Villains, bullies, dicks, and Hanlon’s Razor
I’ve recently read an article that was actually about work environment and building and maintaining a supportive team but one sentence struck me in a way that made me think about real life bullies and how villains are portrayed in media. […] Management expert and author Douglas W. Hubbard [in his] book The Failure of Risk Management: Why it’s Broken and How to Fix It [rewrote Hanlon’s Razor as]: “Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system of interactions.” […] not only are people’s actions rarely malicious, they’re most likely not about you at all. Malice is simply not a probable explanation for people’s actions, and it’s not reasonable to assume it is. So, if you take that to the realm of story villains, the best ones are not just there to be an antagonist but would exist and do their thing even if the hero wasn’t there at all. A good villain is not about the hero. A good villain is only about themselves and what they want to achieve. Think about that when you craft your next villain for your story or game, either forwards as who they are, what’s their motivations and what incentives exist that they will follow down the wrong path; or backwards as what you need the villain to be and come up with the system of incentives that could put someone in that position. But this same conversation got me Continue Reading →
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Bloodhunt, Battle Royals, and Onboarding
I want to talk a bit about Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt. Let’s put aside for now the fact that this game tries to take Vampire: The Masquerade, a deeply dramatic, gothic horror RPG that deals much more with social interactions and tries to make it about vampires shooting other vampires with exploding crossbow bolts. What I want to talk about is onboarding. Battle Royale focused games are very popular right now. Such games are always on the top spots of Twitch’s most popular directory. The problem is usually with the new ones. Every once in a while, a new one comes out and very few of them actually penetrate and even fewer dethrone the big players, even if just a little bit. And I think it’s rarely about the theme, even more rarely about the mechanics. I think it’s mostly about the onboarding. What do I mean by onboarding? For those not fluent with the lingo, onboarding is “the action or process of […] familiarizing a new customer or client with one’s products or services.” In more plain language, a game’s onboarding is the experience a new player gets when they install and run the game for the first time. It’s the main menu, it’s the tutorial, it’s the first 10 minutes to the first few hours of the game. If you’re a known popular developer, you usually get the latter but, if not, you get the former as the time you have to convince players to actually play your Continue Reading →
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Is there such a thing as a Super Perceptor?
A while back, a good friend of mine told me they’re a super-taster. I’m not sure if he’s officially diagnosed but what he described to me is that everything he tastes is very vivid and he can’t stand any kind of spicy food because even the mildest one is very spicy. Recently, this got me thinking: Is Super-Perceptor a thing? One of the things about me that I find is quite out of the ordinary is my really high perception. I can come back home and, even unintentionally, see what changed in the kitchen and know exactly what my wife had for lunch and sometimes even roughly when. I think this might be something borne out of my martial arts experience. When you train, you’re taught to notice even the subtlest muscle movements so you can counter appropriately at the right time, not too early and not too late. You’re probably thinking to yourself that this sounds like Sherlock Holmes and, yes, what is portrayed in the miniseries with Benedict Cumberbatch comes very close and what defines Sherlock, especially in that series, is that he is the best there is at percieving and analysing evidence. Unfortunately, it’s not all good. I think the same core cause is what also makes me very susceptible to motion and simulation sickness, it’s why touching most organic matter feels very uncomfortable for me, why Mindfulness Meditation just doesn’t work for me, why any subtle movement of the screen I’m looking at feels like a Continue Reading →
Posted in Humanity, Me, No Category, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
קנאה במקום העבודה
אני חושב שמשכורות זה משהו שצריך להיות פומבי במקום העבודה. בדרך כלל, התגובה שאני מקבל היא שזה יגרום לאנשים לקנא. לדעתי, זה דבר טוב. כי רוב האנשים לא חושבים על זה אבל יש שני סוגים של קנאה. השפה העברית פשוט לא מכילה את המילים בשביל זה. באנגלית, אפשר להבדיל בין Jealousy ל-Envy (למרות שגם דוברי אנגלית לרוב לא יתייחסו להבדל הזה). כשאומרים קנאה, רוב האנשים חושבים על Jealousy. זאת המחשבה שלמישהו לא צריך להיות משהו בגלל שלך אין אותו. זאת מחשבה מאוד שלילית ועוינת ואני מבין למה עדיף להימנע ממנה, במיוחד בין אנשים שאמורים לעבוד ביחד. אבל זאת הגישה הנמוכה והשלילית ואני מעדיף לנקוט בתער של האנלון. Envy היא הרצון גם להשיג משהו שלמישהו אחר יש. ואלא אם כן מדובר במשהו ייחודי (כמו בן זוג של מישהו), רוב הזמן לא מדובר בלקחת לאותו מישהו את מה שיש לו. איך שאני רואה את זה, אם אני רואה שלמישהו יש משהו מגניב שאני אוהב, אני אחפש איפה אני גם יכול להשיג כזה. אם למישהו באותו תפקיד כמו שלי יש זכויות מסוימות או משכורת טובה יותר ממני, אני אבדוק מה אני יכול לעשות כדי שגם יגיע לי, אני ארצה להשתפר. ומה רע בזה? בכלל, מה רע בלשאול את הבוסים ישירות, “מה אני יכול לעשות כדי שיעריכו אותי יותר? מה המדדים פה? תפוקת קוד גבוהה יותר, יותר יוזמה, הצעות ייעול, הדרכה של חדשים? אני רק רוצה לדעת מה חשוב פה כדי לדעת איפה לרכז מאמצים.” אז תזכרו להבדיל, קנאה (Jealousy) זה לא דבר טוב אבל קנאה (Envy) זה סבבה אם זה גורם לכם לרצות להשתפר Continue Reading →
Posted in Humanity, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
How to Make a Unity Package (For the Unity Package Manager)
Let’s say you have a bunch of code you want to drag around with you to every new Unity project, or maybe just the next project you’re doing for the same company. Don’t just copy and paste the same directory over and over again forcing you to also copy changes and updates. Create a package instead! Unity has switched over to a package model for a lot of the engine’s capabilities. And it also allows you to import non-Asset Store packages straight from GitHub or even locally. So how do you take what you have and make it an easily distributable package? Follow these steps. In your Project window, below all your regular files is a Packages folder. Right click on it and select Show in Explorer. In that Packages folder, create a new directory and name it however you like. This will be the root of your package. Do remember that the folder name can not contain spaces. Create a new “package.json” file. This page right here explains everything about the structure of the file. And here is an example file. Back in Unity, your new package should be visible with the name you gave it. Clicking on package file will open it in the Editor UI, allowing you to edit it more conveniently so you don’t have to go back to the JSON. In that Inspector window, you can also easily add Dependencies if your package requires it which is a much easier workflow than typing them out. Continue Reading →
Posted in Practice, Programming, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Blegh.
I apologise to anyone who was expecting something from me recently. I’m feeling sick and this might take a while.
Posted in No Category by Eran with comments disabled.