Tidbits

Magic: The Gathering is pretty much ONLY fun when done casual. Competitive play has too much overhead. This is why EDH/Commander is the best format: high creativity while encouraging a fun table atmosphere.

Tidbits

I played the character Pretty Pretty Bomb Girl Sparky in Fate Accelerated.

I punched the axioms of the math equation dictating the structure of a hyperdimension, shattering a universal fractal and returning us to our reality. And I did it with a DBZ style explosive wave while SCREAMING for five episodes.

Pokemon GO Reactions

Pokemon GO was a huge part of the summer of 2016 for me, though I'd later stop playing due to the ongoing issues it had. Here are some reactions I had as the game was being rolled out.

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Install starting! Now I shall finally be a Pokemon PROFESSOR! Muah ha ha ha!

I have to use my James voice whenever I'm on this app. And make it double!

Pokemon GO installed! Now I wait for tomorrow when they get more servers running.

Would it have killed them to adapt the English anime first opening theme for Pokemon GO?

Charmander! I shall train him until he takes his final form. A MOTHER LOVING DRAGON!

First wild catch: Pidgey. I named him Grackle. His main attack shall be "poop."

Going to hunt Pokemon at work tomorrow during lunch. I'm curious what I find. Mostly getting grass, poison, and bug types here.

Caught a Pidgey and a Taurus at work. Named the former Cock and the latter Bull. Great story there.

Two Pokestops and a gym right near where I work. Ah, yeah.

I need to remember to point my camera at something interesting when a Pokemon pops up so I can take funny screen shots.

Level 5! Joined Team Valor (Red). Going by mission statement, Team Mystic (Blue) is more my style, but red is my favorite color and that beats it.

...I'm betting the head of Mystic is a glasses girl, though. I have a feeling.

Valor is Gryffindor and Mystic is Ravenclaw. (Which has me going against type for once.)
Let's all agree that Team Instinct is the Hufflepuff.

I'd be further along with Pokemon GO if the server would stay up during my lunch hour, when I'm near two stops and a gym. I've barely been able to use either stop as is and still haven't been able to add a Pokemon to a gym yet.

When I transfer a weak Pokemon, I imagine it's going to a candy factory where it's chopped and squeezed into the free candy the Professor gives you. The strong feed on their weaker brethren to grow more powerful!

Went walking through Rutland doing Pokemon GO. Ended up in a park, met two guys. Also playing Pokemon. And they were Team Valor! Nice.

Yay, lunch time at work. So of course the Pokemon servers are down.

Servers popped back up at the end of my lunch - just in time to see the double lures put on the two nearby Pokestops. Caught quite a few, including some new ones. Also met another couple Go players who work down the road.

I found a place to order Team Rocket t-shirts online. Tempted to get one in white and black.

Climbed down into a drainage field to catch an Ekans, Eevee, and Poliwag all clustered together. Totally worth it.

First Eevee evolution: Flareon! Do I name her Sailor Mars, Phoenix, or something else?

Caught a Ghastly, then my phone died. As I was catching him, had a person drive by and shout, "Are you playing Pokemon?" Second time that's happened. Also met half a dozen players near my work now.

Not bad. Pokémon servers are staying up during my lunch now so I can hit the two nearby stops.

Blanche is trash waifu. I mean, no glasses?! Seriously?! TRAAAAASH.

That feeling when you sing the Digimon theme while evolving your Pokemon.

I don't understand how folks had Eevee evolutions over a thousand but now I'm the same level they were and only getting 500's.

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During work: Ugh, I'm on my feet. I'm in pain. Ugh. Want to sit down.

After work: Oh, the server isn't down. I'm going to walk to that gym finally!

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Tip: like Ingress, Pokemon GO can sense when you're in a car by speed. If you move 20 mph or less, it thinks you're either biking or running. Past that and it won't measure. Tested that today. Good way to level up an egg while driving slow through local streets.

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Not serious Pokemon GO questions:

1. Will Missing No. take over your phone and delete everything?
2. How many children must be stacked into a pile of corpses to summon Mew?
3. When will we have projectors that can put the Pokemon out for everyone to see?

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For those wondering why I'm into Pokemon GO when I don't normally do video games, this is easy to explain:

Pokemon GO is my first Pokemon game.

I watched the show and read the manga. In fact, I remember watching the very first episodes when it premiered on UPN on weekday afternoons - before Warner Brothers bought it. But I never got into the CCG (I did Magic) and I never owned a handheld system for the video games. This has been the first release I can play on a machine I own.

So I can happily say Charmander is my very first and only starter. Just like I always wanted as a kid.

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Serious Pokemon GO question: I have enough candy to start evolving some of my Pokemon. Should I only evolve those with the highest combat points? Does that matter? Or can I evolve whoever? 

Experiment: testing if the CP of the evolutionary antecedent Pokemon is positively correlated with the CP of the evolutionary descendant.

The test: two Pidgeys. One at CP 42 and the other at CP 10. They were both evolved to Pidgeotto with candy.

Result: The CP 42 Pidgey became a CP 80 Pidgeotto. The CP 10 Pidgey became a CP 15 Pidgeotto.

Conclusion: Assuming the CP isn't totally random, evolving a stronger Pokemon provides a stronger next stage. So strengthen them before evolving to get the best results.

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Current Charmander naming scheme:

1. Chamander - Agumon
2. Charmelon - Grimlock
3. Charizard - Godzilla

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Why Team Valor? Valor is red. In anime and sentai visual vocabulary, it means you're the LEADER. You are the Red Ranger. You wear the goggles among the DigiDestined. You are the boy who will become Hokage, and then go on to be King of the Pirates. YOUR DRILL WILL PIERCE THE HEAVENS!

That is #teamvalorlife.

"Go Team Valor!" Say this ala the Venture Bros.

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Pokémon Go algorithm right now:

1. Do not evolve Pokémon piecemeal. Do it all at once in a huge wave with a Lucky Egg in place.

2. Stockpile Pokémon to evolve. Pidgey has one of the best ratios of candy required to XP gained in the game.

3. If you can't evolve a Pokemon yet, transfer lower CP until you get there. Once you have enough, wait per step 1.

4. If you have candy to evolve more than one of the same kind, keep that number and scrap the rest. Do this until the number you can evolve increases.

5. Repeat until you can do a full 30 minutes of nothing but evolutions with a Lucky Egg. You'll get 1000 XP minimum each time. More if a new form.

Sesame Credit

I am both aghast and intrigued by this new Chinese national game system, known as Sesame Credit.

First, historical context: when Mao took over, he indoctrinated the populace into Communism using an easy to understand media for the masses - comic books. When Deng Xiaoping wanted to convert the nation to Capitalism, he used comics as well. Both instances were among the biggest examples of comics - normally a pop culture fixture - being used for something far larger scale than story telling. In this sense, China adopting game design to reinforce their national message is consistent with past mass education movements. They take what we treat as "fun" in the west and figure out how to use it in a more serious manner.

Second, personal reaction. Yeah, this is horrifying. It decentralizes oppression to the individual level. The centralization of the state's hold on people is always the greatest weakness - they simply can never be efficient enough to suppress everything. This eliminates that bottleneck and does so in a way consistent with Brave New World more than 1984. Instead of a single data stream being broadcast from the government, it turns individual citizens into mini-radio towers that broadcast and enforce the party line.

Third, and the scariest point: it could easily happen here. We have interconnected data mining on a mass scale, just like China, as well as at least two major online companies willing to work with the government on anything (Google and Facebook). We have a rising tide of people who want echo chamber hug boxes in their friend circles and a demand for exclusionary "safe spaces." It would be child's play for the government to sponsor a gamified site that ranked people based on adherence to being "environmentally friendly" or "socially just" or any of a dozen other dog whistle terms that all translate to "OBEY."

If they wanted to be more low key, have a private company do it, but receive under the table support from the government in choosing what constitutes "good" and "bad" points. They wouldn't have to pass a law saying it's mandatory: just shunt all the data in there whether you want it there or not and refuse to prosecute them. You will participate, even if you object.

I think I just envisioned Facebook 2.0.

Game Design Reflections

Some small notes I wrote to myself as I was developing games some time ago.

Creativity and follow through. Those are two key traits of successful creators. I like associating with people who have both and I get frustrated around those who have the former, but not the latter. The ground is strewn with the remains of wonderful projects that never saw the light of day because creative people couldn't get their act together. It's also a very good idea not to allow that type to be in charge - nothing will ever be completed.

Part of the steampunk experience that game needs to capture correctly is "class." Part of the veneer of the Victorian era was a certain high brow feeling to it. For a video game, that means interesting visuals. For a table-top RPG, that means words. Vocabulary is exceptionally important to create the right atmosphere. If you're trying to paint a 10-dollar scene with nickel words, it creates cognitive dissonance.

That feeling when you come up with a much cooler name for something than you originally had.

On race design: I like to take a page from TF2 and make sure each race has a different silhouette than the others. That is, seeing nothing but their outline, you can identify them. Too many humanoids gets repetitive. I think most players appreciate when developers put extra work into making really original races to play as rather than "generic orc #64289."

Don't create a "combat system" (an RPG mainly for fighting). Pathfinder and D&D do that already and are much more popular. Go for the people tired of combat after combat and want something else to bite into.

I am tempted to call explosives in my game "Badda Booms." I'm not going to, but the temptation is SO STRONG.

Crafting systems and how to implement them. You can go for realism and have it be slow, or you can go a more flashy, anime route. I haven't seen the latter done (and I think it'll be cool), so that's how my game will go with it. Super engineering indistinguishable from magic. All of the cool factor while still being rooted in scientific laws.

The benefit of creating a game on your own is also the downside: all the mistakes are yours. And it's up to you to fix it.

One benefit of creating a game of my own is the only mistakes in design will be mine. If prior experience is any indicator, that will be a welcome decrease in uncorrected errors. I have had so many experiences with spotting mistakes, pointing them out, and then being ignored only to end up proven right in the end. It was a running gag eventually where we'd tally up how often a suggestion made months or a year prior and rejected offhand would later turn out to have been the optimal solution all along. Now I just have to be sure to take my own advice.

Game Systems 2: Isomorphism and Immersion

Isomorphism is the mental process where we take abstract concepts and connect them to things in our sphere of imagination or experience. When we process math, we often use concrete models in our heads to clarify the meaning of the symbols. These concrete models can lead us astray, but with role-playing games, it’s this kind of isomorphism that is explicitly asked for on the part of the player.

In games, the typographical decision rules are the rules of the game itself, the core mechanics of game play. The role of typographical decision rules is to take the axioms (the game materials) and to give players an understanding of what constitutes a valid theorem, i.e. what they can do with the materials. By inference, the rules also tell the players what they cannot do with the materials, putting limits on them. (I may deal with negation and recursion later.)

Isomorphism enters use when a game asks the player to translate the decision rules into real-world or imaginary contexts. The decision rules, for example, may outline how a player rolls to set a mine and how the result impacts the grid on the map. But it is isomorphism that allows a player to translate that into an explosion in their mind. Often, a game will specify the kind of isomorphism they want the player to make by using descriptive language. It’s how one game may treat an area effect as the result of a mine, while another may treat it as the result of a magical fireball being lobbed.

What is immersion, then? Immersion is when a player accepts the isomorphism requested by the game. When a player agrees that the decision rules the game is using are consistent with a way to model the imaginary world they link it to in their mind, they are immersed. Their personal vision and the formal system are in sync.

What causes immersion to be disrupted? When the imaginary world they’ve created diverges from the rules of the game. For example, a person using a firearm wishes to make a trick shot. However, the rules for that trick shot are not in the game. It is not a valid move and therefore not a valid theorem of the formal system. The player balks, “knowing” that the trick shot is possible and that therefore the formal system should allow it. They have rejected a facet of the formal system and lost immersion.

This is not always a bad thing. “This game is not for you” is a valid result, one born of a player who wants rules that allow them to perform a certain set of actions, but not finding it in the current game. In these cases, the rules simply do not allow them to take the actions of their imaginary world they desire. The solution is for them to find a different game. There is nothing wrong with this and anticipating who will fail to be immersed is a part of audience selection.

Look at how Tephra handles firearms: there are four classes, from light to super-heavy. Players are free to flavor their guns however they like, but those four classes and associated statistics are all that’s there. A player who wants a more detailed gun system would then be expected to look elsewhere, because those aren’t the valid theorems admitted here.

As stated before, isomorphisms of formal systems can lead us astray. A common trap is to think that because you interpret a system as having a certain meaning, that this meaning must exert force over the system. This is untrue - the formal system exists independently of the meaning the person assigned to it. In some cases, players simply need to accept that not every detail of the world will be included in a certain game. It’s when a player becomes too attached to their isomorphism that they ignore the original rules that conflicts between players and narrators occurs most often.

Next, we’ll look at ways game developers can influence isomorphism and with it the immersion level of their game.

Game Systems 1: Games as a Formal System

It is said that discussing the familiar in unfamiliar terms opens up new avenues for thought and creativity. That is my goal here. By approaching games, especially RPG’s, the same way one would a theorem or scientific principle, my hope is to inspire others to rethink of their perception and conception of games themselves. It might prompt people to develop in ways they never thought of before and to explore new mechanics they discovered by codifying what just came intuitively for them.

I’ll start with something very general, but also very vital: formal systems. Formal systems have three major components (and I am borrowing heavily from Douglas Hofstadter for these terms):

1. Axioms
2. Typographic decision procedures
3. Theorems

Math is the most well known formal system. Geometry, for example, consists of Euclid’s famous axioms (with non-Euclidean Geometry altering one of them), a system for deriving proofs based on those axioms, and the theorems that follow from those axioms.

Games are also a formal system. We tend not to think about them as such, preferring to view them as crafts or works of art. And there is indeed a strong element of art to games, from the ideas present and the execution of their delivery. But in starkest terms, games operate on the same principles as math, language, and other systems, albeit at a less abstract level than fundamental elements. By realizing this, it can be possible to define and formalize a number of otherwise elusive terms we use in gaming, such as immersion and elegance.

In a game, the axioms are the materials required to play. The decision procedures are the rules of the game, outlining how the axioms can be utilized. The theorems are then the valid moves that can take place within the game. For example, in chess, the axioms are the board, the pieces, and the two players. The decision procedures are the way the pieces move, removal of pieces, win conditions, etc. The theorems are the set of valid moves a player can make on their turn, such as castling or getting out of check.

A trait of formal systems is the occurrence of isomorphism. Essentially, when the mind is confronted with a set of highly abstract concepts, such as the symbolic language of the 1900’s logicians, we will assign meaning to the patterns. Often these meanings will be drawn from personal experience and knowledge and used as a way to grant additional meaning to the patterns we see. For example, when school children are taught addition with the plus sign, they are prompted to think of the physical act of combining two separate piles of things into one pile. This creates an isomorphism: when you see the abstract symbol, +, think of two piles being combined.

This has the benefit of allowing us to understand something very abstract and foreign, by couching it in the familiar. However, the problem with isomorphism is that we will want to assume the system behaves like the thing we associate it with. This can cause issues in math, where not everything behaves as in the real world. For example, if you add the set of all the composite numbers and the set of all the prime numbers together, your isomorphism idea of two piles tells you that the resulting set is larger. This is false. Since there are an infinite number of elements in the two sets, the resulting set is also infinite - and the same size. (This isomorphism confounded mathematicians and philosophers for thousands of years until Georg Cantor.)

While isomorphisms might be undesirable for formal systems - Bertrand Russell certainly thought so - games distinguish themselves in that they deliberately seek to induce isomorphisms!

Think of Dungeons and Dragons. Players roll dice and assemble numbers on a piece of paper, deriving statistics and numbers. What is written down is highly abstract, the result of navigating a long series of complex rules. However, in the end, the game asks the player not to see the numbers on the paper - but a person, a character. A sentient being whose behavior they control and whose capabilities are defined by the numbers, but whose actions are their choice.

There are games that lack this appeal to isomorphism, of course. Many of the card games, such as Poker, or board games, such as Chess and Checkers, or even many sports, such as baseball and soccer. These seek to stand on their own merits, rather than insert an appeal to our imaginations. This does not make them any less of a game, it just makes their intended hook different. 

The games of key interest here are those that do rely on isomorphism. These games want players to take their decision rules and the resulting theorems and translate them into other terms. When Tephra asks a player to roll strike using their d12, it is asking the player to imagine that the use of the axioms (the d12, themselves) and the theorem (the valid move) they created with the decision rule (how tiers of strike work) not as abstract numerical constructs but as a character swinging a melee weapon at another, ready to deal damage and defend themselves. This is a complex arrangement and understanding how it works is a major step in game design itself.

Next, let’s explore the concept of isomorphism further in relation to the typographical decision rules a game chooses to have and see how that leads us to a concept of immersion.

Introduction to Metamathics

Welcome to Metamathics! My goal is to express some of the regular meditations and epiphanies that occur to me now and then as I reflect on my activities as an educator, game designer, and comic creator.

This blog focuses on two general topics:

1. My experiences and reflections on education and math.
2. Thoughts and ideas on game design.

I've blogged about my early years with the Create a Comic Project quite extensively, so I will mainly focus on 2010 onward. This is when I became a classroom math teacher and on my role as a game designer for Cracked Monocle, which started around the same time. I will also post about my experience writing webcomics, such as Strange Candy. However, expect the lion's share of comic posts to go to the CCP Blog. If I mix comics with other topics, I will likely cross post.

Additionally, I will post monthly columns:

1. Tephramathics, which focuses on a straightforward breakdown of the mechanics underlying Tephra: The Steampunk RPG; and,
2. Game Systems, where I apply the concepts of a formal system to games and game design.

These columns will alternate month-to-month. I am currently thinking of a series detailing my experiences with educational administration and what we need today in school leadership.

You can also expect small snippets of things ("Tidbits"), for things like one-line jokes or random musings/conversation starters.

I hope you enjoy this. Please feel free to comment as you wish. My hope is to inspire discussion and conversation.