Gangneung: Reminiscenses Of Lund

It's been a bit more than a month since I moved to Korea.

I did visit it before, so I already got some ideas about the place, but living here has showed me a bit more of the life here.

And it heavily reminds me of Sweden....or to be fair and more precise, of my particular experiences while in Lund, Sweden.

First of all, most apartments have wooden floors and floor-based heating. This is a small but important detail. Because of this, most apartments also have an entry area where you leave your shoes and jackets. This is rather common in winter areas, but this in Korea is very very similar to the same thing in Sweden, with different tiles and height, to really delimitate that you should not step on the wooden floors with the street shoes. The apartments's style is also familiar, with thick walls and windows, quality details and big living room/kitchen areas, and then one room or more apart, a distribution based on big spaces more than in compartmentalising the floor.

Then of course there's the weather, which is not as cold as north Sweden by far, but it is similar to the weather in the part of Sweden where I lived (although Gangneung is colder than Lund), more temperate but still pretty cold, where it snows during winter. By the way, it snowed already a couple of times, and it was cold enough that it accumulated and lasted for 2-3 days each time, plus in the mornings there were ice layers everywhere. This of course poses problems, especially because I move around with a bike, and I need to be careful about this ice....

Moving around with the bike is also a nice reminder. It's not like I don't move around with a bike in Barcelona, but here in Gangneung the town is small enough to allow using it almost everywhere, while streets and roads are, if not prepared, at least open to the fact that people use bikes around. Adler was also small enough to use a bike, but the reality was that the culture there was unused to this so nobody did it...It is true that Gangneung has way too many cars, and cars are the transport of choice of most people, there's not a lot of bikes going around....but there's some. And again, this is from my point of view, and both here and in Sweden I had similar experiences while using a bike (like going towards some party in a bike, going shopping in a bike, crossing snow with a bike, using a bike while slightly drunk, etc.), in part I guess because it's the two places I've been where it's easy to have your own bike, and it's not stressful.

This brings me to the security thing...I can leave the bike unlocked in the street or just with a locked wheel and I know no one is going to steal it. I love this feeling of security, not even Barcelona has this....here I know I can have my bike to move around and I will probably be fine, and it's not a source of worry. The same applies for using mobiles on the street or having money in the wallet. After Rio, this is incredible and allows me to be a lot more relaxed and calm at any moment.

Internet is also pretty similar, with rather good speeds, although I believe the intercontinental connections and the state censorship that is applied on websites slows traffic down considerably depending on what you're trying to access....

Finally, there's also the social atmosphere. One thing in Korea that is pretty awesome is that all English teachers need to be natives, so from an English-speaking country. This, plus the Olympic travellers, means there's a big group of people from all around the world, even in such a small town. So it feels you're meeting people from lots of places, and because of that there's also a "party" atmosphere, in a way.....I really like this atmosphere, and in other projects there was also a certain feeling like this, but it was usually Olympic-related while here it's more open (well, in the sense that there's also this other group, the English teachers). There's even people who will be happy to meet to play board and card games...

Of course, there's also things that are not similar at all (starting from the population, not many tall and big, blonde, blue-eyed people in the streets here...)

For example, the culture here seems a lot more closed to foreigners and changes, and there are social issues that are light-years behind in Korea compared to Spain (and let's not compare it with Sweden which is more advanced that Spain in plenty of those...). There's a big cult for looks in here, and women are still treated really bad in general...also, work follows a very capitalist model, where you cannot get sick and stay at home to rest (which is worse for the company as well because you're less productive at work and you can get other people sick). SIM cards and phone numbers are ridiculous hard to get. The food is evidently completely different, usually spicy even when they say it's not, or very sweet. There's plenty of dishes with lots of green vegetables, mushrooms and leaves(and rice, of course), and meat is common in dishes but not in big quantities outside barbecue places (and in supermarkets it's expensive). And as I already mentioned, traffic is very car-based, even for small trips that with a bike would be 10 minutes or less, and driving is rather aggressive and chaotic (but well, I was in Russia and Brazil, nothing new or worse than that, really) , with plenty of intersections that are rather badly-designed and cause waits for everyone involved. One surprise I got was that, in general, cars do not respect pedestrians, but they do watch out for them, it's just they don't give way to pedestrians unless they're about to hit them or so...

So yeah, plenty of differences actually, and more I have not mentioned...


Still, the atmosphere has a certain similarity for sure... 

Meaningless Fun

I just realised I never wrote a really long post about Overwatch....

Overwatch is a relatively-new game from Blizzard, an online multiplayer shooter with no in-game plot. You have 2 teams competing against each other in different modes of play, but usually it's 6 versus 6, and based on controlling some area (fixed or mobile if it's represented by a vehicle), and in most modes there's an attacking team and a defending team. You have a number of characters to choose from (at the moment it's 23 but it may increase every few months), each one with a very particular playstyle, but dividen broadly between attack, defence, tanks and support. Depending on the mode you can repeat characters on your team or not (but it's moving towards not repeating caracteres outside "fun" modes). The matches are short (10-15 minutes max, usually, can be much shorter), and it's fast paced and a bit chaotic.

Since it's a Blizzard game, there's a big and rich story around it, with a science-fiction world where self-conscious AIs have appeared and technological advances are miraculous, but where there is still war and factions. In this setting we have our "heroes" (or villains), most of them belonging to "Overwatch", a type of "world police" or military that especially helped in a war against AIs. That's the general setting. Then, each character has a personal story and motivation, with complex interactions and still plenty of things we do not know about them, this world and the secret societies and factions. Blizzard has released several movies and webcomics about all this, with really high quality.

The thing is, this is not shown at all during game-play. During game-play, it's just a 6 vs 6 mayhem bullet/explosion fest, where enemies play together in the same team without hesitation, and where objectives are very bland and unoriginal, and stakes seem pretty low.

While the story is pretty awesome, when the game is defined like this it seems rather boring. The thing is, it's not. At all. It is really really fun to play as one of these characters. Matches are a exciting and dramatic and fast, while being a bit cartoonish to lower tension (when you die, your characters makes some funny comment afterwards like "hope no one saw that" and such). Each character is very unique, and it's quite a different experience to play one or the other.

To elaborate a bit, attackers are usually fast-moving and/or quite deadly in a close space, and have abilities that usually deal plenty of damage. Defenders are more specialised, and their skillset is usually good to clear areas from a static point (snipers, turrets). Sometimes the lines between both are a bit blurry, since you can have defenders with very high damage output or attackers that are better at a distance.

Tanks are more straightforward, they are big, have a lot of health and have skills to either create shields or recover the health fast. The idea here is to attract fire while not dying, but they can also be pretty deadly if left unchecked.  Finally support characters are mostly healers or providers of bonuses/perks, and sadly they're a bit underutilised, although they can also be really interesting and rewarding.

Personally my 2 favourite characters to play are Junkrat and Mercy. Junkrat is a defender with a hilariously high damage output, and I love his playstyle of littering everything with grenades and explosives. The chaos that ensues is usually quite fun, even if sometimes you don't really know if a grenade will hit the enemy or bounce back and hit you, but any direct hit you score is going to cripple the opponent  considerably, and even if you die you drop some extra grenades that may finish your rival as well. Mercy is the healer per definition, the only character able to revive others and with the higher healing output. Playing Mercy feels a bit like you're the team's "Mom", making sure everyone is healthy and fine, and jumping around the battlefield. Also, killing someone with Mercy is a bit of a waste (because you're more useful focusing on healing or powering up other people), but it's really rewarding. The only problem is that, as the local healer, the other team will make you a priority target, so if your team ignores you you will die a lot and you always feel you have a big bulls-eye in your head....

I would recommend Overwatch without a doubt, if you enjoy shooters. However, I insist on the fact that the game itself has no plot...

I have said it before, but I love plots. I love fiction in all its variants and enjoy a good setting and a well-thought world. When playing games I think the same, and sometimes I enjoy games that may not have the best mechanics but their story is great. For example, recently I started playing Pillars Of Eternity. This is an Obsidian game, similar to Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights, but with a system not based on D&D, they created their own. This is a pure Role-Playing game, story-heavy and full of nice little details.

For example, one thing I really love in Pillars of Eternity is that sometimes actions that cannot be done with the current game engine (like, for example, climbing down a hole, pulling a party member from a precipice, launching a weapon so someone else can use it, etc..) are instead narrated next to beautiful illustrations, with you choosing from some available options and using your game stats (like your knowledge or your strength and reflexes) to decide the outcome. I find this really immersive and amazing, a way to involve you in an "action" scene that would be fully scripted otherwise and in this way you can affect and participate in it. This opens a world of possibilities, and allows interactive storytelling while maintaining a different core game and not having to develop costly or even impossible game mechanics to represent this during the normal play.

Another thing that is really immersive and nice is that there's no alignment, you have reputation and your actions and choices guides you towards a certain type of RPG personality, something more greyish and not so black and white as most computer RPGs have.

I also heavily recommend Pillars Of Eternity, it is gorgeous and interesting and compelling. Having said that, it's like a complete opposite of Overwatch,

In Pillars of Eternity, you feel you have advanced and achieved something new if you play for a while. Overwatch, instead, is just mindless fun, and you can "waste" hours in it without really anything to show or gain (apart from an arbitrary level that you keep progressing).  However, Overwatch is so well-designed that it can get away with no plot and be just fun, which is something to respect too of course....

Nevertheless, I would like a bit more correspondence between story and gameplay. Overwatch has defined in it's backstory at least 2 clear factions, so I think it would be eventually possible to divide characters in 2 groups at least, and in this way have a more asymmetric competition while keeping things interesting and establishing a better relationship with the plot part...

Of course, this would require a lot more characters, to make sure both groups get enough of all types. However, Blizzard has time to develop that...

The Art Of (Mis)interpreting Polls

It's been a while since I commented on Spanish politics, because Spanish politics are still really really shitty and it just gets me mad. There were 2 general elections in a row (first one didn't work out so well) and, big surprise, the usual parties won. The most corrupt party actually improved their results a lot. The almost as corrupt party lost support but still had more than enough to be relevant, and at least the new corrupt party didn't win as much as the polls said. Anyway, these 3 parties never had any intentions to associate themselves with the new left party (which may not be perfect but it has some good ideas and could improve the situation), because they would have to stop with the corruption and such things, and in a predictable move they kind of allied with each other. The only good part is that the most corrupt party is ruling in minority, so the almost as corrupt party and the new corrupt party are happy with destroying some of the damage the most corrupt party had done by undoing their previous laws and pretending to be very different in this way, and that's at least a bit decent.

Anyway, Spain is ruled by corrupts and far-right patriots and traditionalist, and I've abandoned all hope of this changing in the next 50 years. The next hope is to just separate from that.

So these days there has been an interesting poll about what Catalans think about the independence process and, more particularly, about doing a referendum, plus also which parties would they vote in a theoretical new local election.

This poll was done by a newspaper with a center-left bias, but big supporter of the almost as corrupt party. This party is against voting to see what Catalan people want to do regarding independence, so the newspaper had to give results that reflected that this vote was a problem for Catalunya.

Here the thing is that the poll said otherwise, so the newspaper had to present it in a bad way to try to reinforce their ideas that voting to decide Catalunya's future was bad and divisive.

So, they wrote that "The Referendum splits the Catalan people", saying that around 49% of the people were in favour of doing a referendum unilaterally without consulting Spain, and 48% were against this idea.

Of course, if you say it like this, it seems it's a 50-50 matter. But they had to publish all the results after all, and as some other have pointed (link in Catalan, sorry), the reality is that a staggering  84.6% of the Catalans DO want to vote. It's only that of those 84.6%, there's almost a half that want to vote in a Referendum negotiated with the Spanish government, and are against doing it without consulting Spain.

If you put it like this, it is quite clear what is the will of the people, that are pretty much united in their intention to vote. However, all the corrupt Spanish parties do not understand the "democracy" concept and are against letting the vote happen. They're paralysed in their fear of the "Yes" winning, and instead of negotiating, campaigning for "No" or proposing a better relation between Catalunya and the Spanish government, they close their ears and hope that by making voting illegal (yep, that's right) they can solve the issue. Meanwhile, they keep rescuing private companies with public money, and they keep neglecting inversions in Catalunya, and they keep trying to judge and condemn politicians for trying to discuss and debate the independence topic.

So every day, people are more and more tired of this, and independence gains supporters.

Other results that the newspaper "forgot" to reinforce as quite brutal and tried to diminish their importance or applied make up to them:

-When voting for independence, the "Yes" would win with 54.8% and "No" would get 45.2%.

-The first poll indicated what people preferred, but if there was an unilateral Referendum, 68% of the people would vote anyway, regardless of their previous wish. If you then count what people would vote in this case, "Yes" wins by more than 80%.

-More than half of the people that support parties that are against voting would be in favour of voting anyway.

-56% of Catalan people believe Spain is not a democratic country because they're not allowed to vote on a Referendum.


Now, on the second part of the polls, people were also asked what party would they vote right now in case of elections. The results were that, out of a total of 135 representatives, between 88 and 94 would be from parties considered left or centre, with right parties being relegated to very small numbers . If you count parties in favour of the Referendum, you would get between 84 and 89.

Polls are not exact and who knows for sure what will happen. But it seems to me Catalunya has a chance of something...different. Really different from conservative Spain.

And some people are scared shitless about it...

Difficulty In Gameplay

I've been reading a discussion lately about Dark Souls' difficulty where it was argued that every game should have difficulty settings and be made as accessible as possible.

This is an interesting discussion, and I felt like writing a bit about it.

For starters, some people argued that an easy mode would diminish the sense of accomplishment of the people that finish the normal Dark Souls or other hard games. This is idiotic and misses the point. If you really really like difficult games, playing them and finishing them is its own accomplishment. For example, people have played the legendary mode in Halo while having always the easy option as well, and it didn't make them feel that the Legendary mode was diminished by having also the easy option. If anything, playing the hardest setting gives you certain "bragging rights", which is not the nicest thing to do but it does feel nice to know you have a certain level of skill.

If that would be the only argument against difficulty there would be no discussion. What is interesting is the people that mentioned that difficulty was part of the game atmosphere and it was integral to understand the world of the game and the developer's artistic message.

This is trickier. When you start talking about art, anything goes. That's the thing about art, if the artist says you should experience it in a certain way because it's the only way to trigger the required emotions , it's hard to argue that you should not...regardless of the fact that the artist may be an asshole about it.

Sometimes it has been discussed if games are art. Well, yes, they are, end of the discussion. Of course plenty of them are bad examples,  same way plenty of art is terrible (there's lots of terrible movies,terrible books and poems, terrible music, terrible paintings, etc),but the badness of some of them does not diminish the goodness of others, it just makes them brighter.

Therefore, as artistic expression, some games may be difficult on purpose to recreate certain emotions on the player. And it's a valid point. I have not seen "funny games", but I know its purpose is to make you, the movie viewer, feel bad about torture porn movies, in a way. Same can be said about some games, like "I wanna be the guy", which tries to frustrate the player in ironic and terrible ways. The frustration it generates is a wanted side effect, the game wants you to kind of laugh at the twisted ways it's killing you or tricking you into traps. That also enhances the feeling of accomplishment once you pass certain sections.

Another point that I would like to make is that horror games,to be truly horror games, need to be difficult. Otherwise they're action games set up inside a horror story, which is very different.  Horror games should bring dread by playing. If the story is scary but playing is not, I would say they have not truly done their intended purpose. And the only way I know to make the player scared is by making the player vulnerable,and to punish failure. This needs to be balanced, of course, too many deaths and it becomes just frustrating, but the right amount makes you feel truly immersed in the game and really scared.

Dark Souls is not exactly horror but the difficulty is basic for its premise of a decaying ruthless world. You need to experience feeling little and weak, lost, in such a world. You need to feel that only hard work and good fighting skills will get you through. The setting is really important, and this difficulty is basic to achieve that.

Having said that, games are never equal for everybody. What one person finds difficult is easy for another. So, if you, as a game designer, want players to experience a certain degree of difficulty,  it is basic to put different levels. This is kind of like clothes, you cannot tailor-made it for each player but you can make scales of difficulty. You can even put recommendations, I have seen already this in current games, where they point that if you're familiar and comfortable with a certain gameplay you should choose this or that difficulty.

Of course some may argue that not all games allow you to tune  the difficulty in an easy way, and that it's not possible to make them easier without changing them completely. And this is true, but not in all games. For example, platformers do depend on the level design exclusively for its difficulty, so you cannot really graduate that. One map is as difficult as it is. You could theoretically increase or decrease it by changing things like jump distance,but its hard to argue if this would make it easier or harder.

However, in most current games the dependency on the map is greatly reduced. For example, in Dark Souls, increasing your HP and decreasing damage dealt by enemies is an easy and effective way to make the game easier, allowing for more mistakes. There's plenty of other stats that you could play around without changing level design nor other mechanics, enabling you to experience some of the traps in the game and such things while lowering the challenge to an acceptable level.

Then of course there is fake difficulty,  like not explaining basic mechanics (don't put a compulsory tutorial but leave a manual you can consult at will),or the inability to pause. This point in particular really annoys me, and may force me to never finish the game even if I kind of enjoy it. I think this adds nothing to the setting nor the tension,  and it's just a dick move.

However, not counting fake difficulty,  a difficult game can be required by the creator to produce the wanted emotions. The thing then is to consider what is the lowest difficulty level and what is the highest, and what levels are in between, knowing that the higher you put the starting bar and the less options are to change its height, the less people will jump over it.

In the end, therefore, while it is a valid demand from an artistic point of view to experience the game in a certain difficulty setting, it depends again on what audience the creator wants to have 

If you believe only a selected chosen few superhumans deserve to experience your art fully, you have every right to do so with your creation,  but this tends to mark you as a huge asshole...

We need stranger stories

I've been living in Gangneung for a bit over 2 weeks now. My apartment is furnished and I'm getting used to live here, and so far it's quite good^^.

Warning: Geeky post ahead, and spoilers for Halo 5.

When I came here, I brought with me a new xbox one that I bought. Since I'm alone, I thought I may have a chance to play a bit, and indeed I have played. Since games are expensive, I currently only have 2 games, one that came with the console and another one. I will bring some of my old xbox 360 games with me soon, and I will be able to play those as well, but for the moment it's quite enough.

The two games are Battlefield 1 (it came with the console) and Halo 5.

I've been a fan of Halo since I discovered it, and I made other posts about it. I think it's a game that combines fun gameplay with story and ambientation (music, scenery) that makes you want to continue playing and advance. It is impressive, epic, dramatic, and also fun. When Bungie stopped developing them it was a big drama, but after playing Halo 4, I saw that the new dedicated department that has the task of continuing with the games was dedicated and similar enough to continue with the original feeling and making an interesting plot.

Halo 4 had some confusing plot elements, but I continued to like it. So, I started Halo 5 with the expectation to be similarly good. And I was not disappointed, I'm enjoying it greatly. After such a long time without playing a Halo, it was like riding a bike or driving a car...all these gestures, movements, actions and possibilities that were new but familiar, that my reflexes learned again by just remembering them.  That was pretty awesome...and the music and atmosphere were still great, epic and strange, maintaining the sci-fi feeling some stories do not manage to achieve.. .


However, there were 2 tings that annoyed me a bit. First one was one new playable character, called Locke. The game changes perspective between him and Master Chief.

In a world full of bland space marines, this character manages to outbland most of them. He's not interesting, he's not dramatic, he does not transmit empathy nor makes me care for him at all. Master Chief, even being pretty bland, has a huge amount of very subtle registers, and a clear inner world that seems interesting. I did not detect any such thing in Locke. He's like your typical "I follow orders" type of military main character,

Also, you're playing in a team with another character voiced by Nathan Fillion, with his looks and part of his tone and characteristic humour. I would much rather play as him, really...no comparison whatsoever....his character is interesting. The one you play, not really.

The second thing is that in this game Cortana is labelled and acts as the bad guy (or girl, or AI). First of all, the most interesting thing in all Halos is Cortana, period. Other characters just do not reach her level at all. Her sarcasm, funny comments, usefulness, depth, etc....cannot really compare with the others. Second, her turning evil is just managing to get to immortality (she was created with an arbitrarily short expiration date) and trying to establish some system to stop people form killing each other constantly. In a world where 2 games ago several species where about to be wiped out because of conflict and war, that seems quite a sensible move, really. I don't see why this is supposed to be bad...Sure, there's the eternal discussion about dictatorships and liberties and all that....but, again, we're taking about a world setting where intergalactic wars are glassing planets and entire colonies get exterminated....and where the guys that are saying "this is bad, she cannot have this control" are the ones that are sent by their bosses and superiors to kill and conquer without much question...hell, the "main character" seems to be a guy that was sent in purely assassination missions ....I mean, the feeling I get is that if it was the human species achieving this power, the game would paint it positively (take Mass Effect's example).

This made me think that I'm a little tired about stories where the omniscient creature is labelled evil when they try to tell humans to stop killing each other or else...plenty of times we get situations where the humans are being forced to be pacific, and this is presented as reducing our liberties....I believe here there's heavy influence from USA's second amendment craziness and the fact that plenty of these stories are made by people in the USA or based in USA's movies and so on... in general, I have repeated this before, but we need to stop focusing on humans when telling sci-fi or fantasy stories....we tend to put the humans as the main characters, and this is the same as putting male bland military protagonists...I don't know at which point someone decided that male guys are the main market for all this fiction and they cannot relate to people unless they're also male and manly....and human, when we add fantasy to the plot...and we need to get rid of this preconceptions.

Stories need to be weirder, more open, more diverse, and take risks, take new stances and original paths. For example, whatever happens in Halo 6, I would love for Cortana to win, and to see that the new results was actually pretty nice. This would be a nice plot twist, something out of the norm, and something to remove humans from the protagonist and ruler point of a sci-fi story with so much more potential than what stupid military space marines offer...