Learn to Test

I used to think it was silly when shows had futuristic computers narrate what they were doing. 

You know, those little stream-of-consciousness declarations, like “scanning the area for life forms” or “initiating self-destruct sequence”? They seemed like cheap writing trying show the audience that things were happening.

Now that I have more programming experience, it makes more sense.

My early coding efforts — in Twine, so we aren’t even talking about something complicated — were nightmares of frustration filled with obscure error messages and opaque syntax warnings. Early versions of the SugarCube documentation didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and it was slow going trying to sift through Q&A pages for answers.¹

It was easier to loiter in the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, where I found Linus Åkesson² sharing a useful metaphor about building bridges. It's okay to start with something feeble, because you can build on it through a gradual process of refinement and evolution. 

As I beat various projects into shape — leaning on the bridge metaphor and applying McDonald’s Theory — I learned the four possible states in which code exists:

My coding efforts are still full of errors and janky syntax, but now it’s easier to find and fix the problems. If my projects need less development time, it’s not because I’m faster at coding. It’s because I’m faster at identifying where things failed. I have become better at testing. 

These improvements came from using more comments in the code and indicators that explain what's going on. When it's easier to see where things are failing, it's easier to identify where you should fix them. 

In that context, it makes more sense to have the computer announce that it’s scanning for lifeforms or initiating a self-destruct sequence.

1. I should note that Twinery.org is much more user friendly in the present day.

2. You may recognize his name from the “8-bit Baroque Metal” performance that recently took certain corners of the internet by storm.³

3. That wasn’t an intentional pun, but it works. SORRY I’M NOT SORRY.

Breathedge: The Good, the Bad, and the Awkward

 

I enjoyed Breathedge, but it squandered a lot of potential. The early game’s creativity and open environment became more linear and less entertaining as its story unfolded. 

The early survival sequence is delightful — Breathedge takes place in a massive debris field that is densely packed full of items and destinations. You have to manage hunger, thirst, and oxygen levels while collecting and crafting items that increase the time that you can spend gathering resources. You’re also working with a limited inventory space, and this is not a cozy world of abundance: All of your crafting decisions involve strategic tradeoffs to prioritize survival.

It sets up a well-managed tension in the opening chapters, leaving players to decide whether they want to spend resources customizing their own base or researching additional equipment that could help overcome environmental challenges.

Some of the most immersive, beautiful, and distracting sequences in Breathedge involved pushing to the limits of explorable space and seeing whether I brought adequate food, water, and oxygen to survive the return trip. There are enough requirements for survival, and enough new locations to explore, that it’s easy to overlook an important requirement. Then you're racing back to a previous location to grab something that was vital for survival. 

Frustration and backtracking are an intentional part of the early gameplay experience, and I enjoyed those challenges. 

Later stages are filled with pointless, mandatory backtracking — everything happens in enclosed spaces full of oxygen and additional supplies. In these sequences, you interact with a designated object that sends you to a similarly arbitrary destination in the opposite direction.

These environments felt like they were padded full of unnecessary space and deliberate switchbacks to extend the amount of time required to finish the game.

It was also disappointing to explore a universe with almost no diversity. Women only appear in Breathedge as pinup art and murals depicting idealized femininity. There’s an overall lack of variety: the humans that get rendered with faces are all men, and the majority of characters have a single, generic body type. (Granted, there are a small number of exceptions used to make fat jokes.) 

The only female voice actor in the game recites lines from a diagnostic computer with BDSM programming — she makes sexualized statements about torture and punishment in response to the player’s choices. 

Some of the poor design choices in Breathedge felt like an attempt to compensate for even worse narrative choices. The game begins with an interrogation where the player recounts their story of surviving the spaceship crash. It's a framing device where the “game over” message is replaced by an interrogator insisting that things must have gone differently. 

That kind of artifice works well in a game like Spider and Web, when the designer wants to call attention to differences between the events that happened and the story that the player sees, but it felt like a needless extra step here. The player ends up loading a saved game to continue, with or without the extra prompting from interrogators. 

Overall, it felt like the developers were reluctant to use the intrinsic motivation of survival in outer space. Instead of trusting that people would want to rescue themselves, the game imposes a confusing plot involving eco terrorists, secret research projects, and corrupt government bureaucracies. When these jumbled story pieces don’t fit together, Breathedge just breaks the fourth wall and says “do this because the designers have made it a requirement.”  

I would have been happier exploring outer space without the extra gamification.

Tomorrow in Crabs

 “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme,” as they say. 

I’ve noticed that the current fragmentation of the internet looks like the internet migrations of the early 2000s. MySpace blew up — first in the sense of getting popular, and then in the sense of complete catastrophe — which left a lot of internet users adrift.

People vowed that they would never to put all their trust in a single internet platform, and it sparked the creation of a ton of blogs. Today, people are coping with the loss of Twitter by swearing never to put their trust in a single internet platform and creating their own newsletters. 

It’s like natural selection creating 5 different evolutionary paths that all ended in crab shapes.  

But mostly I wanted to bring up crabs to note that they had a starring role in the July issue of Trends in Parasitology, a scientific journal that explores “Parasite effects on host’s trophic and isotopic niches.” The article talks about studying the different ways that parasites alter the behavior of their hosts (see also: The Last of Us). 

The article caught my attention because of this sentence: “Wild-caught organisms should not be considered single organisms, but rather entire ecosystems, hosting a variety of microbes and parasites, which can be found in virtually every tissue.”

I swear that links back to video games — I remember reading about a PC game from the 90’s where the player guides the development of a civilization that is being built in the fossilized remains of a dragon. I just can’t remember the name of it.

(The title of this post is a reference to Today in Tabs, which I’ve been using to keep up with online developments now that, you know…)