Site TODO

Here's some subjects I have been thinking a lot about, but haven't had the right inspiration to make a page for. In the meantime here's a short version of each.

• Researching and analysis of motivation

  Motivation is one of the biggest things stopping me from being more productive, and I'm probably not the only one with this problem. I've been "researching" what affects my motivation and tricks to fix it for a long time, but it's just a huge list of disjointed notes at the moment. Ideally I'd like to create a forum of some kind where people can share their own experiences and research this subject together.

• Category/word-based thinking

  This is probably the biggest peeve of mine when I interact with other people.

  Most people have a very strong tendency to view the world through categories or words, as opposed to specific effects. People align themselves with specific groups and will start parroting what "their" group does, rather than thinking about specific things that they'd like to happen. This can be things like political sides, countries, economic models, computer operating systems, the tools they use for their job (e.g. programming languages or text editors), etc.

  A great example of this is the word "capitalism". When you hear that, you probably feel one way or another about it. I don't. People will argue for and against capitalism because of X reasons, as if only 1 exact specific kind of capitalism can possibly exist, even though reality isn't bound by any kind of words or definitions. There's a million ways you could slice and tweak and modify the idea of capitalism in order to fix some of the issues it has in our society, but it's hopeless to try to have such an argument with someone who's "anti-capitalism because corporations bad" or whatever. And because they see the world through words, they will probably suggest something like generic communism or generic socialism as the alternative because those are attached to words that you can identify with. In this example, the people who are "pro-capitalism" and argue against any alternatives and deflect criticism are just as bad, they're doing the same thing from the other side.

  When you express your thoughts about something, because people see the world as a set of categories, they drive conclusions about your other thoughts and beliefs. For example if you say you hate something that Y country or political party does, then that must mean you're "opposed to" Y and also like everything about Z, because they see the world as 2 sides of a coin and are putting you on the other side of it.

  People tend to see things according to what they're called, as opposed to what they do or what their effects are. For example if something is called "department of education" and you want to get rid of it, people will think you want to get rid of education as a whole, even after it has been revealed that 80% of that department's funds goes to disrupting actual education and embezzling money. This is before we're even talking about whether or not organizations of that kind should exist to begin with, if you set up something, people are likely to think it's necessary or important even if it has never been proven to be useful and might in fact cause harm.

  People get stuck on words themselves instead of thinking about what someone is trying to say or accomplish with the words, for example if someone requests a "muddy-yellow chair", people will get into arguments about whether that one chair is really yellow or green or orange, not whether or not the chair's color is good for the desired purpose. People have arguments based on incomplete premises, if something can be interpreted in multiple ways due to lacking context, people try to interpret the accuracy and meaning of various words instead of seeking clarification or giving multiple answers for different contexts.

  TL;DR: people focus too much on words.

  Related: people tend to picture things according to what they have been in the past as opposed to what they are currently. They've made an association that X is Y, and they will continue to think of it as Y even though it's obviously Z now.

• Doing a thing yourself makes you think about it more

  Primarily related to programming, but now with AI probably related to a lot of other things. For example, if you program your own system for User Interfaces, you will think a lot harder about how to make it do the thing you need it to do and how to make it do that thing well, and are likely to come up with small innovations that haven't been seen before. But if you just plug in a third party UI system, you'll likely just try to make it work and adapt yourself to the UI system rather than adapting the UI system to your project. The more things you do by hand, the more you gain experience and deeper understanding with the subject and can therefore build a better, simpler, more unique solution for it.

  Possibly related: I have a theory that by using a weak tool, you'll have to use more brain power to think about various aspects of it, which leads to more unique and "soulful" and intentional designs.

• MMO(RPG) design

  There's 2 major subjects related to MMO design.

  1. There seems to be a fundamental, industry-wide (including the players) misunderstanding about what an MMO and it's strengths are. The most significant thing that differentiates MMOs from all other game genres is that it's a multiplayer open world that exists and persists without the players, and players explore it at their own accord. Almost all modern MMOs seem to treat themselves as giant single player games where players compete for the gameplay, they're not treating the MMO-ness as the most imporant and central aspect of it's design. They work around the problems caused by the MMO-ness instead of designing the game specifically for it from the ground-up.

  The best way to describe what I really mean is that an MMO should be a world first, a game second. It should be a world that players can go into, not a game for an individual player.

  Very related to category-based thinking: when you hear the word "MMO", you'll probably imagine some game that is derivative of World of Warcraft. When you try to discuss MMO design and how to make better MMOs, people can't seem to picture anything other than World of Warcraft with supericial tweaks to it's formula. If you suggest big things, they'll immediately reject it because they seem to project that idea into the WoW formula and think about the entire subject of MMOs through the lens of WoW-centric design/gameplay, and think it cannot possibly work.

  2. The MMO audience, the internet, and gaming culture have changed significantly over decades, but MMOs have utterly failed to adapt to those changes. MMOs of yesteryear don't work the same way anymore, but MMOs of today aren't even trying to achieve what old MMOs felt like, those that do will just copy the old stuff without adapting where necessary (or they just don't have the capability to do it right). From what I can tell, the prevalent attitude of players is to just give up and claim it's impossible to recapture the MMO magic of the past, but I disagree.

• Theory on how low resolution is more immersive/dreamy.

  Primarily related to videogames and art. I think there's truth in the idea that old videogame graphics were better in some ways than modern graphics, but I think people are missing some of the reasons why. When you can see less details, your imagination puts in more work. When the detail is low, you're imagining what you're seeing, but when the detail is very precise and high definition, you're simply observing what you're seeing. Low framerate (FPS) has a similar effect, there's a comparison video from Ocarina of Time that makes this very obvious, the low FPS version just has this very dream-like feeling to it.

  I've been wondering for a very long time if it's possible to accomplish this "dreamy" effect of imagination without having to make the visuals actually low resolution or blurry. I theorize that you could potentially accomplish this effect by making cluttered designs, visual effects like bloom, special shader effects/overlays, and other things that disrupt the "realism" and your ability to see the picture clearly.

  Related but also not related: I think there's under-appreciated advantages to pixel art. As mentioned, it has a low resolution so it stimulates your imagination more, but also LCD displays can reproduce pixels almost perfectly. There's this popular meme going around how CRT monitors are better for pixel art because they blur the details to make a smooth picture, and pixel art isn't designed for LCD displays, but I actually think it's the opposite (pixel art gains a new meaning and different advantages under LCD, so those comparisons are comparing apples to oranges).

Other

Here's other less significant/focused things I've been too lazy to do.

• Tutorial for editing SVG vector images by hand. Did you know that SVG images are very similar to HTML documents and you can edit them with a text editor?
• Collection of thoughts/resources related to game design. I feel like I could write a book about all the notes I've collected, but I don't know how to even begin writing a page for them. Some of them apply to games generally, some are for specific genres, some are inspirations from/for specific kinds of games.
• "Runescape reborn": my thoughts about how I'd remake Runescape. The goal is to bring it back to it's roots (older than Old School Runescape) but also evolve and enhance the concept further from that standpoint.