Pros and Cons of New Apartment

This morning we got the call approving the application for our new apartment. We drove over and dropped off our deposit (only $195--nearly $800 cheaper than some places we looked at), and should move in sometime around October 15th. Moving is going to suck, but I'm really excited about the new place.

The pros vs. our current apartment are many and significant, the cons are few and less-so. First the cons, so I can end on a positive note.


Cons:

No second bathroom. This is actually somewhat significant as our second bathroom is currently the "cat bathroom". It gets a bit messy in there and without it we'll have to be a lot more diligent about cleaning.

No outdoor storage. Currently, we have a nice little outdoor storage closet that we stuff all of our hiking, sports, and Christmas stuff into. It is literally packed to the ceiling (with the help of some cheap shelves). I think we've got a tiny bit more indoor closet space in the new place though, so hopefully we'll be able to find places for it all.

Smaller on-site laundry. The laundry rooms only have one washer and dryer each. We usually save up for weeks and do a batch-laundry evening with three washers running in parallel (and bring our DSes).

Smaller balcony, not fully covered. The cats spend a lot of time on the balcony, but I think it will be big enough for them. The bigger issue is that it's not fully covered. I'm out there a lot in the rain, which is nice, and we've got some patio chairs that won't like getting wet.

No racquetball court. Our current apartment has a racquetball court in the clubhouse. It's about 20 degrees cooler than Dixon and never closed for weird reasons, making it the premier racquetball venue in Corvallis. I'll miss it, and my home court advantage.


Pros:

$230 cheaper per month. Yay! We can eat again!

Vaulted ceilings and skylights. I'm stoked about this. The whole place feels much bigger and brighter. And more natural light is good for my instinctive cave-dwelling tendencies. Plus our plants, which have to be kept out of reach of the cats, will probably do much better.

Gigantic walk-in closet. We have small walk-in closets at our current place, which is nice, but this place has a huge one in our bedroom. I think Allison can still probably fill it.

Bigger kitchen. This will be really nice. Allison's parents have been trying to give us this island/cutting table thing since they're remodeling their kitchen, and we should have plenty of room for it now.

Closer laundry. Rather than one huge laundry room, this place has small laundry rooms in each building. Although batch-laundry will be harder, as I mentioned above, not having to lug it 200 yards up a hill will probably make doing it more often a lot easier.

Not on top of a huge hill. While my bike ride to school will no longer be the exciting, high-speed thrill-ride it is today, my ride home won't force me to take a shower.

Better bus route. I am now on one of only two bus routes in town to operate half-hourly instead of hourly. Come winter, with my bus-missing frequencies, this will be a big plus.

Right next to WinCo. The back entrance is right across the street. Walking distance to the most amazing grocery store ever, w00t! I like walking to get groceries and have missed that since leaving Seattle.

Ping pong table. We're trading the racquetball court for a ping pong table. While a good racquetball court is harder to find, I think this is a net gain, since Allison will play ping pong with me but not racquetball.

Catching Up

It's been a while since I posted anything, but not for lack of material. Rather, I've been silenced by a lack of the internet connection we used to pick up from our balcony, and being generally busy. Without further ado and in no particular order:

Housing search

We've been looking for a new place to live. We really like our current apartment, but we've been running a deficit for most of the year and our already obscene rent is about to get increased.

Trying to find a place has been insanely stressful. All of the cheap places suck, all of the expensive places are expensive, and all of the reasonably priced places don't allow cats. I've skipped out early on work three of the last four work days, and spent the better part of the time that I was at work on Craigslist. After seriously considering a depressing-looking duplex next to a gigantic substation (BZZZZZZZZZZ!), I think we've finally found an apartment that's nice, affordable, allows cats, and isn't halfway to Eugene.

If this doesn't work out we'll probably just live in the woods.

I think I'll call it gravity

I was riding my bike home in the pouring rain the other day because the bike rack was already full on the bus. A pear fell out of a tree and hit me on the head. Fortunately, I was wearing my helmet.

Most successful Albany trip ever

For those back home, Albany is to Corvallis as Lynnwood is to Edmonds. It's the soulless sister that's nice to have around if you need a Target or a shopping mall or something. Only since it's Oregon, you actually leave town and drive through some countryside to get there.

I kind of like going to Albany. It feels like an outing and we'll usually stop at Davis Family Farm for some fresh fruits and vegetables on the way home. But this trip to Albany I was not looking forward to.

Our car has been acting weird for about 10,000 miles. It's been doing this lurching thing that's kind of hard to describe. You'll just be driving and the oomph will drop right out of the car, then suddenly come back, and it'll do that repeatedly. We were taking our car to the dealership in Albany. We've been avoiding it since we have negative money, but Allison needs the car every day and the check engine light came on and stayed on for a few days, so we figured we better do it before getting bit by some catastrophic breakdown.

So we make an appointment, I skip out on work again, we take the car in, we play our DSes in the lobby, and when the guy comes out he says, "alright, you're good to go." We were expecting him to come back with some multi-thousand dollar appraisal, so we double-check, "you mean, it's fixed?" He says that the throttle sensor was going out, he replaced it, and it's covered by the warranty. Total price: $0.

As we drive home from Albany in our now smooth-running, luxury sedan, I'm feeling a bit stupid for not bringing it in 10,000 miles earlier, but mostly elated at having the car fixed for free.

Since that cost us nothing, we decided to stop at Davis Family Farm. We bought some blackberries, three ears of corn, and I picked out the smallest squash they had (Allison doesn't like squash). The lady rings us up and gives me the squash for free. Woohoo! Thanks, lady!

We walk outside and I couldn't be feeling better about the world. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, I've got a free squash in one hand and the keys to my fixed car in the other when I look down.

There, stuck in the mud, is a ten dollar bill.

True story, folks.

Second Birthday

I'm surprised I haven't posted about this already, and I suppose I should since it's a pretty big deal. I now have two birthdays per year instead of one. Today was one of them. Happy birthday, me!

It all started with me whining about how I don't get any presents for the 10.5 months between my original birthday and Christmas. Allison suggested I move my birthday to the summer. This was a solution that had never occurred to me before, so I considered it. After much deliberation, I realized that if I can move my birthday, certainly I can also add a birthday. And so I added August 6th (exactly six months from my original birthday) as my second birthday.

It took a while to convince Allison that such a move was viable, but she's been very supportive throughout the processes. You'd probably be surprised how easy it is to add a birthday--very little paperwork involved.

We went to Izzy's to celebrate with some of our friends. It was actually a joint celebration as it is also our friend Katie's (only) birthday. I received three amazing birthday presents: Allison got me the extended editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies, Allison's parents got me a ridiculously cute baseball piggy bank that I've had my eyes on for a while, and Chris Chambers got me a hilariously awesome Darth Vader bobblehead. Thank you everyone, I love my presents!

For those of you that missed my birthday, no worries. I didn't do a very good job of spreading the word. Sorry!

Tetris DS

This weekend we traded in a bunch of our old video games and Allison got Tetris DS with a chunk of the proceeds. We've both played it a few times solo already. It's really well done with tons of different play modes. Lots of fun, but it's not going to be displacing Advance Wars or Castlevania on my list of favorite DS games anytime soon. After all, it's only Tetris, right?

Today we decided to try out the multiplayer for the first time. 60 games later I was declared champion of the day (a warm-up day, in Allison's estimation). 60 games. 60! Head-to-head Tetris is insanely addictive. It's fast, it's furious, and the games are quick enough that you can always justify just one more (recursively). Poor old Mario Kart DS is going to be sitting in its case for a while.

Analyzing Game Mechanics

What makes a game fun to play?

I have been thinking about games a lot lately--analyzing existing games and playing with my own designs. I am constantly thinking about the above question, as well as its more concrete variation: What makes this game fun to play?

While I certainly don't claim to have solved this problem entirely, I increasingly find myself drawn towards analyzing game mechanics along two critical dimensions, which I've tentatively named: compelling decisions and creative play. I like thinking of these as the beginnings of a more complete framework for thinking about games, like the cognitive dimensions framework for evaluating the usability of notations or programming languages.

It may be the case that these dimension are too broad, and they are certainly incomplete. But I think they provide a nice place to start when trying to understand how a game's mechanics lead to interesting play, or in guiding the development of new mechanics. I should also note that they completely disregard all aspects of theme and the components of a game, both of which can be huge determiners in how a game plays. Finally, this whole exercise may seem obvious to some, but I think that there is some value in stating these things explicitly and considering them in detail.

With all of those caveats out of the way, on to the dimensions. I'll try to use mainstream games as examples, when possible, in the interest of broadness.

Compelling Decisions

A compelling decision is any concrete choice that a player makes which is based on reason, is non-obvious, and has an impact on the outcome of the game. A game with compelling decisions keeps players engaged by forcing them to think, and giving them a sense of control.

Deciding which card to play in a particular trick in Hearts is an example of a compelling decision. In choosing, a player must take many factors into account: which cards they have in their hand, which cards have already been played by other players, whether it would be advantageous to take the lead, etc. This decision is clearly based on reason and impacts the outcome of the game.

An identical argument could be made for choosing which card to play in a trick in Pinochle. However, I would argue that this decision is less compelling in Pinochle than it is in Hearts. In Pinochle there are both fewer different cards and more constraints on which cards can be played and when (for example, you must always beat the best card, if possible). Unless you have the lead, you are frequently choosing from a very small number of cards, and the decision is often obvious. This is not meant as a knock on Pinochle (which has more compelling decisions elsewhere, for example, in the bidding and passing phases), but rather to demonstrate that there are more- and less-compelling decisions, and that perhaps there is a trade-off between constraints and compelling decisions. Clearly, constraints are essential for defining a game, but overly constrained games may suffer from a lack of compelling decisions.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, early moves in the paper-and-pencil game Dots and Boxes are not compelling decisions at all, in this case, seemingly due to under-constraint. So it seems the relationship between constraints and compelling decisions is not simply linear, but somehow more complex. This leads to questions like: Can we maximize compelling decisions simply by twiddling the constraints? Is there a single optimal amount of constraint? And, how can we quantify constraints?

Related side note
Games of pure chance completely lack compelling decisions, yet many people still play them--why? Many such games of pure chance are intended for children. Perhaps children are more easily engaged by randomness? Pure chance games intended for adults are often gambling games. Does the excitement of potentially winning or losing money fill the same role that compelling decisions otherwise might?

Creative Play

A game enables or supports creative play if players feel as though they are able to innovate within the constructs of the game. Innovation can come in the form of newly developed strategies, combining game mechanics or making moves in clever or novel ways, or otherwise being able to repeatedly do things which are not obvious upon a first interpretation of the rules. Clearly, this is a somewhat vague concept, more so than the concept of compelling decisions, however, I hope to again clarify with some examples. I should stress that "innovation" on the part of a player does not necessarily mean that they are the first in history to perform some move or strategy. In fact, the designer may have considered or even designed the game with said strategy in mind. The crux is that it feels like innovation to the players.

For my first example of creative play I'm going to go to a hobby game for the first time: Nexus Ops, quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite games. In this light war game you have six different types of units. They always battle in descending order, from strongest to weakest. There are also "Energize" cards which give special abilities, bend the rules, etc. These cards are usually very powerful, but sometimes a card seems underpowered compared to others. One such card, when played, causes a battle to be reversed, and fought from weakest to strongest. At first, the utility of this card seems a bit dubious. But a clever player can use it to great advantage, often in conjunction with other cards which let you teleport weaker units into battle, to topple a group of strong units with a group of weak units. The first time a player uses this card to good effect is both exciting (to the player) and stunning (to the opponent). Clearly, this is a case of a designer building in some propensity for creative play. This is only one of many examples of mechanics with hidden value, or mechanics whose value is only realized in conjunction with other mechanics, in Nexus Ops.

While I'm confident that Nexus Ops won't grow stale for quite some time, it may seem that this sort of built-in creativity may eventually wear itself thin. After all, there are only finitely many combinations of cards and abilities (though that combination is very large). Perhaps Chess can serve as a counter-example. Chess has a seemingly endless supply of creative potential. Thousands (millions?) of people, over hundreds of years, have spent their entire lives playing and studying chess, and still new strategies are constantly being developed. Yet this longevity and variety is achieved with only six different types of pieces and an 8x8 board. Perhaps even more impressive, Go, with one type of piece and even simpler rules, has been studied and enjoyed for literally thousands of years, and still its creative potential has not been exhausted.

In general, I think that games with a significant spatial aspect (like Chess, Go, or war games) may be more amenable to creative play. Also, games with high branching factors (many possibilities at each decision) may also be more likely to have high creative potential.

Among card games, I think that the ladder-climbing games, such as Thirteen, provide great opportunity for creative play. In Thirteen, especially, cards can often be played in many possible configurations. The high number of options, and ability to dictate the cards your opponents must play to beat you, makes playing the lead a fun and often creative exercise. Additionally, deciding when to abandon your original strategy, to break a run by your opponent, is often a highly-compelling decision. This combination of creativity and decision-making (and fast play) makes Thirteen one of my favorite card games.

Final Notes

I think that there is some amount of trade-off between these two dimensions. Creative play is often enabled through open game play, whereas compelling decisions are often created by creating a bottleneck at which a player must make a choice. Exploring exactly where this trade-off occurs may be interesting. Hansa is a good example of a game that offers little opportunity for creativity, but forces one agonizing decision after another (a good thing) by constraining movement and resources. Perhaps this could be contrasted with more open games with similar mechanics (of which, I think there are many).

One question I still have is where "party games" fit into all of this. Can they be evaluated using the same criteria as more strategically oriented games? Perhaps they are generally low on compelling decisions, but very high on creative play?

In future posts I hope to analyze/review existing games. I will probably refer back to this post, but I will almost certainly also allude to aspects, such as theme and the integration of theme and mechanics, which I think are important to games, but which may be of a more subjective nature than the success of the raw mechanics (also highly subjective, I realize). Perhaps at some point I will add dimensions to cope with these aspects of games as well. Or perhaps not--this took a long time that I should be spending on other pursuits (i.e. papers).