Looking at facebook’s user interface means google’s ads are peripherally visible. The same is true of other sites, but we can’t refresh them without refreshing the whole page. Now, google’s aim is utilitarian. They pay entertainment authors I favor while only showing me stuff I actually want. This could mean books I haven’t read or movies to add to the list of what I want to see. That may even save me time otherwise spent filtering lists of the “25 greatest comics ever”, which unfortunately only differs from “25 comics to read before you die” by only two titles.

Of course, the business model is predicated on my participation. Sculpting its algorithm for me with like and dislike buttons represents a waste of time, if my budget won’t free up money for a new knick-knack until next month. This would fly totally against the Buddhist injunction about conjuring my own temptations. People can more easily ignore queries unrelated to their interests. Car ads and prescription commercials are either boring or nice vignettes for me. My father, on the other hand, pines for a truck and must continually argue himself down from buying one.

Of course, some marketers who I want to suggest future purchases have cut the line of communication. Netflix, like the aforementioned facebook sidebar, intuits offerings based on ratings. Itunes’ genius, on the other hand, only analyzes my playing and purchase habits on my computer. However, I primarily listen to my ipod, and on a schedule to forestall boredom. Since my itunes library sees barely any change, I sadly turned genius off.

Pandora, the internet radio service, sits on the opposite side of the spectrum. Ratings not only guide the next crop of songs, Pandora’s staff deconstruct their library so they can establish my preference for ‘breathy male vocals’ or any of forty other aspects. The majority of my song buying list have come from listening to Pandora, rather than radio. Ambivalence comes from the site’s somewhat conservative attitude. For every new song, good or ambivalent, the service tries to play two songs I already like. Perhaps that makes sense for listeners who wear their favorite shirts at least once a week. Over-familiarity, however, will breed disdain for songs anywhere below perfection.

Walking this line of restraint and desire occasionally fosters warnings of the deterioration of the creative media in all arenas. An unrealistic acceptance of these offerings would be ambivalent. Critics would claim the fool would starve amid piles of joyous entertainment and gadgets. Still, if converting a life savings into everything you ever wanted, some of it would necessarily be food. Flexibility is the greater issue in this case. (Another parking citation? That puts me out on the streets with my hoard of jewels and porn.) Eventually the fool would consume the goods and need to begin again. Of course, shhe would have earned more in the meantime, so this scenario doesn’t suggest much.

My social circle, and certainly ‘pirates,’ would much prefer that advertisers just kept their big mouths shut and let us watch the movie in peace. Obviously, that’s unsustainable and I wonder if entertainment companies are letting themselves be starved out of nostalgia or something. There is a fear that people want to live effortlessly. Under that mindset, the Superbowl’s lineup seems a superfluous act of faith. Sure, godaddy may hire a busty actress, but I’ll just mute the TV until the game’s on again. Google, on the other hand, knows this isn’t a universal mindset. It’s staff not only measure, but prove, that enough people are responsible about their consumption to keep them and their clients profitable for the time being. Obviously, there’s no accounting for switching away from telegraphs and trolley cars.

As with most posts, I wrote this in stages so there are temporal anachronisms all over. That excuse feels a little like the fools who take “I don tpye engrish too nice so dot complane,” as license to type whatever pidgin 1337speak they want. However, there aren’t ubiquitous context-checkers available to correct it and I can’t plan to not finish it until an indefinite future effectively, so I will leave them be. In fact, I wrote the next paragraph in November, but it is true yet again; funny how that works out, eh?

I have broken out of a cycle of interest with Zynga’s games in general. Hungry for more opportunities to waste my time, I made the unwise move back to Myspace rather than make a dummy account on Facebook. The expansion showed me that not all platforms are treated equal. In the end though, the uniform experience and demand overwhelmed me and I just stopped for a while. This became a shuffle with ennui as my dance partner until I could understand my ambivalence. Just what was so fun and what sort of fun was missing?

Yesterday, I figured it out by comparing it to what I liked about Newground’s games. Newgrounds is cousin to youtube and flickr, but archives user-donated Flash media. Some create games and some movies, which other users vote on to determine whether they survive. Directing my own flash movies remains on a marching horizon, so I opted to ‘level’ up via voting. A user’s vote weight is a product of hiser level and rank. Vote on any five submissions daily for level points. Vote on any number of submissions that haven’t been accepted yet for rank points. To be efficient, I voted on five or so new submissions to get the points for both before looking at the day’s headliners.

This and a couple other factors soured the experience. Specifically, I only accrued points if I had approved the candidate if it succeeded or ‘blammed’ it, if the community rejected it. This gave some pressure, not to vote about whether I felt a file was below average, but how other users would vote on it. This became pretty annoying if the people judging in the (generally) ten minute window are more permissive than I. On Youtube, no one cares if you submit a thirty second clip of your thumb. Here, it seemed like the point was to have better work and let people document their first tries on sites without voting systems (deviantart). I even penned a couple of reviews to castigate the very worst submissions. As an example, I dismissed die die fuckers die by saying “this is a ‘music video’ in that an asian song plays in the background while it scrolls a single image of a tikiesque skull at a snail’s pace. // Turn back any who read reviews before watching. // the preloader didn’t suck.” Eleven months later, I got a note that informed me that my review had been deleted because I hadn’t followed the guidelines. It was the sinning third message, because appearantly some ‘helpful’ moderator noticed a pattern in my reviews and deleted every sinning one. The only seemingly prohibited element is that I encouraged other people to blam the submission or not play it. The deletion swarm came at a convergence when I felt tired of trying to gamely predict whether ten year olds like crappy flash movies or not. I stopped visiting the site, which is foolish because its best submissions are top-notch.

So, in puzzling my ambivalence to Zynga’s games, I recalled a curious entry called “Upgrade Complete!” It came as a sequel in spirit to another called “Achievement Unlocked,” a metagame of maneuvering a small elephant around a static level trying to perform 100 admittedly arbitrary states. Upgrade complete has two elements. One is a simple starfighter game to earn money for the store. The store is the second and coequal element of the metagame. The author accomplished this by beginning with virtually nothing and forcing the user to buy and upgrade every element, from the title screen and menu buttons, to the game graphics and weapons. All of Zynga’s games utilize the passive elements of each to make pale clickstorm copies of ‘upgrade unlocked.’

Farmville commits this crime most obviously. Zynga’s other offerings – Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars, Dragon Wars, and Youville – hide the truth with various pairings but never surmount that core. Perhaps Facebook’s structure or market factors incentivize these forms. Others I tried, Tiny Adventures and Starfleet, support this idea. The point isn’t to belabor some perceived short-sightedness on the part of game designers. Their forums are full of whiners who ask for game-changing perks despite the injurious effect they would have on Zynga’s business model. I intend, with the preceding analysis and subsequent reviews, to warn potential players about the type of experience offered. For the longest time, I felt a varying ambivalence about the endeavor. Until I realized the superficial nature rationally rather than intuitively, I couldn’t decide whether I was wasting my time or having fun. Hopefully, I can save you some grief.

Youville

I did accuse Farmville, but Youville – on Myspace – tempts via a shorter review. I used to watch my sister play The Sims before my parents gave me my first laptop and we no longer had to share our family computer. She used it as a simple home designing program and rarely ventured into the mollycoddling proper. I recall trying that aspect but found the level of micromanagement beyond my patience. Youville attempts a substitute by cutting the biological foolishness and emphasizing more emotional activities: work, shopping, and pretending to interact with other people. The work consists of baking sweets at a ‘factory.’ Here, the clickstorm and scheduled return is a minigame to enable shopping and avatar abilities (like ‘the Egyptian’ or ‘anger). But, it makes the whole of Farmville’s world, so I’ll describe it in more depth below. Suffice that baking is a sequence of prep, choose your return time and profit margin, harvest and clean.

Zynga offers two types of interfaces: primarily graphic and primarily textual. Some artists are sitting pretty because – despite cartoony character design, for self-identification and cheaper scripting – the backgrounds are very nicely rendered. Mind, Youville sits with point and click adventure games rather than any sort of dynamically rendered environment. The furniture fails to stimulate me, but it isn’t too far from the quality on Maxim’s (original) offering. While Youville compares favorably, given the platform, besides working and buying stuff, I couldn’t find anything else of note. Sure, I can make some flippant gesture in front of some ten year-old’s avatar and gain xp, but why bother? Perhaps if I had more Myspace friends playing it, we could make a flashmob in the 50’s diner, but then what? Fifteen turns at the wheel left me cold. If you like buying clothes and furniture for yet another avatar in your army, go right on ahead. (I bet the Facebook version is even nicer?)

Myspace

Zynga obviously showers most of its attention on its Facebook franchises. Myspace doesn’t get short shrift, but has missed out on most of this year’s events. I suspect users on Tumblr and the iPhone can relate similar stories. Very likely, Facebook’s fan advertising prominence (status updates) created the difference. Sure, Myspace has announcements that perform similarly; but, this is a liminal feature. It is a small panel on the left side of the homepage and only to friends. Barring self-censors, Facebook shows updates center stage. Further, Myspace’s messaging system is individual oriented. Gifting on Facebook uses a CC system, so I can easily send sweet meat to twenty people at once. Myspace lets me queue the recipients, but requires I reaffirm the message twenty sinning times. They are less obvious on the latter because Myspace doesn’t offer a filter for just friends who play that game. I added a few ‘friends’ for both Mafia and Vampire Wars, so it’s annoying to click another ‘yes, really send a gift’ prompt, only to receive another informing me that soandso blocked messages from this app.

Zynga does offer some incentives to stave complaints from the limited attention, but these are not compelling enough to encourage me to log in. I tried these games on Myspace because I felt like I was running through Mafia Wars too quickly. Plus, it seemed like a chance to start over better, with full understanding of its incentive structure and the strategy I wanted to pursue. Unfortunately, these clickstorms have the replayability of a one day dvd.

Dragon Wars

That is true of all of them but Dragon Wars had pretenses that ‘should’ have elevated it. The frame work is a resprite of the other Wars’ interface. But, some quests distinguish themselves by actual rendered play. You control a (quake level) avatar that fights enemies hiding in the corners of the room. Unfortunately, the room is always the same. Buying weapons doesn’t improve performance. Levelling up skills doesn’t improve performance. Frankly, the only thing that changes is the number of enemies. We can just see a second room to the left that, when clicked, promises it will be released in the future. Strictly speaking, I could be wrong about the 3D subgame’s operation for the later levels. I could only access the first two because Dragon Wars needs more players. Of the sixteen quests I can see, only five don’t have a friend requirement. Sure, they are modest, the highest only required five friends. At this point though, I am not going to ‘make more friends’ just to unlock some pretty thumbnail sized pictures. Nevertheless, a review I read beforehand warned of no progression in the rendered section as well. Not worth it.

Farmville

I have kvetched enough about the clickstorm quality to describe its exemplar edition. Your avatar scurries about a diagonally oriented grid of your arrangement plowing, planting, and harvesting. My farm – deepened three times with a bare two tile widths each time – measures 12 x 12 because I utilize the most efficient grid anchored to the bottom corner. As that leaves a wasted gutter around the upper two corners, I have plenty of space for all the fauna accrued. If I laid a single crop across the whole grid (insanity), that would be three bouts of 144 clicks. Then my animals or trees mature on various schedules and require two bouts of clicks. One opens the menu to move, sell, rotate, or harvest which is the second click. Perhaps you may visit your ‘neighbor’s farms and fertilize five of their crops or plowed fields for more xp. (That is a misrepresentation, but close enough.) That is the whole game. There are achievement embellishments, but those come pretty easily if you just reconcile yourself with repetitive stress syndrome of clicking ninety quintillion times. I have, obviously, tired of the game. I can’t say I have stopped, because I want to test one last feature: mastery.

Mastery is the third most important sliding bar to fill that sources promise me will eventually feed into experience. Planting and plowing cost money but reap experience. Harvesting earns the profit and mastery. Supposedly, when I have harvested through three tiers of mastery, the mastery will become experience for harvesting. I have no clue why I still log on for that subzero gruel (mainly to see if it is true). Unfortunately, the mastery curve is so steep, it works against the leveling – which could be the goal of a nut busting company, but they could just be wildly incompetent.

Crops, flowers and foodstuffs alike, mature at one of ten rates: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, & 16 hours or 1, 2, 3, & 4 days. At each level a new crop unlocks, so after roughly ten levels, you may receive a crop with a reproduced maturation date, but a slightly higher profit margin. If mastery was at all fair, I would be two tiers into, say, strawberries (4 hours) when blueberries unlock. That way, I must decide whether money or future experience is more important. The highest mastered crop – rice – is just short of the third tier. It became available at level seven. I am level twenty-nine. The ridiculous disparity is not from crop rotation. Only four our other crops have the next most mastery: just over one tier. If this incentive is taken seriously, I can play the game with the first few crops exclusively (not really, those are multidayers which are for dummies). That is rather ass-backward since the goal of accruing levels – by earning mastery xp – is to get different crops that should be significantly better. I don’t think I have ever encountered a game that set its players the conundrum of ignoring the upgrades unlocked or leveling ineffectively.

Of course, there is a faction that epitomizes the ‘casual gamer’ demographic. Appearantly, some of the youville gamers see all this farming as a minigame to unlock simfarm furniture. They don’t play the game as much as arrange their clutter into pretty designs. I’m not just referring to players who order hundreds of trees to simulate Central Park. I mean people who order hundreds of blue hay bales to simulate a river. Farming is a pain in the a-scaphoid, but arranging a simulated skyline blows my mind. On Mafia Wars, I can understand paying Zynga for skill points to buy energy and be able to do more missions, as those are the ‘fun’ part of the game. Spending money to buy lawn ornaments that I spend ten minutes lassoing into the right niche of my hay bale Christmas tree speaks of wasted talent. (Even if it goes to crooks, spiriting away fools’ money always helps the economy at large.) If you have the ‘ocd’ to meticulously clear away droopy flowers and replace them with new ones, I have some dusting for you to do. (The flower setting prompt warned that flowers only last 14 days. I thought, cool: I set them out, earn my achievement button and then they disappear in two weeks. No. They become droopy but never die, so I had to click all forty sinning pots twice to delete them.)

While I’m not on the subject, forget about that profit margin, it is only better by a tenth of a gold piece per hour. If you want to delve in despite my warnings, I highly recommend reading through that blog’s advice. The author wrangled a good table for seed profit per hour and experience per hour but not much else. His table for trees is a waste of time to study. He gave the harvest time and reward, but trees – unlike crops – offer a fraction of the price paid for the tree at each harvest. The correct focus is time until the tree is profitable. Obviously, any gifted tree is immediately profitable. Here follows my table of breakeven dates for purchasable trees:

With the exception of the Ornament tree, a limited Christmas offer, the more expensive and longer duration trees have a much slower profit margin. This stands as more evidence that zynga has a solid art department and their daycared children are in charge of deciding the difficulty curve.

Animals compound still slower profit times with double the wasted space. I didn’t bother to make a table because we can only buy three for coins. The rest demand legal tender or a perceptive friend. Recently, zynga did some remodeling so the above trees are being phased out as gifts and weird fruit takes the stage (cashews, starfruit). In fact, zynga must have realized their grind lost meaning at level 10 because they concurrently introduced a collectibles aspect. Various knick-knacks are paired with certain actions; so only shears are gifted, only a rusty faucet comes from plowing, and only a hoe comes from planting (or whatever). I paid little attention because in the time since I kvetched about the droopy flowers, I mastered rice. It indeed returns experience to harvest them and I do not care.

Perhaps you think, “Nicholas, you complain this whole time, but you are still playing, right?” No. I am sinning done with this one-trick pony. I have not accepted nor given gifts in three weeks, and that was out of weakness. I have not planted anything since early January. Fool that I am, I returned to harvest trees (because they involve fewer clicks) and broke the habit. I steadfastly do not recommend Farmville. I played it, essentially to write this post. I played it because I hoped that it would get better somehow. No, the game is just click ninety times to decide when you have to click ninety times to remove the pretty flowers, earn achievements and collections by grinding even harder. If you tire of that click one thousand times to make a picture from giant, hay pixels. Take hammer, apply directly to forehead.

If you ignore my suggestion, at least block off your avatar with four hay bales. It wastes a tremendous amount of time poorly pathfinding. It is so bad that zynga gifted everyone a ‘biscuit’ that sped the avatar up for a while. I imagine they offer more for cash. If you are one of the ten friends who still play this, don’t send me any gifts any more.

Rather than keep this hidden for several more weeks as I begin to displace lazy vacation weekdays with homework hours, I published this rogues gallery of shitty zynga games. I will publish my thoughts about the two I still play, Mafia and Vampire Wars, forthwith.

Artificial Stratification

Sigmund Freud still commands a strong audience despite the dated nature of his analyses. His case study, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, particularly embodies this problem in the divergent fashions he dealt with Dora’s illness. The main consists of finding a huge number of potential symbolic connections he spun around her behavior and dreams. Only his technique shines through to assist the frail, yet challenging woman under his care. His therapy fails to capture Dora because his brush with therapy is almost always subsumed by his interpretive indentification of problems.

Freud brooks no facts in his all-consuming quest for relating Dora’s dreams and memories to his paradigm. Dora relays she saw a painting of nymphs the day before Herr K’s fateful proposal. Freud gives so much significance to the recollection of nymphs in conjunction with her second recurring dream that Freud ‘discovers’ a new sin that Dora has no memory of:

“ ‘Nymphae’ as is known to physicians but not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora […]. But anyone who employed such technical terms as ‘vestibulum’ and ‘nymphae,’ must have derived his knowledge from […] an encyclopedia – the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. […] [One of her symptoms] must have been inflicted as a result of a process of displacement, after another occasion of more guilty reading had become associated with this one; and the guilty occasion must lie concealed in her memory behind the contemporaneous innocent one.” (91, 94).

Freud commits a plethora of fallacies in the above passage. The translator notes that the german word for nymph and the anatomical term he prefers are the same. Rather than rely on a word association supplied by Dora, Freud uses his ‘not very common’ knowledge to supply the preferred meaning. Nymphs populate many paintings depicting woods because the Greeks considered them wood spirits. Very likely, the artist titled the painting and included the term Nymphs. Instead, Freud commits his most common error: projecting his interpretation onto Dora. The exclusive term implies, to him, that she browsed an encyclopedia for names of the genitals and other sexual topics. Strangely, this trounces his earlier discovery that Dora’s governess and Frau K spoke candidly on sexual topics. Their influence was no small import in earlier interpretations and Freud even made a game of testing how much she knew. In light of his turn of phrase, the likely vocal communication might have supplied the hypothetical connection. But, Dora denies having read the encyclopedia for more than learning about appendicitis. Freud considers this no obstacle because the memory is repressed, unconscious. Manufacturing an event based on his interpretation of a word exposes a deep hypocracy in Freud’s method. He regards his interpretation as the only possible one of the word and its source, necessitating the repression. Another interpretation exists – wood nymphs – and makes his conclusion less likely by half. The patient’s testimony oftentimes serves as little more than grist for relating their lives to his paradigm about the tripartite self.

Freud succeeds primarily when he subsumes his wish fulfillment to the gritty task of therapy. One fashion this occurs is in his reliance on the Socratic method. Very often, Freud led the session by asking Dora to relate her thoughts on particular feelings or dreams. Before he received the recurring dreams, he generally treated her relationships with her family and the K family. Eventually, this inspires her to take on the task of understanding herself outside his paradigm. “For some time Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives that presumably underlie them.” (86). Of course, she is more interested in conventional motivations rather than infantile prototypes for her symptoms. She weighs the different motives behind waiting and then revealing Herr K’s proposal. Freud, in contrast, complains of lingering surprise at her “having felt so deeply injured” (87). On the face, these mark the difference between the behavioralist and psychoanalytic schools of psychology. Her focus concerns how her conscious – yet contemporarily inattentive – thoughts propelled her various decisions. Freud insists that all important factors reside in the unconscious. Her id’s unquestionable acceptance is buried underneath three or four unconscious resorts to sensory transference, the reinvigoration of her Electra complex, and so on. Nevertheless, these tangential objections have evidently expanded her self-awareness. Her perception of the complex relationships around her show intelligence, but she failed to turn the searchlight upon herself. At Freud’s insistence, Dora admits that her own illness may have been learned through imitating her father and cousin’s illness and finding the technique effective. There is no question that a great portion of our personalities come from the earliest experiences. Freud argues most effectively when he strays from finding parallels to his own thought in favor of values Dora actually holds.

Much as Freud deviates from expectations, his approach in this and other therapies show a marked improvement over his peer’s approach to understanding neurological disorders. Despite centuries of classifying hysteria as a female exclusive disease, Freud stood with his mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, in recognizing cases of male hysteria. In this fashion, both considered a disease as a collection of symptoms independent of any particular victim. He erred, however, by substituting an inherited paradigm for another inferred from unrepresentative cases. While studying people to understand general human behavior makes sense, Freud’s enduring theories came from strikingly idiosyncratic sufferers. This ironic inclination to distance himself from the (less afflicted) patients actually under his care explains why Freud’s greatest satisfaction came during the penultimate session. Then, he stood agape that Dora completely missed the significance of his connection of her infant foot dragging and an expectation that she should be pregnant. In contrast, the final session moved her as he showed her how she likely identified herself with the scorned maid that her father abused. Freud could only have resolved Dora’s problems by resisting the desire to flaunt his ideology and concentrating on her problems.

I ended the last post with an inclination to try Mafia Wars. (Obsolete numbers signify delay in writing.) I sit ten days after that fateful compromise, feeling somewhat as though I have played it much longer. For a time, it was a harrowing obsession. My choices have propelled me to the opposite extreme from my bored lamentation before. In short, I have joined a cult whose preening updates eclipse almost all the legitimate relations I kept tabs on before. Without dropping the game entirely, I can’t go back. Woe and enjoyment keep watch over the gateway; see how lightly I ignored both.

For the uninitiated, Mafia Wars is (yet another) economRPG. Perhaps strategy game is more appropriate than rpg. A prospective player makes some lasting, permanent decisions – with little guidance, mind – and generally attributes stats to one of two paths: fighting or working. I chose working. As with Tiny Adventures, I made a point of researching the game prior to making the all-important initial decisions.

While there are traditional forums and a couple short articles by fans, I found a shocking divergence from Tiny Adventures. There is a faq that the forums and certain sites reproduce that comes from a promotion page. It turns out that people can spend money for game perks or advancement. This inclined other people to create a strategy guide for playing Mafia Wars, an e-book strategy guide. (They show a picture of a printed book, but its digital nature makes the next all the more damning.)  The website for the top search hit suggests that a niche is actually willing to pay the twenty dollars demanded. The particular style of the promotion is one I have seen before, suggesting a similar web design company or at least imitation.

Any purchase, in retrospect, represents waste because I have seen indications that we are not playing quite the same game. Old reviews … sin. I was going to point out that some old reviews show obsolete costs for many items, suggesting my cousin leveled up more cheaply than I. But, the forum posts in question have been updated to my costs. Still, I know that some new players have complained about using a different system than I. My predecessors and I buy properties to provide interest accrual. Newer players (which I appear to have avoided by less than a week) use a system that dominates on the next stage involving collecting from rackets instead. As I play with restaurants and hotels for the moment, I can’t make any comparison about balance or retention.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine paying for advice on a facebook game. I admit that I came close (to paying for ‘perks,’ not advice) because the economics looked so harsh until I paid by sacrificing my user interface entirely to this hobby. I am actively resisting that level of commitment (and the game helps too, perversely). Besides Tiny Adventures’ bare imitation, I have used similar economRPGs. Five years ago, I tried and dropped a text based stand-alone called Fantasia Five. My friends in high school were far more successful and described anecdotes (killing noobs via crushing them under huge gifts of gold) and changes to the experience (the introduction of a degeneration system to prevent players from battling a particular low-threat, yet infinite opponent). The game’s learning curve put me off and I forgot about it.

Some months ago though, I found a descendent via an ad banner. Though a cool little graphic enticed me, Improbable Island is another text-based RPG. Its authors produced a clever setting, but its stamina system keeps me away for three hours at a time. Websnark introduced me to the reason in his lamentation for Tiny Adventures long ago: server load. Obviously, meting out participants’ demand in subjective or objective units offers more opportunity to replace or cool down the machines responding to my fervent click storm. Improbable Island enforces an objective window, four hours long. Mafia Wars is crueler by letting me choose subjectively. As  the character ages, the player likely increases the energy or stamina to accomplish more. No, explaining this ahead of a better introduction is backwards. Let’s start over.

Mafia Wars, and its kin Vampire Wars, offer two choices for the prospective player: hiser name and regeneration advantage. Both offer the opportunity to change that name later, but Mafiosi pay far more dearly for the privilege. I strongly suggest creating an enduringly satisfying name either in either case to save the effort. The regeneration choice has a tremendous influence over your progression and, while offered lightly, ought to be given real thought. Again, Zynga (the company that runs both games over several platforms) favors the Vampire crowd by letting players change their regeneration profile.

You may select a faster regeneration for your energy (Maniac or Modern), money (Mogul or Noble), or health (Fearless or Primordial). They offer, as so many publishers do, that your preferred playing style ought to guide your hand. No one can really make that choice prior to learning the incentive structure of the game. Consider real D&D, the Player’s Handbook suggests you think about whether you like to deal damage to one foe, many foes, protect your mates with your health, or by ‘healing’ them. Strictly speaking, a responsible DM ought to offer a variety of fights to rotate the importance of each class’s advantage. In the static program though, like Diablo 2, my choice has no real basis until I play each class for ten or so levels (lest the weakness of early levels dissuade me). Of course, computer games encourage this unwieldy complexity as “dozens of hours of replayability.” So, you need to know which regeneration matters in which way.

Again, I note that my advice only holds for systems like my own. I have no idea if the racket version offers a different flowthrough. Energy represents the number of times a ‘character’ can perform jobs that give experience and money. The money is worthwhile for buying weapons/abilities to unlock levels that require them and to buy the properties/minions that offer interest. A (blood) bank exists to store money at a 10% deposit fee so when other players fight your character, they can’t steal from your pocket change. I am fairly sure that is only possible, in Mafia Wars, when you are logged off. I vaguely recall being notified during Vampire wars that I had defended successfully, so you may not be safe while logged on. Health functions intuitively. If your character is reduced below twenty hitpoints, shhe is safe from being attacked or put on a hitlist. If that final attack kills the character, some experience is lost and the (Mafia) victor can offer perks to ten friends. Zynga’s introductory note says health regeneration enables more fights, which is true.

On its face, this looks like the health regeneration is the least valuable. The real limitation on fights is stamina/rage, which regenerates in five minute increments universally. One stamina point allows for one fight. Fight doesn’t really represent the interaction justly. There are a couple early jobs in both games that function as a stereotypical fight: I attack and defend from an opponent until one avatar’s health meter expires. Attacking a player more resembles a mugging. I do some damage, the victim may damage me, and if I succeeded I may gain experience and money from the event. Whether it turns up any money depends upon whether that player has any money in hand.

The system I described in Mafia only gives that opportunity if the player forsakes the bank or if shhe has some defense winnings. The server also gives a small chance of helping one of my ‘family’ during one of their fights (or jobs) and rewards me commensurately. The interest from properties needs to be manually withdrawn, so it remains safe. Vampires, in contrast, receive blood directly to their hand hourly (or every 54 minutes for nobles, like me). Visiting hourly would obviate any loss, but I have more money than I can reasonably spend at the moment, so I let them have what they can carry. A particular assailant’s stamina and health represent the upper limit on potential gains, but some courtesy exists. Zynga established a maximum theft at a given level. For the last ten or so levels, the most I can take is 70,000. In that case, I hit the person again before moving on. And yet, we embody criminals and monsters. No game mechanic stops me from sucking that person dry. Of course, shhe could put me on the hitlist for a fee, but the damage is done. For the moment, that represents courtesy enough, though I won’t trust anyone else to return the favor.

That number, 70,000 deserves a second look before moving on. I hadn’t created a fighting character when I began and only shifted my focus after thirty or so levels. Still, with judicious selection, I can succeed with the majority. The problem in comparing fights with jobs comes from the rewards and predictability. A fight may give five or so experience for each success. If the victims chosen all have more in hand than stolen, each may give that maximum. But, it depends on success and favorable conditions. Jobs, in contrast mark out explicitly that twenty energy returns thirty experience and three hundred-thousand dollars (at my level).

In a single fight returning the maximum, the two skill points to buy that point of stamina appear worth the cost. 70,000 / 2 = 35,000. 300,000 / 20 = 15,000. But, I steal the maximum intermittently. Let’s be overgenerous by stipulating super-success each third turn: 70,000 / 6 = 11,666. The trade pales further if a player focuses on the single job each tier that returns the best energy to money ratio. In the particular tier I am grinding out, that comes to 3,420,001 / 35 = 97,714 per skill point spent. The experience difference hammers the last ten nails in the metaphorical coffin. Yet, overfocus entails a weaker character, certainly. A great many of my family fight all the time, but not as much as they perform jobs. This merely highlights the problems in Zynga’s under-explanation of the game’s structurally favored tasks.

Which culminates in the strong contradiction of what I imply above about the fearless character, specifically. The following does not apply to primordial Vampires. With the preceding, regenerating health looks to be the least valuable type of character. The real limit on mugging comes from stamina points chosen, which don’t levy that sweet racket reliably. It seems better to go through jobs faster or unlock jobs faster via buying the necessities earlier. It seems demonstrably foolish to choose a fighting profile, until the tenth level. At that point, Mafia Wars unlocks the player’s “Top Mafia” board.

Now, a player can promote seven members of their family to positions (mastermind, buttonman, safecracker) that randomly return particular bonuses of experience, defense, money, and so on. In addition, that player’s character now has a tiny chance of receiving an extraordinary bonus. The bagman might get twice the money when performing a job. However, only your mogul friends can be a bagman. And only fearless characters can be promoted as their friend’s wheelmen. A wheelman has the miniscule chance of performing a job for no energy at all. Over the course of several months of play, that could represent a great boost over even the maniac’s faster regeneration. The sixth tier’s jobs require, on average, thirty energy; the seventh requires forty. Likely, the progression holds in addition to offering slower rates of mastery. (That means times these jobs must be repeated before awarding a skill point bonus.) So, even if I regenerate 3:5 minutes faster than the fearless character, one out of one hundred jobs (or less, or more) costs nothing, which represents two or so hours to me.

That could be a fantastic boost or average out. The math involved is complicated and depends on rates of play and, especially, when that character is promoted. I want the highest level wheelman because that, randomly, decreases the energy that I spend on jobs by one or seven points. Generally, this will depend upon the makeup of your friend’s families. But, if a person is of a sort to sink money into this game, that isn’t worth trusting. Shhe may make a facebook profile for hiser infant sister, or a fictional person with a shell email address. That way, each puppet promotes the other to the more important job and one can serve as a consumable miner and the other as a primary account. But that spirals into its own uninteresting grand strategy with goals I neither understand nor value.

For the rest of us, the preceding ought to give the proper basis to decide which of the three regeneration types might suit your perceived need. I like performing the most jobs in a sitting and seeing the colored bars increase. Maniac does suit that. A wheelman may get an extra job (weekly? Every other day? I have no idea, and if promoted by several friends, maybe one daily) occasionally but has fewer until that point because of slower energy regeneration. Perhaps unpredictable rewards and contesting players rather than the System appeals more. The fearless Mafiosi makes sense, but so does the mogul. To increase the chance of success, we buy the strongest guns, armor, and vehicles to equal the number we have in our family (which is poorly explained on the website). A faster income could speed that stockpiling.

As any adult-oriented must be, Mafia Wars incorporates much more complexity. Whatever its real value, that strategy book will certainly run into dozens of pages. I may describe my strategies at a later time. For the moment, this post represents all that you need to be aware of before creating your character, for Mafia Wars. Vampire wars balances the need for fighting more evenly with jobs. I suggest choosing a modern or primordial vampire because their meters come into play more often. I have seventy million blood points in the bank but only use five in a given day and currently earn one million each hour. In sum, its overkill even with the inflation tweak I saw during my first week of play. Either of those two would be fine.

Should you feel restless with your choice in Mafia Wars, try it on Myspace, tagged, or yahoo. Should you try out Improbable Island (which I may describe some other day), I would appreciate it if you told them that I sent you.

In addition to playing tabletop D&D with my friends, I participate in the pale shadow that Wizards of the Coast licensed to Facebook. I have described encountering and rediscovering the ‘app,’ but not playing it. Basically, this resembles a card-based game wherein my character of the moment submits to drawing the cards of a particular adventure’s deck that (via simulated die results) determine whether he receives loot or blows to the face. I repeat this – distributing and buying equipment to maximize success – until he has graduated past the tenth level. The program retires the character and lets me pass on the particular benefits of that generation. Obviously, the GUI only barely resembles this analogy and incorporates a few other nuances.

One is the buff and healing of fellow player’s characters, which I can neither use nor rely on any longer. I am the last of my social circle still putting time into it. The majority that did, quit some months ago and haven’t pushed past the fourth generation. Only Chase pushed beyond me, likely from beginning earlier and in sympathy with his brother Brent. Brent no longer uses it because he beat the game, as much as one can. He reached the twentieth level and either tired of the long summited plateau of perks or received his virtual cookie and was told to buy the real thing. The difference in between us all has been attitude or interactive strategy.

With the limited interaction, boredom or ennui (confrontation with meaninglessness) easily sets in. My path has been perfect to keep my interest despite evolving needs. Besides reviews off site, the first thing I read about playing D&D Tiny Adventures resides in its forum. Like most boards, it had a nostalgia thread on top, but more useful than any other. The originator asked people about whether they named their characters based on a theme (eg: successively using all the characters in the Wheel of Time series). While the replies escape me, I absorbed the idea that I should prepare a set rather than take the intuitive route – use the names of characters I actually roleplayed. That became the first warning to be stoic and bemused about any particular iteration.

I settled on a pleasing solution affording me uniqueness, propriety with irony, and a large set to draw from. I chose to modify the names of various font types into fantasy-esque names for each.

I made a grave mistake soon thereafter. Despite distancing myself from the character’s progress, I took too great in interest in the adventures themselves. Occasionally, I toy with the prospect of DMing an rp campaign. Chase’s example showed that store-bought material could furnish a complexity that a novice might omit. Cory somewhat made this mistake in his vampire chronicle when he sent us across Canada or something like that. Appearantly, he hadn’t planned out challenges for the trip and collapsed under Rob’s badgering of “and then what happened?”

Foolishly, I copied and pasted each encounter’s flavortext into a file for later study. While seemingly simple, mid-level adventures have thirteen encounters and high levels feature eighteen. The whole became unwieldy and unreadable, not in the least because the system reused encounters no matter the level. The game chafed under the class “work” rather than amusement. I quit the task midway into the second generation.

In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered copying the encounters at all. Others had done so already. The second character gets to inherit one item from its previous incarnation. Like many new players, I stressed about this and another aspect: potions. The program lets a character carry two potions during an adventure. Two types exist those that increase a particular statistic, whether strength or resistence to undead, or those that heal the character. The first time I played, I checked in every ten minutes to witness the encounter update. Then I’d copy the flavortext and sweat about whether to use a potion or not. My stoicism had crumbled under pointless obsession.

Finding the Tiny Adventures Wiki dispelled all that. Its contributors have uploaded every encounter (story and random), piece of equipment, and character class ability. They even revealed the different generation perks. For some reason WotC kept these a mystery, which works against them. Knowing that I could eventually inherit some of my ending money encouraged sticking with the game. Keeping it a big unknown fostered disappointment and ennui, especially after the third generation unveiled “ironman” mode. That gifts the user a character that retires when its character fails an adventure through death. Ordinarily, death (x<0 hitpoints) sends the character home to heal. Instead, you can have your character retired with midlevel equipment via underconservative choices. The wiki page dispelled the disappointment of similar features by fostering hope.

My relationship evolved in other ways with the app. I debated whether stat potions and then even healing potions are worth the price paid. I tried every class and resisted revisiting some when their best and otherwise unequipable items turned up. These struggles informed my current strategy.

The strongest character is one who has the highest mean ability modifiers with a given set of equipment. This informs most decisions. Which item do I pass on to my next generation? The wiki reveals the base ability scores and, depending upon gender, this could be two or three 10s or 11s. The best item plugs these gaps, preferably via a crown. Encounters reward crowns least frequently, so later items of greater frequency(amulets and bracers) will tempt less juggling. Shouldn’t I use items that beef up my hitpoints? No, I thought so too, though and kept wasting gold on troll skin armor (+10). The character loses hitpoints when he fails; using equipment that increases ability modifiers might have ensured success instead.

There is one exception to the above principle, story encounters. The wiki documents the scores each tests, so a dedicated player can check in just before the encounter updates and redistribute items to maximize the modifier. As I don’t care to time out this reappearance, I just leave them. As I am finishing up my ninth iteration, I sell all my useless equipment to bump up my gold inheritance. In fact, I will test a new technique. Normally, I end wearing my best equipment since these are tenth level encounters. I get to pass on a quarter of my gold. So, I saved the loot from the first levels to replace all the elite armor. Likely, Sam Bole will fail a lot more encounters. But, he is too close to retirement to chance wasting the opportunity.

My next and final character will be a rogue, so I will have played with every class. The male’s dump stats are Intelligence and Constitution. I will inherit a ring to plug int and use the five thousand inherited gold pieces to buy whatever will fix my con. While I would like to have used a woman for variety, the female rogue has three dump stats instead of two. His name will derive from Haettenshweiller. It isn’t as popular a font as Calibri or Tahoma, but the name I chose is cooler than “Cal Ebree” or “Ted Oma.”

But for the opportunity to throw lots of gold to the last character via a naked, final adventure and writing this review, I have no interest in playing Tiny Adventures any more. The stoicism necessary to play a game with almost no interaction nulls my interest. The real benefit comes from justifying visits to Facebook, which I would otherwise visit less frequently. Besides checking on Sam Bole, I check our D&D group’s page for updates and comment on other’s status updates or renew my own with whatever book I am reading.

Still there is one final word on maximizing the encounter survival: potions. They are not worth the gold paid at any level. I didn’t intuit this because I had stopped checking what stat the encounters tested. The wiki has noted the two most likely for each terrain type. Since these seldom last more than a quarter of the adventure, I didn’t bother studying. But, I wanted to know when it was worthwhile to buy healing potions. Seeing the answer pushed me toward the realization that succeeding individual encounters benefits more than lasting to the final one.

To test, I noted the total gold awarded for each adventure, grouped by level, for two generations. I averaged the three or four adventures per level to hide the idiosyncracies resulting from completion or early death. In writing this review, I noticed my first character’s encounter notes could have been used to further dilute outliers. But, it isn’t altogether important since the success rate (and rewards) reflects the strength of the presiding strategy rather than a general reflection of the adventures themselves.

So while you could buy healing potions as soon as the fourth level (on average), it isn’t really conscionable until the sixth level because the hero would spend all his income on the potion itself. The stat potions are even worse value because – during the four encounters each lasts – the adventure will test it once or never. Money buys potions or equipment, so equipment’s permanent benefit justifies the expense.

Wizards of the Coast likely hopes we will use potions or test our luck with potions or iron man mode because of the scoring system. Encounter success under these conditions or higher challenge ratings net a higher score. What they ignore is the very point of a scoring system in the mind of the player. The app fails to maintain scores into the new generation. Somehow I suspect others parallel me in not writing down my scores so I can measure how lucky I am now compared to two weeks ago. They show our friends’ scores, but these are incomparable when we are different levels. I wouldn’t even mention the “feature” if it didn’t reflect the generally foolish design of the whole game.

And yet, Tiny Adventures figured largely into my visits to Facebook. I would log in every three hours or so (90 minutes for the adventure, 90 minutes to heal) to send himer back out. Now, I am only returning to check and comment on my friends’ status updates. I did it before incidently; but, without other justification, the whole feels like an exercise in stalking. This realization came before its time because I failed to make the right character. I inattentively pressed a Fighter character rather than a rogue. In protest, I decided to stop early.

I have some options at this point. I can visit Facebook less frequently, just daily. Tiny adventures holds no value, but it gives some structure to my schedule. Or, I could try some other game app. Mafia, which I tried months ago in sympathy with the forum version of the game, blows chunks. Scrabble is nice but demanding, in time and effort. I guess I will check out Mafia wars. My cousin does not shelter his friends from occasional, obscure updates (Mark is looking for a tie and a rubber ducky). Chase also mentioned he plays it, so now is the best time to try it. Facebook runs counter to a solitary experience.

I had read one Kurt Vonnegut book prior to Slaughterhouse Five last week, Welcome to the Monkey House. I read the short story collection perhaps six or so years ago. The only memory that stuck was a scene from the title story wherein an (avowed feminist?) was deflowered by anarchist rebels to convert her to their opinion about the value of physical, heterosexual intercourse. Otherwise, nothing else indicated his power as more than simply average. Nonetheless, people routinely include the former in lists of good science fiction novels.

While it sat way down on my list of books to read, I had lowered my standard on the most recent trip to the library. In anticipation of the move to the newer building next door, the Tustin librarians have shed at least half of their entire adult stock. The effect is rather depressing and akin to an exploded view of a swiss cheese. The book I had planned to check out was missing so I wandered to the classic paperbacks and gave Vonnegut his second chance.

Slaughterhouse Five is a fictional memoir of a World War two veteran who lives his life (or simply recounts it) nonlinearly. I admit, this device would have surprised me much more had I encountered it before its descendants, most obviously the movie Momento. Further, I had already read the most difficult nonlinear novel I have yet encountered, Eye in the Pyramid. Roberts Shea and Wilson not only shifted without warning across time, but also between (distant) characters occasionally within the flow of a single conversation. To my understanding, the only more difficult text is Finnegan’s Wake. A Chorus of Stones is much easier and distinct for being a nonfiction account of the intertwining threads all throughout the second world war and conditions that fostered it. Coincidently, it also treats the destruction of Dresden (via a firestorm) that the protagonist here survives.

After the boring frame story, Vonnegut delves into the anecdotes and experiences of Billy Pilgrim as he slunk through the German prisoner of war system and his subsequent life. These mostly constitute the accounts of absurd behavior that populate any treatment of war time. He meets an artillerist who operates in an unrealistic fantasy because his many layers of clothing shield him from the snow. The fool’s world breaks down when a German patrol captures them and takes his coats and exchanges his boots for two blocks of wood with leather straps. “So it goes.”

The last is Pilgrim’s response to many events deaths and coincidences. In practice, his nonlinear experience involves seamlessly shifting from one event to another but “adopting” the mindset and memories of his ‘concurrent’ self. In essence, to an outside observer, Billy Pilgrim lives a linear life but his consciousness flits through all its states randomly (including the womb and the ‘purple hum’ that is the afterlife). This encourages fatalism in Billy because he controls his body – in a given time frame – for short periods and lives chronologically later events (like his marriage to an obese woman) ‘before’ he will ‘possess’ himself at the time when he makes the decision. The next thought is a spoiler.

Spoiler spoiler spoiler.

However, the narrative supports the interpretation that Billy only ‘rewrote’ his memories late in life. The linear chronology follows his army days, Dresden, marriage, abduction, mundane dentistry, and post airplane crash when he decides to share the alien’s outlook with others. At all points except when abducted, Billy lives as he would have linearly despite transitioning between, say, a golf game and the prison cattle car. The only exception before the crash, when he claims remembering and prophesying memories from his entire lifetime, comes during his abduction.

The fourth-dimensional Tralfadorians take him through a time warp to their home (besides the crash, the only likely cause for his temporal condition). and put him in their zoo along with a porn star who bore his child after he returned to Earth. Their fatalism comes from an even stronger temporal objectivity. They see their entire lifetime (and that of the beings they intersect with) simultaneously, as a three dimensional snake stretching as far as they can see. By Vonnegut’s description, the aliens have even less control than Billy professed to because they are merely an abiding consciousness with access to a particular body’s perspective with neither influence nor embodiment. The experience would likely reflect a soul in limbo seeing the solid tapestry of an individual body’s life.

Besides the peculiar existential alternatives and morbidly entertaining war anecdotes, Slaughterhouse Five underwhelmed me. Its enduring fame likely springs from its pioneering device that others have since improved (and I consumed ahead of time). Asimov’s Foundation similarly underprojected its future. His atomic empire comes across as a shade dated and succeeds by its characters rather than wondrous prediction. Both are easily readable books, recommendable even. If you like pseudo-arbitrary number conclusions, I’ll settle for 62/100.