On Optimization
I have a confession to make. It's something that sets me apart from my peers; something that makes me feel as though I don't belong among my co-workers, sometimes even among my friends. It's a hidden shame that I've seldom spoken of before now.
You see, I don't really enjoy optimization.
There, I said it.
Tonight I finished Peggle, the highly addictive game of brightly colored computer pachinko crossed with crack (the link, and for God's sake don't click on it unless you are seriously okay with having your life consumed by this ridiculous little game, is here). Well, sort of. In fact I finished the "undergraduate program" of "Peggle University," and now I am free to pursue the Challenge stages of the "graduate program."
Now, understand, I've been playing this game most nights for the last few weeks, much of that without even having the full version--just playing the same ten stupid levels over and over, trying to get higher scores and increasing amounts of insane rainbow explosions at the end, because the game is just that addictive. I got the full version a few days ago and spent a great deal of my free time playing through it rather than cleaning my apartment in anticipation of my family's visit. And now I have reached, I have been informed by such august personages as astridsdream and Nate Heiss, the point at which the real game begins, as one tackles the same levels with escalating numbers of orange pegs (the ones you have to hit to complete the level) and thresholds on how many points you have to score to continue. This is where it gets challenging; this is where you really have to work to get the points and the pegs.
And you know, I am just not all that interested.
I'll do some of it, of course, because all the bouncing and dinging and lighting up is a great deal of fun, but it will get too hard for me to really enjoy, and eventually I will wander off. Because ultimately, I don't care how many points I get; I care how much fun I have playing the game.
Maybe that sounds entirely normal to you. But I work for Wizards of the Coast's R&D department, an organization that is utterly dedicated to serving hardcore strategy gamers, where optimization is discussed at great length and in intense detail. "Fun" is an issue when designing a game, but when discussing games they're actually playing, the folks here are talking almost exclusively about attaining an absolutely optimized strategy.
Within my first month here, I had already turned down two offers to join weekly WoW sessions, both from groups of people I would quite enjoy spending time with, because I simply do not like WoW. It's a game that takes everything I actually enjoy about roleplaying, strips it out, and replaces it with a hugely complex optimizeable system, with talent trees and equipment setup to worry about. After all, how can you tell you're having fun if you don't have numbers to back you up? With WoW, you know exactly how much fun you've had overall from your level and how much fun you're having every single second from your DPS!
And yet, I do enjoy some level of optimization. I play RPGs for the actual roleplaying aspect, but I still like to make a character who can deal out a good amount of damage and serve as an effective member of a party, particularly in optimization-driven systems like D&D. My current character in lord_vantace's campaign is fun in part because he totally kicks ass. And when I play Magic, I'm certainly trying to optimize, because in the circles I play with, there isn't anything else to do. I lost my ability to just make a silly deck and have fun a really long time ago, so now optimization is what I've got, and I genuinely enjoy learning power curves and making incremental improvements. I guess I'm wrapped up enough in Magic after playing it for literally over half my life that I've gotten invested in doing well at it (and have the conceptual tools to do so at least some of the time), but for most things I just can't get worked up over winning.
I remember trying to explain to a friend of mine why she should play a Magic deck that was the minimum deck size and had so many lands in it and contained an even curve of mana costs... and she just didn't care. She was building the deck so she could get together with her friends and have fun, not so she could pilot a finely tuned killing machine that would give her an optimal chance of winning.
I don't have that mindset about Magic, but I have it about almost all other games. I enjoy winning, but the process of optimization in and of itself--of dissecting the system, finding its nuances, and exploiting them in order to reap improvements in my performance--does not interest me beyond the most basic level. I am, in that sense, a casual gamer.
And you know, maybe that's okay.
You see, I don't really enjoy optimization.
There, I said it.
Tonight I finished Peggle, the highly addictive game of brightly colored computer pachinko crossed with crack (the link, and for God's sake don't click on it unless you are seriously okay with having your life consumed by this ridiculous little game, is here). Well, sort of. In fact I finished the "undergraduate program" of "Peggle University," and now I am free to pursue the Challenge stages of the "graduate program."
Now, understand, I've been playing this game most nights for the last few weeks, much of that without even having the full version--just playing the same ten stupid levels over and over, trying to get higher scores and increasing amounts of insane rainbow explosions at the end, because the game is just that addictive. I got the full version a few days ago and spent a great deal of my free time playing through it rather than cleaning my apartment in anticipation of my family's visit. And now I have reached, I have been informed by such august personages as astridsdream and Nate Heiss, the point at which the real game begins, as one tackles the same levels with escalating numbers of orange pegs (the ones you have to hit to complete the level) and thresholds on how many points you have to score to continue. This is where it gets challenging; this is where you really have to work to get the points and the pegs.
And you know, I am just not all that interested.
I'll do some of it, of course, because all the bouncing and dinging and lighting up is a great deal of fun, but it will get too hard for me to really enjoy, and eventually I will wander off. Because ultimately, I don't care how many points I get; I care how much fun I have playing the game.
Maybe that sounds entirely normal to you. But I work for Wizards of the Coast's R&D department, an organization that is utterly dedicated to serving hardcore strategy gamers, where optimization is discussed at great length and in intense detail. "Fun" is an issue when designing a game, but when discussing games they're actually playing, the folks here are talking almost exclusively about attaining an absolutely optimized strategy.
Within my first month here, I had already turned down two offers to join weekly WoW sessions, both from groups of people I would quite enjoy spending time with, because I simply do not like WoW. It's a game that takes everything I actually enjoy about roleplaying, strips it out, and replaces it with a hugely complex optimizeable system, with talent trees and equipment setup to worry about. After all, how can you tell you're having fun if you don't have numbers to back you up? With WoW, you know exactly how much fun you've had overall from your level and how much fun you're having every single second from your DPS!
And yet, I do enjoy some level of optimization. I play RPGs for the actual roleplaying aspect, but I still like to make a character who can deal out a good amount of damage and serve as an effective member of a party, particularly in optimization-driven systems like D&D. My current character in lord_vantace's campaign is fun in part because he totally kicks ass. And when I play Magic, I'm certainly trying to optimize, because in the circles I play with, there isn't anything else to do. I lost my ability to just make a silly deck and have fun a really long time ago, so now optimization is what I've got, and I genuinely enjoy learning power curves and making incremental improvements. I guess I'm wrapped up enough in Magic after playing it for literally over half my life that I've gotten invested in doing well at it (and have the conceptual tools to do so at least some of the time), but for most things I just can't get worked up over winning.
I remember trying to explain to a friend of mine why she should play a Magic deck that was the minimum deck size and had so many lands in it and contained an even curve of mana costs... and she just didn't care. She was building the deck so she could get together with her friends and have fun, not so she could pilot a finely tuned killing machine that would give her an optimal chance of winning.
I don't have that mindset about Magic, but I have it about almost all other games. I enjoy winning, but the process of optimization in and of itself--of dissecting the system, finding its nuances, and exploiting them in order to reap improvements in my performance--does not interest me beyond the most basic level. I am, in that sense, a casual gamer.
And you know, maybe that's okay.