What I Learned Today

I recently had the pleasure of playing Portal for the first time. It’s precisely the kind of puzzle-game I like: progressively more challenging levels that require innovation, and even after you’ve solved a level, there’s often further cleverness to be employed in finding faster or more efficient ways to solve it. I blazed through the first 13 levels in about an hour and a half, and felt a little disappointed when I learned that there were only 19 total. But then I got to level 14, which was the first time that the goal itself had to be divined, not just the way to achieve the goal. And other players’ comments about the levels getting exponentially harder are now starting to make sense. :)

I’ve been fascinated by the process of adjusting to “physics” in a world where you have a teleportation gun. You can open one portal in a nearby wall, and another at a far-off wall, then walk through them to avoid the gaping chasm that lies between. But you can also open a portal beneath your own feet to avoid having to walk to portal 1, or open a portal under some object to make it drop in front of you (instead of having to walk through the portals to retrieve it). And then some crazy stuff starts happening when you pair portals together and bounce between them — or open one in the roof and one in the floor and fall forever between them — or look through a portal and see your own profile from across the room. Mind-bending fun!

Lack a PS3? You can play the flash version, which retains many of the same mechanics but provides a 2D side view rather than a first-person 3D view. The puzzles are different, too.

Portal was first released nearly 3 years ago… and Portal 2 isn’t due until February, 2011. It will feature a two-player cooperative mode! As with so many types of media, I’m glad that my slow adoption rate means I don’t have to suffer through years of waiting. (It may take me a while to solve the last five levels!) Now if only I could finish season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, or season 3 of The West Wing, and catch up with the present!

FarmVille is, I hear, some kind of game one plays on Facebook. Well, not just one; the game has over 82 million active users as of May 2010. I’ve never tried it myself, so I don’t really know what makes it so fun or addictive. And although I knew of it in passing, I thought it was confined to Facebook.

Not so.

FarmVille (and its sister games such as Mafia Wars) have entered the real world, the one that you and I live in, through (of all places) 7-11. I was driving along a week ago when I noticed this billboard. That’s right, if you buy a Slurpee, you get a “virtual gift” in the FarmVille world. The gift turns out to be 200 “FarmVille dollars.” Am I the only one who finds this utterly bizarre? I’m aware that people buy and sell virtual goods for real dollars in Second Life. I know that some MMORPG players pay others real dollars to generate game commodities like experience points or gold. But for these virtual objects and services to obtain a “real world” value, they have to reach a certain level of social dissemination and perceived value in a large real-world community. And certainly, 82 million people is a large community — I hadn’t realized just how many people were playing this game.

I now wonder how much of an incentive 200 $FV is. What’s that worth to anyone? Is there an exchange rate with USD? To those of you who’ve played FarmVille: would the promise of 200 $FV be enough to persuade you to buy a Slurpee?

Today in Edinburgh I came across a boxed set of the first four Fighting Fantasy books. Immediately a wave of childhood reminiscence swept over me. I was totally fascinated by the Pick-a-Path books (in which you’d make a story plot choice and jump to a different page to learn what the outcome was) and then later by more sophisticated versions that had you track D&D-style stats and possessions and simulate battles (I remember really enjoying some spaceship-themed books). I don’t remember Fighting Fantasy itself, which apparently was the U.K. version of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA).

I hesitated, the books in my hand. I’d had a recent disappointment with CYOA in which I’d jumped on purchasing a couple of recently published books that I’d come across online. “Your Very Own Robot” and “The Haunted House” (both published in 2006, originally 1982) turned out to be painfully inane and even worse, random! There was no connection between a “good” choice and a “good” outcome. No matter what choice you made, it was like rolling a dice to see whether it would lead to success or failure (or unicorns on rainbows, in one case). I was left unsure whether the books ever had any redeeming qualities. (I later learned that these books are from their “younger readers” series. But still.)

Checking these Fighting Fantasy books, they turned out to be 2003 reprints of the original 1982 stories. I wondered whether I should purchase them (turn to page 67) or save my money for something else (turn to page 125). I went with the first option and brought them back to my B&B room. So far I’m midway through my first play/read of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and it’s fun (if simple). I’ve slain five orcs and two goblins, and although I am not very Lucky, my Stamina is high and I still have 9 meals of food remaining. Even better, there’s far more logic evident connecting choices to outcomes. I’ve also enjoyed crafting a map of the mountain (one of the things I love about interactive fiction, too). I’m hoping to be faced with some actual puzzles to solve.

I find it interesting that there seems to be a thriving community still surrounding these books. While revolutionary when they were first introduced, I would have expected them to be superseded by more advanced video games, interactive fiction (which provides a richer kind of interaction), and the web itself (hypertext being a much easier way to provide the jumping-around narrative). But judging from the Official Fighting Fantasy Website (where you can sign up to join the online community), they seem instead to have maintained their popularity, and they’re even providing the books in iPhone App format (which seems a less clunky (and more aesthetic) solution than the books).

Perhaps one reason they’re still so popular is that they’ve made it easy for fans to write their own Fighting Fantasies (Amateur Adventures) which are posted for other fans to enjoy. This reminds me distinctly of the Interactive Fiction Archive, where IF written by enthusiasts is shared with others in the community. And in addition, the Fighting Fantasies are actively marketed as a teaching aid for reluctant readers. I think they’re great, even for non-reluctant readers!

Yesterday, I attended the Southern California Games Day for the second time, and I got to play three new games:

Cheeky Monkey is a push-your-luck, draw-till-you-bust kind of game, in which “bust” means drawing two of the same kinds of animal from a bag. The odds for each kind of animal are given on the board, and if you pay attention to what others have collected and apply some probability savvy, you can do well despite the element of luck. It’s also possible to “steal” previously drawn animals from other players, so there’s a bit of strategy in how you stack up your successfully drawn animals, to avoid others taking them. Fun, fast-paced, and easy to learn.

Beowulf: The Legend is a competitive bidding game, in which you “accompany” Beowulf in his adventures, fight in his battles, and receive “scratches” or the even worse “wounds” if the encounters do not go well. You aren’t directly fighting the other players (in fact the game scenario is that you’re all traveling together) but in several rounds, there are bad effects (like wounds) that have to be divvied up to one of the party, and the weakest one will lose. Rather bloodier than most games I’ve played, but intriguing.

Pillars of the Earth was my favorite. It’s a resource/building game, which I tend to like, and it has a gorgeous (rather complicated) board set in olde England, in which you seek to build a cathedral. The cathedral itself doesn’t really factor into the game; it’s more about building, buying, and selling the wood, stone, and sand resources needed for the castle. But there are enough wrinkles to keep this from being more than just a production/selling game, mainly provided by your three “master builders” that let you snap up special bonuses or avoid taxes; you compete with other players for their placement. That’s about it in terms of direct contact with other players (no trading), but it helps to keep an eye on what their current collection of craftsmen reveals about their current strategy, so that you can thwart it. Great fun!

A friend pointed me to FreeRice, a site that donates 20 grains of rice to the UN for every vocabulary analogy you get right. Maybe the ETS (of SAT and GRE fame) should team up with these folks! In the meantime, you can study for your standardized exams and feel warm and fuzzy for your efforts. Or if you’re like me, you’ll get hungry and need to go fix yourself a bowl of rice.

Neat twist: The site doesn’t just run you through a gamut of random words; instead, it adapts to your progress by ratcheting up the difficulty until you start getting words wrong. As a result, I learned several new words today (it shows you the correct answer when you get them wrong):

captious: hypercritical (a lucky guess)

bunco: swindle (another lucky guess)

rodomontade: bluster (what, again?)

icteric: jaundiced (missed that one)

aperient: laxative (ugh!)

.. and so on. Go try it out yourself! Enjoy!