Removing Her

Removing Her

By: Paul William Fassett

I have lived for hundreds of years, traveled the endless dimensions in search of meaning, and I have found nothing but pain. Meaning is in the experience of life, and that meaning changes from person to person. Experience is what tells us that water is wet, that fire is hot, and falling down, though painful, is just a lesson to be learned.

            Sometimes our experience can control who we are, and no matter how hard we try to break our programming we end up repeating the same mistakes because we are trying to avoid pain.

            But pain is universal. At some point we all experience it.

            What if you could shape your experience? What if you could tailor the memories of your life to fit the lifestyle and future you desired? Would you become a different person?

           

            Kaiber Kully was a man of special talents that only his closest friends knew about. Which is why Jaden found himself with a broken heart knocking on Kaiber's apartment door.

            Kaiber wasn't expecting company. In fact he was meditating. It was the only way he knew how to deal with all the pain he took into himself from others.  He stood and looked in the mirror, quickly dealing with his hair by running his fingers through it until it was brought to lay back against his head.

            Bang bang came the sound from the door.

            “Hang on a minute,” Kaiber said.

            Kaiber never saw himself when he looked in the mirror. His lips, though thick and plump could be thin and tiny, depending on who he saw there. His small dimpled chin could be large, jutting, round or covered in hair. He never saw himself anymore or felt like himself. He had experienced too much of other people's lives to know who he was anymore.

            Bang bang the sound came again, and this time Kaiber had enough. He swung the door open to see his friend Jaden standing there, looking like his muscles leaped off his skeleton and wriggled out of his skin.

            He was like an empty flesh colored sack. His skin seemed to hang off him, and deep circles ringed the outside of his eyes. Every hair on his head seemed to be working for itself going this way and that way, and he gave off a smell that should never come from a full grown adult.

            “Jaden, what are you...” Kaiber didn't know what to say. “What happened to you?”

            “I'm a mess man. I can't sleep, I can't hold down food. I haven't left my apartment for weeks.” Jaden slid around Kaiber and walked to the middle of the living room, sitting on the arm of Kaiber's beat up green couch.

            “Why?”

            “She left me man. She just walked out.”

            “Who, Katey?”

            “Yeah. I thought maybe something happened to her. I came home, and all her stuff was gone.” Jaden was in a panic. His eyes were wide and dark. He paced and sat and repeated. “No note, nothing. I called her on her codex, and she had her serial number changed.”

            “Why? I mean, what happened?”

            “I looked into that, you know. I had a PI go and find her. She moved in with some Elf named Jock.” Jaden grabbed Kaiber by the collar. “I need you to help me man.”

            “Calm down, Jaden.”

            “Seriously! You don't know what it's like to live in my head! She is in there, fucking that Jock asshole, in my brain, all hours of the night. And she enjoys it. She enjoys every fucking minute of it, and all I can do is lay in bed and watch her, hear her moaning in my head. I can't fucking take it anymore!”

            “What do you want me to do about it?” Kaiber asked, hoping he didn't know the answer.

            “Take it away,” Jaden said.

            “Take what away?”

            “Her. Get her out of my head. Do that thing you do and get rid of her.”

            “No.”

            “Come on man.” Jaden was pleading. His face took on the pallor of a dying man. His lips trembled. “Look at me. You know I wouldn't ask you to do it if it wasn't important, man.”

            Kaiber turned away from his friend and was walking to the door when a clammy hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

            “Look at me!” Jaden held his wrists out, and several cuts scabbed his forearm like tree bark. “You have to help me man. I can't take it anymore. There's a decade worth of memories in me and every thought is her.” He beat his fist against his head as the tears came spontaneously.

            Kaiber grabbed his arms and pulled Jaden in and hugged him like a mother would a crying child. Jaden's body convulsed and bucked with each muffled cry becoming louder and louder as tears soaked through Kaiber's shirt. A minute seems like an eternity when you are holding a crying man, trying to come up with a reason not to help.

            Jaden pulled away, wiping the tears from his eyes, never looking up from his feet.

            “Jaden. Do you know why I don't don't mess with memories anymore?”

            “No,” Jaden said.

            “Your memories don't just disappear when I go into your head. It's not like I take an eraser and they are gone.”

            “I don't care what you have to do, I just want to forget her.”

            “Listen. Whatever you are feeling, I will experience it. Your pain, your memories of her, that feeling of betrayal, anger, whatever, it becomes mine.”

            “I...”

            Kaiber could sense his friends hesitation, but his resolve didn't seem to break.

            “Would you do it for me, Kai?”

            “Is it worth losing me as a friend?”

            “It doesn't need to be that way...”

            “Yeah it does. Jaden, every time I see you from now on, I will be reminded of your pain. I feel it like it's happening all over again. Every time I see Katey, every time I think of you two together, I'll feel that agony. I'll have to cut you out of my life. Are you sure you want to do this?”

            Kaiber sat on the couch and watched as his friend stood there thinking, his face contorting as if sudden pains had shot up his neck and face. Tears rolled out silently from his eyes, and his mouth moved in a wordless cry as pain etched lines on his forehead.

            He sniffed and took a deep breath, trying to gain composure and sat down on the floor.

            “I keep thinking,” Jaden said. “How I could deal with these thoughts but there doesn't seem to be a way out. Drugs, liquor, I've tried everything and all it seems to do is make it worse. If there was a way for me to pry her out of there I would, but just when I think I am over her, I find myself at her apartment, banging on the door. That elf fucker beat me so bad I thought I was going to wake up in the hospital. She stopped him. I went home that night, in pain, and figured, that's it. That was the wake-up call. Then I was laying in bed and I thought, she must still love me. She stopped him from beating me to death. There must be some love still in there. It's sick! I know that, but I just want her back, and then I want her gone, and then I want to kiss her, and then… I just want to kill her.”

            Jaden laid his arms on the coffee table and rested his chin on top, staring through the glass top at Kaiber's feet. Kaiber already knew it was over. Jaden had made his decision.

            He stood and went to the medicine cabinet and pulled out a red gel capped pill as big as a suppository and when he got back to the living room he laid it on the table in front of his friend.

            “Take that, and lay down on your back.”

            Jaden took the pill into his fingers and looked at Kaiber, a smile inching its way, tentatively, yet never committing to his face. It was a sort of silent thank you. Jaden swallowed the pill and laid back on the carpet as Kaiber came around the table and sat on his knees next to his friend.

            It only took a few minutes before the pill took control and Jaden was drifting off to sleep.

            Kaiber closed his eyes and in the jumbled mess of his mind, through all the voices of past memories. He sifted through the slide show of images, pushing aside photos and large novels of peoples lives that he had archived away in his mind. Kaiber turned off the hundreds of televisions stacked high as skyscrapers playing childhood memories of lives he never live, and cleared the space in his mind to be empty, and clear of clutter.

            He pictured his friend's face. The mask of pain he seemed to be wearing as a new persona, the premature wrinkles, and dark eye rings, his voice, he built a version of his friend in his imagination, lying on his back in the empty black void of the memory world. A tiny white dot formed at the center of Jaden's forehead and a beam of light shot from it like a beacon.

            Kaiber placed a finger inside and pulled at the white dot until it tore open and he was able to fit his entire hand in, and as the dot grew larger, Jaden's head, neck body and legs tore open to flood the empty space with a white light, and when the light receded, and the world of Jaden's mind rendered itself, Kaiber was there, with Katey, looking into her large green eyes.

            She was young then. Long blonde hair, tiny pointed ears, small among most elves. Kaiber knew her then, knew whatever Jaden knew. Knew she was only half elven, and hated that about herself. Like she had no identity. Kaiber felt Jaden's insecurity, like she was only with him, a human, because she was insecure, unsure of who she was.

            Kaiber was in bed with her, her body on top of his, her sweat becoming one with his sweat, feeling her tightness, her wetness, the warmth inside her, the intense pleasure.

            The memory split and they were in a room, a hotel room, and she threw something across the bed, almost hitting Kaiber. She creamed at him, told him he was making it hard to breathe. Kaiber felt what Jaden felt. The fear, the anxiety of her leaving him. Of her wanting to leave. All he wanted to do was cross the threshold of the bed that seperated them, and hug her, tell her he was sorry and that he'd do whatever she wanted, but he didn't. He didn't want her to know how weak he felt around her. How utterly powerless her inability to be honest with him made him feel.

            Roller coasters, video games, movie nights with friends, Kaiber even saw himself in Jaden's memories, felt the jealousy that Jaden felt whenever Katey talked to Kaiber, or laughed at one of his jokes.

            The hallway was just an outline of a hallway accented by a narrow floor, no walls, no ceiling, just a void and a helpless feeling that Kaiber could fall at anytime and be dumped into an endless fall. An echoed called to him as the hallway seemed to stretch forever into the empty horizon.

            Kaiber walked on as the floor became thinner and thinner until he was walking a tight rope, his arms stretched out at his sides, taking one step at a time, and though he wanted to stop, turn around, and pretend it wasn't there, the echoing sounds and the muffled pleasure, forced him forward.

            A single missed step sent him tumbling over, just barely able to catch the floor with his fingers. He hung there listening to the sounds grow louder as a door appeared above. It slowly swung open, and the noise was clear. Kaiber clawed his way up to the floor, and into the room on his hands and knees and when he rose he saw Katey, and a formless, shapeless thing of a man, twisted into impossible shapes, writhing in a sweaty pleasure.

            Kaiber clawed at his face closing his eyes so he couldn't see the woman that he loved betray him, to toss all those years aside for someone she barely knew.

            The floor turned soft and Kaiber was sinking. He tried to trudge toward the bed, but the mud was thick and each step took him further down until he was waist deep paddling trying to keep his head above the black, thick bloody mud.

            His head went under and when he opened his eyes he could see Jaden, hanging from a door knob, dead, a note pinned to his chest. The lack of air caused him to gasp and Kaiber felt the mud clog his lungs like vomit that would never rise and the last thing he saw was the lid of a storage chest closing as those memories were stored away in Kaiber's mind.

            Kaiber only saw Jaden when the stabs of painful memories became too frequent. It comforted him to know that Jaden was happy again. Able to live. If he was happy, it was like Kaiber had permission to be too.

            One day he saw his friend at a street side diner, eating with a young woman. Breaking his own rule, Kaiber went to see his friend, and they exchanged pleasantries, asked how the other was doing. Doing good, they said, and only one of them was lying.

            Her name was Britney, a half elf girl. Kaiber looked at her long blonde hair, green eyes, small pointed ears, and he started to cry. She reminded him of Katey, even that ineffectual look behind those beautiful green orbs.

            Kaiber walked away, embarrassed, unable to see them together anymore because he knew what he had done for Jaden was only delaying the inevitable. Like a wise man from earth once said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

            It was a lesson well learned.

The Case for Evergeen Model and The Effects of Destructive Versus Constructive Design

The Case for Evergeen Model and The Effects of Destructive Versus Constructive Design.

The Evergreen Model, also known as the 4+2 method, is a set of business basics that the Harvard Business School call their “Four Primary Management Practices”. They consist of: strategy, execution, culture and structure. The Harvard folk go on to claim that with just the mastery of two the secondary management practices, you too can have a successful business. These secondary practices are: talent, innovation, leadership and mergers. The idea here is that if you don’t have mastery of any of these areas, you hire people who do which will bring us nicely to the video games industry.

The triple a video games industry, as it has been taken to being called, is a strange place as far as technology sectors. It would make sense that someone who has a history of great ideas is put in charge of leading a company, but the video game industry sees ideas as expendable. It is a place so full of talent, yet simultaneously fearful of creativity. It is a place that doesn’t need to bargain for wages because the passion keeps employees there, until it doesn’t anymore. The video game industry sees talent as replaceable because there is such a high demand for their jobs that there is no scarcity while other industries wither and die for lack of talent and innovation, the gaming industry is rigid and unchanging and has only gotten larger and more profitable every year.

                In general, a place that doesn’t appear to appreciate its own talent yet benefits greatly for the efforts of its talent.

What, if anything, does the triple a industry excel at in the secondary management practices list?

Leadership and Mergers.

                It is hard nowadays not to hear evergreen model being bandied around and most of the time, used outside of its true meaning. So, what is the evergreen model?

                It is a research project, essentially, that turned into a business model.

                There were 160 companies in The Harvard Business School’s studied 160 companies for the Evergreen Project with the goal of gathering data on variables that contributed to the growth or decline of these companies over the span of 10 years. A specific set of variables emerged from this test which is the basis of the 4 + 2 method.

                I often hear this term applied to game design in the context that the Evergreen model is a way to constantly generate revenue from a single game title by constantly upgrading the game from version to version and charging for this additional content. Even this context is wrong in a way because, aside from companies like Blizzard, these companies are not making a constant stream of revenue from a single game, but sequels of a game in a cycle of destructive obsolesce.

                My case in this essay is not for the Evergreen model, nor is it an endorsement of a subscription model. What I want to talk about is the two schools of thought in the Evergreen model of constructive design, versus destructive design. Or in video game speak, expansion versus sequel.

                So let’s dig in, shall we?

Constructive versus Destructive Design

For this essay I will be comparing two companies, side by side to see what their strengths and weaknesses are and to see if I find any commonalities between them and from there, construct a framework for which the Evergreen Model can become a sustainable model for a company that doesn’t wish to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

The two companies I will be comparing have a lot in common and yet, not a whole lot in common at all. A paradox of parent and child ownership: Blizzard and Activision or Activision Blizzard if you’re nasty. A merger of two names so large that they kept both.

We will be looking at three titles: Blizzard’s largest title: World of Warcraft, Activision’s Call of Duty series and Bungies Destiny series.

Okay, so on the constructive side of this argument is World of Warcraft.

As for the destructive side of the argument we have Call of Duty, and Destiny.

WHAT IS CONSTRUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE DESIGN

First let us talk about constructive design. Constructive design is best exemplified by MMORPGS who, instead of making older content obsolete either from neglect or through sequelization, add onto the content already there and at times, make it better by improving it.

In constructive design, we do not delete content. Just like the law of thermos-dynamics, our content never disappears, it just changes.

Destructive design is the yang to the yin. Planned obsolescence in the face of an incoming sequel. The way it works is this. You make a game, like Inifinite Warfare. You add DLC and a season pass that has a bunch of new multiplayer maps, maybe some single player if you like that kind of thing, and then… Bam! A brand new sequel comes out even further splitting the playerbase. All that hard work and effort is all for nothing now because you have effectively killed it as a publisher. The title may still have a playerbase that has yet to upgrade to the newest platform, but with consecutive title releases, that playerbase shrinks more and more until it is abandoned completely. Destructive design favors short term profit over bucket loads of profit in the long term.

Let’s look at how World of Warcraft does constructive design.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT

            To say that World of Warcraft was a highly anticipated game is underselling its impact. When Blizzard teased its newest title they had a reputation for quality that is the envy of most studios. They were renowned for their quality titles and their ability to make games that were both fun to play, and highly addictive. Starcraft was an e-sport before we really had a name for it and Diablo 2 is still played to this day even though Battlenet no longer supports it.

            When a company is this well known for quality and they jump onto a relatively new gaming genre, good things are bound to happen. At this point, their major competition was Dark Ages of Camelot, Ultima Online, and Everquest which was a personal favorite of mine. Their direct competition, however, was from Everquest 2 which was releasing a mere 15 days before the highly anticipated MMO, no doubt in an attempt to undercut WoW’s sales.

            Everquest 2 did not live up to expectations and in a lot of ways, seemed a step back from the original as it was rushed out before all functionality was complete, while World of Warcraft sailed out of the gate with a whopping two-hundred and fifty thousands sales in 24 hours with one-hundred thousand concurrent users.

Vanilla World of Warcraft came out in 2004 and remained untouched for a while until complaints about the end game started trickling in. Within the few months after the initial release, Blizzard released several patches one of which added a PvP arena for a type of combat with capture points, a quest system and so on. Patch 1.2 was released in December and included, among other balance changes, a new dungeon called Maraudon which was a 40 – 49 level dungeon. They also fixed the awful torrent patching system they used.

            They added many high level dungeons and raid bosses in 1.3 as well as meeting stones which were the first iteration of their dungeon finder system making it easier to find groups.

            Most of the changes were quality of life and content editions to keep the player base happy. They were able to do this because of subscription fees that allowed the development team and QA more breathing room to make bug fixes, balance changes, and so on because this was a game as a service. You can face the fact or don’t, but the reason why most stand alone titles get terrible patch support lies squarely on the fact that there is no budget laid out for things like minor bug fixes. I’m not saying the money isn’t there, but a corporation that reports to a board and has to maximize profits are not terribly concerned about the title they released months ago. They are already moving on to the next release.

World of Warcraft was going strong at this point and while all these patches were going live, Blizzard was creating their first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

EXPANSIONS

            First, let’s talk about what an expansion is and how it differs from DLC. DLC is a bit nebulous. It can mean anything from a hat for your horse to an entire 30-hour campaign if you are CD Projekt Red. For the most part, DLC is a small add-on that adds a bit of content to get those concurrent player numbers up.

            An expansion is like an entire new game that tacks onto the end of the game you already bought and keeps you playing for as long, if not longer than the base campaign. It is the very definition of constructive design.

            When Blizzard released their first DLC, The Burning Crusade, they were already crushing the competition and every MMO announced or being released was starting to look eerily similar to WoW. When the expansion released, WoW was boasting a subscriber count of 7 million and every expansion since that point increased their numbers. Wrath of the Lich King brought them up to 11.5 million subs and Cataclysm brought them to 12 million but this was the start of the decline and ever since, their numbers fell back to pre-Burning Crusade levels.

            The reason, as far as my research shows, is that Blizzard started on a path to destructive design. They re-designed old areas and replaced starting zones for old races with new starting zones. Some zones switched factions. This change was much too much for players and it wasn’t uncommon to hear complaints from players stating that they wished there was a way to go back to the old design with updated direct x 11 capabilities. The reason for this backlash, I believe is from the fact that old content, which players enjoyed, was no longer available or changed beyond recognition. It’s like what happens when a sequel comes out and you find yourself wishing you could play the old maps with updated graphics.

            Cataclysm lost Blizzard nearly 3 million subscribers, a million of which they got back with the Mists of Panderia expansion which quickly lost them even more subscribers. Since then, the trend line is pretty steady, they haven’t added significant amounts of subs, but they haven’t lost them either.

            And the expansions keep coming because the game is still very much profitable.

            This is an example of the destructive power of the destructive model and the power of a constructive model of design. You start with a solid base game, and you just keep adding to it being careful not to kill the things players like and fix the things they hate. At this point, World of Warcraft has become absolutely bloated with features which can be daunting for new players, but the benefit is, there is nearly something for everyone.

            Then in 2018, Blizzard did something that the playerbase has been asking for. A thing that Blizzard had shut down private servers to prevent. A thing that seems a no-brainer. They announced World of Warcraft Classic. A return to Vanilla content. A return to the design that brought the original hordes of players in. It was met with applause from the community:

            Players in fact, contrary to popular opinion, knew what they wanted. What they wanted was to play the game they had bought originally. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a plan to add the expansions, and honestly, maybe they shouldn’t. As one player put it:

The Constructive Design Model and Agile Development

            I was told recently by a colleague of mine from China that the Asian market is much different than the American market because the Asian market values collectability. Pokemon, antiques, card games, if the game has some sort of collectible component to it, the Asian market will eat it up. At least that is how he put it.

            The benefit of a constructive model is that you are not constantly reinventing the game from the ground up. You have the ability to act quickly to customer demands because there is no three year development cycle to implement a pokemon like catch it all minigame in WoW. The resources and time dedicated to a project like this is minimal in the scale of a triple a title and if you were, let’s say, to want to break into the Asian market, it would behoove you to appeal to them specifically even if the rest of your market isn’t interested. Those who don’t want it in their game can ignore it, for the most part.

            The other benefit is that when a competitor comes into the market, they have a long road to travel to compete with you. Imagine the absolutely monolithic heights a game like Elder Scrolls Online must climb in order to compete with the sheer scale and amount of content that WoW has on offer even with a rabid fanbase such as Bethesda’s. An MMO, to compete in this arena must do things either significantly different, or similar in methodology with a glut of content out the gate and a plan to release more in order to have a chance at competing. In order to compete now, ESO will need to release content almost as quickly as WoW is, and to be frank, they don’t seem up to the task. When they do release content, it is nowhere near as expansive. They have, however, been picking up in popularity since launch with huge patches delivered that included a thieving mechanic, Morrowind expansion (thanks Bethesda), and their latest expansion Summerset Isle which proves that the more content you release, the more players you bring to your platform.

            By some very unscientific calculations and from looking at players who have completed every achievement in the game, it would take the average player over 600 days to complete all of the content on offer in a game as expansive as WoW and for a game with a subscription model, this is exactly what you want. You want your fan base to keep playing because there is no possible way they could experience all the content on offer in just a month or so, where other MMO’s tend to lose subscribers over the span of a few months due to a lack of content.

            Often you see players leave WoW to try another MMO they are excited about, just to end up resubbing to WoW once the other game runs out of content.

            This is the power of the constructive model of design. You do not take away from the player, or make content obsolete. You add to it while keeping the integrity of the other half of your game intact.

GIVING AWAY EXPANSIONS ONCE A NEW ONE COMES OUT

            Our antithesis argument, Call of Duty and Destiny have a problem with doing expansions right. See, in these games, the model is quite a bit different and causes problems with splitting up the community, which can be a problem because what content these games provide is small enough to become boring before the next expansion even releases, which can explain their dropping player numbers, but World of Warcraft doesn’t have this problem because even thought there is some splitting of the community, not only is there a glut of content to experience otherwise, but the expansions get rolled up into the free to play model once a new expansion comes out.

            This is a very player facing model because, if you think about it, the more expansions you release that the player base doesn’t have access to, the more you split the audience. So, think about it this way.

            World of Warcraft has 6 expansions, currently. Imagine you just bought WoW because it isn’t free in this example. You play through the content and now you want to play with your gamerboy and gamergirl friends in some dungeons and raids, but they’ve already done the vanilla content ten times or more over and they are bored by it. You decide to get up to date on the expansions by buying one of them, but then your friends want to play a dungeon or a raid in another expansion that you don’t have, or they want to grind high level gear.

            In order to catch up to them, you would need to spend 360 dollars plus the subscription fee just to play with your friends. I believe this is the reason WoW picked up the free to play model and went with an early access form of expansion releases. Basically, when you buy the expansion, you are paying Blizzard to play that content early before it is rolled up into the base game for free. It is brilliant from a business perspective as not many people are willing to wait for that part of the game to become free but for those that are, their patience is rewarded.

            It also cuts down on the amount of player base splitting for the reasons stated above. When the player base is split, the player base who goes without the expansions normally quit, hence player rate drops.

CALL OF DUTY AND DESTINY

            Let’s start with what could possibly be the best example of destructive design, Destiny, which has a problem that could have been easily addressed if greed had not blinded both Activision and Bungie to the potential profit that could be had from continuing development of their base games.

            When Destiny was being teased at the various expos, it was so unbelievably hyped by fans of Halo that it seemed like the second coming of Christ were about to emerge from his tomb and proclaim from the mountaintop that he with a capital H has risen. With hype this large, the only logical thing that Destiny could have done was release with a ton of content that would live up to the expectations of players. Expansive open world maps, tense encounters, a great story, incredible loot, all that would have been amazing.

            What we got instead was… Well you all know how this went. We didn’t get what was promised and many in the playerbase felt cheated even if they were pumping an obscene amount of hours into the game.

            Bungie began releasing content to enrage the playerbase further with lackluster expansions and DLC. When the Taken King was released, we finally got a glimpse at what could have been with Destiny. The problem is, what was sold to us and promised to us was a game that will be expanded on over the span of ten years. Thie quickly turned out to be, not only a lie, but the first in what will likely become several sequels.

            Bungie made their destructive design decision here when they decided that Destiny 2 would not be an expansion, but instead, would be a sequel.

            This would have been fine if what Destiny 2 released with was even better and more expansive than what OG Destiny had on offer, but it was clearly smaller in scale, and far less ambitious and even did away with features gamers had grown to love in the base game.

            This was a destructive design decision because your choice to play one or the other decides what content you get to experience instead of having all of that content rolled into one game. The strength of World of Warcraft is that the game is always expanding and giving the players something new to come back to when they leave.

            For Destiny, there is no such incentive because not only has Bungie followed a destructive model of design, but they have also proven that when they do release DLC and expansions, it is usually rather lack luster, not to mention short, recycles old content and so on.

            And we have seen what happened to World of Warcraft’s numbers when they started changing and deleting old content. The player base revolted.

            Now before you type into the comments, you just said you want them to recycle old content and now you are saying that is a bad thing.

            Listen, there’s a difference between expanding a game with brand new content and saying you are adding new content when what you are really doing is using old content and calling it new. If you can’t tell the difference, then I don’t know what to say to you.

            Imagine if Destiny 2 was just an expansion to the base game. Imagine having all the old multiplayer PVE and PVP content alongside the new content. Maps you know, and maps you don’t know, all in the same playlist, and every two years you get even more content. More things to keep you playing.

            In ten year’s time, the game would be approaching what WoW achieved but in the multiplayer FPS genre.

            Now let’s talk about Call of Duty. Of all the games that I have talked about here, Call of Duty is the franchise most poised to do a constructive design. Call of Duty has a whopping 15 main titles in the series. That means 14 single player campaigns (sorry black ops 4), 15 sets of multiplayer maps and several maps and entries into the zombies series.

            What I propose for this is a constructive model of design that rolls all of those games into four different game modes. Past, Modern, Future and zombies modes.

            The past mode would roll all of the world war two era games into one playlist.

            The modern mode would likely be the largest playlist with some of Black Ops entries being rolled into it. We’re talking modern warfare, ghosts, etc.

            The future mode would have the movement and weapons of the future games and would have those playlists to pull from.

            The way this would work is that even though some of these games might have outdated graphics, the gameplay would be roughly the same throughout as the game play could be dictated on what the current version of the engine is and since artists usually have downtime between titles, they can work on updating the graphics for older maps as free DLC (but knowing Activision that will likely be called cosmetic DLC and sold as such). You keep the gameplay the same for each mode to ensure that the player does not become disoriented when the gameplay changes from the latest iteration of World War 2 gameplay to Call of Duty 2 era gameplay and movement and violently switches to wall running and slide dashing. Each mode has it’s own specific gameplay model that way map designs don’t need to change.

Essentially, all you are doing is importing maps and assets like weapons into the newest version of the engine. Player models would all be updated versions meaning you wouldn’t need to worry about the animation engine and needing to change skeletons and bone weights or tweaking old player models.

            Imagine queuing up for World War 2 games and having over 80 maps to choose from on rotation. Imagine how easy it would be to expand this game. You would still charge for future expansions, but all past titles are rolled up for free as a part of your subscription fee.

            The downside to this is that the sheer size of each modes install would be prohibitive, but with this model, you have the budget and leeway to change maps, texture sizes, and since textures, models, and light maps are the majority of a games size, if you redesign texture placement, have a base player model set across modes, you can reuse a lot of textures strategically to ensure a smaller install size.

THE EFFECTS OF DESTRUCTIVE DESIGN

            The effect of destructive design is much like the effect of DLC splitting a player base but multitudes worse in that the only people who are likely still playing your older titles are those who hated the new entry, have no interest in the new title, or those who cannot yet afford to purchase it. A subscription fee can be seen as pernicious by some and a sustainable development environment for others.

It can be seen as pernicious because I would think that most people do not even acknowledge a fee in their bank statements unless they look at them often. A subscription fee sits in the background, consuming your money while the content you pay for is sitting there untouched.

            But it also provides you with the resources to provide a real service to the consumer with constant patches, support and content. It is a constant sort of revenue that you can predict for a period of time.

            Each title released is a sort of calculated risk. When a studio releases a stand-alone title, much research is done to determine how the product will be received, what it’s likely meta-score will be, and if all shows the title will do good, the project continues, as is, to a release state. If the score is bad, then that title might be pushed back in order to provide more time to polish the product. This is the critical phase of a project. Every month delay is making the risk and exposure of your product much more visible to the executives.

            It is critical at this stage to get gameplay and presentation right so there are no more delays and hits to your stock price.

            With each title being riskier and riskier financially as project bloat inflates the budget for your sequel, you would think a model like this would be useful. When your expansion flops and no one wants to play it, there’s still incentive to pay and play the content they previously enjoyed before the expansion came out with possibly better graphics and updated game play.

            The other problem with destructive design is that it encourages developers to drastically change the things that players liked and be stuck with that decision for the development cycle of an entire new game. This tendency comes from player expectation with sequels. Bigger, better and more. Developers, to justify their sequel, seem bent on fixing things that didn’t need fixing which is a problem that the constructive model doesn’t have because it doesn’t need to justify its asking price. You are buying an expansion to get more content, not to have a different experience.

With constructive design, you have the ability to patch often and improve the experience. The budget for a non-subscription based, destructive model game title is much lower for patches and as a result those games do not receive the support they sometimes deserve. When the company lacks a good response to issues that plague the game, in the community’s eyes, their faith is shook. They start to grow suspicious of that companies next title, and most of the time they move on to something else. This is why having a support budget, in the form of a subscription fee, is good for the customer. It’s just not that great for their wallets.

So if you’ve ever wondered why games don’t do this, there’s fear, mostly, that a subscription model would not be well received. I personally don’t mind paying for service games, but my main fear in this design is that eventually, games die, and triple a studios are known for killing games. In many cases, the community surrounding a game have managed to keep titles they like alive through private servers, but these cases are few and far between.

            But there are two schools of thought on this. Those who will never pay a subscription fee to a game, and those that would rather pay a fee than to pay for the whole game.

            What side of this argument do you fall into, and why? Let’s discuss in the comments below and on Discord which you will find a link to in the description below. If you like this channel and haven’t rage quit yet, subscribe.

            This has been a rant from strat-edgy, and now that you’ve heard it, go play some games.

Prison

It's like prison. No other way to describe it. No matter what my plan of escape is, there will always be three walls and a barred gate keeping me here.

I went out last night with a friend to a bar where the women hung out with men twice their age, and tried not to betray their disgust when the withered old hands snaked around their thin waists. Fathers living out some sick fantasy about their daughters, and the whole time my friend kept egging me on.

“Go on man. You're like, better than any guy in here.”

It was the kind of rah rah, go team go bullshit you'd expect from the well meaning friend. The equivalent of a two man pep rally. He didn't understand where my head was. The whole time I kept thinking about how I couldn't possibly compete with the kind of green these guys laid out on a daily basis to their ex-wives just in alimony, let alone on their arm candy. No one in their right mind would even want to. Those women weren't there to meet mister right, and those guys were only there for the girl of the night.

So there I was, standing in a crowd, my hands at my sides, standing still. I was careful not to move in the off chance I might bump into someone as we watched a cover band do their best impression of another band who did it better, and all I could think about was how much I hated this scene. How much I hated it years ago, and how much I still hate it now that I am single. The heads of men bobbing up over the crowd like a spinning buoy, surveying the sea of bleach blond and tight night dresses.

Last week is a mystery. I drank like I was trying to die, and maybe I was. Maybe that was the point. I drank long islands by myself until the night was a slide show of events I don't remember the order of, and at the end I threw it all up.

I woke up in my bed, and I didn't remember how I got there. I went outside to check my car and there were no dents, in fact I parked it perfectly. It was like a magic trick. On the driver's side window was a little spot of grease, like maybe at some point I passed out in my car, and fell asleep on the window. 

I searched the house, the parking lot, and my van for my missing glasses and they were no where to be found.

My phone had a crack in the glass covering the camera and there was a video on there that I had recorded the night before. The only evidence that a night had even occurred.

I hit play.

A bleary eyed me looked into the camera as I walked through the streets of my neighborhood.

“You know what I hate? I hate that I have to do this.” I said into the camera. “I hate that I have to be here another year and that I spent so much of my life waiting. Most of all...”

The video flipped and streaks of street lamp light blurred across the screen and everything went black with a cracking sound. The me from the night before cursed his stupid clumsy fingers, and the video ended.

She messaged me today. She asked me how I was feeling? Was everything okay? I answered back with one word: lonely. She told me that it would get better, that I should just give it time. She said that her life was crazy, and that was the end of the conversation, if you could even call it that.

I picture her going out all night to bars with her Jersey friends, living it up. Newly single, ready to mingle, the kind of carefree living afforded only from living at home with your parents. She was able to move on, the center of attention of all her would be suitors, all men wanting to stick their fingers inside her, and here I am staring at a blank page trying to figure out how best to channel my rage into something productive. Lying to myself that if I just stay busy it'll be alright.

I must go out to meet people, that's what my mother tells me. I must work out, get in shape, I must do this, I must do that, but at the end of the day, these four walls are my prison, and even when I leave, in my mind I am still here.

I KNOW YOU WON'T READ THIS

I KNOW YOU WON'T READ THIS

I came home tonight and she was sitting on the ground next to her suitcase packing. It didn't really phase me because I had been expecting it even though nothing tonight had been going according to plan. In fact it had all been going to shit.

I took off my shirt and went to hang it up and when I walked into the closet I saw the skeleton of hangers and empty racks in the incandescent light. The sadness rose in me so quickly like a pain shooting from a stubbed toe that I had to turn around. I sort of gasped and walked out the bedroom door. She followed asking me what was wrong, and I didn't want to cry in front of her again. It was humiliating enough the first time, to cry, looking for the other person to look back at you with love in their eyes, but instead all you get is that sort of cold resignation.

I was forced to deal with that fact that all of this was over a while ago, but every time a little more of her disappears from my life, I feel like I am mourning the death of a relative. Because that is what she is, at the end of the day, a part of my family.

That's the hardest part of all this. Knowing that I am not losing a girlfriend, I'm losing a family member.

I keep going back through memories in my head trying to figure out where everything went wrong and all I keep thinking about are those moments. You know them. Those moments of pure joy where I got you laughing so hard that you couldn't breathe and your hand got going like you were swatting away flies.

I remember we were high, laying in bed watching Fraggle Rock, and I pointed out the one Fraggle in the background, during the musical number, was wearing an evening dress. You said it looked like the kind of dresses that wardrobe on set used to make you wear when you were doing extra work.

I did my little directors voice and said: “Hey, it's a little inappropriate for the scene don't you think?”

And you did the wardrobe voice: “Ahh, she's in the background, no one will see her.”

I called her a Fraggle hooker and you did that soundless laugh while you tried to catch your breath and we kissed and made love without reservations.

It was a moment.

Now, just six years later, it's over and I don't know how to cope with it and you seem fine. It's like a fucking betrayal. It's like some bad science fiction movie where my whole life has just been a simulation and none of this was real.

But, I guess it's better this way. You've been phoning it in and I have been driving us both crazy trying to figure out why you hate me, and I'm one of those kinds of people that will hang around even if shit is awful. I'm never one to give up.

Still though, the memory of you is like a tick. Every time I pry you out of my brain and just try to let go, or tell myself everything will be all right, it's better this way, we are better off as friends, a little part of you is still in there, in my skin, and you grow back and suddenly I'm crying again, I'm embarrassed, I feel emasculated, and worse of all, alone.

I wanted to write this and feel some sort of vindication, feel some sort of release, but even typing these words I am finding my vision blurred by the tears welling up in my eyes.

There's no quick way to do this. No quick fix for what I am feeling. I never expected it to feel this way. To feel this broken up over someone ever again. Not after the first time I had my heart broken. See I thought I sealed all those passages up, but I didn't. 

Maybe I should have.

You need time to be by yourself. I guess we all need time.

I always wondered why people did it. How could someone end their life? Now I know how. They just couldn't deal with the pain anymore.

I don't even know who I am writing this for… Maybe it's cathartic, a word I've never fully understood but have nodded my head whenever I've heard it.

I mean, I know you'll never read this, you've never read anything of mine voluntarily, but I guess in some way, I'm holding onto the hope that you will because I've never been able to say these things to you before.

I probably never will.

Announcement - A challenge to you, and myself

Announcement - A challenge to you, and myself

I will be proposing a challenge to myself, and to the people who read my blog. Whether you be a writer or not, let's do something together, shall we? For the rest of the year, I will be writing thirty short stories, which is approximately one short story every 8.5 days.

The challenge starts today and will end on New Years Eve of this year. Prizes will include:

• self-esteem. 
• An impressive library of short stories to bother some editor at a magazine with. 
• Most of all will come the discipline of doing a thing you love every day for a year!

The rules are simple:

• Stories must be at least 500 words, and free of as many grammatical errors as possible.
• Story must be a story and not just random thoughts. Ask a question, then answer the question by the end of the story. You know, plot.
• Stories must be posted at the end of the week, Sunday before midnight, or you're tardy for the party. (doesn't mean anything, just means you should be ashamed of yourself)
• Once your story is up, post it at the #ShortStoryAWeek on twitter so we can all read it!

If you are one of those rebel types, and just not into following rules, join the club. I'm not a fan either. Post anyway. Everyone is welcome in this big bus of love (which is really just a utility van without windows).

So come on people. Join me. Let's do this thing and prove to the world that success is just another word for will power! And beer. Lots of beer. Or coffee. You know. Whatever drug you need.

Join us at
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23shortstoryaweek&src=typd

Middle Aged - Drama Monologue

M I D D L E   A G E D

I've come to a place in my life where I am middle aged. When I turned thirty, and people did that thing where they like to make fun of you as if you were an old man, it rolled off my back. I was in the best shape of my life, living my dream in California. I did stunt work, I did photography professionally, and I boxed with guys much younger than myself, and came out on top nearly every time.

I recently blew out my knee boxing. That's when the realization hit me, as I laid on my side in that ring, grasping at my knee, trying to extend it. At thirty-six years old, that kind of injury ends any hope of continuing that hobby. The first in what will probably be a series of things I will have to give up on as time beats away at me like sea water worn wood. Eventually I will be nothing but deep ruts, knotted coils of flesh, brittle bones, and forgotten dreams. A pile of misery draped over a lazy boy in a room without lights, unable to sleep because it feels like something is missing.

At some point I will give up on whatever dreams I may have had for being a published writer of renown, and I will give my life up to servitude. Begging for the scraps off the president of the companies table.

I've gained weight. Heavier now than I have ever been. It's probably why my knee went out. I think about my weight daily. I think about, how even now as I write this, about all the things I need to do, but haven't done, and I forget about them the next day. If I am to die a no one, it will be because I felt like no one, and my weight will be The Sword of Damocles hovering over my head, never knowing when it will break it's tiny tether and kill me.

I had always wanted to write this. I tried many times to include so much of my life in the fiction that I've written, but it never felt right. It felt like a cop out to write about my life, and disguise it as imaginative. Like I could have plausible deniability for everything that had happened to me, every horrible decision I made, every person I hurt, every dumb thing that I did, while getting the same feeling of release when a massive weight is lifted from one's shoulders.

It isn't right. You have to take credit where credit is due.