Cyberculture: July 2008 Archive Page

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content -- a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture -- is excellent. NYT Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

In today's landscape, defining "the media" isn't nearly as clear-cut as it used to be. Big-name newspapers and networks mingle with cable channels, all-purpose Web sites and blogs in the minds of the average news consumer, and for good reason: They are, in many cases, converging, with widely read blogs run by newspapers and online Web stories originating from cable networks. Meanwhile, a number of relatively new outlets have become powerful forces in their own right, taking advantage of the speed and connectivity of the Internet to scoop the mainstream media and blur the distinction between the producer and the consumer.

Moreover, much of the new media eschews precisely the kinds of journalistic conventions still taught in school, preferring instead to apply pressure to ideological opposites, using blogs, crowdsourcing and other citizen media techniques to gather raw material for the next humorous or polemical viral video.

Maybe that's the point.  -- Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed

It was intersting to see online political discourse (with a case study on the Kerry-Edwards attempt to build a blog presence in 2004) and a history of the internet filtered through a folklorist's lens. I'm saving this in case I need ever need to update some of the insights found in the older, classic, historical studies of cyberculture (such as Buckles's dissertation on Adventure, or Levy's Hackers, or Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine).

While mass-mediated communication technologies have empowered the institutional, participatory media offer powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity. However, alternate voices do not emerge from these technologies untouched by their means of production. Instead, these communications are amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression. In this situation, any human expressive behavior that deploys communication technologies suggests a necessary complicity. Insofar as individuals hope to participate in today's electronically mediated communities, they must deploy the communication technologies that have made those communities possible. In so doing, they participate in creating a telectronic world where mass culture may dominate, but an increasing prevalence of participatory media extends into growing webs of network-based folk culture. -- Robert Glenn Howard, Journal of American Folklore 121(480): 192-218 (PDF)

A good feature from the New York Times:

Young people "aren't as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn't go in a line," said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. "That's a good thing because the world doesn't go in a line, and the world isn't organized into separate compartments or chapters."

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

[..]

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted "Dieing Isn't Always Bad," about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. "No one's ever said you should read more books to get into college," she said. -- Motoko Rich

Where to begin? Where to end? Lots of food for thought.

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

Jimmy Maher offers a provocative editorial in the latest issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Also of note, A Blind Man's Take on Interactive Fiction:

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

When you die, would you rather be remembered as a technology hack who annoyed millions and forced them to waste time by weeding through torrents of junk e-mail, or a brilliant teacher who inspired millions to treasure every moment of the time they have left?

According to police, Edward Davidson, the "spam king" whose wife helped him break out of a minimum security prison, has killed himself, his wife, and a child yesterday. He was famous for getting rich off of the stupid people who respond to unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements.

According to various news reports, Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University became a YouTube sensation, has run out of time in his battle with pancreatic cancer today. He was famous for giving the rest of us a model for how to face our final days.

Blogging yet another story that reminds young fans of social networking sites that their profiles may be more public than they think. WashPo

"I know for a fact that when a superintendent in Missouri was interviewing potential teachers last year, he would ask, 'Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page?' " said Todd Fuller, a spokesman for the Missouri State Teachers Association, which is warning members to clean up their pages. "If the candidate said yes, then the superintendent would say, 'I've got my computer up right now. Let's take a look.' "

How would you feel if a potential employer clicked through your social networking profile during a job interview?

Does anybody today say -- without shame -- that their hobby is watching TV? Or listening to the radio? These media are so deeply entrenched in our society that we barely think of them. According to Ian Bogost, a time will come when the concept of "the gamer" is obsolete. Not because games will be obsolete, but because they will become so mainstream that the category will no longer be useful.

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called "serious games" claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn't be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account  for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don't distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero -- and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game? --Wired

I tell my free-verse-loving creative writing majors that Picasso learned to paint traditional portraits before he chose to put two eyes on one side of a figure's nose. Likewise, learning the traditional rules of grammar will make your writing more powerful, since if you choose to ignore a convention, it will be a deliberate action, rather than something that happens because you don't know any better.

When transcribing spoken words, reporters regularly cut out an "um" here and an "uh" there.  Since punctuation is often just an approximation, different reporters who hear the same passage don't always record it the same way. (See "Ladies and Gentlemen [?] we got him." for a brief overview of how reporters variously puncutated the dramatic pause in Paul Bremer's 2003 statement on the capture of Saddam Hussein.)

But what if you're quoting an e-mail from a source whose computer apparently doesn't have a shift key?  You can often work around it through indirect quotation:

Using the clipped lingo typical of online chatter, Sasha said she would be right back ("brb") because her kid sister's rabid wallabee had gotten stuck in the air vent again ("ksrwsiava").

When does standardizing a language change the sentiment too much? There's a whole side industry of bloggers who enjoy picking apart President Bush's published verbal gaffes.  Certainly anything a public figure says at an official event is fair game, but when an ordinary citizen suddenly becomes a source of news -- perhaps by being related to a crime victim -- it may appear patronizing to publish their ungrammatical statements either verbatim, or with an encrustation of parenthetical corrections. 

Online communication adds yet another layer of uncertainty. When is it appropriate to leave the cyberspeak as is, without parenthetical clarifications or silent corrections?  The NYT offers a great reflection on the relationship between cyberspeak and standard written English.

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way -- shape-shifting at a rapid pace -- than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web's lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take "hey guys, i'm stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth." Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as "she admitted her mistake on a message board"?) I can't tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there. -- Virginia Hefferman

Rather than link directly to the article, which was published by the Associated Press (an organization that tries to charge bloggers for quoting excerpts of more than a few words), I'll link to the Slashdot discussion of the article.

Fascinating stuff... according to CNN, the story is, in order to secure the release of 15 hostages, the Colombian military set up a fake website that borrowed heavily from a real organization's identity.

The organization's logo -- a stylized red bird on a white background in the centermost of three concentric circles, with blue leaves on white in the middle circle and the organization's name on a blue background in the outermost circle -- is featured prominently throughout the site.

That same logo was pasted on the side of a helicopter used on the rescue mission that brought former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers back from the jungle, according to unpublished video shown to CNN by a military source who had been looking to sell the material.

The emblems can't be seen in the heavily edited video released by the Colombian Defense Ministry. CNN declined to purchase the unpublished material. 

But Mision Humanitaria Internacional doesn't exist. Although the site said the group was registered with the Spanish Interior Ministry and the regional Department of Justice, Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman Alvaro Pena said the organization was not registered with the ministry and was not in its records.

http://misionhi.org is turning up 404 now, but there are a few pages left in the Google cache.

ZDNet:

Researchers at software vendor CA have discovered that social networking site Facebook is able to track the buying habits of its users on affiliated third-party sites even when they are logged out of their account or have opted out of its controversial "Beacon" tracking service.

On a listserv of which I'm a member, Jerome McDonough points out that Tennis for Two is an analog game, so not only does it not require a computer, the medium itself -- an oscilloscope -- is an analog, so the information being represented on the screen isn't digital at all.  An even earlier game, and the first game to use digital graphics, is Noughts and Crosses (1952).

This page lists the source code for the world[']s first computer game and incidentally the world[']s first computer based version of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe).

This is the original source code written by A.S. Douglas that was loaded from a punched paper tape and run on the EDSAC machine. It is written in an assembler. even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the EDSAC instruction set and it's assembly language some parts of the code look reasonably comprehensible. The most impressive feature is it's length - this very short piece of code manages a good game of noughts and crosses.

Keen to find out more? Then download the EDSAC simulator and the documentation from www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/ You can then follow this algorithm or try your hand at programming the worlds first programmable computer.

Every year, the Army recruits, at great expense, tens of thousands of young men and women. Given the costs of recruitment (and the dearth of eligible recruits), the Army cannot afford to lose many of these new soldiers. Army training is designed to take recruits who may know nothing about military life, discipline, or maneuvers, and mold them into warriors. Likewise, my task is to mold nascent scholars out of the under-performing, ill-prepared students who frequently show up in my community college classroom. I've found three Army practices most useful: making expectations explicit, the "crawl-walk-run" methodology, and formal evaluation of training. --Martha Kinney

The military has a fairly simple evaluation scale -- "go" or "no go."  In practice, that means means "success" or "do it again."  When I teach writing for the internet, one sequence of assignments culminates in the students having to create a website (a series of interconnected web pages with appropriately credited images) according to my specifications, in the space of a single class period. I gave very general guidelines -- "A client who loves the color green and who is obsessed with cheese."  Obviously the point of that exercise is not polished prose, but rather a knowledge of the HTML-authoring tools, CSS, filepaths, and basic online courtesy (giving credit where credit is due).

A student in my basic composition class who misplaces a quotation mark can still get partial credit, since I can still read the rest of the paragraph despite the technical error. But a student who misplaces a quotation mark when creating a hyperlink might create a technical error that prevents users from getting to the rest of the site's content.  So I recognize the need to walk students through the whole process carefully, even though I typically get at least a few students who are already accomplished web authors, who might find this process tedious. (I'll have to let them start working ahead if they do well on the authoring exercise.)

I'm glad Kinney acknowledged that the army teaching model is not designed to foster creativity, but there are certain basic skills --not just HTML authorship but also peer-critiquing, close reading, and literary critical analysis -- that have a technical component with very specific requirements. Students who haven't mastered those technical requirements can be extremely frustrated when they notice their end result doesn't meet the advanced requirements (where creativity is more important).

Modern recreation of the 1958 video game "Tennis for Two" (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

Employees of the New York Times are expected to follow these guidelines for ethical online activity.

B5. Web Pages and Web Logs

126. Web pages and Web logs (the online personal journals known as blogs) present imaginative opportunities for personal expression and exciting new journalism. When created by our staff or published on our Web sites, they also require cautions, magnified by the Web's unlimited reach.

127. Personal journals that appear on our official Web sites are subject to the newsroom's standards of fairness, taste and legal propriety. Nothing may be published under the name of our company or any of our units unless it has gone through an editing or moderating process.

128. If a staff member publishes a personal Web page or blog on a site outside our company's control, the staff member has a duty to make sure that the content is purely that: personal. Staff members who write blogs should generally avoid topics they cover professionally; failure to do so would invite a confusion of roles. No personal Web activity should imply the participation or endorsement of the Times Company or any of its units. No one may post text, audio or video created for a Times Company unit without obtaining appropriate permission.

129. Given the ease of Web searching, even a private journal by a staff member is likely to become associated in the audience's mind with the company's reputation. Thus blogs and Web pages created outside our facilities must nevertheless be temperate in tone, reflecting taste, decency and respect for the dignity and privacy of others. In such a forum, our staff members may chronicle their daily lives and may be irreverent, but should not defame or humiliate others. Their prose may be highly informal, even daring, but not shrill or intolerant. They may include photos or video but not offensive images. They may incorporate reflections on journalism, but they should not divulge private or confidential information obtained through their inside access to our newsroom or our Company.

130. Bloggers may write lively commentary on their preferences in food, music, sports or other avocations, but as journalists they must avoid taking stands on divisive public issues. A staff member's Web page that was outspoken on the abortion issue would violate our policy in exactly the same way as participation in a march or rally on the subject. A blog that takes a political stand is as far out of bounds as a letter to the editor supporting or opposing a candidate. The definition of a divisive public issue will vary from one community to another; in case of doubt, staff members should consult local newsroom management.

131. A staff member's private Web page or blog must be independently produced. It should be free of advertising or sponsorship support from individuals or organizations whose coverage the staff member is likely to provide, prepare or supervise during working hours. Care should be taken in linking to any subject matter that would be off limits on the Web page itself.

I came across this brief article in Pocket Gamer. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't check out this version of the game.  The 1977 date for the Don Woods expansion is correct, but ("[s]ources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974... are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976." --DHQ )

Forget motion-sensing and touchscreen malarkey. What you want from a modern-day iPhone game is a proper text adventure, where you get to type GO NORTH, HIT TROLL WITH AXE, and LKHJ VSDJD.

(Okay, we're still having the odd problem with the iPhone's pop-up keyboard).

Anyway, iPhone has its first text adventure, and it's actually the first text adventure ever made.

It's listed as Advent on the App Store, but the screenshot calls it Adventure, and the product text points out that it's also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or just Colossal Cave. Hope that's clear.

Leigh Alexander makes some good points in this GameSetWatch article.

Most lifetime gamers, then, have a built-in bias engine, whether they acknowledge it or not. For some, it's much more conscious and overt - hence the "Fanboy" network of platform-specific sites, hence forum flamewars, hence almost frighteningly irrational ire over certain reviews. Most reviewers dread having to evaluate a new flagship Nintendo title of the Mario or Zelda heritage; while the PlayStation 3 struggled to gain traction in the market early on, every new release was viewed as a flashpoint as fans were desperate for a killer app, and detractors were eager to see it fail.

I'm conscious that some students who sign up for a course on video games may expect to get credit for their skill at videogames they already know and love, rather than experiencing new genres and at least sampling the classics that established conventions that echo through the years.

From Shelly Weaver (of Seton Hill's entrepreneurial center), a brief introductory article.

On the subject of social networking, what you don't know can hurt you. These networks create opportunities for businesses that would not previously have been conceivable. One avenue to approach is to follow blogs and 'doers' in your industry as well as that of other industries to keep up with the fast-paced environment --E-Magnify

I remember when I was deeply involved in working on my dissertation, I would have dreams in which I was reading an academic article, and I grew frustrated because the text on the page would keep changing -- apparently my dreaming mind didn't have a buffer big enough to store that much text all at once, but I was able to note that it kept changing.  But this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes how a teenager managed to send text messages while sleeping:

Castillo's multimedia message to her boyfriend on her Pantech C300 phone involved 11 different steps, not including the typing. First, she had to select "Menu," then "Messaging," type "New," then select "Multimedia message," then punch the "Add" button and the "add text," before entering her garbled message. Afterward, she had to press "OK" twice, scroll to "contacts," find the e-mail address on that contact, select it, and press "Send."

"Not an easy process but once you get used to it, it becomes very easy," Castillo said.

Google's version of Second Life, as explained for the benefit of an audience that isn't expected to know anything about virtual worlds (NYT).

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog -- its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company's site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional -- they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Rosemary sends me this link from PhillyBurbs.com:

About 600 students are enrolled at Pennsylvania Learners Online, a cyber charter school where online gym is a requirement, and 12 others are enrolled in a program called e-Cademy to make up a failed credit.

Rich Campsie, who teaches physical education at e-Cademy and at Pennsylvania Learners Online, said he works with students one-on-one through an online interface to teach them about concepts ranging from lifelong physical activities and exercise to team mascots and game strategies.

They report back to Campsie via worksheets and written reports. He acknowledges there is no way to know for sure if a student is completing the physical requirements of the course.

Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. (Active and Passive Verbs)

I'm slowly rolling out a new template for my online handouts.

For years, I've been using Dreamweaver to manage my academic website, but I don't have a copy of the program on my laptop, so I can only update my handouts when I'm in the office. Plus, now that MovableType is open source, I'd like to use it.

I love the idea of letting visitors post comments to my handouts, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to keep all the URLs. the same.  MT automatically removes dashes and underscores when it creates URLs, and all my index files are index.html (rather than .htm). I'm sure there's a way to use .htaccess to solve the problem with redirects, but I ran into a brick wall.

This list from Mark Potts (of "Recovering Journalist) is just the thing I needed in order to motivate me to ask my students to think of the online version of the paper as the primary product, and the print version a useful offshoot. (At present, the reverse is true.)

What would you do if you ran a newspaper?

Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:

1. Make the Web the primary product

Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.

(Full story)

It's been several years since I attempted a redesign of my curricular website, which holds trusty old handouts, some of which I tweak on a regular basis, and some of which I haven't touched in years. I've been thinking a lot about navigation and layout, especially now that most people's computer monitors have fairly high resolution, and the growing number of widescreen monitors is opening up some space on the right-hand side of my web pages, which I hadn't previously been using.  I've already put a "recent related entries" feature on the individual blog entry pages (the system selects those automatically based on category... it's not perfect, becuase it doesn't weight more heavily an entry that shares three cateogries as more similar to an entry that just shares one category with the current entry, but it's better than nouthing). 

I was reading a Washington Times article on the press coverage of Obama's doings, when I noticed this widget.

As one would guess from the triangle over on the right, when you click on the headline, a box opens up.  But if you see an open box, and you want to visit the article on the other side of the link, if you do what comes naturally -- clicking the title -- what happens is the window closes up. You have to click it again to open it, then click on the tiny word "view >".  (I don't want to "view" it... I want to "read" it! But that's beside the point.)

To my mind, the collapsing menu thing is done better at the Evening Standard, where the panels will glide open when you hover the mouse pointer over the title. (Horrors! I just checked, and the mouse-over menu at the Evening Standard doesn't appear to be working anymore.)

Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there is always a way out. In some games, you can just level grind until your characters can overpower a boss. Interactive fiction or puzzles rarely maintain their difficulty because you can always check for hints online. The origin of such accommodations in these games was to make sure that someone who enjoyed the plot would always be able to get to the end. After all, as Pickford notes, when you're telling a story, getting to the conclusion is the reward, not overcoming a tricky boss fight. -- L.B. Jeffries (Moving Pixels)