devices are nice and fun, but some of the best puzzles hinge on something obvious but easy to forget. For instance, a lot of nice puzzles mostly use devices throughout, but the final stage requires you to remember that gravity exists, or that nothing can pass through solid objects. In fact, I find that when I design puzzles I often forget that gravity is an element of the puzzle which I can incorporate into my design. Sightlines are also an important part of puzzle design.

2. I really like puzzle designs in which the same chamber involves multiple puzzles, where the different puzzles use the same pieces. For instance, one of mine has four chambers, in succession; you must solve each on its own to get to the next one, but when you solve the final rooms you then have access to all of the rooms and must solve a final puzzle which involves elements of all four rooms. Since I like four-room chambers, I'm also thinking of making a kishotenketsu-based puzzle which repeats the same kind of puzzle in the first two rooms, uses a whole different design philosophy/puzzle type in the third room, and blends the two in the fourth. (I hear this is what the makers of the Mario games did.)

Multiculturalism in the Monster Kingdom: Part II

Majesty 2’s Monsterculturalism

As I said in the first post, Majesty 2’s third and final expansion was called The Monster Kingdom, and this expansion let you play as the monsters rather than as the humans (and elves and dwarves). Not only did that excite me to no end, but I found the narrative even more compelling than I had anticipated.

Monster Kingdom begins with the Conclave of High Priests stealing the Crown of Ardania, using it to summon the legendary Spirit of Kings, and storming the palace. The Sovereign—that is, the player’s avatar—is smuggled out of the palace thanks to the quick thinking of the Adviser—the Sean Connery-esque narrative voice of the game—but the Conclave succeeds in installing the Spirit of Kings on the throne as their puppet. In order to find safety and muster an army to reclaim your throne, the Adviser forges an alliance with a tribe of goblins. Thus your quest to return to power begins by reconciling with your former enemies. As you reclaim territory and build up an army (and the infrastructure to sustain it), you must gain the trust of other goblin tribes and incorporate other creatures into your polity: liches, minotaurs, werewolves, koatls. Often you must undo actions you had completed in the previous games; in order to win the liches to your side, you must help resurrect an especially powerful lich that you had killed previously, and in order to recruit the minotaurs, you must destroy the ancient defense towers you helped Baron Pampa rebuild—towers which forced the minotaurs out of the area and prevented their access to ancestral territory.

What is interesting about this narrative is that all parties are changed by it. It is not only about how the humans' long dominance came to an end, but also how the monsters were brought together into a single polity—the eponymous Monster Kingdom. The goblins are now organized in a way more reminiscent of human than goblin culture, after all, since you run the kingdom the same way you ran your human one. Minotaurs now adventure with liches and ratmen. And the end of the game promises to involve integrating the human kingdom with your monster kingdom, once you get the Conclave under control. Grum-Gog’s shamans would have a place on that Conclave, and one of the liches’ demands before joining your cause was that you reserve for them three seats on the Council of Archmages. The minotaurs had their own demands, too, most of which involved a recognition of minotaur culture. Unfortunately, that is where the game ends; I assume we do not get to see what happens when humans and monsters are made to live in one kingdom. (I have not finished the game yet, so I cannot be sure.) But even prior to this it is clear that you are forging a new culture, a mix of human, gnome, goblin, ratman, lich, minotaur, koatl, and werewolf influences.

I am, alas, overstating the degree to which the game presents this cultural development. For one, there is little sense that the Sovereign and what remains of his human court really value anything the monsters offer except their military force: there is a running joke that the goblins’ pumpkin-based cuisine is unappetizing, and the way the game presents the minotaur demands suggest that they might be a joke about political correctness. (I actually think the things the minotaurs ask for are great: they want one of their holidays officially recognized, they want cultural centres and museums that attest to the fact that they have a civilization of their own, and, most interesting of all, they want a human legend re-written so that it no longer represents minotaurs are wild and bestial. I love that last one, because it actually demands that the other races change how they understand the minotaurs; however, it could also be a joke at the expense of feminist or anti-racist retellings of legends, fairy tales, and history.) And there isn’t much sense that the monsters change in response to one another, either. Ratmen seem to have little to no impact on the kingdom’s culture, despite being a part of it from the very beginning. Other than the fact that all of your heroes are equipped with goblin or human goods, there is little sense that they are learning new skills (or lifeways) from each other. Rather, they are living side-by-side in the same community, they have found a place for themselves within the goblin/human political and economic structure, and that structure has accommodated them, but they remain otherwise unaffected by their new-found proximity, even when you’ve assigned goblins and ratmen and werewolves all to the same party. Were is the minotaur who decided to become a shaman? Were is the gnome who decided he could be a hero rather than a labourer or guard? An why are the fire elementals, who show some signs of sentience, not volunteering to join the Monster Kingdom?

The only instance of one monster race adopting the lifestyle, values, or technologies of another race comes in the option to upgrade Ratman Robbers to Paladins to Grum-Gog. The story goes that the paladins of Daurus went underground as missionaries to the ratmen, but it seemed that their words fell on rocky soil. Some years later, however, humans began encountering the Paladins to Grum-Gog; it turns out that the ratmen had no interest in Dauros, but they were impressed by the idea of a paladin, and applied that idea to their own god, instead. Except it’s interesting to note that Grum-Gog is not, exactly, the ratmen's god; at least as established in the original Majesty, which Majesty 2 occasionally references as its own past, Grum-Gog is explicitly the goblins' god. Not only have the ratmen adopted a human type of religious specialist, but they have applied it to a goblin god. However, all of this occurs before the development of the Monster Kingdom. We do not get to see any of this syncretism or religious inculturation within the timespan of the game. Each race is for the most part content to live in the same community, but not in the same way, as the other monsters.

Of course this is a common way of thinking about multiculturalism, at least in Canada: there is one core or standard cultural framework, which is willing to accommodate other cultures, so long as those cultures are willing to fit within that framework. So, English or French culture makes the framework, and other cultures must fit into it. But the framework-cultures are also understood as flexible (after all, in its secularism it can accommodate the others) and evolving (it is the culture that drives technological development and social reform). The other cultures do not, in the multicultural imagination, evolve; they are time-bound, old-fashioned, traditional; they are relics. Members of those other cultures (other races, that is) are allowed to practice their time-bound cultures, we have allowed them to do that, but if they want to move forward, they had better adopt parts of the mainstream, dominant, evolving culture. The problem with this vision, of course, is that all cultures change and evolve, borrowing from one another and developing their own forms; no culture is locked in time, except and unless social governmental structures lock them in time. (I am drawing from Thobani’s argument in Exalted Subjects here.)

The way Wade Davis describes cultures in The Wayfinders seems relevant here: people have a finite amount of intellectual/creative resources (time, energy, material goods, and capital), and any use of these resources is a kind of investment. Different cultures have invested in different things, at first as a response to the physical environment and then in response to both the physical environment and the social environment that has developed. You wouldn’t go to the Polynesian wayfinders if you wanted brain surgery, he writes, but if you knew what you were doing you would go to the wayfinders before going to Westerners if you wanted to sail the ocean. Cultures are specialized, he is arguing, and they contain specialized knowledge that other cultures do not contain. When cultures come into contact, the people of those cultures would do well to learn from one another rather than engage in cultural conflict or, as in multiculturalism, build cultural siloes.

I’m not seeing, in Monster Kingdom, how the monsters are learning from one another, and I’m absolutely not seeing how the humans learn from the monsters. I think I know why this is: the game developers do not want to change the political and economic structure because they do not want players to have to learn to play a new game on top of familiarizing themselves with new units. RTSs with different kinds of units work best if those units fit in rigid, distinct niches; if they started learning from one another, these niches might start to erode. And more importantly, they need these units to be visually distinct, so it might be confusing if some of the archers you recruited were ratmen rather than goblins. While it would still be possible to make the game that I want without compromising on these practical necessities, I don’t think most players would care one way or another, so the developers have no incentive to make that game. But still, there is an interesting story about the formation of a new culture, maybe even a new kind of culture, and I would like to see that developed more. I would like to see the monsters learn from each other; I would like to see the humans learn from the monsters.

And before anyone else says it, yes, I know the answer to my problem is fan fiction.

Multiculturalism in the Monster Kingdom: Part I

Race, Religion, and Culture in Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Simulator

This two-part informal essay was written to be one post, but it wound up far too long, so I have  broken it into two parts. This first part will simply explain the mechanics of the computer games I will discuss, and why they appealed to me; if you are familiar with both Majesty and Majesty 2, I imagine you could skip right to Part II, though it might be good for you to read this one if you want to know how I am framing them for discussion.

Paradox Interactive’s Majesty 2 is the sequel to Cyberlore’s Majesty: the Fantasy Kingdom Simulator; the first Majesty was my favourite game for most of my life and still ranks in at least the top three. Both games are real-time strategy games (RTSs), putting you in the role of the Sovereign of a kingdom in a fantasy world called Ardania. You can order the construction of buildings and the research of improved technology. You can recruit heroes to defend your kingdom and enforce your decrees. You can set tax and building repair policies. You can commission spells from local temples and wizard’s guilds. As Sovereign, you attempt to complete quest, which usually involves building up a settlement, earning gold, and, invariably, trying to rout out the enemy monsters and defend your village against dragons, ratmen, goblin hordes, and the like.

What sets the Majesty games apart from other RTSs, however, is that you cannot directly control your heroes; instead, you can try to motivate their behaviour using reward flags (in the original, only Attack and Explore flags; the sequel adds Defend and Avoid flags), providing them with equipment, and constructing specific buildings which promote certain behaviours. You also carefully choose which heroes to recruit: Warriors tend to be stalwart and aggressive; Rogues are cowardly but highly motivated by gold, and also tend to steal from you; Rangers prefer to explore above all else and will; Paladins are stubborn and tend to take on foes well out of their league. (If you can’t tell, the franchise draws heavily from D&D.) These quirky, flawed, endearingly predictable, and frustratingly autonomous heroes are the heart of the game; the storylines leave much to be desired, but that’s usually fine given the minor dramatics your heroes will be getting into spontaneously.

In the original Majesty, there were three non-human races[1] you could recruit—elves, dwarves, and gnomes—but since elves and dwarves shared a mutual enmity, and neither of them cared for gnomes, you would have to choose only one. Which you chose would have an effect on your whole settlement, since if you chose dwarves, you could then defend your settlement with much superior defense towers; if you chose elves, your economy would grow but gambling halls and elven “lounges” (thinly veiled brothels) would pop up; and if you chose gnomes, slums would appear. In a subtle but important way, which non-human race you chose would influence your settlement’s culture, both cosmetically (lots of blue-tiled roofs if you choose elves) and mechanically (everything will be in good repair if you choose the handy gnomes).

And there was more: you could build temples to the assorted deities of Ardania, but these gods (and their followers) had a complex set of alliances and rivalries which meant that by building certain temples, you prevent yourself from building some of the others. For example, if you build a Temple to Dauros, god of law and commerce, or a Temple to Agrela, goddess of life, you can no longer build a Temple to Fervus, god of chaos and nature, or a Temple to Krypta, goddess of death. Again, your selections have subtle impacts on the culture of your settlement, both in flavour and mechanics. For instance, if you go with Krypta and Fervus, your settlement will likely be swarming with packs of charmed vargs (wolves) and rats thanks to Fervus’s cultists, and protected by mobs of skeletons thanks to Krypta’s priestesses.

Majesty 2 did not keep these mutual exclusions; instead, it limited the number of Temples you can build, in order to keep the need to choose between them, and it programed rivalry and hostility into the characters’ own decisions: paladins will attack a friendly priestess’s skeleton bodyguards, for instance. In addition, you can assign your heroes to adventuring parties, which stay together until you re-assign the heroes to new parties; there is an art to putting together a successful party, and part of the fun is pairing up mutually antagonistic characters together. I do not know how I feel about the change: on the one hand, you do still need to be deliberate about which temples you build, and it is fun to make dwarves and elves go a-Viking together; on the other hand, you settlement does not gain the same unique culture depending on your choice of temple. I miss the sense of custom-building local character depending on your navigation of these alliances and rivalries. (I suppose, in a way, what I liked about this RTS is that it had an element of an RPG to it: you could customize your kingdom by your choice of temples and non-humans much as you can customize your character in an RPG by whatever choices such a game offered. Majesty 2 loses some of that.)

Enter the Monster Kingdom expansion. This expansion was, in a lot of ways, exactly the game I had been day-dreaming of for years, for the simple reason that it lets you play as the monsters: your heroes are goblins, ratmen, minotaurs, and liches, not humans, dwarves, elves, and gnomes. (It wasn’t quite the game I dreamt of, only because the cosmetic change between Majesty and Majesty 2 meant the goblins I could play as were not quite the same goblins as in the original game, the ratmen weren’t quite the same ratmen as in the original, and so on. But close enough.) But in some ways it was more than I had been hoping for, in that the narrative frame holding the expansion together was far more interesting than what I would have written.

I will deal with that in a second post.

---

[1] I have a lot of trouble with this use of “race” in fantasy fiction and gaming, but I’m going to keep using it because Majesty uses it. If I had my druthers, the word we’d use would be “species.”

Playing as a Critic

I have recently been amused by Scott Alexander's Dungeons and Discourse game, based on Dresden Codak's fictional RPG of the same name. D&Dis is an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, set in a fantasy universe in which a person's philosophy can manifest in the world in the form of spells. It is full of philosophy references and has a fairly interesting mechanics system (says the person who reads up on RPGs but doesn't actually play them...). There are some misrepresentations in the system--as you might predict, I thought Protestantism was poorly represented, but hey! it's a joke--but I was amused. (Thanks, Leah, for the introduction.)

So amused, in fact, that I decided to write up a whole new class for the game based on my former discipline, literary theory and criticism. After all, this is technically Dungeons and Discourse, not Dungeons and Philosophy, and "theory," as we usually call it, is part of discourse. Furthermore, literary theory seems to me closer to what we think of philosophy than science--which gets a class--is, especially since critical theory has begged, borrowed, and stolen from Continental philosophy (a trait I tried to represent in the mechanics).

However, when I wrote the class spells, I had fundamentally misunderstood how class levels worked, so it is now dreadfully unbalanced in the Critic's favour. Or I presume so; since I haven't had a play-through there is no way to tell.

I wanted to have you download the document as a PDF, but I could not figure out how to do it. In the meantime, it is here.

Gamers who are Gay

I recently found this blog: http://vorpalbunnyranch.com/. It concerns the intersection of gender and sexuality studies on the one hand and gaming on the other. To my knowledge, this is far from the only blog to do so. If you don't see me for a few days, I got lost in the Internet again.

7 Quick Takes

1. I've been moving the last couple of days (and will still be in the midst of getting my stuff together in the coming days). If you've been noticing a marked absence in posting, this is partly why. I'm moving from a basement suite into an apartment of my own. This will be the first time I'll have my own place, no roommates, no housemates, no shared accom.

2. I have purchased and played Portal. I realize that I'm at least a half-decade behind on this, but I'm happy I finally did get caught up. I very much enjoyed it. Part of what interests me about it is that the game is (relatively) non-violent, at least in so far as you get shot at but you don't do any shooting. It's puzzle-based with a simple, stream-lined story. (In this case, I'd say it's simple in a good way.) Also, the gimmick the game is built around--that you can make linked portals on surfaces that you can travel through--is a lot of fun, in that it requires a slight tweak to your regular spacial reasoning.

And speaking of computer games, I think you might want to look at this trailer. The genre is squarely cyberpunk and has all of the conventions of it, but I'm interested in how it indicates a change in how computer games are marketed. I've fallen out of that world for a little while and I don't want to make unfair generalizations, but story and theme seem increasingly valued. Maybe Tycho at Penny Arcade exaggerates a little in his assessment of how philosophical this product is, but I think we are headed somewhere where his panygeric is not an exaggeration. (Though, given his writing style, I imagine he would up the ante as well and continue to overstate.) (And maybe he doesn't exaggerate. I've never played the game. And I may have unrealistically high expecations for theoretical questioning, since that is what my career seems to be right now.)

3. I visited a Buddhist temple. Not with the intent of converting, mind you, but of just looking and learning and (hopefully) taking photographs. However, no one there at the time was especially fluent in English, so my ability to learn things was a bit hampered by this (combined with my own lack of Mandarin, of course) and by the fact that I didn't really have any questions prepared, since I knew almost nothing about that temple before I visited. (I was lucky enough to see Pure Land displayed prominently somewhere, and to remember a little bit about the Pure Land sect from my RELS minor in undergrad.)

I was only allowed to take photographs of the exterior, but that's still pretty cool. The property is very beautiful, the interior more than the exterior, I think.

4. I have been going to David's Tea fairly often, equipping myself and my new crib, and trying new teas. I'm still a novice at this whole tea-drinking thing, and I've been meaning to find some new black teas--no fruit, no spices, no flowers--for first thing in the morning. I like the fancier teas later in the day, but first thing in the morning I like a straight black tea. Also, I got a kettle and a travel mug (with a built-in French press! what luxury!) that is wide enough for me to get my hand in to clean the bottom. This is always a problem for me with travel mugs.

Anyway, I like David's Tea because the staff are so extraordinarily friendly and helpful and chatty, and I am learning a lot about teas. Whenever I go in requesting one kind of tea, they show me others I might like based on that (and when I go back to try one of those, they show me more...).

5. At church I have been performing new liturgical roles. I am now trained to do pretty

much everything, liturgically speaking, with the exception of those things the priest does (of course). I imagine it's somewhat unorthodox for me to be doing them--I'm not even a diaconal assistant--but "somewhat unorthodox" is our modus operandi. However, as much as I am "good" at liturgy, I am increasingly reminded that no one is good at something they first start. I fumble as much as I did when I started being a server, and unfortunately those fumbles are bigger now. Still, everyone is quite nice about it.

6. I was reading Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, which is very important and theoretically originary queer literary theory/queer theory without the literary, since Sedgwick is somewhat lauded for her ability to make bridges from text to politics/practice, a move that's difficult, controversial, and otherwise fraught. However, even though I enjoyed it a lot, I found that I stalled entirely at the beginning of the final chapter and simply haven't finished it. I need to move on. I've been trying to work with Precarious Life ("how mourning and violence might [...] inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice"), but I may need to read something lighter, at least until I'm finished moving. (I did want to finish it before classes began, though.)

7. For the last few weeks, we have had only one day of rain. The grass is dying here. This is so unlike Vancouver. It has also been less than excellent for purposes of photography, though I am finding that I can get some beautiful pictures of flowers in bright sunlight, even though it's usually the case that slightly overcast is all-around better for floral photography. If you can avoid the sunflares and the terribly inconsistent light levels, though, bold sunlight makes for bold colours.