Why we need TCS: link

was swimming. this kid cut swam in front of me ... so i swam around him. his father then punished him despite me insisting i was fine.

A Conversation

curi: I think the notion that taking away freedom from people helps them by making it harder for them to make mistakes is absurd. Even if it did prevent mistakes, it wouldn't be help.

crowd: hmmm

curi: Imagine not being allowed to use computers to help you avoid breaking a computer!

crowd: Yeah!

Lone Voice from crowd: Hey, don't we help children like that?

curi: No!

crowd: Hey, he's right. Yes we do.

curi: I mean we shouldn't do that.

crowd: What!?

Lone Voice: You don't think children should have any rules or boundaries? You're nuts!

curi: I don't think we should make our children unfree.

crowd (not listening to fine points): Lynch him!!!

I like game design quite a lot. I'm going to present one of the major problems in the field. Perhaps one of you will have a suggestion. Even if not it's still interesting.

The best computer game is Warcraft 3, so this will be my example game. It comes with a World Editor program so anyone can create their own maps.

To create a warcraft map of the RPG variety, you using the following main elements: place heroes, monsters, terrain, treasure. Create spells, quests, traps, and possibly a little AI to help the monsters use spells or fight smarter. You can also put in a city with shops and people to talk to.

Most warcraft RPGs I play are way too easy if I play with friends (multiplayer, cooperative). But, surprisingly, playing with random people we usually lose badly. The skill gap between random people and experts is huge, and directly effects survival rate.

So if I make a map of fun difficulty for me, most people will never get anywhere in it. But if it's going to be too easy for me, that's no fun and I won't make it at all.

One solution is difficulty levels. However, those involve either creating separate versions of each fight for each difficulty, or using some general function. The first plan is tons of work. The second has limited use. The simplest way, in warcraft, to set the difficulty at a stroke is to alter the amount of life the badguys have by some factor. However, this has unintended consequences, such as making spells that deal damage very good on low difficulties and bad on high ones.

My current map is too hard for unorganised (bad) players even on easy difficulty, but I can't lower life more because the badguys already die en masse to spells as they have so little life. The issue is that the monsters are threatening, and if they die fast, even really fast, idiots or novices can still die first. The fix would be making the monsters unthreatening...

It just occurred to me to try giving the heroes more life on easy mode. This may help.

BTW the reason I call these people idiots is if they just did the following they'd survive way way more:

- heal between fights
- buy replacement healing potions
- start fights together with everyone ready
- cast some spells like Ice Armor before combat
- run away if losing
- back up if all the monsters are targeting you

Designing difficulties for people who don't get any of those is really tricky...

Anyhow the real balance issue is to make maps interesting they should require some strategy to win. But then people bad at strategy lose. Most players have terrible strategy. And in a four player map, just one bad player can ruin it. So, what do ya do?

so in some events, like soccer, when its down to four teams or ppl, say a b c and d, it can to like this:

a beats b
c beats d
then in finals a beats c
and in bronze match, b beats d
c gets silver, b gets bronze

but look, c and b did not play each other, and had identical records, beating d and losing to a. so why should c get a higher medal? hasn't anyone noticed this?

Skools are a horrid place. It starts with legitimised grade falsification over discipline issues like attendance and participation, and often over being sufficiently deferential to the teacher. It continues with the implicit assumption that children must be forced to learn that comes out in the constant forced feedback to make sure students are paying attention. This takes forms like graded assignments, quizzes, and participation grades. Worse still is that teachers design tests based on what they consider important, and so one must listen to teacher to pass tests. Tests should be designed by third party certification agencies, and classes should be optional things designed to help people learn the material (only the parts they want to learn, which may or may not be what's on the test - student's decision). Much like SAT prep classes (I imagine - never been to one). Of course, there would be other classes not designed for any sort of certification, with no need for grades. By separating the issues of certification and education, schools would be able to focus on one and thus do it better. And when it became popular opinion that current certification methods hurt people (we all know no one likes tests, but few people seem to care), then new certification companies sporting new methods would spring up to compete with the testing-based ones. And people would flock to them.

Parenting as we know it is a horrid thing.

Children are dehumanised - parent knows best. You may say the parent usually does, and that's true, but usually the child doesn't disagree with his parent. In cases of a conflict, when a child is sufficiently confident to contradict his parent, his view must be taken seriously, just like one would listen if a friend thought you were in error.

Many parents consider children like clay to be sculpted into a good adult (read: valid person). This also dehumanises children who are people now. A child has preferences of his own, and these must be taken seriously, not the preferences of some imagined future person.

Parents believe that people can't always have what they want. In practice this is a transparent excuse to deny things to one's child. In principle, it says people are doomed to unhappiness. This is not true. Through a combination of creatively solving problems so people are better able realise their intentions and wants, and creatively analysing and changing their intentions and wants to better, more realisable ones, people can be very successful. There is nothing stopping them; the limiting factor is just their skill (morality).

Parents so often treat their own desires as unquestionable, unalterable truth, and from this point of view declare their children's desires impossible. Examples include the mundane (but still important) like a parent who insists he can't stand even the sound of violence and bans many movies from his home, or a parent who hates messes and insists child meticulously clean his room (why the child should clean the mess the parent hates is unclear). Another example would be a parent who says "I will feel like a failure if you do not graduate college, so you must go." Isn't it obvious this is the parent's problem and the solution is almost certainly for the parent to get over it? (unless child doesn't mind college, in which case parent is lucky and need not address his flaw) Sadly it is not.

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