I’d have more to say, but need to catch the bus.

This pastebin contains a discussion thread between the owner of the Australian gaming site PALGN, and it’s volunteer staff, admin, writers, etc.

There’s so much to say about it really, but the most obvious is that it’s a really incredible example of The Sunk Cost Fallacy:

…having inherited the editorial position when PALGN was in the shit over three years ago, and having worked my arse off to maintain it, rebuild many damaged relations while building the best staff team ever, I’ll be damned if Iím going to walk away and let you reap the benefits that I’ve tried so hard to provide for this team.

All of these people other than Roland should clearly have cut their losses months, even years before the situation reached the downright abusive and destructive point it’s at now. I know one (perhaps two? maybe more that I don’t know about) people who did just that. I bet it now seems like the best things they could have done, in light of this.

Some excerpts of a recent piece ‘The Bulldog and the Pegasus‘ on Zynga/Nimblebits and the accusations of copycat behaviour by the Big Z. Best thing I’ve read this week.

It’s easy to hate Zynga, but neither moral turpitude nor mythic hubris sufficiently explains our present situation. Folklore and modernity alike condition us to desire a lucid answer, a simple take with a clear moral: don’t steal game designs, don’t abuse players, don’t exploit workers. Those are decent principles. But they are also stories, and stories are lies whose deception we forgive in exchange for their grace.

…

If games ever can do good for the world, this is perhaps all they have to offer. To remind us of contingency, to give every move an orthogonal weakness. To impose a doubt for every certainty, while still admitting the need to carry on, out of vanity and shame as much as ambition and hope, to ride higher like Bellerophon on Pegasus to touch Olympus, all the while secretly knowing that we are not gods, that we will be toppled. And to hope that when we do someone will take us in, and that we won’t die alone.

And a great point from one ‘Nicholas Bollerophon’ in the comments:

…when you attempt to make something with a bit of originality to it – even just a little – your effort shows and is in and of itself a political expression. You are asserting that you can step out of the path of collapse; culture has grown instead of just turned over.

I’m reading little bits of Oliver Marchart’s stuff on the difference between ‘Politics’ and ‘The Political’. According to a journal article, “Marchart has elaborated an extended definition of minimal politics, the minimal criteria required for an action to be considered political… To this end, he proposes five criteria of minimal politics.”

The five criteria are 1. “the aim of becoming a majority” (i.e. “…it aims to transform the contemporary social order.“), 2. “Strategy”, (“Strategies contesting traditional ways of doing and saying are also linked to the aim of establishing new institutions and practices.“), 3. Some sense of organisation, 4. “Collectivity” (“As with the aim of becoming a majority, the collective dimension of political action need not be understood as an empirical collection of individuals, but as a symbolic collective; as the symbol of a collective actor.“) and 5 & 6 are “conflictuality and positionality” (“Since politics therefore always includes a dimension of conflict, actors will need to take up a position within this conflict.“).

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that making “something with a bit of originality to it” could be made to squeeze within this set of criteria.

I also really like Ian’s phrase “orthogonal weakness” and emphasis on contingency.

So in just about every matchup, I’m pretty okay up till I’ve basically taken and held my second base. Where most of my games are falling apart at the moment is the late game – at the point where my upgrades should be popping real fast and giving me the edge, and where I should be getting some hi-tech units like Ghosts (in TvZ/P/T) or Thors it (TvZ) or even Battlecruisers (TvT? Ghosts for snipes & EMPs on dropships is probably better unless they’re going mech… in which case… the only air>ground units terran have are Banshees or BCs, and Banshees are reasonably hard to control). Day-9 has just recently (like last week!) done a series of Newbie Tuesday videos on The Late Game which I hope will really help me out. I’m starting to get sick of losing to either massed BCs, or to Broodlords (about three times now I’ve seen it happen with increasing levels of dread and resignation each time).

I also played some 3v3 last night with two of my good friends who are both quite good at their niche skills, and who both play much more aggressively than I do. Again, I think the TvZ Boxer-build attitude of the mass two-base turtle has kind of infected my other match ups with a conservatism and risk aversion that is really hitting me hard. I don’t think it matters how good my Macro is if my economy is two bases behind.

Steven Totilo has the news here.

That’s pretty neat. I love it when bloggers turn their labour of love, sweat and tears into something more financially fulfilling. I still remember when we first found and linked both Patricia and Kate’s work at Critical Distance, maybe around a year ago. If we helped them in any way to get where they are now, I feel we’ve basically justified our existence.

A sad day, as what I’d seen of MVP was just really, really solid Terran play – a lot to learn from. Maybe not as flashy as MMA’s performance in the Blizzard Cup, but “safer”. Basically he lost twice (I think) to build order failures tonight.

At age 20, is MVP past his prime – or was Tasteless right in thinking that MVP looked physically ill? Gumiho is only 19, after all.

Apparently it’s freezing in Soul. When my parents were there last year (I think?) they both said it was literally the coldest they have ever been – and they’ve trekked through Nepal. The cold is quite conducive to colds.

So I’ve played a pretty good 1/1/1 build vs a Terran player – they seem pretty lacklustre. I managed to block their natural expansion and force a planetary just by putting down a supply depot over the spot it wanted to be build, so I reach a point in the game where I think I’m okay. I think I’ve got him on the ropes and he’s just flying his buildings away from me to prolong the game.

Above: Not a lot of hope for our terran adversary.

Heck, he even sends his last SCVs to suicide against my base, so the illusion is complete.

Above: SCVs about to die

But then he doesn’t lose, so I go hunting for a secret expand. I find it, think it’ll be easy… then all of a sudden… this.

Above: 13 Battlecruisers

The dude had been hoarding battlecruisers, and was now pummeling me with 13 of them. Half that was probably enough to wipe me out at that point, my air defense was SO low, and there was no chance I was going to build enough Thors. The game was already 30 minutes in, so I threw up a GG and a WP and quit. But have a look at the minimap. Dude had basically a whole extra secret base-trio that I knew nothing about. Crazy. I felt really, really stupid.

Pippin Barr: Curious Games from Tabakalera on Vimeo.

Really good talk (except that it’s only the first 17 minutes, then it goes to a black screen for some reason). I quite liked how he noted that he could either continue on forver criticising games and bemoaning the kinds of games that get made (“Oh man, another shooter/platformer/RPG/etc.”) or he could actually go out and make some games. Well I’m not really all that interested in learning to make games, and I imagine a lot of other critics are too, so I wonder what this does to the game critic/blogging endurance curve? Do we get stuck complaining about the same things over and over again? I could certainly see a case being made for that. And certainly it’s probably a lot safer bet to say that making the kind of game you want to play is going to have a far greater chance of realising a change in that situation than if you were only a critic – even a highly influential critic (which most of us are not).

Well, at any rate I’m glad I’m taking a break from that game – while I’m learning and playing and practising Starcraft 2 all I’m doing is liking and enjoying. There’s no real element of “oh gosh I wish I could improve this aspect” or “I wish I could change that” about the game. I suppose I probably could find those things in the game – medics and ship pilots are the only female units in the game, it’s true – but none of that really helps me in my goal to improve my play. What does that mean for the challenging of the status quo? I don’t really know, you tell me.

Yes, the other player was actually called Hercules. And he was a comedian. Something about being funnier than me (which is highly likely – my sense of humor is quite dry) was a conversation we had at the start. This game ended in a loss for me. Why? A couple of reasons – 1. I didn’t impliment my 1/1/1 build very well at all. I didn’t even get a Starport till after my opponent had made a successful drop into MY base. When will I learn?

I had good game sense though. I felt like it was probably coming, so I had marines in a good position and didn’t lose too many SCVs (point to Ben). But from then on I was on the backfoot. A later cloaked banshee attack again cost me momentum, taking out a tank and a bunch of units, and precious mining time. But no, even with all that it was my inability to harass and push out, letting map control and his superior mech-heavy build run un-checked that made me lose. He felt so confident that he even pushed out into the gold expand. (That’s very bad for me).

Seen above: me, losing.

And yet I still didn’t push out… I just turtled and waited (again, playing as if I’m vs. a Zerg player – my TvZ is good, but it’s ruining my other matchups!). I grabbed a third base and even maxed out with a huge marine/marauder ball…. which I then promptly tried to stim into sieged up tanks, taking out… two of them.

I tried a late transition into ghosts but it was too late. I did get off a handfull of really nice nukes, two of which I was exceptionally proud of.

Goodbye tanks.

Goodbye Battlecruisers.

So what did I learn? That my 1/1/1 needs refining. That my TvT needs more agression. And that my late game ghost work is a little lacklustre, but given how little practise I’ve had at using them, I’m not so fussed.

Addendum: And hey, what happens the very next game but a TvT. I went aggro at around 10mins, with 3 tanks a nice MM mix and 1 dropship — look where it got me!

Above: Me, winning. Look at the difference high-ground vision makes. This is what the 1/1/1 build it about.

I received an email today in the generically formatted mass-email configuration, and normally when I get one of these I just bin it straight away because it’s inevitably from someone on the payroll of MegaCasino666.com just looking for a leg-up in SEO. We get these emails all the time at Crit-Dist, and I have gotten a few for BA.net but the one I got today… seemed reasonably legitimate.

So now I’m in a quandry – should I mention this site that seems to be doing at least superficially interesting things with playing games in Ironmode in order to raise money for charity? There can’t be much harm in it, surely.

Iron Man Mode: The Blog is apparently trying to raise money for the Child’s Play charity by playing classic games with Permadeath on, and then writing about it. Have a look.

In fact, it’s something of a resolution of mine (new years or otherwise) to get pretty good at Starcraft 2. It started around the time of the Blizzard Cup, back in December ’11 but it had been nurtured by the When Cheese Fails series which I’d become  slightly obsessed with earlier in the year. If you’re new to the series start here, give it a few episodes, then see if you don’t feel compelled to keep watching all the way up to the end of the fifth (!) season.

But I heard about the Blizzard Cup via my brother, and as December is a pretty slow time, I watched the majority of the games live through the week, with growing interest. The games were really watchable, in no small part due to the stellar commentary combo of Tasteless/Artosis (aka Tastosis), and the players themselves were phenomenal. The last game of the final was utterly unforgettable. I’d never really had an entry point into pro gaming/SC2, so the Blizzard Cup was my reefer that got me hooked on heroin.

So I started playing Starcrtaft 2 again and I was seriously rusty. But it started to come back, and I more or less arbitrarily resolved to play a lot and get better. And that’s all it really takes, which funnily enough is pretty much the same sentiment Frank Lantz  tweeted a couple of weeks later:

btw, here’s the secret about amazing athletic performance, “e” or otherwise – they just decide to get good. Action is decision.

— Frank Lantz (@flantz) January 14, 2012

So with that goal in mind I started to take my playing a little more seriously, and I also started to educate myself a bit. I watched a bunch of Day[9]‘s newbie tuesday daily videos that go over a host of newbie friendly topics, from the very basics of where/how/why you should be looking, clicking, moving, etc to a few encouragingly simple strategies. The key so far seems to be a combination of practise and planning. Which is all pretty neat.

I’ll be honest, I still get mad nervous about playing online and at the end of a match the adrenaline is always making me shaky (like, literally shaky) but at least now I’ve trained down some of that panic response, so I screw up less from panicking now. It’s probably only been… a month? About a month of pretty beyond-casual play. I haven’t really played a lot of other games in that time, but that’s okay, this is kind of what I’ve always done anyway –  I like playing only one or two games at a time for a long time, and I sincerely hope SC2 keeps my attention for much, much longer. I can certainly forsee it doing so, with the combination of the GSL (which I bought a year-long ticket to – that was one of my tricks to forcing myself into playing SC2 more, I at least have to watch the GSL now to get my money’s worth!), Day-9′s daily growing number of excellent teaching resources (Start here, if you’re interested – the one on ‘the basics’ is just terrific) and a reasonably committed 2v2 partner (Hey Alex!) and an kind of unstated goal of wanting to get into Gold league by the end of the year… and yeah, I can see myself playing a lot of SC2 this year.

Which is great, because I am really enjoying it. I might talk a little more about the specific delights a bit more later, when I write about some games I’ve played. I’m hoping to do a little bit of post-game research blogging about my own playing, and do some of Day-9′s refinement tips. Watching replays is good but it’s better if you know what you’re looking for and what to do about it. One of Day-9′s videos went into how to do that, checking timing s of when your build macro slipped, making notes of timings, etc, etc. I want to do that, and talk about some games after I’ve played them but while they’re still fresh in my mind.