Site TODO

Here's some subjects I have been thinking a lot about, but haven't had the right inspiration to make a proper page for.

• Researching and analysis of motivation

  Gist: 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 in society

  Gist: Most people have a very strong tendency to view the world through categories or words, as opposed to specific effects. For example people align themselves with political parties and what "their" policial party does, rather than thinking about specific things that they'd like to happen. When someone aligns themselves with a thing, they tend to start defending even the objectively bad things about it and make excuses and attack anyone who points them out, I see this often with programming languages and development methods and tools/editors/etc.

  When you express your thoughts about Y, people tend to drive conclusions about your alignment about other things. For example if you say you hate Y country or political party, then that must mean you like everything about Z country or political party, even though in reality you might hate both/all of it.

  Similarly, people tend to think of things according to what they're called as opposed to what they do or what their effects are.

  Related: people tend to think of things according to what their effects have been in the past as opposed to what their effect currently is.

• Doing a thing yourself makes you think about it more

  Gist: 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 every aspect of it, which leads to more unique and "soulful" designs.

• MMO(RPG) design

  Gist: 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 persistent world inhabited by many people who are not related or know about each other. 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.

  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 has changed significantly over decades, and I think MMOs have utterly failed to adapt to those changes. MMOs of yesteryear don't work anymore, but MMOs of today aren't even trying to achieve what old MMOs did except in the modern context. From what I can tell the prevalent attitude 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.

  Gist: primarily related to videogames and art. I think there's some factual truth about 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 your ability to see the picture clearly without specifically focusing on the details.

  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.