One crepusculant lucifer is better than twenty. (Juicy oatmeal is still oatmeal)

[droqen]

what is a better way of naming things in a sci-fi videogame?

[48.8%] "laser cannon"

[51.2%] "crepusculant lucifer"

84 votes

link

[droqen]

Adjacent "laser cannon", "crepusculant lucifer" is hilariously overwrought.

Suppose a work is not a series of interesting choices... just a series of interesting moments. Once those moments cease to be interesting, the user disengages; it is no longer performing its function.

We do not continue to eat a meal once the food is gone and all that remain are bones and cutlery, even if those things are beautiful.

What's wrong with oatmeal?

In So you want to build a generator... Kate Compton describes "the 10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal problem."

I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal. Perceptual uniqueness is the real metric, and it's darn tough.

Boiling this oatmeal problem down to one of perceptual uniqueness misrepresents the problem.

When writing, when drawing, when making a game, when creating any bit of content, ask: What is EXCITING about it? What is NEW here? What is it doing that might make you burst into your friend's room and holler, "Look what I found!" or "did!"?

Rather than Perceptual uniqueness, consider instead the simple benchmark of Delight, or if you like, Fun. Sometimes you need to generate oceans of content in order to properly enshrine a particular beautiful thing -- in Probability 0, old and crusty thing that it is, the level generator is, to my eye, stupidly simple. It is a game about jumping and shooting and awkwardly positioning yourself around corners. The levels that it generates are just... not that interesting or valuable on their own merit. That's alright, though. They are there to be forgotten. The delight comes from jumping, shooting, and awkwardly positioning yourself around corners, among other things. The levels are not designed, they are in your way, they are passed through, and they are occasionally destroyed.

So, getting back to Backus' "crepusculant lucifer" question. What's the "better way of naming things"?

Crepusculant lucifer as a name is hilariously overwrought. It makes me curious about the definition of a word I've never read before: crepusculant. It suggests something strange and abstract and dangerous: lucifer. But the phrase "better way of naming things" implies that the question might be "Can I hand-generate a hundred bowls of oatmeal like this?" Each name is its own little work of art, its own potential source of delight.

There is delight in "crepusculant lucifer," but it's not delight you can repeat ad infinitum. It is a work of art, and it stands alone.

There is no delight in "laser cannon," but at least it gets out of the way.

[droqen]

Right. The latter part of the subject line: Juicy oatmeal is still oatmeal.

I'm intrigued to apply this to juice, too. Juice can hurt when it's overdone, when it doesn't "get out of the way" like "laser cannon," but instead dominates the mental landscape like "crepusculant lucifer" does.

Re-using the same juice over and over can't carry an experience forever; that's okay! It doesn't have to. But when designing juice, ask yourself how often it's going to steal the spotlight (think in literal numbers: will it be center stage 1 time per player, or 1000 times across a whole playthrough of the game?) and then ask yourself how often it deserves it.

[droqen]

Also, I don't mean to prescribe. You might find that you love the idea of a thousand crepusculant lucifers. Maybe it's a joke that keeps on giving, or it's representative of a consistent style. I'm thinking about the name crepusculant lucifer in my own (narrow, personal, particular!) way.

How long will it remain relevant, interesting, worth it to you? How long will it keep on giving?