The Harass-Justify Pattern

I did not even want to write about this.  Then I load youtube to watch a tutorial on Scala, and up pops this ad!

I had already written this article in my head, decided I didn't want to write about it, and then I see exactly the ad I was thinking about, all in a matter of about 1 minute.

Okay!  I'll write about it!  Here's a screenshot of the ad:

Harass

The ad starts out by saying "these are real people".  I.e. they are not actors, other than the guy throwing eggs at them.

As the people go to sit down at the table, the man in the middle throws eggs and the real people jump in surprise.


Justify

If you didn't skip the ad, the middle man explains something about "life is hard to respond to when there are surprises" or something along those lines.  The justification for the harassment of throwing eggs at complete strangers is "I have some insight to share."


The Pattern

Whether or not the insight is valuable is not really interesting to me.  What is interesting is that the 2 behaviors "harass" and "justify" are presented in combination.  Throwing an egg by itself isn't enough.  And justification by itself apparently isn't enough either.  It is a theatrics pattern.

That's all... I'm going to watch about Scala now.


POSTSCRIPT

This is really obsession-compulsion, where "harass" is the compulsive behavior ("I must"), and "justify" is the obsessive thinking.  The justify is like a broken record that keeps playing over and over again.  There's some projection of "if everyone only could see what I'm obsessing about, they would understand my harassing behavior".  Such thinking is fantasy.

I guess the pattern could be generalized into Powerplay-Justify.  It's a "when words are many, sin is not far..." sort of thing.  Something about it doesn't smell right, as opposed to people operating in a natural outflow.

We could ask "what is source of obsessive thinking?"  There is a source.

The Antidote Pattern

There's a quintessential Christian marketing story that goes something like this:

- Person was desperate

- Person experienced miracle

- Person became a Christian

When I called myself a Christian for many years, and before that growing up in a Christian home, I heard this story with variations over and over.  The frequency was maybe never lower than every 3 years, sometimes more often, at least that's how I remember it.  My mother LOVED repeating every new variation of this story when it came out.

Every time I heard this story, I had 2 responses internally: the story was always unverifiable, and the story was always believable.  At least it was believable when I heard it for the first time.  It lost some of that luster after hearing it countless times though.

Then many years ago I left Christianity, and I never heard that story again in other religious practices.  There are other parallels to Christianity in other religions (like love your neighbor as yourself, or practice kindness, etc) but from what I've picked up in Buddhism or Hinduism or maybe even Mormonism - at least so far I've never heard this type of story.  And possibly that's why at a very deep level Christianity just wasn't for me - at a certain level the story produced more doubt than it produced devotion.

The closest story which also shows up in other religions is something like this:

- Person has good practice

- Person lives good life even with hardships

That story shows up in Christianity and Judaism (i.e. Job, Habakkuk), but also in Buddhist Koans and maybe even something like it is in the Baghavad Gita.

Back to the marketing story.  My only explanation is that this story exists on 2 levels.  It may actually reflect real events.  But it also serves a purpose for countering lost practice.  So I think of it as an antidote.  If you have really bad theology (namely the whole universe is really tainted with sin and all people are fundamentally bad) and everyone in your religious practice actually believes this bad theology (rather than seeing it for what it is, a metaphor of the not-yet-born-again-enlightened mind), then nobody new would ever come in.  So that horror theology needs an antidote story.  And you have to keep applying this antidote over and over again.

It is similar to the "end of the world" story that comes out at about the same frequency - every 3 years or so - where the world will end on such and such a date.

Now maybe that's not true.  Maybe I'm seeing something that's not really there.  Maybe your mileage varies.  But the idea of an antidote pattern seems a compelling storytelling mechanism, so I present it here, because storytelling and game design are closely related.  There is something very human going on here, and it seems worth mentioning.

The Anti-Learning Pattern

If learning was just the acquisition of knowledge, it wouldn't explain how news can affect people so differently.  Thus the necessity for framing "learning" in very precise terms, to allow for the idea of "anti-learning".


The Learning Pattern

We can think of learning in terms of process and need.  For example, a basic need might be hunger.  So any process which allows meeting that need which is new to the person hearing about it can be called "learning".

This way learning becomes a general game design pattern.  The problem the pattern addresses is any need.  The solution is a process to meet that need.


The Anti-Learning Pattern (Coping/Distraction)

The opposite of learning (yet similar enough to be misconstrued as valuable) is anti-learning.  Let's pretend it's the same problem: hunger.  Now if we provide a process which doesn't address the hunger, but instead distracts the person from their hunger, that process is anti-learning.  In short, a coping mechanism or distraction.

[I'm not going to get into situations where someone is obese and their hunger is habituated - that's a different health need pattern where the solution process would involve spending time with hunger, diet, and exercise.]


The point of even discussing an anti-learning pattern is that all knowledge is not beneficial.  Unless it addresses a need, it actually creates distraction.  Or it may benefit one party while exploiting another.  So there may be an interesting game dynamic available in this pattern.

The Anti-Wiener Pattern

Wiener

Have you heard of the "wiener" game design pattern?  It involves making a possible future state of the game visible to the player.  For example equipment that costs a 100,000 tokens, but your character only has 10 tokens - this is a wiener.  It shows "if you play long enough, you'll be able to afford this cool thing".

Another example is the Disneyland castle, which draws people to walk in that direction because they want to see the castle up close.

Sword Of The Stars II and Over-budget Technology Research

Over the weekend I bought a 4x game (called Sword of the Stars II).  The game is somewhat unfinished, had lots of bad reviews, but it was on sale and had enough youtube video evidence that I'd probably like it, so I took the risk and bought it.

Like most 4x games, you research technologies.  Like some 4x games (Master of Orion), research can finish ahead of schedule.  To describe research progress, a progress bar shows 0 to 100%.  You could hover over the progress bar to see how many turns before it would reach 100%.  At 100% a notice would come up that the technology was now available, and sometimes this happened early.

Fine.  Everything is just as I've seen before in other 4x games.

What I didn't know, and which the UI didn't reflect at all, was that some research could go over-budget!  So I'm playing along innocently minding my own business, and eventually see the progress bar fills to 100% and no new technology is available.  Nada!  I think "oh just an off-by-one bug" and go to the next turn.  Still nothing!  2 more turns!  Nope!  I was completely convinced the game had a bug in it which wouldn't let some technologies be unlocked - which essentially was going to shelve the game for me.

What a rip-off!

After consulting the forums - I got a gentle rejoinder: "RTFM".  Now whenever I hear "RTFM" - I think: "that's fine if we're talking about programming."  RTFS.  Okay I'll read the source code.  I'll do whatever work it takes to get the job done.

But this is a game.  I'm not being paid to do this.  Someone else was paid to make this experience "fun" - and instead all I got was that "what a rip-off!" feeling.

So this feeling of "what a rip-off" led to the idea of an anti-wiener.

Anti-wiener

With an anti-wiener, the game has hidden a future possible state from the player, so that when that state comes up, the player is surprised and traumatized (especially if they feel they just bought a broken game).  This is probably unintentional, unless you really hate your players.

In this case, the progress bar implied that 100% was the edge condition for research, when actually the edge was beyond 100%.  The design for SotS2 is actually 200%: an over-budget project could take up to 200% before completion, and at 200% that technology would be considered unavailable (i.e. just too hard).

[The solution I that finally came to me was the edge condition should always be clearly shown in the UI.  The bar should really show 200% as the full scale, with 100% being somewhere in the middle, and what players would usually see when doing research.  This becomes a wiener pattern again, because the player will wonder "can research go beyond 100%?  It looks like it can with the progress bar."  Then there's no surprise and no RTFM - it's an intuitive design again.]

Patterns and Rules

Here's a good link:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132649/the_case_for_game_design_patterns.php?print=1

While the author is talking about "Game Design Patterns", it brings up a progression of Design Pattern discussion:

http://www.slideshare.net/JoshuaKerievsky/a-timeless-way-of-communicating-alexandrian-pattern-languages

Perhaps most well known among software engineers is the "Gang of Four" Design Patterns book.  Whenever I've heard the term "patterns", I've assumed this was the usage.  Not true!  Design Patterns seem to have originated in architecture, with applications in gardening, theme park design - not just software.

The progression for game design continues to "The 400 Project", which is deliberately a list of "rules" rather than patterns, as discussed in the GDC presentations:

http://www.finitearts.com/Pages/400page.html

This is all fine.  It provides a great framework and vocabulary for discussion.  These are recipe books in architectural and experiential domains.

[Edit:  What I'm wondering now, is how to put wieners, rocks, paper and scissors to good use!]

[Edit: For GoF patterns, this also looks like a good discussion: http://www.oodesign.com ]