Life Amongst the Nords

I've been meaning to write about Skyrim for a while, but then, that would mean stopping playing Skyrim to take time to write a blog post. Somehow, I'm managing that tonight. I've been playing Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for a while now. I'm up to level 18, and having a smashing time.

But things weren't always like that. Starting out in the game, I was pretty overwhelmed. It's like there is too much to do and no one telling you what you should pay attention to and what to ignore. Granted, it is a sandbox game, which means there's no set course. You can wander where you will, and do whatever you like. But when I am starting out, I was freaking out a bit because I had no idea whether I would need to save this broom I found for later, or if I would regret not talking to that person because they'd never show up again and I'd lost a chance for a cool quest or something. So it started out being stressful.

I've gotten past that. I'm entranced by the lush landscapes and detail. At one point I emerged from a cave to stare agog at aurora borealis lighting up the fantasy sky adorned with double moons. I'm oddly enthralled by the menial tasks you can perform like cooking, training, picking flowers, or chopping wood. I'm enjoying the lushness and the cool dungeons and monsters. That doesn't mean I haven't come up with a new set of gripes.

Even after the amount of time I've played, combat still is chaotic button mashing. I usually end up staring into my opponent's armpit or slashing next to them. Any lateral movement makes me lose track of where my foe is. Thankfully, I've got a few other people to depend on. I can summon a flame elemental thingy that is very effective at blowing up the baddies, and I have my trusty housecarl Lydia who has much better battle sense than I do, even if she cannot figure out how to climb out of a lake on her own.

Sometimes, combat is awesome. After one dungeon, I found a route out of it on top of a mountain. I emerged on the snowy peak and climbed through a blizzard to a monument on top. There I was attacked by two ice wraiths, nasty serpents of cold and malevolence. Right as I was finishing up that pitched battle, I was bathed in fire. I was immediately being attacked by a dragon! In the raging snowstorm, Lydia and I fought a desperate battle. Lydia almost died before I healed her back up, but the battle raged on. I lost sight of her, and I feared she was dead. The dragon landed and I went in for the kill. As I slew the dragon, the body started to slide down the side of the mountain with its valuable treasure. I ran after it and caught up before it went over the edge. I turned around and Lydia was there. She had survived! It was an exultant moment. I was pumped and grinning. That was awesome!

I then spent the next hour trying to get Lydia to walk through a door. It was not fun.

That's one of the other things I can gripe about. The game can be pretty buggy. You'll come across axes or tables floating in midair. Lydia wasn't following me through a door because there wasn't enough space to accommodate her on the other side. I also spent a lot of time trying to get her out of lake she'd fallen into. The floating sword type bug is easy to forgive in a world as massive and complex as Skyrim, but when a bug threatens to make me lose a valuable companion (plus all the loot she's hauling for me), and I spend hours trying to circumvent the problem, I get grumpy.

One other gripe I have is that the people don't seem to matter very much. This is an odd complaint, but it stems from having played the Mass Effect games. In those games, your companions, the other people on your team, have stories and personalities and you bond with them. You delve into their lives and help them in their personal crises. It makes sense that people going through war together would get to know each other. In Skyrim, Lydia has crawled through dungeons with me. We've battled dragons and trolls together. She's followed me through the rain on nighttime treks. She has saved my life, and I have saved hers. Yet all the communication I'm allowed with her is where I want her to stand and what items I want her to carry. She's following me all across Skyrim. Shouldn't I learn something about her family or her history?

In another example, I retrieved a guy's stolen family sword for him for one quest. Immediately, I also beat the snot out of him for another quest. I then ask him to train me in combat, and he agrees. Then after that, he acts as if we've never interacted. Weird. Again, I have to forgive this to an extent, since the land is so amazingly detailed. It's definitely the strength of the game. I can understand if the social interactions got short shrift.

Ok, one final gripe before I go back to extolling the virtues of this game. The plot has to do with everyone freaking out because dragons are coming back. People act like they're these super scary monsters. But they're pushovers. I beat my first when I was level 4, and every one since then, with the exception of the mountaintop battle, has been a pushover. The giants, however, are things to be feared. They can kill you with one hit. Or how about snow saber cats that can maul you in seconds? No one seems concerned about them, but they are far, far, far fiercer creatures than dragons. But everyone is soiling their pants over dragons. It seems a bit silly, really.

Anyway, I am loving Skyrim. It is so open-ended; it is astounding. And the fact that it can make me enjoy foraging for alchemical reagents or trying to find cheese to make fondue (really), says something. I'm going to be playing this one for a while.

San Francisco

This last week I was in San Francisco receiving some training with a couple of my coworkers on the Ext.js JavaScript framework. Our flight to California, which was less than 3 hours long, was delayed by 5 hours, so rather than get an evening in San Francisco, we got to hang around DIA watching the playoff games and waiting for a flight that seemed like it would never come. Finally we arrived just after midnight. We were staying on the border of the Financial District and Chinatown. We heard a bunch of firecrackers going off when we got out of the cab. That's when we realized it was the Chinese New Year. So those firecrackers continued well into the morning. I fell asleep around 1:30 AM, but John said they went longer. Then they started up around 7 the next morning and would intermittently punctuate our time there for the rest of the week.

It was fascinating to walk through Chinatown. It felt like being in a different country where all the street names were in English. Most of the conversations I heard though were all in Chinese. There were stores and restaurants that were unlike what I've seen in the States before. In the morning I could see old women doing tai chi in the park across from our hotel. There were restaurants with whole roasted ducks in the window. Pretty wild. Our first morning there, there was a celebration at the hotel complete with dragon dancers and the mayor of San Fran.

We had some great food while we were there. I tried raw oysters for the first time at The House, which in general was quite good. I had escargot for the first time at Cafe Bastille, accompanied by an absolutely excellent cassoulet with duck confit. We had some really great Italian food at Perbacco, too. And we got great sandwiches from Molinari Delicatessen, which felt like it was lifted from Italy or some other decade. Of course we also had some good Chinese food, though we did not stop at the restaurant with the ducks with their heads still on.

One morning I decided to hike up to the Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill. Unfortunately, I chose a rather foggy morning, and I only got a few glimpses of the bridge. I did see and hear the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill though, which added to the feeling of being in a different country. Despite the cool weather, I was well drenched in sweat as I descended the hill and went to the training. I stood outside for a while to try to cool off, but I think I was still getting condensation from the moist air.

 Thankfully the trip back was much, much smoother than the trip out. I was glad to get back to Colorado and my lovely wife, who managed to finish up a lot of the nursery while I was gone. Now it is complete with border, crib, and changing table! San Francisco was fun, but I love my wife and am glad to be home! You can see a few more pictures in my gallery, if you like. Below is a sneak preview of the nursery!

Playing to Win

Last night we had a friend over for some games. We introduced him to the game Agricola, which I had gotten Jen for Christmas. It's essentially Subsistence Farming: The Game. It's a lot more engaging and fun than it sounds. As we played, our friend Tom's tactics were markedly different than the way Jen and I have played the game. The game is designed to punish you for not diversifying your strategy. If you don't have, say, any vegetables or any cattle at the end of the game, you lose points, so you can't just pour all your efforts into specializing in farming grain or raising sheep. You can make that a core of your strategy, but you must diversify to avoid penalties. Tom, however, was picking out a couple of areas to focus on and exploited every advantage it afforded him. He grew very strong in certain areas, but had nothing in most others. Where Jen and my farms were growing in a balanced way, his was skewed and lacked many essential things. I thought he was heading for a fall. Instead he ending up winning.

So, my brain has been buzzing with ideas of how people play games and why they play them how they do. Tom was playing to win. He saw the numeric structure and where the points could be most efficiently gained and pressed the advantages his cards gave him to focus on the most profitable areas. Then with his "profits" he could diversify at the last minute to stave off penalties. He saw the system of the game and determined how to play it in a more optimal way, even though that is outside the way I intuited that the game was supposed to be played. I was playing in the way I imagine the makers of the game intended it to played, whereas Tom was playing in a way that worked around the obvious approach to take advantage of the system. It's a totally legitimate way to the play the game, and I'll confess a bit of jealousy that I didn't see the same type of strategy. I was playing the conventional way, taking on the challenges from the angles it seemed to me the game designers intended. I was walking through the maze to reach the goal, when a legitimate and smart way to reach the goal would be to simply walk around the maze instead. I was playing to play.

Playing To Win

What is the goal of a game? It's to win, right? You want to reach the Candy Castle first, to destroy your opponent's army, to beat all the levels, to get the high score. So logically, you want to optimize your strategy and take whatever steps that will give you the most points or propel you quickest to victory. In a point-based game, it means you have to pursue points and do whatever will give you the most points the quickest. In this efficiency, you may abandon whole parts of the game that don't contribute to your strategy. If you find a particularly effective strategy (or a game is unbalanced), you may never need to deviate from it. You've figured out the game and mastered it. You win, and you win regularly. What if that's not actually the goal of the game? What if you're playing the game for fun or socializing? What if it's to be stimulated and challenged by the obstacles in a game?

By Accident

Dear People Having Accidents,

You are having far too many accidents. Stop it. Pay attention while you're driving and stop hitting each other. In the past 3 days, one of which I didn't drive on, I have had to deal with 5 of your accidents, 3 of which caused major traffic jams. This is highly inconveniencing for the rest of us. And the accidents I've seen haven't even been snow related.

If you simply must have an accident, please be considerate enough to have it on a minor side street and not on a major freeway. Why, just the other day I was rear-ended by a gentleman sliding down a snowy hill in his mini-van. Not only did he have the courtesy to have this accident on a minor side street, but he also managed to do essentially no damage to me. You all could learn a lesson from him.When you have emergency vehicles come, they block things even worse than the rubble from your ruined car.

So please, stop having accidents. They are driving me insane with rage.

Thanks,

Nils

A New Dawn

Ooohhhh, I couldn't resist using something cheesy like that. It is the dawn of a new year, and this morning the dawn looked amazing. I stepped out and snapped a few quick picks. They're a bit blurry, but the crispness isn't the point. Look at that color! Once Adobe releases that wicked anti-blur technology, blurriness will be even less of a problem. For now, however: pretty! You can click on the photos to look at a larger version.