Pokémon Card Game vs. Magic the Gathering: A Cursory Comparison

so, i played a couple rounds of the Pokémon TCG with the boy a while back.

in particular, the 2018 World Championship decks were on sale right next to the cash register at Kinokuniya, and in general i'd rather dive straight into the deep end of "intense competitive play" rather than fuck around with "starter decks", so i bought a couple and we both plunged in without any previous knowledge of the game.

and from a game design point of view, the contrast with Magic the Gathering is fascinating.

(i'll attempt to write about this in a way that makes sense even if you're not familiar with Magic, but uh, no promises.)

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anyway, tl;dr "card advantage" is not a concept that applies equally to all trading card games! which is obvious in hindsight, but was really fun to experience in such a direct way.

a tale of two widgets

say i'm in a team of engineers, and everyone else is discussing how to use Widget A to solve a problem.

but i think we should be using Widget B. so i say, "why don't we try using Widget B? i think it's better than Widget A for this."

a Super Senior Engineer could respond with a massive screed, with multiple bullet points, tearing down every aspect of Widget B, implying that it is Total Garbage.

i could then respond in one of two ways:

(1), the most likely, i'll stare at Super Senior Engineer, and i'll stare at all the dudes on his side, and think: fuck it, this isn't worth arguing about, let's just go with Widget A.

i haven't been convinced, and no knowledge was gained, but Super Senior Engineer sure got to feel superior.

(2), i'll buckle down: come up with a point-by-point rebuttal of all of Super Senior Engineer's points, and then Super Senior Engineer will get frustrated that i'm not "listening to him," and no matter who wins (probably not me!) we're both going to leave the encounter feeling unheard and frustrated.

alternatively, Super Senior Engineer could respond with a simple question: "hey, i've worked with Widget B in the past and it had some issues with cache coherency, but what's your experience with it?"

then that opens the door for me to answer: "well, i thought Widget B worked great for [x], but you're right that we did have to deal with cache coherency," and then we'll have a bit of a discussion of how i dealt with that, and maybe we'll still end up deciding that Widget A is best, but i've been heard and maybe Super Senior Engineer even learned a thing about Widget B he didn't know before. or, hell, maybe that even lets me say, "actually, they fixed the cache coherency problems in 2.0," and now maybe we can all agree that Widget B is better!

say Super Senior Engineer does the "massive screed" approach, though. then a colleague comes to him later and says: hey, did you consider maybe not doing a massive screed.

if Super Senior Engineer is being defensive, he could say:

* but i was right, it shouldn't matter how i say it (sure, but we're all squishy humans here so actually it does matter)

* but i care so much about getting this right and i don't want to feel like i can't speak up about engineering problems that are important to me (sure! but don't you want to speak up in an effectual way?)

* but when i argue that way with So-And-So, they argue right back, and we actually do discuss things and change each other's minds (okay, but maybe you and So-And-So know each other better, maybe you and So-And-So generally have an equal number of engineers on each other's sides, and so on... by default you should probably assume someone suggesting an alternative is being brave, and is a little nervous, perhaps)

* but that other engineer didn't even consider my point of view, they didn't even consider that they could be wrong or really consider Widget A (well, you didn't really give them a chance, after that opening salvo, right?)

* look, i'm a Super Senior Engineer, i have to deal with people questioning my decisions all the time, i'm fucking exhausted, i just had a kid, i'm too fucking tired to word things nicely for some punkass junior engineer. (yep! being senior sucks!!! sorry but that's just life. you're allowed to delegate, or just bow out of discussions until you're less tired, you know. but seriously, it sucks, sorry, part of the job.)

okay, i disguised this all as an engineering metaphor. and i think it applies in engineering situations. but really i was thinking of the average level of discourse i see in Certain Parts Of The Internet. replacing the relevant variables is an exercise left to the reader.

the spiral of death

So I replayed a bit of Final Fantasy X over Christmas, and—man. While Auron’s “spiral of death” speech doesn’t hit particularly well out-of-context, I rightly remembered it as one of the most affecting moments of the whole game:

Auron: "[Yuna's] strong. She'll make it."

Tidus: "She'll make it? What, so she can die? Why is it...everything in Spira seems to revolve around people dying?"

Auron: "Ahh, the spiral of death."

Tidus: "Huh?"

Auron: "Summoners challenge the bringer of death, Sin, and die doing so. Guardians give their lives to protect their summoner. The fayth are the souls of the dead. Even the maesters of Yevon are unsent. Spira is full of death. Only Sin is reborn, and then only to bring more death. It is a cycle of death, spiraling endlessly."

When Auron says these lines, he is tired. He's seeing a kid finally "wake up" to the reality of the world that he's known and lived for a long time. And he's complicit in it just as much as the foul maesters are, to his own disgust.

It sounds a little hippie-dippy to say so, but, I've thought about this a bit on-and-off throughout my life, when regarding governments, social organizations, and so on—this system we're building, what's it spiraling around? Is that thing horrifying; has it become horrifying?

For instance. The classic case in Silicon Valley is "data." There are so many goddamn "data-driven" companies, which started out as a beautiful, liberatory thing (if you can prove with numbers that this is better then you can just go make it better!). But before long, data turns into a bizarre fetish in-and-of-itself—UX people have to contort qualitative user experiences into "data" to be taken seriously, people represent data dishonestly or end up pursuing certain metrics until they become useless or actively harmful, people who vainly say "I dunno everything just feels worse" are ignored because they can't express their concerns in a spreadsheet, until no one's even thinking about users anymore, they're so damn busy chasing those numbers.

I mean, that's one cynical take, in one domain. Pick your favorite domain, system, whatever—I'm sure you can find plenty of other spirals.

FFX's final act is arguably overly optimistic, arguably a power fantasy—not because they defeat the villain, but because there is a villain, a man with a name who we can slay to make this horrible cycle end.

Because in the real world, the first shock is realizing the spiral exists, and the second shock is realizing no one person can stop it. Even the people who, in theory, could make it stop, you discover cannot, or have bought so much into the spiral that they cannot believe they have the power to make it stop. (Like every other summoner who approached the heart of Zanarkand, and made the hard choice to bring the next Sin into the world, all for just a precious few years' reprieve from Sin's suffering.)

((Also, as an aside: FFX is quite literally a game about letting dead things go. It's interesting to replay it, with that in the forefront of your mind, since that theme is less obvious on a first playthrough.))

moral musings

a few threads of moral thought / themes but i've been thinking about lately, or else, seem to be coming up a lot in media i've consumed lately:


(1) to what extent should we take responsibility for, or else be held responsible for, actions done under some kind of duress?

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(2) to what communities, distributed both temporally and physically, should we be held accountable?


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to some extent, both of these questions are things we pondered in my college philosophy class—the topic of the class was free will, but naturally that topic brings up a lot of considerations of blame/responsibility/etc—but it’s been a long time since i took that class, and i don’t think i thought about things in quite the same light back then.