Time for Monster Hunter Tri again. I finally killed the Barroth. It was a triumph. I’m making a note here: “huge success”. It was also a good example of the Monster Hunter Tri experience.

It should be obvious by now that the Barroth is one bad-ass monster. It’s basically a mixture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Rhinoceros. It is constantly angry and tries to trample you over. But that’s not everything. It also bathes in mud and carries an ample supply of it on it’s back. Every now and then it shakes itself and big slabs of the mud fall. When you get hit by the mud, you get encased in it, which prevents you from attacking or blocking, slows your movement and drains your stamina. And on top of it, the Barroth simply looks scary.

I did many attempts to hunt it down. I failed many times. I got the best results with the lance because it enabled me to simply block all his ramming attacks. However, I couldn’t block the mud attack and it was always my doom in the end.

But the cool thing about Monster Hunter is that you can do something different if you get stuck. So I started collecting armor. From the beginning I sat my eyes on the Rhenoplos Armor, mainly because it looks ridiculous. It took me some time to get the elusive ingredients to craft the final pieces of it. A lot of Great Jaggi died for that one King’s Frill. I actually finished a bunch of other armors before I was able to complete this one. Imagine my surprise when I went trough the list of abilities that armor set unlocked. One of them turned out to be immunity to mud.

I haven’t even noticed it. The solution to the Barroth problem was sitting right there in front of me. So I donned the new armor, took my trusty lance, set out for the desert to face the Barroth… and failed.

The armor was not the problem this time. I was able to hold out much longer than previously. However, I wasn’t dealing as much damage as I needed. Blocking with the lance leaves you only with very weak attacks. To deal out the heavy combos you need to go from the blocking stance to a non-blocking stance. That switch takes too long, the Barroth is quicker. The fight got very long. Eventually my mistakes accumulated and I lost before I could do any significant damage.

Monster Hunter is not a game where you win simply with cool new gear alone. You need to hone your skills and your strategy. You need to adjust them so they bring out the best in the equipment you use. I went back to the drawing board and realized that I still had a talisman that enabled the skill “Auto-guard”. People familiar with fighting games like Soul Calibur know the idea – your character will automatically block as long as you are not moving or attacking.

I had an idea. My new strategy was to… do nothing. I would let the terrifying Barroth trample all over me without even flinching. I would rely on the Auto-guard skill to block all the damage. Then, still in standing stance, I would turn around and execute the damaging combo.

A couple of heart-stopping minutes later, shortly before my healing potions ran out, the beast was slain. I made a new lance from its remains.

I’m not going to bore you with any of my Monster Hunter Tri Escapades today. Mainly because there is a Barroth out there that makes me go to a dark place every time I even think about it. Last time I remember I was poisoning bugs so I could make a sleek looking suit out of them, let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

Instead I want to start another series because it worked so well in the past (NOT!). This time I want to talk about a couple of small observations on what games teach. The thing is that nowadays we are so very much obsessed at making “serious games” – games that teach stuff. I feel that in this process we often end up abandoning the things that makes games great in the first place. And even without making the extra effort games actually teach a lot. They do so at a very low, sub-conscious level. Of course these may not be actually good things. Some of them are even dangerous stereotypes. But that’s OK, I don’t want to be too judgmental here. I merely wanted to point out some observations.

So one area where games seem to have parallels to real-life is training, especially physical training. It is a well established meme in games that your character actually gets stronger as you progress trough the game. This may be most prominent in RPGs where you literally get experience points as you fight monsters. But even in a game like Metroid or Doom you get more bad-ass as you progress, even if it is trough items. This idea culminates in the concept of “grinding” where players endure repetitive tasks because they may turn out to be beneficial in the long run. Sounds very much like physical training, right?

You see, not quite. As I have written, I have restarted doing some physical exercise myself recently. I actually already did it for a while way back when I went to high school. I was always quite interested in the logistics of it especially because they are so different to games.

I noticed that the biggest difference between grinding and real training is time.

In games you are rarely forced to wait or postpone something. Games are very good at allowing you to instantly pursue every goal, no matter what. So if you grind, you grind intensively and at a time until you are finished. Training on the other hand is about spacing out training intervals over a longer period. You want to train today but you also want to train the day after. And in oder for training to be effective you need to continue training twice every week as long as possible, ideally forever. Training is not a single event and not even a time span like grind is. It is periodic and continuous.

The other thing is that when grinding, the more you put in, the more you get out. If you want to be a super-bad-ass, you just need to grind some more and there you go. Training doesn’t work this way. You body has limits, especially as you start out. It needs rest to regenerate and grow. So training too much will yield negative results at some point.

But it is not all that horrible. Games are very good at teaching how to pursue goals and how to deal with difficulty and failure along the way. The guys from Experience Points Podcast once did a very insightful discussion about how games often put you though those very frustrating experiences. They observed that they have become quite frustration-resistant nowadays. It may have to do with the fact that especially the difficult old-school games all taught the same idea – that failure is simply part of the process. In a way, this is what is also the heart of the grind philosophy. It is the concept that enduring unpleasant experiences may be necessary if you want to achieve greatness. In some cases it is even about finding solace within those unpleasant experiences.

So games do show a very fallacious idea of how training works on the one hand. On the other hand they prepare psychologically very well for the challenges of doing training.

I assume that most of you did some kind of sport in your life at some point. I’m curious, what are your observations?

I thought I continue my observations on Monster Hinter Tri in a sort of a diary. The game got me big time yesterday. I’m recovering from it now. I was able to leave it at midnight today – yay! I think I’m at a point where I understand most of the game’s systems. I got some online play in and I have defeated 3 big monsters already, even the infamous Qurupeco. Because of Brainygamer’s post I was terrified of that one. Thankfully, due to my newly discovered favorite weapon (Lance FTW) everything went well.

Freeform Hunt

Monster Hunter is so weird, it took me a while to understand how to play it. You start out in a village. You can simply walk out of the village into the wild and start slaying the local fauna or collecting stuff. This is called “freeform hunt” and I actually spent a lot of time doing it at first. Besides freeform hunt you can also take upon quests. When you do so, you are being teleported to a base camp the very same environment as in freeform hunt. You then need to fulfill some task within the time limit. The strange thing is that the time limit is quite generous. It’s 50 minutes – way more than enough for most of the quests.

I didn’t notice it at first so weary of the time limit, I did freeform hunt to gather resources. But this stopped working when a new environment was introduced. Some quests teleport you to places you can’t access via freeform hunt. So in order to gather resources there you need to do it while doing quests. The right way to play it is to take upon an easy quest and use the generous time limit to gather the required resources. Because of this, the freeform hunt is somewhat obsolete. I heard that it was a new addition to the series. It seems like this part is not really polished yet.

Online Play

I got some online play in and it works good. However, you need to jump through a lot of hoops to get there. First, the online mode is a separate game mode that takes place in a different environment (”The City”). Fair enough. You select “city” and you get 4 different categoires of servers. Within each are just a bunch of random servers. After you log into a server you then need to select a “city gate”. After selecting a city gate you actually can walk around in a level so you might think that you can play now, but no. Each city gate has a bunch of “cities”. A city contains 4 players and is somewhat like a game. You can start your own city too. So after you start a city or join one you get to an area where you can buy stuff and take upon quests. You then need to start a quest and wait for players to come to your city and join in your quest in order to play.

This is bullshit.

There are 4 or 5 consecutive layers of decisions that need to be made in order to start playing. Why? Why do I have to select a server? The game gives me no basis on which I could make this decision. It could just as well connect randomly, I don’t care which server I play on. The same goes with city gates – it’s an arbitrary decision that stems from the fact that their infrastructure is built this way. But the user shouldn’t be burdened with it!

Thankfully, once you get in a “city” the rest of the experience is rather smooth. I even got my old keyboard working. The players are generally nice and supportive. And there are indeed no friend codes which is a blessing.

Now, it seems like Barroth is next *gulp*.

Speaking of teaching games, I forgot to make a quite important announcement. As I already mentioned in my profile blub at the end of each post, I have been working for some time for the Cologne Game Lab. The CGL is a new institute of Cologne University of Applied Sciences. I have been helping out getting a Master in Game Development and Research program started with two very ambitious professors. After two years, we are finally accepting applications RIGHT NOW.

One of the reasons I find this quite exciting is that we are really trying to do a very different kind of games education. We did a little bit of research and so far many of the programs focus very much on preparing students to be among the low-level workforces in big studios. Seeing how the games industry is slowly maneuvering itself into a creative dead-end, we believe it is time to develop alternatives. So out program has a unique artistic / scientific approach. We want to reasearch and teach strategies and skills on how to develop new ideas and concepts for games. But this isn’t a big pie in the sky. The curriculum consist almost entirely of Experimental Gameplay-style practical projects. After spending two years at CGL, the students will have produced A TON of innovative experiments and prototypes and developed a solid understanding of an iterative design process.

This is not an education to be the next UV-unwrapper for Square Enix. This is not an education to be the programmer of the pause-screen for the next Gears of War. It’s the education for the creative lead of the next innovative indie studio. It’s the education for game developers who will develop games in a time where there are no doubts on games being art – possibly even thanks to them. I – an indie myself – was personally responsible for developing large parts of the curriculum. Being able to define the shape of things to come this way was quite amazing to say the least.

So now with everything in place, all we need are students. We accept applications from all over the world. The course will be held in English and takes two years. The requirement is at least bachelor-level education in any major and a total of one year of experience in a games-related profession (this specifically includes working on your own indie game experiments). More details here. You can also get in touch with us on Twitter and on Facebook if you have any questions. Please do so. We have been working a lot to get this one chance. We can’t pull this off without ambitious students, who want to change the face of gaming as much as we do.

Recently I have been listening a bit the the new Kernel Panic podcast show. One of the show’s hosts is @GGlick whom I had some intriguing debates with at Twitter. It’s a bit weird because it is very much an Apple fanboy show and I certainly don’t consider myself one. But on the other hand, widening one’s horizon is a good thing. For example, they mentioned the iPhone App “Things” which I promptly checked out. And I must say, even it was one of the most expensive App I’ve got, it was a very sound investment!

It’s basically a very simple to-do list app. The unique thing about it is that it is based on the “Getting Things Done” organizational method. And even though I’ve never read anything about GTD, using Things I immediately see the advantage. You have things like the Inbox which is a place for you to randomly drop in tasks you just remembered you need to do but don’t have a clue when. You can then later on go through them like through you E-Mail inbox to figure out how to deal with them.

But what really makes this a very effective tool is the Today list. You can mark certain items as things you want to do today. They will then appear prominently in the App itself but also as a small number at the icon of the App. So you are constantly reminded of the things you wanted to do, but only of the things you really CAN do. Tasks, which aren’t important today are stored elsewhere so they don’t bother you as much anymore.

Finally, if you check a task, it doesn’t just disappear or something. It remains in the list for a day but checked-out to give you the good feeling that you’ve managed to get some stuff done. It is being moved to a history folder at the end of the day.

I just started using it but so far I love it. I will keep you posted if I stick with it… and that’s another task checked-out