Wilsontomass

Player Agency: The Curse of the Video Game

or

Why Outer Wilds is the Greatest Game Ever Made

Player agency is a tricky problem. Games have always had an advantage over other media since the viewer is able to take part in the story in a way not possible in books or movies. But writing a story isn't free. For every choice a player can make new dialogue or content may need to be made. How do we make a player feel like they are in charge while keeping the development costs manageable?

There are tricks to avoid needing to do lots of extra work to make your world feel "real".

Wilsontomass

You Can Gaslight Yourself Into Loving Someone

Ever thought about how Love (or having a crush) is like having an addiction to a person? Well, it is and you can benefit from knowing this. Ever gotten to know someone slowly and realised after a while that even though they seemed almost-perfect (kind, outgoing, cute, smart, introspective, and understanding) you still didn't have any feelings for them? No? Just me? OK, but it can happen to you! Read on.

Disclaimer: I'm not a psychiatrist, nor am I a doctor or have any medical background or really any authority to talk about any of this. I'm a programmer and I didn't even finish my masters. I might be autistic but haven't been diagnosed (assessment soon!) so for now I'm just a Weird Nerd who writes about complexity aaaaaand let's move on to the interesting stuff.

Wilsontomass

Complexity Fills the Space it's Given.

I want to talk about an idea that I've started seeing everywhere during my work. To introduce it, here are a number of cases where excessive pressure in the software development process leads to certain perhaps undesirable designs.

1. You have a slightly slow algorithm, but you have enough processing power to handle it so you leave it as is (runtime fills the computing power it’s given)
2. The same is true for memory, see any meme about chrome ram usage
3. You have a big class with far too many responsibilities but you don't break it up (usually this leads to spaghettification of code)
4. You see a class that shouldn't really exist, it's too simple and only used in one or two places, but you might need it later so you leave it there (the topic of this post)

The last one here is what I want to talk about because I think it goes most under the radar. The class with few methods (for now)