On Motivation

This week I’ve been sinking a lot of time into two games, neither of which are terribly new, but both are rated very highly. I’m new to both of them, although one of them is a Total War game, so I’m hardly new to the franchise. The other is a browser-based, story-heavy RPG set in ‘Fallen London’ – a gothic, alternative-history, Victorian-era London that has been dragged below the earth by bats – called Echo Bazaar. It’s as weird and awesome as it sounds.

These games have almost nothing in common, apart from the fact that I am addicted to both. In fact I’m writing this in-between doing action in Echo Bazaar. Echo Bazaar has this rather annoying mechanic that means you only have a certain number of actions you can do per day and only a certain number of those actions you can do at one go. You begin the day with ten actions, and have another 30 waiting to be used. You get a new one every seven minutes up to a limit of ten. In those seven minutes, I usually tend to busy myself doing other stuff, or staring at the count-down clock, waiting for more actions. This means that I get a little bit of time to sit and wonder ‘why is this so appealing, and why am I willing to waste so much time for what amounts to a very small amount of gameplay?’

Likewise, in Medieval Total War 2, the other game I’ve been playing this week, you get a fair amount of time between turn to twiddle your thumbs. While watching the computer play every other faction apart from my own, I tend to wonder why England’s conquest of the entire western world is so damn important that I’m inside making it happen while the hottest week of the summer is busy happening outside (yes, at the end of September).

I’m going to university tomorrow, so I’ve also been busy preparing everything for that. True to form, I’ve left all the important stuff until the very end, so I’ve been fairly busy. While waiting on hold to various banks, I’ve wondered to myself why I always seem to leave things until the last minute before doing them. It’s not an affliction that is unique to me, by any stretch, but it’s incredible that I could have easily done all of this literally months ago, but didn’t. In fact I’ve been seriously lacking any motivation all summer. Days on end with nothing to do haven’t really given me the will to do anything. Aside the occasional moment of creative energy, I’ve really been lacking in any desire to do anything.

All of this has leads me to ponder on the nature of inspiration and motivation. Why do I want to desperately to conquer the Holy Land for Christendom? Why do I want to stake my soul on a card game for the chance of wining my heart’s desires (in Echo Bazaar)? Why do I leave it until the last minute to sort important things out? Why do I waste time when I could be doing much more interesting things?

You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog about some cooking I’ve been doing recently. I think the reason cooking appeals to me has a lot to do with the answers to the above questions. The reason I really like cooking is that feedback is instantaneous. You make something, it smells good, it tastes good, you’re satisfied. You get a very simple payoff for the effort of the cooking – you get to eat it. I have the inspiration and the motivation to cook because I know what the outcome is and I know when it will come.

But there’s something more than that; I don’t just enjoy cooking because I get to eat what I cook. I am always striving to make better and more interesting food. I make something and instantly critique it, not because I’m not satisfied with the taste, I almost always am, but because I want to better myself. I want to make meals that taste better because I see it as a challenge.

These two things are a large part of what motivates me to do things and inspires me to do them well. The outcomes of an action or the deadline for an action to be completed are very obvious motivators. If you can see a tangible result from your work, it’s a lot easier to get off your backside and do it, likewise if you have to do something by a certain time, you tend to do it.

The desire to do whatever it is I’m doing well is something that really drives me. In part it’s about being better than other people, but largely it’s about being bettering myself. It’s a challenge that I rise to.

This is how games like Echo Bazaar and the Total War games pull you in. Echo Bazaar is based around numbers. Everything you do increases or decreases your stats for certain qualities or affliction which have an impact on what happens to your character and what options you have open to you. It’s pretty standard RPG stuff. The reason I keep playing it is that I want to keep pumping up my stats and so unlocking more and more of the game’s content. The game is heavily story-based, and your stats dramatically affect the way the story goes, so it’s not just increasing stats for the sake of it.

The Total War games use missions with a time limit and overall victory conditions to drive your conquests, and the feedback for success is obvious, both in easily available graphs and the map showing the extent of your conquests to date to give you more and more things to strive against. Game play might only be a combination of moving little men around a map and town planning, but it’s compelling because there is a purpose and a goal to it. I want to play because I want keep succeeding according to the game’s definition of success.

A lot of games are built on this premise. I joke with a friend (who is probably reading this) who plays Football Manager that he is basically just playing with spreadsheets, but the same thing applies to FM. You keep playing it because you want to get Worcester City playing in the Champion’s league, no matter how meaningless that is. All RPGs work on this premise – you play in order to keep pumping those numbers up. You want to get a level 80 character, so you’re willing to grind for hours to get there.

Of course sometimes games lose touch with what exactly the end goal is. I ended up quitting playing Mass Effect and Fallout 3 because there was too much grinding and doing what seemed like very pointless tasks without a tangible result. I wasn’t getting any reward for my effort, or even any success in the broader sense of the game, so couldn’t see the point of doing it anymore.

Another similar way in which this is expressed in gaming is scoring. Something as simple as Tetris is addictive because you have a high score to beat. Challenge mode in Batman Arkham Asylum gave you a very simple way of measuring yourself against both yourself and others. The combat and the stealth mode were both wonderfully put together, but that’s no reason to keep playing the same level again and again. The only reason do to that is to try to beat the score you posted before.

The most interesting thing about this, however, is the way it works in reverse. In Echo Bazaar today (while I’ve been writing this post) I got a random ‘Opportunity’ that dramatically increased one of my stat, increasing it to the point where I could continue on the next step of the storyline that I’d just begun. Rather than feel happy that I’d been able to advance without the effort of building up this stat, I felt robbed. I had been allowed to advance without taking the effort and time to get there and it felt wrong. It’s not like it takes any skill to play the game – it’s all dictated by chance – but part of the reason why you become invested in the game is because it takes time to achieve anything. It felt wrong that I hadn’t had to put that time in, which is very strange.

The reason for that feeling is that success is not necessarily all that fulfilling in and of itself. Success unearned or underserved or even unworked-for is somewhat hollow. A well designed game makes you work for your success, so it feels good when you make progress, without allowing you to lose sight of that progression. That is why we keep returning to some games when we’ve already played through the content.

This is true in games because it is true in real life. I enjoy eating, but I appreciate a meal more if I’ve prepared it. Creating something will almost always be more satisfying that experiencing someone else’s creations. It’s not even limited to creativity; simply accomplishing something is more rewarding that having someone do it for you, certainly in my experience. The more challenging that accomplishment, the greater the sense of achievement. Of course, the more detached that sense of achievement is from actually doing the thing, the harder it is to find motivation; as was the case with my long, lazy summer with no lengthy spell of inspiration.

That summer has now come to an end and I’m off to uni next week, so I apologise if my blog post is late or non-existent next week, I will probably be drunk.

Empire Total War and some other stuff

Last week I reviewed the demo for Empire Total War and now that the full game is out I guess I’d better review it. I didn’t think I’d have time to play it enough to be able to do it justice by this weekend, but I think I have played enough to form an opinion. I wrote last week about the battles in the game because that’s all there was in the demo, so I wont go back over what I’ve already said, instead I’ll talk about the campaign game, which doesn’t feature in the demo.

For the first time in a Total War game there is a story element as part of the campaign game; The Road to Independence (or RtI for short) follows the colonisation of America and the American War of Independence. This is far more structured than the ‘Grand Campaign’ which is a lot like the other Total War games. While bursting at the seams with Patriotism, RtI works very well structurally and is a good introduction to Total War, however I was under the impression that it was meant to be a tutorial and if I was new to the Total War franchise I think I would have great difficultly working out what’s going on. The story itself is just a rehashing of the American foundation myth, ignoring the fate of the Native Americans and making the British look like a bunch of wankers. Amusingly all the Americans have thick north American accents even though the founding father would not have had an accent very dissimilar from and English accent. Despite it’s shortcoming it’s a pretty decent introduction to the game and is a nice change from the usual campaign.

There are a few changed from previous games, some of which are quite nice, some of which are necessary but slightly annoying, and some are just annoying. The main change is the fact that the game has now pretty much gone global; the campaign map now stretches across the world rather than just including the Europe and the Middle East. Thy have dealt with this really well, introducing different theatres of war which are separate from each other. It certainly adds a new dimension to the game, making control of the seas very important to transport ships and soldiers between different theatres of war.

Some other changes to the game, such as moving some building out of the cities and the introduction of a technology tree and the ability to research new things makes the game feel a lot more like the Civilisation games. To be honest I’m not a great fan of Civ; trying to go from the start of civilisation all the way into the future is just trying to pack too much into one game so it feels rushed. But they’ve really brought in the good bits from that game and left a lot of the crap behind. These new aspects stolen from Civ add more complexity to the game and taking the emphasis away from the warfare element slightly (although that still plays a major role)

There are a few really annoying changes however; the interface has changed massively, in some cases this makes it more intuitive, but for the most part it just makes the game harder to get the information you need. The great thing about the other games is that it was really easy to get the information you want quickly. Another annoying thing is that lots of very trivial parts of the map are not covered by the Fog of War for some inexplicable reason so you have to sit and watch what Northern Europeans killing each other between turns. You also have to watch your own troops ponderously wonder around the campaign map rather than just assuming that we all know how people walk and letting them just get there. These factors mean that there is rather too much waiting around between being able to do stuff.

To be honest this is just nitpicking; the gameplay is still fantastic and provides hours of fun. It has its flaws, but overall it’s a very good game and well worth getting.

Moving away from Video games now I was really disappointed earlier this week when they announced that the final headliner for the Download Festival was Faith no More. I literally have never heard of that band and given that their major selling point is that they influenced Limp Bizkit (who are also set to play the festival, *sarcastic celebrations*). Linkin Park and Korn (who again are playing the festival); I wonder why they had a countdown to the announcement in the Download website. I was expecting a really big band like Guns and Roses or Metallica, instead they hype up some 90’s crap. The line-up for the festival as a whole is pretty disappointing; Marilyn Manson and the Prodigy real fail to get me excited. The combination of Def Leppard and Whitesnake is pretty impressive, but other than that it’s all rather disappointing.

Staying with music and on a slightly betting note I recently discovered a band called Amity in Fame, an unsigned Austrian acoustic rock band, they’re pretty good and you should all check them out here.

A week in the life of

Well I’ve had an interesting week; the main thing was the release of the Empire Total War Demo on Steam, so I’ve been playing that far too much given how little content there actually is. A while ago I mentioned that I would be going to see Rise Against and that happened on Thursday when they played the Carling Academy in Birmingham, and it was awesome. The last addition to my frankly fantastic week was going down to Oxford yesterday for an Ethics conference, which was equally awesome but in a very different way.

But first of all the Empire Total War Demo: I’ll do a full review of the game when it comes out, maybe next week, but probably the week after (my life starts getting a little busy around now, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have to play it), so this will be fairly brief. I know that, given the fact that I have not bought a videogame in literally years, I am not up to date with the latest graphics so I’m not a great judge of these things, but it looks really, really, really nice! I mean all the people don’t all look like really unresponsive clones; they are actually slightly individual and interact with each other in melee combat. You can also destroy buildings on the battle map; yay for physics engines. Leaving graphics behind because frankly they’re pretty unimportant compared to things like gameplay; the battles feel a lot more realistic that previous Total War games. This is probably partly due to the fact that a bunch of people standing in a line shooting one another is far easier to replicate that the slightly more riotous affairs of ancient and medieval combat, even so there seems to be a remarkable high casualty rate; far more than in real life as far as I know (although 18th Century warfare was a pretty bloody affair). The inclusion of naval warfare is completely fantastic and the best idea Sega has had regarding the whole franchise (and that is saying a lot). The naval battles are probably more realistic that the land battles (although I would sort of expect that). They have done the controls really well which means that it is pretty simple to get the basics of controlling a large number of ships, which means you can quickly get down to actually fighting rather than spending many pencil snapping hours trying to master which controls are locked to which keys and how the hell you avoid sitting in the water and giving the enemy firing practice.

The problem is that there in only one sea battle and one land battle, so once you’ve mastered the controls, marvelled at the graphics a little and thrashed the arse off the computer you have very little to do but sit there and kick the arse of the computer in a slightly different way. You may also have noticed that I didn’t mention the campaign game at all. That is because there isn’t any in the demo, which is really annoying because that’s mostly what I play the Total War games for; the battles are nice, but they only really support the main part of the game and the reason why the Total War series is so fantastic. Seems odd then that they would leave it out of the demo, but hey, I’m not a developer, so what do I know? I can still complain that it makes the demo too short however. Now before you inundate me with emails and comments about how it’s a demo so it’s unlikely to be very long let me just say that the demo it literally 2 hours worth of gameplay if you’re new to the franchise, if not It’s probably less than that. You can redo the battles ad nauseam but to be honest repetition of the same thing is not an extension of gameplay, it’s just pointless repetition, like beating a dead horse just slightly more entertaining. I suppose it does a pretty good job if wetting your appetite and making you more likely to go out and buy the game when it comes out in 5 days time. Given that it’s so short you should be able to play through it before then so why not all download it now and then you can pay your money to the faceless corporation on March 4th having been completely won over by it. Go on, off you go. It’s on steam so you have no excuse.

On the subject of corporations, well not really, but I had to try to link this together somehow, I was bombarded with a whole evening of socialist propaganda from a bunch of dirty, unwashed Americans. No I didn’t go to a rally, although there was one yesterday, but more on that later. I am of course referring to the Rise Against gig I went to which, despite the excess of hippies and liberal socialists, was absolutely fantastic. I’m not going to pretend than most of Rise Against is not just a series of power chords with the occasional hammer on; I think I mentioned their chronic lack of variety last time a talked about them. When you combine this with the fact that I find it completely I possible to get behind their message; I think PETA are idiots and I really hate socialism, it is a great testament to their live act that I really enjoyed the gig. Their songs are samey but they’re so energetic and Rise Against play them so well that it doesn’t really matter. It may be somewhat hypocritical of me to really disagree with their world view and still provide it with monetary support, but for me, all they are is entertainment (that was a joke for Rise Against fans).

Of course Rise Against were not the only band to play; they were supported by The Flobots and Anti-Flag; both of whom where distinctly average. If you combined Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine and turned down the quality considerably, you would have The Flobots. They did have a couple of redeeming features though; they had a really good female violinist. Not only was she probably the best musician on the stage at any time during the evening, she was also by far the best looking. Then again the competition was pretty rubbish; if she wasn’t there I would be giving the award to one of the guitars. Another plus The Flobots had was that some of their lyrics were so painful that they almost made me burst out laughing; then again it was rap, which is just really bad poetry put to music, so I’m unlikely to be impressed. One of their songs was interesting; they had a sign with IRAQ on and every line only had words beginning with I R A and Q (well they weren’t all that strict on the last one…). It was an interesting idea, but to be honest it was never likely to work; there just aren’t enough words that make sense together in that way to make a song than isn’t painfully forced. The other support act was Anti-flag, who get the crowd going and were slightly less painful than The Flobots, but I’d probably not rush to buy any of their music.

Any attempt to lead on from that onto the ethics conference I went to yesterday in Oxford would be as forced as The Flobots lyrics, so I’ll just move on. Yesterday I went to Oxford (which is the most awesome place on the planet or at least in England) for an Ethics conference for A-level students. I mentioned earlier that there was a rally, which there was. It wasn’t much of a rally really; about 5 people standing around with banners one of whom was yelling inane nonsense into a megaphone. There were more police on the street than actual protesters; all told it was pretty pathetic. The conference itself was pretty interesting, but I won’t go into the details because to be honest it I doubt you would care and it would be far too intellectual for a Saturday morning. It was thought provoking and I enjoyed it and I got to go to Oxford so it was a pretty damn fantastic end to a very good week in my life.

Obama and some other stuff

Well it looks like the US has a new president; I think everyone was bored of Bush and his antics, although some of his literary slipups were pretty damn hilarious. I’m glad we now have a leader rather than a laughing stock at the head of the world only superpower. If you haven’t heard or watched the inauguration speech yet then you need to get your need to crawl into a hole and die because if you don’t even make an effort to pay attention to the world around you your life is utterly devoid of meaning. Alternatively you could just watch it now.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6-zjho9SPgA

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=y88a9EpQid8&feature=related

In fact Obama has already done some stuff as president; he’s ordered the closing of Guantanamo and the end of torture. So he’s stopped the practice of holding people without charge, something which we in Britain outlawed in 1215 (the date of the Magna Carta for the historically inept). So along with that and the end of torture it looks like Obama is fully committed to bringing the United States out of the middle ages and firmly into the modern era, already better than Bush then. Although I don’t think even Bush managed to fail to swear the oath like Obama did.

Obama has beencompared to Lincoln, who was assassinated, Kennedy, who was assassinated, and Martin Luther King, who, you guessed it, was assassinated. Is it just me or is there a theme running through those comparisons? I give him 6 months.

Moving onto a completely unrelated topic, I have recently discovered a band called Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They a post-rock band from Canada and well worth listening to. Post-rock is a genre where classical music is played using ‘rock’ instruments, like electric guitars, drum kits and keyboards etc. All the songs are like 20 minute long instrumentals with random sound clip of annoying Americans (or maybe Canadians) talking thrown in. Anyway, check them out, they’re pretty good.

And moving on again to another, totally unrelated topic; Empire Total War is coming out soon (1st March) and I’m really looking forward to it. One thing that has been bugging me however; Sega have decided, in their infinite wisdom, to release 2 versions of the game; the standard one and one with a few extra units and some other gimmicky stuff that cost £10 extra. Which retard at Total War HQ thought that this was a good idea? Why not just release the game with the extras instead of making me choose between extra content and cheapness. They’re even screwing with what you get with the extras; for example, if you buy the special edition of the game from Amazon you get a unit of Amazonian warriors. Witty. Anyway for the record I will be buying the standard version and probably Torrenting the extra content, just to spite Sega for trying to screw me over.