Because I said so

Whatever someone is making you do usually sucks. Mowing the lawn sucks. Going to bed sucks. Cleaning your room... well, you get the idea.

But this is "because I said so" applied to chores. Applied to video games, this "because I said so" is the key to fun in my book. Why don't I just call it BISS for short. Everyone else seems to be making up acronyms, so I'll just go ahead and take ownership of this one.

I like my games BISSy as all get out. Smash Brothers is a great example. You can pair characters from completely different worlds together. It's up to you, and it doesn't have to make any sense. Yoshi fights Marth. Bowser fights Link. Princess Peach fights Princess Zelda. Where else can you go for that kind of Princess on Princess action? Sure, you pick characters because they are "good" to "win," but additionally, the game gives you permission to do things that don't make sense, and that in itself feels good. Imagine if the people that you played against insisted that vs. matches be reasonable, or the game inserted a backstory about, say, how Mario and Luigi had an argument about the electricity bill before you could fight them together. It would be vexing to say the least.

A minimal backstory, however, is another way that this can work well. Take NES's Blaster Master. You're a kid. You have a pet frog. You jump down a hole to chase him. You find a tank and some sleek futuristic armor that fits you. You hop in the tank and start shooting mutants. Your radioactive pet is the first boss. You kill him. There's no crying scene, no girl telepathically calling your name, no king pleading to save the world. There is no reason to go on, except... You have a tank and you can shoot mutants and soon your tank will fly and ... You don't motivation from the story line. You forgot about the frog as soon as you started killing stuff. The game told you to play in this weird world where you have a tank. BISSy permission to be arbitrary.

FFX2... This game had one great BISS point and one grossly misused BISS occasion. Dress spheres. Magical orbs or something that let you change clothes... and abilities! What? That's... weird... whatever, fine... cool. Grlpwr! Okay great. But what about the airship action? From the first FF game, one of the best things is getting to fly around the world. The fun in that is looping the world 6 times, spinning in circles, and eventually, deciding to go somewhere. FFX2 automated the airship experience with what amounted to a menu of destinations? WHAT? Here's a case of "you can't BISS," and not "you can BISS." That sucks. It's a rule to confine the world, not to allow players to act arbitrarily.

This game suffers from something much worse though. And it didn't take me long to stop playing for this reason. If you don't use a walkthrough, you will disappoint yourself. Why? Because you will miss out on your maximum chance to be arbitrary. You will not get every dress sphere, and your chance to switch outfits and abilities goes out the window. I don't know who to fault for this. I guess it makes money for websites and player's guide publishers. The games can promise 600 hours of searching every unmarked location searching for the elements that allow you to play arbitrarily. This is backwards. Through the course of the game, you should automatically be able to do more arbitrary things, but "missing" a chance to have maximum arbitrary power later is criminal.

In FFVI, you could kill Shadow, and not mix him with your characters later. This is the same thing, but it is ONE thing. And it is a binary choice. Wait or don't wait. I don't remember if I killed shadow the first time, but it's an easy thing to remember not to do again. If you were missing any Espers, you just went out and found them whenever you wanted. No problem. Not like FFX2. You miss it, you save, and the world has changed enough that you have no second chances. Horrible. Given a choice between having to search every nook and cranny to maximize game enjoyment later vs. "playing" a game glued to a walkthrough, I'll choose neither.

So what is good? The power to be arbitrary. Games that give that power are much more fun to play. So are instruments, actually. A controlled vibrato (or tremolo on some instruments), which is a pitch fluctuation, goes beyond being a mark of musical training. It is fun to do. It says "I own this." In language, there is fun to be found in the arbitrary. People develop code words, pet names, and inside jokes to strengthen bonds. It makes you feel important. Screw English, I'm making up my own words. Aren't I special? Meta-programming... the list goes on.

I think I get why parents tell kids that they can be astronauts.

This is only half the story though. A pursuit to be arbitrary ends up looking amorphous, blobby, or jack-of-all-trades-ish. A lot of times, I have the impetus to do something, but it's my nature to try to solve it. I spend hours contemplating the pros and cons of doing one thing or another. I chart the paths, I imagine all possible futures. This is a horrible anti-solution. I don't need to take the best course of action, just some course of action. The best will usually reveal itself later, but there is no use waiting for it and doing nothing in the mean time. I think my solution gives a nod to both the power of the arbitrary and the BISS principle.

The strategy is below:

Now Stuff and Future Stuff:
Gmail todo lists. Always accessible. Clean. Categorized

Everyday stuff:
Thought of tracking this on a calendar, but it was overkill. I just wanted a simple tool that would tell me what to do. Tasker just takes a list of longish term goals that I have, and picks one of them for me to do. For now, it just tells me to do it for an hour, and then gives me another task in an hour, but I think that there is a good deal more that can be done with this.

Namely, the time could be variable(maybe semi-random) for a given task, or depending on how important the task was to me, it could get different weights to increase the likelihood of being chosen.

Or maybe I'll just leave it alone, of course, that is until Tasker says that I should work on it.

Creepy...