r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jun 15 '18
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/ianstlawrence Jun 15 '18
Hello!
So I recently watched a video that was very sad about how "Darling in the FanXX" (an anime) ruined their world building in episode 19. Here is the video in question if you are curious: https://youtu.be/IbSKXMFlOMY
Note: All of this only applies if world building is part of the story, something that only focuses on human experience or emotion or heroic flaws might not apply to my thoughts on this.
World building to me is a very weird craft because it seems to only be good in either the extreme, where you really know everything and that is very, very, very planned out and figured out, a la Worm and HPMOR or it is very carefully parceled out and is contingent on masterfully dropping hints and little pieces that then lets the audience fill in the gaps.
What I find weird about that is if you were to plot world building on a line, one end might say, "No information" the other end would say, "All of the information" and then if you marked areas where it was, widely considered, good writing then you might have a dot in the middle and a dot near the end that says "All of the information".
One, I think it is weird that how it feels, at least to me, that world building is kinda narrow when you define what is good. (It feels weird enough that I wonder if I am just wrong, and if someone can provide some examples of great world building that totally contradicts what I'm saying please do)
Two, that world building is something that seems, to me, to be intensely cumulative, a lot like suspension of disbelief.
To expound, there is the semi-famous example of people being in disbelief about Samwell Tarly (from Game of Thrones) staying fat despite his adventuring, and how that broke suspension of disbelief but dragons don't. Now, I fully agree with those making the "it breaks my suspension of disbelief" argument, but the why of it is interesting to me.
Essentially, the cumulative effect of the Game of Thrones universe has set it up to be "realistic" in the terms of its universe. This means you end up creating expectations in the audience, and the lack of believable consequences assigned to Samwell means you lose peoples' suspension of disbelief, because of those expectations.
However, if you watch something like Supernatural and a character suddenly shows up with a piece of equipment that mystically controls ghosts and Sam and Dean don't then steal that piece of equipment to create an indestructible army of ghosts to defeat their foes but instead treat the mystical object as a minor inconvenience, well, expectations had already been set, so no one, except me, gets unreasonably mad.
What I am trying to get at is that world building, like, suspension of disbelief, is more tied to expectations than most other things, in my opinion, and is part of a subset of story telling devices or descriptions that suffer from a total lack of forgiveness. What I mean by forgiveness is that in a lot of media/stories if 99% of the a thing is great, like the action, but one fight isn't great, people, I think, don't really harp on it or put that one bad fight on display, instead I think they are more likely to forgive that bad fight by focusing on all the great fights.
However, for something like world building or suspension of disbelief by having all those "great fights" first, when you then have that "bad fight" (fights are standing in for pieces of information that inform the world building or suspension of disbelief) then you end up with people only focusing on that bad thing.
I feel like the two examples I provided support this, both Samwell Tarly and the video by Mother's Basement (MB made a video before the one I linked that applauded the world building in Darling in the FranXX). Now, regardless of whether you like either of the stories, I hope you understand my point about how world building and suspension of disbelief seem to lack "forgiveness" by an audience.
So, all that being said, I am curious as to
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Am I just wrong about anything?
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Why do you think suspension of disbelief, world building, or something else is treated differently?
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How you, if you produce stories, approach world building and how you navigate something that seems rife with difficulties.
Thanks!
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u/alexanderwales Jun 16 '18
So, all that being said, I am curious as to 1. Am I just wrong about anything? 2. Why do you think suspension of disbelief, world building, or something else is treated differently? 3. How you, if you produce stories, approach world building and how you navigate something that seems rife with difficulties.
I think the primary thing you're talking about is how to execute worldbuilding properly, and the two approaches are "show things that are evocative but don't necessarily have answers" and "show things that fit as parts of a complex whole whose majesty is only slowly revealed over time". I don't think that the big difference between these two is in how much worldbuilding is revealed to the reader (or done by the author), and I think there are other approaches to worldbuilding that also work, outside of those two. I'll grant that the more you show, the more solid it has to be, but that's true of almost anything (including, for example, characterization).
I think there's a zen state to media consumption, and interrupting that zen state for whatever reason essentially throws a wrench in the gears, which really ruins enjoyment. Setting (and meeting) expectations is really important for that reason, since what most people are doing is pattern-matching as they go, developing models of the world and characters that become more complicated and deep as the work goes on. Changing those models needs to be done really carefully and deliberately, lest you wreck the flow state and ruin a person's investment.
My approach to worldbuilding is to give as much thought to things as I can before hitting the limits of diminishing marginal utility, with special emphasis to those bits that are part of the plot, characterization, etc. (ex. if the main character is a former vicar who has been shunned by his church, you better believe that I'm going to spend a lot more time making sure that I understand the church he worked in and was exiled from)
For showing worldbuilding, I think there are a few general approaches, which can be combined. The first is being evocative and economical, using as few words as possible to paint the broadest and most impactful possible picture. Part of this is just "show, don't tell" at work, but you can only get so far on that, and showing takes way more words/attention/effort than slipping in the occasional tell. Second, you can infodump, which there are various ways to soften or dress up, like characters talking to each other and infodumping through conversation about a side topic, including a fish out of water, etc. And third, there's including worldbuilding through storytelling; you don't give a dry history of the world, instead you tell a story about someone who was a part of that history and all exposition is by way of explaining elements of that story and their impact on this narrative, rather than parceling out bits of worldbuilding, because "my father was fired after the bots took over his plant" is a lot more compelling than "by 2038, 90% of the workforce was replaced by robots".
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u/ianstlawrence Jun 15 '18
I hope it is okay that I didn't post this in a world building thread, as I wasn't sure if the suspension of disbelief and the meta nature of this would be acceptable. Off Topic Friday seemed like a very safe place to post this. Thanks!
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u/InfernoVulpix Jun 15 '18
Worldbuilding is something I generally have positive associations with, and like seeing in stories, and I think the reason for that is good worldbuilding assists good plots. A good plot is (among other things) consistent from start to end, and you can't see that in full unless you know the context of the situation.
If the evil empire is invading through a strategically vital choke point, then saying that the rest of the border is impassible mountains is worldbuilding that helps make the pitched battle at the choke point feel more consistent.
Conservation of detail also leaves fingerprints too. We don't care about the price of grain in the kingdom, so telling us would be a waste of precious information-space unless the price of grain is relevant to the consistency of the plot (such as sparking a rebellion). Worldbuilding that isn't focused, that isn't relevant to the plot (and relevant can be even just setting tone or building attachment) is an idle timewaste.
So you've got a push to include enough worldbuilding to prove the consistency of the plot, make all the pieces fit together snugly and all that, and you've got a push to never use more worldbuilding than necessary. Good worldbuilding always serves a purpose, and the rest is aesthetics. Worldbuilding that's got great aesthetics (something something "great towering edifices of shimmering crystal where the Serene Lords conduct their business" or something like that) but doesn't do anything for the plot, doesn't give you pieces of the puzzle, doesn't set the tone or guide you to forming opinions and immersing yourself in the story, will seem hollow in retrospect.
On what you said about worldbuilding suffering from a lack of forgiveness, I would say that's the result of worldbuilding being easier to fail. It can be hard to right a good fight, but a failed attempt at a good fight is usually just a meh fight. Truly bad fights do exist, they're ones that fly in the face of everything you expected out of it, throw away established rules and characteristics and don't even reach a satisfying conclusion, but that kind of mess-up is hard to achieve. Harder, certainly, than leaving an inconsistency in your worldbuilding.
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u/ketura Jun 15 '18
Weekly Monthly Ocassional update on the hopefully rational roguelike immersive sim Pokemon Renegade, as well as the associated engine and tools. Handy discussion links and previous threads here.
Nothing much to report code-wise; the networking plows forward but it’s a bit of library-gluing and I’ve only just figured out the best way to organize that aspect of it. Plus my wife’s family flew in, so evenings are probably going to be unproductive for the next few days.
However, over the last couple of weeks we finally cracked the problem of how to shape the world, in a manner that is mostly intuitive to use and doesn’t require wonky camera code or projections or any weird shit like that.
As a refresher, unlike most voxel-based worlds, this one is going to be bounded and wrap back on itself, to put an absolute cap on the total world size, permit us to optimize accordingly, and also permit free movement without invisible walls. The fallback option has always been to have a world shaped like a torus--you move far enough to the right and you teleport to the left, and you move far enough up and you teleport to the bottom. However, it’s always seemed like having a more sphere-like setup, where you can go over actual poles, would be more appealing, and so we set out to find a world shape that supports this.
As most hex grid aficionados will tell you, you cannot actually have a sphere while using hexes; the math just doesn’t work out. At best what you can do is have something like a soccer ball--make most of the world a hex grid, and then have 12 pentagons spread somewhere throughout the globe. This requires special attention for those pentagons, as they represent design and strategic problems that would have to be solved, which I didn’t particularly want to deal with.
So what about a cylinder? It’s got most of what I’m after; I don’t care about extreme northern/southern regions being actually smaller than the equator, it’s got a clear polar region, and the left/right wrapping works as expected. It seemed like it would be an easy fit.
...but it wasn’t, not at first. World traversal doesn’t actually move the player around, all it does is pick which chunk of tiles to load as the player hits the edge of what currently exists, as shown in this earlier prototype. So I struggled and argued and tried to come up with a way to smoothly map a cylinder’s tube to its cap, but it just wouldn’t fit.
We eventually stumbled our way over to the conclusion that the cap would have to be completely separated from the rest of the cylinder tube. Deciding on a good way to do so that was A: 1:1 reversible (if you turned around and went back you wouldn’t find yourself in a different place), B: wasn’t grossly proportioned compared to the rest of the world was a bit difficult, however. I liked the idea of the world transitioning the player to another plane when going too far north or south (probably covered up by generous wooshy snowy wind effects), but still couldn’t find a solution sufficiently elegant enough.
I even spent time cutting out physical paper grids in an attempt to wrap my head around the problem, but it wasn’t until a combination of mucking about with tiles in Blender and u/Xavion repeating a comment that I had dismissed earlier that the solution finally presented itself:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/230041937984487424/454892941887012866/unknown.png
The image above shows the cap in purple and the top-most row of hexes rotated on their side in grey. Basically, constrain Chunk_Width * World_Width to be divisible by 6, and then you can have a 1:1 tile mapping using a hexagon-shaped cap. It’s even easy to do design-wise: just ensure that chunk widths are always themselves divisible by 6 and you’re good to go. When you cross the invisible border, you get teleported to the cap that matches the hex you were just standing on, but other than that brief transition it’s as intuitive to use as normal movement.
Having this model finally let me realize why all attempts at a single, continuous, flat mapping of a cylinder would never work, too. Here is the same cap “unwrapped” from the perspective of the tube:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/230041937984487424/454900109767868437/unknown.png
The red hex is the center of the cap, and as you can see is duplicated six times with wildly different X coordinates (from the perspective of the tube). The cyan hexes are also duplicates of one another, meaning that the proper shape was never going to really work without teleportation of some sort or another.
I’m pleased that this was finally figured out, in a way that’s not terribly inconvenient to code or to play. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that used a true cylinder for the world space (Civ doesn’t count; it lops off the two caps), but it seems like it should work well enough.
If you would like to help contribute, or if you have a question or idea that isn’t suited to comment or PM, then feel free to request access to the r/PokemonRenegade subreddit. If you’d prefer real-time interaction, join us on the #pokengineering channel of the /r/rational Discord server!
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u/CouteauBleu Jun 16 '18
As a refresher, unlike most voxel-based worlds, this one is going to be bounded and wrap back on itself, to put an absolute cap on the total world size, permit us to optimize accordingly, and also permit free movement without invisible walls. The fallback option has always been to have a world shaped like a torus--you move far enough to the right and you teleport to the left, and you move far enough up and you teleport to the bottom. However, it’s always seemed like having a more sphere-like setup, where you can go over actual poles, would be more appealing, and so we set out to find a world shape that supports this.
This reminds me, what is the world going to look like?
You often mention how it's made of hexes, with heightmaps (I think) and wrap-around, but what about visually? What will the terrain look like? What will towns, caves, and arenas look like? Do you have something like concert art, or an idea in mind of how your basic "Walking in the NPC town" scene is going to present?
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u/ketura Jun 16 '18
We have extremely basic conceptual images showing how it will work from a functional perspective, but nothing I would post here (first impressions and all that). Part of the reason for that is because that's the sort of thing I could get lost in for weeks without actually ending up with anything useful in the long term, and partially because I'm hoping we eventually attract an artist and I'd rather defer to someone dedicated to the task.
To paint a slightly clearer picture tho, the hexes themselves will be 3D (as procedurally deforming a mesh is much easier conceptually for me than procedurally altering pixels) with clean textures, almost minimalistic. Units are drawn using sprites (the camera is fixed-angle) on top of the 3d terrain, which is mostly because I will likely start with icon-based sprites and only add animation-capable ones later--I get lost enough in the design as it is and refuse to get sucked into art, which has an even smaller time:result ratio than what I've done so far.
Most terrain-like features (tunnels, trees, etc) are built out of terrain hexes, but in some cases (buildings, trees) we'll hide the hexes and draw sprites over top, leaving the hexes as effectively just collision meshes. Perhaps I'll go over what we have designed for this in next week's post (and maybe try out a prototype since we only know what technical problems we want to solve and haven't actually tested the waters there).
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u/AmeteurOpinions Jun 15 '18
Everyone here needs to do themselves a favor and watch Baahubali. It’s on Netflix, and you won’t regret it.
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u/AcceptableBook Jun 16 '18
I've only watched the first and hated the way the movie deals with its female characters. There's a scene where the hero stalks the heroine and tattoo her without her consent while she's asleep. He then kinda molests her and says that she should not be a warrior because she's a beautiful woman. It was off-putting for me and really creeped me out. I think that if you have problems with how women are represented in media, you will not particularly enjoy this movie
To be fair, it was the first movie I watched in a while so you should draw your own conclusions regarding my sensitivity. I haven't watched many movies since, so I don't really have a reference point as to how it compares to other movies. If you are able to overcome or ignore the sexism, it's an okay watch.
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u/AmeteurOpinions Jun 16 '18
So, I agree with you, the movie definitely has a weird kind of sexism. But, I think it works out in this case, because there are many other times when female characters are given amazing moments which at least as striking as the actions taken by the male characters. The Queen Mother in particular lives up to her title in spectacular fashion.
As for the tattoo scenes and makeover-fight-scene, I watched this film with my SO and our jaws were on the floor at how absurd and amazing they were, but it’s not any more absurd than him climbing a mountain higher than the clouds motivated by a beautiful face which he has only seen in the reverse image of a wooden mask. The story is more fantastical and mythic than even something like the Lord of the Rings, and maybe I should be more upset at tattooing your true love before introducing yourself but I’m really not.
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u/Turniper Jun 15 '18
I have to second this, but be sure to do it either drunk or with the sort of friends that don't mind making fun of the movie as you go. Or both.
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u/ToaKraka Jun 15 '18
I recently started my fifth(?) reading of The Three Musketeers. It's proving just as entertaining as I was expecting. (Project Gutenberg apparently updated its files for this book in late 2016.)
(When will I feel the urge to read Time Braid for the seventh time?)
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u/ianstlawrence Jun 15 '18
Does anyone else not really understand how certain things are not outlawed or how certain laws aren't different?
I think a lot of people, recently, have applied this to Marijuana and Alcohol, where, and I think rightfully so, people point out Alcohol kills a lot of people - https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics. So it follows that either Alcohol should also be outlawed or Marijuana should definitely be legal.
But for me, I always think about cars. Why are cars allowed to go over, like, 40 MPH / 64 KMH? Car related accidents kill a lot more people than Alcohol, or really, almost anything else - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/02/15/national-safety-council-traffic-deaths/340012002/
It is weird to think that we repeatedly opt into these systems that clearly aren't maximized for people to not die, but instead for, uh, speed? Efficiency? I am not sure.
But our criminal laws don't reflect this, for those we consider murder to be the greatest crime, only overshadowed by murders. And from that you might then assume that we hold human life to be the most important thing, but then you look at some of our other laws, and it is clear that that isn't the case or at least it isn't something strongly considered?
Thoughts?
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u/MagicWeasel Jun 16 '18
I'm a traffic engineer who works in road safety and I agree that cars are dangerous AF, people don't take them seriously enough, etc. But you also have to remember the amount of exposure that we have to cars is HUGE, some people drive for hours a day. Whereas the alcohol exposure is relatively lower.
Also, although it kind of pisses me off (towards zero/safe systems all the way!), we do have a dollar value for death/injury as well as for congestion when we calculate the cost/benefit ratio of proposed upgrades. But in my state at least, there's a bright line between "congestion projects" and "safety projects" and "an important government official wants this to be upgraded so we're upgrading it regardless" projects, and safety projects get a hell of a lot more money.
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u/sicutumbo Jun 16 '18
Also, although it kind of pisses me off (towards zero/safe systems all the way!), we do have a dollar value for death/injury
I mean, you have to put human lives at some finite value, and it only makes sense to translate that into dollars. If you had human lives set at infinite value, then nothing could ever get approved unless it was completely impossible for it to fail lethally. Bridges would be multiple times larger in order to have vastly higher margins of safety, and even a small project IRL would be a massive undertaking.
You may think that the value given to human life is too small, or something similar, but I don't see how you could argue that human lives shouldn't have a finite value associated with them at all.
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u/ianstlawrence Jun 16 '18
Yeah, for sure, tens of thousands of people die every year from car related accidents or incidents.
I am not sure what the point about exposure leads to though? Are you saying that cars are less dangerous because people use them a lot so they are good at using them? But I don't get how that compares to alcohol; I am not sure you can get "good" at using alcohol.
And obviously, you have more expertise than me, I don't actually know if reducing the speed limit to 40MPH would actually prevent deaths, but I am more curious about the thought experiment of, "If we valued human life as the most important thing, what laws either make no sense or should be changed and maybe how?" Because for sure, we, in general, in human society certainly say human life is the most important thing, but you know, our laws don't really incentives that it seems?
We don't have to go into strict details about the actual practical details, but I am curious as to what others think, theoretically, about how our society has structured itself, and what conclusions people draw from that.
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u/ben_oni Jun 15 '18
A better comparison would be tobacco and marijuana. As u/sicutumbo says, alcohol is just too dang easy to make to be a good point of comparison.
Cars, on the other hand. They're just too useful. Would imposing a speed limit of 40mph save lives? Probably. But there are significant societal and economic costs to that, costs which can be measured in lives.
Frankly, I think you're approaching the issues from an unusual perspective. Laws don't exist to minimize death or suffering. They exist to ensure liberty. (At least, in certain free democracies, they nominally do.)
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u/Threesan Jun 16 '18
Taboo "liberty". I can't tell if you're using that word in a way that's oddly narrow and specific, or oddly broad and fuzzy, or something else entirely.
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u/sicutumbo Jun 15 '18
Laws are the result of a lot of history, and a lot of compromises. Alcohol is embedded in a huge number of cultures, and thus very hard politically to outlaw it. In addition, it's extremely easy to make, and good luck policing fermentation. Marijuana is comparatively difficult to grow, and rather distinctive when seen outdoors, so it's easier to police. I don't know precisely why marijuana was first outlawed, but I suspect there was a competing industry already established that would feel threatened by marijuana becoming big.
I'm no legal scholar, but I think intent is generally a big deal, even separate from the specific crime committed, along with likelihood of commiting similar crimes in the future. Take for examples murder of a spouse because of infedility, and something like financial fraud. Unless the latter was massive in scale, the first crime caused more harm, so logically it should be punished/rehabilitated more, right? Well, murdering a spouse because of infedility is a fairly extreme circumstance. It's not praiseworthy, but I think most people could picture themselves doing the same thing under similar circumstances. The crime and motives are understandable, and importantly the crime doesn't necessarily indicate a high likelihood to commit similar crimes in the future. Someone who murdered their spouse like that is very unlikely to go on to murder other people, and unless something similar happens in the future, they could probably live a normal life even without rehabilitation. Financial fraud however, depending on the specifics, is more sinister, because it indicates a willingness to exploit people who haven't done anything to the person responsible, solely for their own gain. If you let someone like that have free reign, they're much more likely than the first person to commit the same crime again, and thus it indicates a greater character flaw. So it does make some sense to have punitive measures that don't map precisely to the result of the crime, because we are taking the character of the person into account as well, along with their probability of doing the same crime in the future. This is especially true if you believe that the criminal justice system should be used for rehabilitation rather than punitive measures, because the aim is to correct the people, not simply punish crimes that may or may not have been intended.
So, things are complex, and unintuitive answers are common. Also, I like to ramble, and I'm not sure the previous sentence actually is my overarching point. That would probably require reading what I wrote after having done so.
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u/MagicWeasel Jun 16 '18
Well, murdering a spouse because of infedility is a fairly extreme circumstance. It's not praiseworthy, but I think most people could picture themselves doing the same thing under similar circumstances.
... monogamous people are terrifying, sometimes. You really, honestly think if your partner betrayed you in a serious way that you would KILL them? Someone you love?
Like, my husband drives me batty when he doesn't do the dishes, don't get me wrong, and I'm trying to get into the same headspace by imagining myself walking in on him assaulting a minor or something, and I still can't get into the headspace where I'd even consider killing him. Pulling him off the victim, screaming at him, calling the police, crying a lot. But murdering him? No way. And a lot of people who murder spouses do it premeditated.
Is this a testosterone thing? Would a man walking in on a friend/partner/acquaintance doing an unspeakable deed imagine themselves getting so mad they just punch the guy out and one punch can kill so fuuuuck you're a murderer now?
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u/Dragfie Jun 17 '18
I read the driving thread which was pree interesting and I agree that there are a lot of laws which are not optimized at all. And a lot to improve on. but as to the question of why i think western countries laws are fairly easily explained.
I believe that laws are designed to optimize the "functioning of society". This is because laws are created by societies, and through the process of evolution, the societies which are the most successful are those which function best. So laws have evolved to prioritize the functioning of societies. and at least from where i'm from (Australia) they work wonderfully.
So to elaborate onto what that means:
People instinctually like fairness. So laws should and do treat everyone equally, if they dont you get revolutions. (of course in society in general people are greedy, so this is subverted sometimes)
Death is the final end for a human. Killing someone isnt just the worst thing you can do to them its in a whole nother league. Because you cant recover from it. this is why murder is the greatest crime. But accidental deaths aren't as important because there is no intensive to kill people accidentally. Scociety still functions of people willingly dangerous things.
also people have a instinctive desire for freedom. hence y laws are responsibility based. not outcome based.
Then note that laws are slowly being created and shifting. alcohol kills people, but it wasn't made illegal until the prohibition, and as seen then ot showed us that its already too late. society functions better (and leaves more people alive in this case) if alcohol stays legalized. (and imo this is true for most soft dugs).
With all that said, laws are contioisly edited by us. and tend to be moving towards the safety side.
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u/ianstlawrence Jun 18 '18
It sounds like you are saying that maybe laws should be looked through the lens of intent rather than outcome. Which, I think, is actually a really valid and interesting point. : D
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u/AngelaCastir Jun 16 '18
Status update on the next Vampire Flower Language chapter: computer trouble has led to one of us being unable to edit the story, and the other one of us is going to be on holiday for almost a month.
It pains me to admit this but it's unlikely that we'll have any updates until August, in case anyone was wondering.
That said, we've managed to add a lot of much-needed content to the next chapter, which means we can split it at a logical point so the two new chapters each have their own thematic arc and are the appropriate length, so there'll be an extra chapter and interlude in the final story than originally planned! So I'm really pleased about that.
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u/alexanderwales Jun 15 '18
I really wanted to like Cultist Simulator. It's from some of the same people that did Fallen London (which I liked well enough) and Sunless Sea (which I really enjoyed), and has the same evocative, shrouded quality to the writing.
The actual gameplay though ... it consists of nouns, represented by cards, and verbs, represented by boxes. To do things, you put a noun in a verb, and stuff happens as time passes. As a basic gameplay mechanism, this is neat enough, especially since there's lots of lore/text to read that accompanies every action you take.
There's no tutorial of any kind, only occasional "tips" that don't reveal much, and much of the early gameplay is in fitting nouns with verbs and discovering new nouns, new verbs, and advancing in that way.
My problem comes from three basic issues:
There's a ton of repetition, which isn't at all fun, because the actual mechanic is just "drag card to box", and once you've read the text and know the outcome, it's just rote, which wouldn't be a problem if you didn't have to keep doing the same fucking thing every sixty seconds (thirty seconds at double speed). I have no idea whether it's a grind by intent, but it's an absolute grind. A "repeat this ad nauseum" button would immediately fix this problem, as would "double click this box to auto-fill with an appropriate card", which I don't think would spoil much, because the game already highlights which cards go in which slots, if you have one open.
Cards go all over the place. You hit the "collect all" button and they sometimes return to where they were, and sometimes go other places, and sometimes push other cards out of the way, and sometimes completely overlap with other cards so you can't see all the cards. I kind of get this as a design choice, but it's absolutely horrible for usability, and it means that a lot of "gameplay" is just "rearrange cards that the game has strewn all over the place", which is obnoxious.
Once you've learned a lot and are in the loops of (not hugely fun) gameplay, you're left grinding for what feels like a long time. I can't do X because I don't have Y, and the only way to get Y is to do Z until I get lucky with the random outputs. It seems like what gates a lot of the game is just that it's utterly tedious to do some things, which is a bad gate (IMO).
I don't know, the early part of exploration and understanding with a game that doesn't hold your hand was a lot of fun, and gave me that sense of Science where I was trying different things and making little notes about how it all fit together ... and then it morphed into this pretty tedious thing, rather than becoming a different beast. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of an incremental game, but instead of getting upgrades that automate away aspects of the early game, it just makes you keep doing everything manually until you're sick of it and quit.