#oneaday Day 169: Analysis paralysis strikes again

I’m having a bit of a “moment” this evening. I want to play something, but my brain is bouncing every which way while I try and actually settle on something to spend some time with. Part of the issue is that I’ve started several things, and when this happens I find myself feeling “obliged” to try and finish those off, but part of me also wants to experience something brand new.

To clarify: all the things I’ve started I absolutely want to finish. But I think I may have inadvertently overwhelmed myself with everything I have on the go already. So indulge me a moment, if you please, while I attempt to make some sense of what my brain is thinking.

Games I have started but not finished (and which I want to finish): Mon-Yu, The Eden of Grisaia, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Yakuza 5, Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings, Little Busters!, Rance Quest Magnum

Games I am considering replaying for New Game+/DLC etc: Final Fantasy XVI, Final Fantasy XV, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, Blue Reflection: Second Light

Games I quite fancy starting: Loop8: Summer of Gods (yes, I know it’s supposedly pump but I want to try it anyway), Rhapsody II, Kowloon High School Chronicle, Collar x Malice, Nights of Azure 2: Bride of the New Moon

Games I feel like I “should” start at some point but which seem to get knocked down the priority pile regularly: Final Fantasy IV/V/VI Pixel Remaster

You can hopefully see the issue I have presented myself with: a veritable horde of long RPGs and visual novels, all of which I want to play and finish. And I’ve rather stupidly gone and actually started a bunch of them and left them half-finished, which is where my analysis paralysis is primarily stemming from.

So let’s take those “games in progress” and look a little closer.

Mon-Yu: Dungeon crawler that I started on stream, but have subsequently been playing off-stream, because I’m not sure it’s the best game to “build an audience” with. Has the advantage of being extremely light on the narrative, so it’s a game that, in theory, can be dipped in and out of as mood dictates. Its main disadvantage is that it’s quite tough, so rewards protracted sessions. It’s not super-long, though: I believe there are seven main dungeons and I’m on the fourth. So a bit of determination can probably bash this one out before too long.

The Eden of Grisaia: Visual novel that I’m really enjoying and have been wanting to see the conclusion to for nearly ten years. This is easy enough to fit in whenever, since it requires no decision-making, just concentrating on the unfolding narrative. I am presently about 50% through its main storyline, though there are some other stories that unlock after that is completed. This is something that, perhaps, I can play over lunch instead of watching videos, since I can just stick it on auto and watch it unfold.

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana: I love Ys, but I started this at the behest of one of my wife’s friends, who was drunk at the time and wanted to see it. This means I’m not particularly invested in my current playthrough, so it’s pretty much at the bottom of my priority list, and I might even just start it over when I come to play it “properly”.

Yakuza 5: I also love Yakuza and am keen to get up to date with the series, but doing so feels a tad overwhelming right now. I am fairly early in this and haven’t gone through much of the plot, but I have been enjoying the side activities, as is the law with Yakuza games.

Trails in the Sky Second Chapter: I had bold plans to play through “all of Trails“, which was a silly thing to promise myself. I enjoyed revisiting the first Trails in the Sky, but Second Chapter’s similarity to it made me feel a little burnt out going straight into it. I’m not far into this at all, but I’m far enough that I’m not sure I’d want to start over.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle: I was doing great on the Atelier MegaFeature over on MoeGamer, but I kind of ground to a halt with this game, not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but at least partly because I started working on Rice Digital and thus didn’t have time to commit to personal projects like this. It has been long enough that I think I can probably start this over when I want to come back to it.

Little Busters!: I took this with me on an overnight trip to work to play out of curiosity, and enjoyed the few chapters I played through, but again, haven’t got far. Again, I think I would probably start this over when the time comes.

Rance Quest Magnum: Another game with Yakuza syndrome: I want to catch up on the series, but doing so is a daunting prospect. This game at least has the benefit that its early hours are relatively light on plot, and its quests are bite-sized, making it a game that you don’t necessarily have to devote hours to in order to get the best out of it.

I’ll also say it’s worth noting that recently I finished Silent Hope, which was one of those games that had been looming over my head for ages, and it felt good to finally knock that one on the head. I also played through 1000xRESIST the other day, and enjoyed that a lot.

Thinking about things sensibly, then, the thing that would make the most sense would be to play The Eden of Grisaia when my brain is alert enough to read, Mon-Yu when I fancy bopping things until numbers come out. I drop Ys VIII, Atelier Lydie & Suelle and Little Busters! without guilt for now, and come back to them fresh and from the beginning when I’m not so overwhelmed. I review how I’m feeling after finishing either Mon-Yu or The Eden of Grisaia (or both) and consider whether to pick up where I left off in either Yakuza 5 or Trails in the Sky Second Chapter at that point — in other words, defer that decision until one or two things are checked off.

That sounds good, right? Okay, The Eden of Grisaia it is for now, then.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

As I reach 100 days of daily blogging for the second time around, this symbolically significant but practically unimportant milestone seems like a good place to reflect on the fine art of Doing the Thing, inspired by this video that I’ve seen floating across my YouTube feed a few times, and which I finally decided to have a look at.

For those disinclined to click on random video links — don’t worry, I am too under most circumstances — the summary of the video is simple. A lot of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves with more limited amounts of free time and, paradoxically, we seem to spend an awful lot of that “free” time agonising over what we “should” be doing. The focus of the video is on picking a video game to play, but really the principle applies to anything where you have a choice to make.

Analysis paralysis is the enemy. It’s a peculiar form of anxiety where you get so overwhelmed by the possibilities that surround you that you find it impossible to decide to engage with just one of them on the grounds that it might be the “wrong” one.

The video maker uses the video game StarCraft II as an analogy. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, which means you control a bunch of little dudes and tanks and make them blow other little dudes and tanks up. Because it’s real-time, it’s rare you get the opportunity to stop and think, so the best StarCraft II players are those who make decisions quickly and decisively — to the tune of several hundred minor decisions per minute if we’re talking about professional-grade players.

The secret is not to worry if the choice you make is the “wrong” one. If you make a choice and subsequently discover there was a more “optimal” thing you could have done, who cares? You made the choice, now all you need to do is deal with the consequences of it. And for the vast majority of decisions that we make in our day to day lives — particularly when it comes to our leisure time — neither those decisions nor the consequences of them are particularly important.

Let’s take video games as the example again. Let’s say you have about an hour and a half of free time before you need to go and do something important — and that thing is important, but up until it is time to do the important thing, your time is completely yours. You have, at least, made the decision that you would like to play a video game. This is one of those decisions where both your options and the consequences are unimportant. If you chose to play a video game, great, you get to play a video game. If you chose to do something else, great, you get to do that instead.

The only really “wrong” choice in this scenario is not making the choice in the first place, as sitting by yourself getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as what form of entertainment you want to spent 90 minutes of your day engaging with is the height of absurdity if you stop to think about it. This is supposed to be your time to enjoy yourself, not to put pressure on yourself about something that is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Most people can successfully make that first decision: “I would like to play a video game”. The next step is, in many folks’ minds, the harder one: “I would like to play this specific video game”. And yet, really, that decision is just as inconsequential as the other one. No-one but you really cares what you’re going to spend the next 90 minutes doing, so, again, the only “wrong” choice is not making a decision in the first place. Because then you’ve just wasted your 90 minutes, when you could have been doing something that relaxes or invigorates you.

If you’re someone who does creative stuff online, I’m willing to bet you’re probably prone to that second point of analysis paralysis, because there’s that constant lingering thought in the back of your mind that you “should” do something that you can write an article or make a video about. But the thing we all need to get well and truly fixed in our mind is that deciding to Do the Thing is not the important part of the process; actually Doing the Thing is the important bit. And if you never get as far as even Starting the Thing, then you’re probably going to be annoyed with yourself, regardless of whether or not the Thing you decided on is “productive” or not.

I’m trying to be better about this. I think back to how I enjoyed games before social media, blogging, the Internet and YouTube, and I want to recapture that feeling. I want to be able to be decisive enough to say “tonight I am going to play Yakuza 5” and not spend the next 90 minutes second-guessing myself.

Because taking time to engage with something you enjoy — and to take care of yourself — is never time misspent. Time agonising over things you’re supposed to be enjoying absolutely is wasted time, however.

So, y’know, cut it out. Stop it. Stop it. And go enjoy something. Anything. I don’t care what. Just go and do it now.

#oneaday Day 23: Why The Steam Sale Is Less Fun Than It Used To Be

You know the cliché. Steam sale rolls around, everyone jokes about locking their credit cards up. Except I haven’t felt like that about a Steam sale for a very long time. And I think this stems from a broader and well-documented problem that Steam has today: the fact it has too much choice.

Having too much choice is pretty much the very definition of a “first world problem”, but at times like this it really does highlight how it’s something of an issue. What’s doubly sad is that this problem has come about at least partly as a result of attempting to sort out a completely different problem.

Years ago, Steam was still the leading PC digital storefront, but its catalogue was much smaller. This is because it was primarily the domain of big publishers. I don’t know the ins and outs of what it took to get a game on Steam back in those days, but I know that it was out of the question for a lot of smaller developers. The few “indie” titles that did make it onto the platform tended to be celebrated, because they were often doing something very different from the highly commercial publishers. It’s from those early indie titles that we got the first steps in the direction of the “art game” movement that is thriving today.

The Steam sale during those days was an exciting time, because more often than not it was an opportunity to pick up something you’d been thinking about for a long time at a knock-down price. And because the catalogue was still at a manageable size, it was easy to discover (or rediscover) games that you might want to grab. A simple browse of the homepage would almost always result in you picking up a virtual armful of games, then checking them all out for considerably less than the price of a single undiscounted new release.

Today, though? The front page is full of an overwhelming amount of choice, and clicking through to the various curated sections doesn’t help, because those are also full of an overwhelming amount of choice.

This is the result of Steam’s increasing permissiveness of small-scale and independent developers. It’s theoretically a good thing that now pretty much anyone can get their game on Steam rather than having to sell their work independently — which means getting eyes on their own independent website — but it also means that Steam’s catalogue is no longer at a manageable size, and hasn’t been for quite some time.

I say “theoretically” a good thing, because the problem with this is self-evident: if you flood the market with that much stuff, it becomes difficult to find anything but the most high-profile titles. And that’s got to be almost as bad for indies as not being able to publish on Steam at all.

And, as much as I was in favour of Steam allowing adults-only titles on the platform after many years of rather opaque policies in that regard — policies that developers, publishers and localisers still fall foul of at times, for reasons that often remain unexplained — it’s been disappointing to see the absolute torrent of low-effort porn games flooding the market. And with the advent of AI-generated art that will actually draw dicks and fannies, that’s only going to get worse.

It’s one of those situations where, like the obsession with following the trends I talked about yesterday, it’s difficult if not impossible to put the plug back in now the flood has happened. Steam now can’t just suddenly turn around and say “actually, we fucked up and inadvertently filled our entire store with garbage, please get out”. I mean, they can, but I feel like there would be significant challenges (and likely lawsuits) thrown their way if they were to do so.

This is one of the reasons I spend a lot more time browsing and using GOG.com these days. GOG.com arguably still has a bit of a curation problem, particularly since it stopped being about just “Good Old Games” (which is where it got its name from) but it’s nowhere near as bad as Steam is. In a GOG sale, I can usually find a few things that I’m interested in playing without too much difficulty, whereas when a Steam sale rolls around, I tend not to bother even looking unless there’s something specific I had in mind.

Just another example of the gradual enshittification of everything, I guess, and a reminder that the human race should probably never, ever have nice things.

1639: Analysis Paralysis

One thing you’ll almost inevitably have to deal with at some point if you play tabletop games is the matter of “analysis paralysis” — those moments where everything grinds to a standstill as one player takes ages over their turn, trying to determine what the best possible course of action will be.

It’s a problem most evident in Eurogames, which tend to have the largest variety of different decisions to make each turn, as compared to more theme-focused titles where the emphasis is more on the ongoing narrative created by your play session. A typical Eurogame provides you with a wealth of options every single turn — and in many cases, those options get broader and broader as the game progresses. This means that as you get closer to the end of the game, turns slow to a crawl until, in some cases, you have to abandon the game altogether because it’s getting too late — not a desirable outcome for anyone involved.

For the group I regularly play with, this is a particular issue with Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola, a worker-placement game that I don’t like all that much, but which is enjoyed enthusiastically by two of our number and as such we break it out every so often according to our “different person picks each session” rota. For the uninitiated, Agricola is a game about building up a small medieval farm, and as the game progresses, more and more different action spaces become available to choose from, meaning the game gets increasingly complex as it progresses. This naturally leads to analysis paralysis, particularly as competition heats up for the more obviously useful spaces towards the end of the game.

So tonight we decided to try something different: timed turns, a la competitive chess. My friend Sam had acquired a funky little timer cube which had a different digital timer on each of its six faces, and we allocated ten minutes per player for the whole game, pausing the timer once a decision had been made so that players could move pieces and tokens around the board without being pressured by the clock.

It really, really worked! By the end of the game, the players most prone to analysis paralysis had nearly reached — but not exceeded — their ten-minute time limit, while the members of the group more inclined to take their turns quickly — usually by deciding what they were going to do during other players’ turns rather than ignoring what was going on around them or getting distracted by phones, tablets or pieces of cake — had a couple of minutes left on the clock by the end of the game.

We all agreed that it made the game feel markedly different. One of the most traditionally analysis paralysis-prone players noted that he felt like he wished there was a little more time, but conceded that this was probably the point of the whole exercise. We also agreed that it wasn’t necessarily desirable to play like this all the time, but that on occasions where it was necessary to get through games in a timely manner — playing on weeknights, say — it would be a good idea to implement in the future. More leisurely play sessions can still be had on those occasions where we have time for them — weekends away, holidays, that sort of thing.

I still didn’t win Agricola, but I think I enjoyed the experience a little more than usual, which is saying something. And if I hadn’t made a stupid mistake in the final turn, I would have probably done somewhat better than I ended up doing. Oh well! There’s always next time.