We're all starving

sigmen4020 · 2020-02-27 02:26:54

fug wrote:

DestinyCall wrote:
Spoonwood wrote:
These are quotes from dev-changes:
"foodScaleFactor applied with ceil (instead of lrint) so that a food never rounds to 0 (like foodScaleFactor of 0.35 applied to popcorn)."
"eatBonus and foodScaleFactor now decline over the generations from Eve. eatBonus starts at 4 and eventually reaches 0, with a half-life of 50 generations. foodScaleFactor starts at 1.0 and eventually reaches 0.5, with a half-life of 50 generations."
I'll start carving tiny little baby coffins.
Make sure you eat your 10 one pip berries because that's a lot of hungry work for all those dead babies.

Oh yeah, forgot hungry work was a thing a sec. That makes this update even worse.

Spoonwood · 2020-02-27 02:38:26

jasonrohrer wrote:

Game-fun is precisely the process of learning and improving in a controlled, well-defined context.

Game fun can happen when already knowing the entire process by creating good looking things. Or by engaging in some sort of competition and doing well without learning or improving. Or by teaching others (which isn't a form of learning or improving). Also, people have fun playing card games where chance is sometimes involved without having a controlled context, because what cards one gets doesn't (or shouldn't) follow any predictable pattern. Jason can write words and think he's right, but the reality is much different and more complex than what he has asserted.

Oh, his post also involves trying to persuade people to ignore things that they might have or in fact have found fun in favor of his "theory". One simply cannot honestly look at something like 'fun' and just discount things because they are inconvenient for one's hypothesis. That's a whole level of being closed-minded and dishonest.

jasonrohrer wrote:

This is obviously not by design. They are emergent, degenerate cases enabled by the mechanics that I designed, however.

No. At least one of them is by design. Fug clearly said:

fug wrote:

Fun is not: Looking at your character model and releasing you're the wrong color.

Jason clearly designed things so that players would be the wrong skin (or hair) color sometimes for a particular task. Jason knew that such would happen before he implemented race restrictions.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Furthermore, there are (at least hypothetical) situations that emerge from those same mechanics that ARE fun. For example, negotiating with someone across a language barrier can be fun.

Yet again another attempt at lecturing people on what they actually think or feel. Also, I don't think Jason's playing of his own game has increased since he added these things. So, he likely doesn't even the strength of his own experience to believe such. His hypothesis, lacking solid *game-playing* experience, is clearly dismissive of people's experiences also by the attempts to talk about 'pseudo-fun' as if people couldn't drastically find different things than what his theory could be fun.

And really, how many people play games to "learn" or "improve"? Those are words usually found in schools, or self-help books or programs.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that Karltown, other roleplayers, griefers, and people who make things because they look or feel nice, feel rather sure that they aren't trying to "learn" or "improve" in game.

Spoonwood · 2020-02-27 02:40:56

DestinyCall wrote:

Race restrictions and tool slots are predominantly NOT fun, even by your definition. They repeatedly create hard roadblocks that are effectively unbeatable. No way forward, nothing to learn or teach. Just a dead-end.

This is correct. They also don't happen in a well-defined context from the player's perspective, because such interactions are chaotic, and likely to be chaotic by what Jason originally asserted.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-02-27 03:37:30

Jason doesn't care what is fun for us because he read a book about fun so he knows better.

Meanwhile less and less people playing the game, weird...

Coconut Fruit · 2020-02-27 03:58:36

There is no way to convince flat earthers they are wrong. No matter how hard you would try, how many proofs you would show, they are just fanatics, their brains are closed for everything that is round. They would probably not believe that the earth is a sphere even if they could go to space and see it with own eyes.

Saolin · 2020-02-27 19:57:49

Fun can mean a lot of things. I think Jason and Spoonwood are both right in their contrasting opinions of what fun is.

For myself I would say fun is making progress against a reasonable challenge.

another thing I find fun is having positive social interactions.

These two types of fun don't describe each other though.

There are some things about this game I don't find fun when I last played that leave players feeling helpless in some situations to reasonably make any progress.

jasonrohrer · 2020-02-28 03:33:44

Total helplessness is not fun, for sure.

However, I don't think you're actually ever totally helpless, even with the biome restrictions in place.

I mean, helpless in which regard? To the point where you have no choice but to starve for lack of water?

Even if you send out a search party and don't find the necessary specialist for the next step in water production, that doesn't mean you're helpless. You're in a tense situation, and the clock is ticking for sure, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

What about moving to a new primitive water source and making an outpost there as a stop-gap, or even moving the village entirely, and leaving a way stone behind so that wanderers have a better chance of finding you in the future?

My goal, in general, is to give you trans-generational problems that don't necessarily have "textbook solutions" available. Problems that require you to think on your feet, and make do with the situation that you're handed.

If you look at one of these problems as an individual, it might be unsolvable for you, right now, in this moment. It might actually be impossible for YOU to make rubber in your lifetime. But "making rubber" isn't your personal problem anyway. It's a trans-generational problem. A problem that your village faces collectively.

And a problem that IS getting solved, collectively, again and again, by village after village, eventually. Here we have the Tini family that has been going strong for two whole weeks and 750+ generations. What's impossible, exactly?

This is a very different feeling from the individual mastery that is offered by most games, where you look at goal X and can try and retry until you get there.

But this isn't a game about individual mastery, nor individual goals with guaranteed solutions.

There have ALWAYS been things that could get in the way of whatever individual goal you set in your life. That's the fundamental nature of a game about cooperation.

Spoonwood · 2020-02-28 04:33:20

jasonrohrer wrote:

However, I don't think you're actually ever totally helpless, even with the biome restrictions in place.

As if being born only able to wiggle around is something significantly beyond total helplessness.

jasonrohrer wrote:

What about moving to a new primitive water source and making an outpost there as a stop-gap, or even moving the village entirely, and leaving a way stone behind so that wanderers have a better chance of finding you in the future?

Doing that isn't about people trying to get to some technology which can meaningfully replace "iPhones". It's also not progress. Doing things for the sake of merely surviving is not progress.

jasonrohrer wrote:

What's impossible, exactly?

Jason here has asked a question as if someone had made an assertion about impossibility, when no such assertion had gotten made in this thread.

jasonrohrer wrote:

This is a very different feeling from the individual mastery that is offered by most games, where you look at goal X and can try and retry until you get there.
But this isn't a game about individual mastery, nor individual goals with guaranteed solutions.

Nope. There's plenty of people who play it that way, and the mechanics of the game do allow individual mastery to occur, depending on the player's goals. And the spirit of the game is whatever the mechanics of the game allow:

jasonrohrer wrote:

Regarding "the spirit of the game," the only spirit present is what is embodied by the mechanics themselves. Playing "against the spirit" of Chess or Go is impossible, despite what some people have said in the past when people employed "perverse" strategies.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/529

Thus, some player playing for the sake of individual mastery is NOT playing against the spirit of the game, since doing so is impossible a priori.

Jason's claim that this isn't a game about individual mastery is thus inconsistent with his own assertion about his game.

mensrea · 2020-02-28 05:59:31

Spoonwood wrote:

These are quotes from dev-changes:
"foodScaleFactor applied with ceil (instead of lrint) so that a food never rounds to 0 (like foodScaleFactor of 0.35 applied to popcorn)."
"eatBonus and foodScaleFactor now decline over the generations from Eve. eatBonus starts at 4 and eventually reaches 0, with a half-life of 50 generations. foodScaleFactor starts at 1.0 and eventually reaches 0.5, with a half-life of 50 generations."

This is change I look forward to. I think endgame gets very stale after a while. Tuning this could force an end condition, where people are starving. It will encourage clothing and valid building making to survive. Skillful yumming will be rewarded. Basically it could make endgame food management be as difficult as an Eve town. For some reason fun for me is higher when there is a threat of death. Even death by murder in previous modes of this game was fun.

And tuning it could determine what kind of end game we get to. Whether radios and other frivolous pursuits occur, or for how long.

pein · 2020-02-28 09:11:58

Nothing really forces people to do things instead of hanging around and talk.

What you say is not happening right now. One veteran gets a horse or two and gets water while the others stay at home and don't do anything.
When they see a few buckets of water, they waste it on the berry bushes.

Some people go out and start new towns, others go back. Thing is bell towers signal locations and got more resources so people will always try to stay there.
There aren't too many tasks to do without water. Get water. To get water you need water that's bad enough but then now you even need other families. So people don't do anything at all. Then a newbie asks for a job and you can't even tell him what to do. "Go 200 tiles NE with a bucket" never gonna happen.

The game kinda needs more jobs to make people useful for others, where their time and work creates some sort of advantage, make something out of nothing or almost nothing. Right now you can just yell at people for not doing things effectively. Too much focus on having the resources vs converting them. It takes a lot of time to get clay. Later on, takes even more time. While making plates is quite fast. Takes second to cut down trees, then transport can be an issue, then all trees are so far no one ever wants to go out so far, well-planting trees is actually a good mechanic other than the water cost.

I only want one thing: a kid should be useful to me always. I should see her/him as an asset not another mouth to feed. If I can convince him to take a job, he should be willing to do it cause its worth it, also worth for me cause it creates a net gain.
Right now kids can do most things right away so not much different from an adult. Maybe we need more pickup age limits. Also, tool slots might need to come over time not right away. So adults can learn more things later on and kids can only do a few things.
Also, jobs that require a bit of combining things for a tiny benefit. Maybe collecting rainwater or leaves or mushrooms that are temporary.

Spoonwood · 2020-02-28 16:50:36

mensrea wrote:

And tuning it could determine what kind of end game we get to. Whether radios and other frivolous pursuits occur, or for how long.

Radios are not frivolous pursuits. They're the most complicated objects in the game and the ones that require the most pre-requisite technologies existing to get made, and require a decent amount of water also (so the food supply should be somewhat secure before such is attempted). Radios are thus unquestionably replacements for 'iPhones':

jasonrohrer wrote:

"If we had to start over from scratch, but kept all of our knowledge, how long would it take us to get back to iPhones?" where iPhones are a placeholder for whatever sufficiently advanced tech we can imagine.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 896#p81896

That said, they are rather easy to destroy also and arguably don't have a whole lot of function, so that people have enough motivation to make them comes as another matter.

Saolin · 2020-02-28 19:59:55

jasonrohrer wrote:

Total helplessness is not fun, for sure.
However, I don't think you're actually ever totally helpless, even with the biome restrictions in place.
I mean, helpless in which regard? To the point where you have no choice but to starve for lack of water?

Even if you send out a search party and don't find the necessary specialist for the next step in water production, that doesn't mean you're helpless. You're in a tense situation, and the clock is ticking for sure, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
What about moving to a new primitive water source and making an outpost there as a stop-gap, or even moving the village entirely, and leaving a way stone behind so that wanderers have a better chance of finding you in the future?
My goal, in general, is to give you trans-generational problems that don't necessarily have "textbook solutions" available. Problems that require you to think on your feet, and make do with the situation that you're handed.

The problem isn't that there's NO chance of success. There is a chance of success, but the chance is low, and feels more helpless than challenging. Spending a life running through the wilderness looking for a town/family is not very interesting or engaging, and failing most of the time allows for little feeling of progress or accomplishment. It's why there's been complaining about living in the same big towns, and complaining of relying too much on bell towers. It's possible to get a new town started, but unlikely to the point of being unrealistic, and knowing that, a lot of players won't be willing to stay and help.

DestinyCall · 2020-02-28 20:34:32

Saolin wrote:

The problem isn't that there's NO chance of success. There is a chance of success, but the chance is low, and feels more helpless than challenging.

This is the critical problem with race restrictions in a nutshell. It is not fun. It is frustrating.

If your village desperately needs rubber to upgrade the well, locating a black village or a random black person feels like winning the lottery. It is that rare.

But the lottery is based on chance and should be played for entertainment only, not for investment purposes. If I relied on winning the lottery to feed my real family, they would all be dead by now.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2020-02-28 20:41:31)

One Hour One Life Forums

#26 2020-02-27 02:26:54

Re: We're all starving

#27 2020-02-27 02:38:26

Re: We're all starving

#28 2020-02-27 02:40:56

Re: We're all starving

#29 2020-02-27 03:37:30

Re: We're all starving

#30 2020-02-27 03:58:36

Re: We're all starving

#31 2020-02-27 19:57:49

Re: We're all starving

#32 2020-02-28 03:33:44

Re: We're all starving

#33 2020-02-28 04:33:20

Re: We're all starving

#34 2020-02-28 05:59:31

Re: We're all starving

#35 2020-02-28 09:11:58

Re: We're all starving

#36 2020-02-28 16:50:36

Re: We're all starving

#37 2020-02-28 19:59:55

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#38 2020-02-28 20:34:32

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