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Weekly Update 2020-3 (Personal)

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago2,317 words

This week, I went to the brain hospital (I'm not doomed just yet), didn't start playing a new game (but did get back into Beat Sabre a bit), was unpleasantly surprised by some feedback on last week's development post (but I think I understand the psychology of it), and was contacted by a group saying they're giving new life to old Flash games (but I wish I knew more about them)!

Brain

I went to the brain hospital again earlier in the week, to get the results of the previous week's scan back. The tumour's not growing back yet, so that's a relief. The doctor also told me that the chance of recurrence is greater soon after the treatment, and the longer you go on, the less likely the chance becomes, which is the opposite of what I assumed; I thought the risk would just build every day, that the recurrence was a matter of 'when' rather than 'if'. Hopefully getting through this period without signs of alarm is a good omen.

Games

I asked in a poll last week which game I should play next, since I am intending to play more. Celeste and Octopath Traveler are currently both topping the list, but I've been dragging my feet about getting into either. I suppose it's those same old worry about just comparing my own efforts and feeling bad, since my attempt at exploring the whole mental issues thing (Sindrel Song) was obviously a lot less successful than Celeste, though I assume marketing is an enormous part of that. Isn't Octopath Traveler made by a big company rather than an indie team though? I've no idea. There's no real reason not to play that other than the general difficulty of changing familiar habits and beginning something new, especially considering fatigue. I get a lot of focused work done each morning, but tend to just crash after that, devoting my time to things like drawing or composing music rather than taking the effort of acquiring a new game and breaking through the unpleasant feelings that initially come up.

I have however returned to VR briefly these past few weeks, or rather I've returned to Beat Sabre after talking about it to my step-dad in the car to the hospital. It's getting me moving around a bit, and maybe the exercise will reduce the tiredness and make other things easier.

Feedback

Some of the feedback on the previous post reminded me of the comments that made games development so toxic for me a few years ago. That affected me mentally, and my excitement for Divine Dreams took a bit of a hit. I'm saying something about that here rather than fuelling comment arguments or starting more by writing about it in the Development half of this post.

I'm always wondering about why my thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are what they are, due to my interest in psychology. I tend to assume other people are similarly curious, but that's probably a mistake. Still, if you are curious, there are a couple of psychology concepts that seem relevant to this situation.

One is called the mere-exposure effect, and it's the basis of nostalgia. It essentially means that you feel positive feelings about things you recognise. ∞ The Wikipedia article about it ∞ mentions a few examples of psychology studies into it, including this amusingly bizarre one:



There's also this 2-minute video which touches on the neurology involved:



This is also relevant to why I've been struggling to begin these new games; the first exposure activates my (already hyperactive) amygdala (the 'fear bit' of the brain; mine being hyperactive is why I have an anxiety disorder), though it gets easier as I get more used to the experience.

Another relevant thing is confabulation, where behaviour or feelings are evoked by some subconscious process, which our conscious mind then invents a post-hoc explanation for; the effect comes before the supposed 'cause' (the actual cause is unknown to the person's conscious mind).

The example that comes to mind for me is of split brain patients, whose left and right hemispheres are disconnected from one another, such that their eyes can be shown two different images, with each image only being perceived by one hemisphere. One image seen by just the non-language right hemisphere (eg a spider) might elicit a bodily response (eg a cry of shock), but the left hemisphere, the one that uses logic and language, never saw the spider, so it would have to come up with an explanation for that behaviour, perhaps from the image it did see (maybe it saw a planet, and explained that the shock was because they're worried about environmental issues). This wouldn't feel like a lie to the person; as far as they're concerned, they're simply explaining the truth.

∞ Here's a good article that explains several examples found in studies of how confabulation applies to more ordinary, everyday behaviours and feelings ∞. For example:



Psychology's full of that sort of stuff, and I had to write essays about a bunch of them when I was getting my degree. The biggest bit of understanding I got from studying psychology academically is that the conscious 'pilot' is just the CEO of an enormous company, privy only to fragments of information the busy lower levels have deemed worth its notice.

With something like a remake of a fondly familiar game, the mere-exposure effect is going to mean that most people would react more positively to the old stuff than the new stuff. Since this isn't a conscious decision as such, they must confabulate a 'logical' explanation for their preferences. Again, this isn't lying; it's a process that happens outside awareness.

I hope you can see how this makes sense, but I also get that it's not really a very human way to see other people's thoughts and feelings. It's more like some detached scientist analysing lab rats or something. I suppose I need to be more aware of that in how I respond to people who've taken the time to share their thoughts on my blog.

But I'm also not exactly a diplomat, who tells lies that people want to hear. In one of my replies, I said I genuinely didn't know how to respond to criticism about the new names. Am I supposed to just say "sure, I'll change them then!"? Based on the reply that got, it seemed like the person interpreted it as condescension, which wasn't intended; they also asked why I'm even asking for feedback if I don't want criticism. I suspect this might be due to differences in the Agreeableness Big Five trait... but that's being the detached scientist again.

But it makes me wonder whether people who say things like that present anything to an audience themselves, and what they hope for when they do. Would they share a photo hoping people would tell them how ugly they are? Surely most of us share what we share because it brings us some kind of pleasure, and we want to share that pleasure with others. Hearing that they enjoyed it makes us feel that what we've done is worthwhile, and motivates us to continue doing it. Hearing that people like something about us helps us feel better about ourselves, allowing us to get through the days without slumping into deep despair. Obviously not all feedback can be wholly positive, but criticism is an unfortunate part of the sharing process rather than a desirable thing.

Though there's an enormous difference between criticism and constructive critique. Feedback that offers alternative solutions or improvements rather than just shooting down what's already there is very useful, if presented in a helpful rather than combative way, and some of the regular commenters here have given feedback like this before that has really helped me out, which I greatly appreciate. Shockingly, it's possible to be both nice and constructive at the same time.

(Also, they're allowed to give criticism, but I'm not allowed to reject it? They respond badly to my post, but react badly when I respond badly to theirs?)

This didn't bother me purely because I'm such a sensitive little sausage, but because I suppose it feels like a precursor of what's to come. It'd be impossible to attract enough notice to get by without also attracting a whole bunch of critics. It's one of the biggest reasons I stopped making games before, so I'll have to hope I've got more resilience - or that I handle it better - this time, though my response to the last post makes me wonder.

What do other developers do? Just not engage, or are they all somehow skilled diplomats?

Profiting from old Flash games?

I was approached last week by a representative of ∞ IceStone, a group that says they're converting old Flash games to new formats to give them a new life ∞. They'd clearly contacted me due to MARDEK's popularity, though they only convert AS3 games, so MARDEK doesn't count. Clarence's Big Chance is my only released AS3 project.

I was quite slow at replying to emails at first because I was busy with other stuff, and they were essentially saying "hey, complete stranger, can we have the original development files of your games so we can release them ourselves?". Those things are too important to just casually give away to some stranger just because they asked, and I didn't know how to be sure they were genuine or that it'd be worth my while.

Eventually I asked for some estimates for how much money I might stand to make from something like this - I expected pennies, really, like what my Flash games earned back in the day - and they gave me some rather big numbers, like thousands per month. How they're achieving that, I don't know - I didn't quite understand their email, whether they were telling me their top earners or bottom earners - but maybe it'd only apply to games that were already enormously successful in the past in a way that mine never were. Likely mindless puzzlers that anyone can play and keep coming back to. Maybe. They somehow know the figures for the total number of plays Flash games had across the internet, and were using 40,000,000 as a minimum... but also said that they were making exceptions for games that they felt were special in some way, which I suppose is a category MARDEK falls into (I don't know what MARDEK's stats are, but it'd be nice to know).

They do seem to have the kind of outreach that I just don't though. They say they publish to a whole bunch of different platforms, and make efforts to push each game as much as they can. They also don't claim to take any intellectual property rights or anything.

I'm considering giving them Clarence's Big Chance for a start, since I was going to 'publish' that myself here anyway but I can't imagine it'd amount to anything if I did. It also wouldn't be too much of a loss if there was something fishy somewhere. It seems like I'd have more to gain than to lose.

If it went well, maybe I could look into dusting off Alora Fane Creation too... Maybe Miasmon? I could even include links to this site in them to hopefully draw new people to me. It's not like I've been making any efforts myself to increase my audience yet!

And if it would be profitable, I might 'have' to convert MARDEK to AS3, though that's an enormous undertaking that I'm not eager to get into, so we'll see how it goes.

While it seems like a good idea that they're executing here - they take 50% of the profits for games they didn't make, while helping those games live on and perhaps even succeed more than they did in the past - I feel I don't know enough about them yet to wholly trust them, so if you know anything about them, or know that any other Flash developers have had good experiences with them, I'd love to hear from you!



I think overall I'm getting into a good routine and set of habits recently, and writing these each week is contributing to that. Hopefully you got something out of reading this! There's also the development half, of course.