- Caring about what happens to a character (without authored narrative)
- What happens to the character that you care about?

X-COM

Your soldiers (idk if they're called soldiers by the game - I will call them soldiers here) level up over the course of the game from unspecialized rookies to entry-level specialists to experts. As the game gets harder, their improved stats and special abilities increase your ability to succeed.

[WELL-OFF CHARACTER = SUCCESS]

If a soldier dies, your chance of success on the current level falls, since you're down one person. Your chance of success for the rest of the game may fall as well; a downed soldier may die or at least be out of commission for a while, and you may have to use a lower-levelled soldier.

[SUFFERING CHARACTER = FAILURE]

The player controls these soldiers directly and wrong decisions will lead to quick deaths, but there is a lot of randomness too.

[CONTROL OVER FATE]
[SEMI-CHAOTIC, UNKNOWN FATE]

- Caring about what happens to a character (without authored narrative)
- What happens to the character that you care about?

The Sims

Sims have relatable needs like "Hunger" and "Social" and when those needs go unsatisfied for a long time they throw little tantrums which indicate that they are not just upset, but really suffering because of those unmet needs.

The sims will act on their own but the player can directly control what individual sims do, if they want. A player spends their time decorating a sim's house, spending their money for them, directing them. The player has a lot of control over what happens to the sim.

What can happen to them? Emotional suffering, as above. But the sim can also lose money (which is used by the player to purchase things), they can also get old and die.

Most bad things that happen to a sim cause the player to lose agency. If the sim is emotionally suffering, they may act against the player's wishes to resolve their need. If the sim loses money, the player cannot buy as many things. If the sim dies, the player can no longer control them. -- The player cares about the sim's well being and the better off the sim is, the more ability the player has to influence that.

- Caring about what happens to a character (without authored narrative)
- What happens to the character that you care about?

Heat Signature

Your character has a mini storyline with a goal, which you care about completing. If you die, you can never complete that character's goal.

The game is quite lethal, so you might die at any time.

Your character builds up an inventory of items but this doesn't make you care about the character.

The player has direct control over the character. The game is quite lethal. If the player messes up their planning, their character's death feels like their fault.

I've shuffled the list. Another side question is "what happens to the character that you care about?"

- Heat Signature
- The Sims
- X-COM
- Pokémon (the Pokémon)
- Tamagotchi
- Animal Crossing (villagers)
- Shadow of Mordor (nemesis)
- Disgaea
- Dwarf Fortress
- Etrian Odyssey

I guess the core here is the emotional experience of "caring about what happens to a character (without authored narrative)".

So, how do these 10 games create this effect?

10 games chosen based on relevance, personal familiarity, and finally diversity of design/genre.

- Tamagotchi
- X-COM
- Etrian Odyssey
- Animal Crossing (villagers)
- Shadow of Mordor (nemesis)
- Pokémon (the Pokémon)
- Dwarf Fortress
- Disgaea
- Heat Signature
- The Sims

Quote from: 26:43when I asked if there was anything in the fridge, it was implied that I meant anything TO EAT.

By arguing that the empty fridge is not REALLY empty, I was using the word "thing" in what Thomasson calls a "neutral stance". I used it to mean any and all entities that could possibly be described.

^ But, no, you didn't even use the word thing at all. You said empty.

Quote from: 23:40What do you MEAN "a chair IS simples arranged chair-wise?"

This quote has it exactly backwards. A chair is a word we use to describe this thing.

The problem with Vsauce's arguments about symbols and real things is that it's made of words. "If you believe that there are some simples arranged chair-wise" he says at 23:23. But what are simples? What does it to mean to believe that there are things? Yes, I believe chairs and simples exist. They both exist. Can I count them? Sure, if I decide that I want to count 'chairs and simples' for some reason. These words just refer to ideas which we use to understand reality.

Quote from: 15:52If I take a knife and scrape off a tiny part of this chair ... is it still a chair? I think most of us would say yes, it's still a chair. And it would still be a chair even if I removed a tiny bit again. And again.

A series of tiny innocuous removals is called a sorites sequence.

[..] it seems we must accept that each individual step doesn't annihilate the chair, clearly enough minute removals will leave us with no chair. nothing at all in fact.

but how can that be? how can subtracting zero over and over again EVER give a different result?

clearly, there must be a point at which a tiny change DOES make a difference

The problem is not in the reality of the chair but in the construction of our argument; we ask, "is it a chair?" as if something must either be a chair or not a chair. But some things exist in a middle state, where someone would not really say with confidence either way that it is definitely a chair, or not a chair. However, we have defined the problem to disallow this ambiguity.

Suppose I have a hundred D6 dice. "If I roll them, will the result be over 100?" With confidence, I can say yes.

If I remove a single die at a time, Sorites Sequencing* my collection of a hundred dice down to zero,

* look up the actual definition of this droqen

of course that answer will eventually become a confident No. However when it comes to "chair" we have generally decided that chair is a boolean thing, and not a maybe-floaty-thing.

The issue is the construction of the problem -- it's made out of a false linguistic assumption that a thing must either be something or not, an assumption that we hold because it's generally true and useful and convenient to build our language along those lines.

Quote from: 8:10[some people] believe the universe has "joints" and we can cut up reality into objective, real things by finding them.

Ontological antirealists disagree. Their position is that what we think there is is just one way to cut up reality. It's a good one for us, and our needs, but it's not objectively more true than any other [configuration].

Am I an ontological antirealist?

Regarding Vsauce's "Do Chairs Exist?"

QuoteKirbyKid — Today at 1:27 PM
hmm
what do you think is missing with the way you used to go about things?
Droqen — Today at 1:29 PM
good question! i think what was missing was.. the feeling that i wanted to use any game design theory when actually making a whole game? i can list out a bunch of jumping mechanics, but that's really just analysis, not application, and certainly not application on a large scale
if i know how to design a platformer character controller that's one thing, but i didn't have any sort of conceptual framework that connected these individual pieces of knowledge into a 'big picture' i had any faith in

- Blaseball - I haven't really engaged with it but I am familiar with it. Might exclude it on the basis of it being fundamentally, deeply multiplayer.
- King of Dragon Pass (the council)

This pattern was created using an exercise from Pattern Language for Game Design but before I read The Timeless Way of Building. I'm not sure I'll continue to use this format. I need to experiment and see what aspects of it work for me - maybe I will not find any better way, but I feel like this construction is too rigid, too industry, and not "Timeless" enough, not "alive" enough.