My WorldCon Schedule! Come And Say Hi To A Ferrett!
Friday, 8:30 pm: Ferrett Reads From Fix!
If you’re looking for a sneak preview from the next book in the ‘Mancer series, I’ll be reading the chapter where Aliyah starts out playing a soccer game and ends up destroying large swathes of Kentucky. And I will be reading it dramatically.
Saturday, 5:00 pm: Ferrett Signs Books!
I’ll be signing in the same room with John Scalzi, so I’ll just sit there with a sign saying “MY BOOK’S NOT AS GOOD BUT MY LINE IS SHORTER.”
(As usual, I will be so happy to be there that I’ll sign anything. Doesn’t necessarily have to be my book. Or even a book. If I can put a pen on it, I’ll sign it.)
Friday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm: Second Childhood: Cartoons For Adults
Hear me squee about Steven Universe and Adventure Time with several people on a panel! Because I assure you, I can squee about Steven Universe ALL DAY.
Entire Convention: Hey, Text Me.
If you wanna get a lunch or a dinner or hang out at some point, I’m amenable. This is a light schedule, and I’m there to say hello to people, so if you’re there let’s find someplace to meet!
How Pokemon Go Simulates The Ravages Of Old Age Though Terrible Game Design
Want to know what it’s like to go senile? Pokemon Go is the perfect way for teenagers to experience what it’s like to get old, so much so that I presume your trainer just dies when he hits level 30.
Because in Pokemon Go, you start out as a young and hale Pokemon trainer at the top of his game. Every monster is capturable. You can track down monsters easily, and the rewards for getting them are plentiful. The world is your oyster.
But as you level up, old age settles in. Your senses dull. Monsters you once tracked easily become findable only with great effort, and by today you can’t even find them at all – you know, maddeningly, that the Clefairy you so desperately seek is somewhere in the neighborhood, but deafened and blinded, you have no idea where it might be.
Your grip weakens, too, as you level up. Trivial Pokemon that once took a single ball to capture now require you to weakly lob five or six balls with your arthritic, useless hands. The rewards you used to get for accuracy and skill get removed, so the 50 extra XP you used to get for a nice throw no longer count – presumably because you’re so bitter and jaded that you no longer believe you deserve reward for an excellent throw.
Other games, foolishly, have equated “levelling up” with “more power” and “greater skill.” Pokemon Go breaks with that tradition by demonstrating that levelling up is merely crawling closer to the nursing home – with each level and Pokemon Go patch, you lose power and skill.
I’m level 19 now, and I dread becoming level 20 because I can barely catch a Weedle as it is, and how do the poor bastards of level 24 shuffle about?
You may think I’m kidding here: I’m not. Thanks to a combination of poor game design and inexplicably terrible patches, Pokemon Go has become a game that actively punishes you for playing it, and players are not happy about this.
Let me first explain how I play Pokemon Go, however, because there’s two ways you can play the game. A lot of people are concerned about levelling up their biggest Pokemon so they can battle for dominancy of the gym markers placed all over the map. Personally, that’s of no interest to me. Pokemon Go released in summer, which means that teenagers and college kids have nothing to do except squat near their gyms and battle. If I, the underlevelled fortysomething, do manage to squeeze a Vaporeon into the gym, the seven camp kids squatting near the Rocky River pool will ensure I’m kicked out in short order.
No, I play Pokemon Go for Pokemon’s very mandate:
Gotta catch ’em all.
There are a hundred and fifty or so Pokemon, and the only way to catch them is to go wandering for great distances in real life. My wife and I, who know little about Pokemon, get a thrill every time we find a Pokemon we didn’t know about – “What the hell is that magnet thing? Look at that” we cry happily, as one of us captures some weird-ass beast we had no clue existed.
We could look up the list of Pokemon on the Internet. We don’t. For us, as for many people, the joy is in the exploration.
And Niantec has actively started punishing us for exploring.
In the beginning, the game gave you a list of Pokemon in your neighborhood, along with a rough estimate as to how far you needed to walk to get them. You had no directional element – but you knew there was a Ponyta roaming through this Target parking lot somewhere, and you could play an elaborate game of cold/hot to find it.
After a few weeks, Niantec removed this feature. Now you could see the Pokemon in your neighborhood, but they were only sorted by distance. You couldn’t tell how far away you were, only that you were closer to the Ponyta than you were this useless frickin’ Weedle.
And now, with the latest update, Niantec has removed the order. You can only see the Pokemon in your neighborhood. You don’t know which direction to go, merely that they’re within about a half a mile of you. Good luck!
If you started playing from the first week, in the last month you have watched your ability to find Pokemon degrade. That’s Pokemon Senility, Part One.
Now, “finding Pokemon” is pretty much the largest reason people play – so much so that there are multiple sites that fake geolocations to map out the Pokemon in your neighborhood. Or there were. Niantec has shut them down, ostensibly because they were overloading the server – but their game trailer promised that you’d be able to find Pokemon by direction and distance, so basically Niantec has eliminated third-party services that provided what they promised.
Want to find a rare, specific Pokemon? Hell with you, buddy. Now you can’t. And by the way, we’re going to punish you for wanting to do anything else while you’re hunting for rare Pokemon.
Punish? How? Well, as every Pokemon player knows, your local neighborhood is infested with Com Mons – Pidgeys and Rattatas are everywhere. You will, quite literally, find Pidgeys and Rattatas on every corner, sometimes two or three at a time…
…and you will hardly find anything else, if you live in a “Pokedesert” like I am. See, Pokemon are generated according to the number of people playing Pokemon Go in your local area. If you live in a big city, rare Pokemon spawn all the time, because the game goes “Oh, there’s fifty people there, let’s drop some good loot.” But if you’re walking through the sleepy suburbs Rocky River, you will hardly ever find a Pikachu – just Pigeons and Rats everywhere.
Which would be fine, if the game encouraged you to capture pigeons and rats. But as you level up, it encourages you not to.
See, Pokemon Go’s way of encouraging you to make in-game purchases is Not Subtle. In fact, it’s so blatant that it literally makes you feel feeble. Because as you level up, Pokemon become much more likely to escape your tossed balls, until eventually a Pidgey that would have taken a single ball at level 5 suddenly starts requiring four or five balls.
Now, admittedly, quietly ramping up the difficulty on pay-to-play games is a long-standing tradition. Seriously; go read this article on a guy who’s spent $9,000 on his iPhone game, it’s terrifying. But Game of War has tons of fiddly options that confuse the user – which doesn’t sound like a strength, but at least when the game screws you over, your dignity is preserved because you’re not sure what’s happening.
Pokemon Go has so few stats that it’s blatantly apparent the game is jacking you. Pokemon have a single rating: Combat Power. And you know that at level 12, getting a Pidgey at CP 45 never took more than a single ball, but when at level 18 it takes two or three balls to capture it, there’s no denying the game is making you less effective as you climb the ranks.
And that Pidgey breaking loose is maddening, because you don’t even want the Pidgey. You’ve captured literally hundreds of Pidgeys, and if your goal is to “catch ’em all,” then Pidgeys are an active annoyance because they’re taking up a spot that maybe an exciting Staryu or a Bulbasaur might occupy.
Why would you try? Because the game is boring otherwise. You’re just looking for some small entertainment while you’re endlessly wandering around, hoping a Squirtle appears. Having it burn up four or five of your precious supply of Pokeballs, particularly in Poke-dry areas where you can’t refill them except by buying them or driving to better locations, means that when a Squirtle does hove into view you might not have the balls left to capture him.
(Oh, and Niantec inexplicably removed the XP reward for super-accurate throwing of your Pokeball. That didn’t matter when your reward was a rare Pokemon, but removing rewards when all you’re getting is a Pidgey makes the grindy parts even grindier and less fun.)
So you wander, the game encouraging you not to interact with its low-level entertainments, rendering you unable to find its high entertainments. And you can’t have the game on in the background, you can’t text while you have Pokemon Go on, you can’t do anything but Pokemon Go and maybe have some tunes on.
Basically, Pokemon Go demands PAY ATTENTION TO ME and then, as you level up, actively punishes you for trying to interact with what it offers the most often, and has taken away the tools that allow you to find the things you want.
That is the epitome of bad game design.
And unless Niantec can deal with this problem, it’s going to start hemorrhaging users soon; oh wait, it already has. Unsurprisingly, people don’t like feeling stupid, and the entire game is currently devoted to making its most invested users feel feeble.
They can fix this; I know the stated issue is “server overload,” but honestly if the game allowed me to home in on rare Pokemon, I’d be okay with it not working more often. Helping you find rare Pokemon is a must-have feature in a game that is about capturing and exploration; otherwise, why do I even have this thing on?
Likewise, yes, technically speaking we’re “encouraged” to buy Pokeballs when the game ramps the level up. But that ramp is so apparent, and for Pokemon we actively have come to hate, that we’re more likely to quit the game out of disgust, or only check it when we’re in a high-traffic zone.
This game is broken, and broken in a way that screws over its most heavily-invested users. It can be fixed, but that’s gonna require communication – Niantec is infamously closed-mouthed, but an announcement of “We know how important Pokemon-tracking is, we’re working on that, it’s our top priority” would keep me playing more because I’d know they knew why I was playing.
As it is, Niantec looks clueless. That’s not a good look. Especially when you’ve taken an interesting game and patched out all the features the “Gotta catch ’em all” people liked.
Fighting The Last-Book Hangover, Or: An Overly-Revealing Look Into The Writing Process
So as y’all should know by now, I’ve been live-writing my latest book The Song That Shapes The World to raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop.
I’m now going to trash three weeks’ worth of work.
It’s not because what I’ve written over the last few weeks is bad. It’s typical first-draft stuff that needs cleaning, but it’s a strong start: a musician fleeing an abusive marriage stumbles into the mystical world of Backstage, where once every decade they have a Battle of the Bands that determines the song that shapes the multiverse. I like the lead character. She’s got depth I could explore in a different manuscript.
But she’s the wrong character for the book I want to write.
The book I initially described was “Pitch Perfect with magic.” I want something that is, if not light, at least full of weirdness and humor and bizarre situations. I want friendship. I want oddball.
And what I wrote was mundane, everyday angst.
Now, I know why I wrote angst: it’s a last-book hangover. See, the manuscript I finished before this one is the as-yet-unsold Savor Station – which is, hands-down, the best thing I have written. And that novel is mournful and elegaic, because, well it’s the story of a prince who’s been starved of everything good in life (including food and dignity) and regains strength by finding the finest restaurant in all the stars.
And I hit that book so out of the park that when I started writing The Song That Shapes The World I was like, “The last time I wrote a very sad person in a dire situation, I wrote a great novel, soooooo…. let’s do that again!” I even, I am shamed to admit, went back and reread the opening to Savor Station to go, “Okay, how can I duplicate that?”
But rehashing what I did well last time is not delivering what got me excited about this. I could make a good book about this, but that book wouldn’t be “Pitch Perfect with magic,” it’d be “Savor Station with music.” And while it’d be nice if my muse decided to write tonally-consistent books, apparently I write novels like I write short stories – continually switching valences.
(Rich Horton, noted short story reviewer, met me at a party and said that I was notable for the way no two of my short stories sounded alike. He did not make this sound like this was actually a strength.)
I could continue and write a book I’m capable of writing, or I could set everything on fire to write the book I am thrilled to write.
Yet! This is a fantastically interesting situation! Because what I’m going to do is swap out the lead character and write the exact same story, and show you how the story needs to change when the protagonist changes!
Gone is Gwendolyn of old, who’s practiced in her husband’s recording studio for three years but has never been certain of her talent before live audiences.
Arrived is Gwendolyn the new, the samurai musician, who sees fame as a virus. She hitchhikes from obscure bar to obscure bar, waiting months between performances, playing for people who don’t even know she’s supposed to be there.
In both cases, the Gwendolyns stumble into a bar, hoping to play.
In both cases, the Gwendolyns flee the bar and head to the mystical world of Backstage.
In both cases, the Gwendolyns meet the dragon-riding, cello-playing nemesis who escorts them into this bold new world.
But what you get to see – at least if you donate and get your membership for the Clarion Echo blog I’m doing – is how a book’s plot is tailored to its protagonist’s weaknesses and strengths. This isn’t a matter of swapping out personalities – a story’s elements are about showcasing what the protagonist can do and jabbing at their weak spots, and so the bar that Gwendolyn the old walked into would be no challenge at all for Gwendolyn the new.
The bar changes. The people changes. The attitude changes.
And if you donate $10, you get to see how mutable a world is when a writer’s starting out. You can read the old chapters, then see the new chapters as I write ’em, weigh in, maybe help me refine the magic system a bit. And you do that by donating the cost of a couple of coffees to the Clarion Foundation, which is a good cause that helps writers.
Anyway. I’m starting that tonight. You can come watch.
I’m kinda excited about this.
So as always, here’s the steps to do this:
Step #1: Donate at least $10 to the Clarion Foundation. More is good if you can spare it. You don’t have to donate in my name or anything, because honestly, their Write-a-Thon webpage forms are dreadful.
Step #2: If you don’t already have one, create a LiveJournal account. Rejoice in this feeling of web page time-travel, as one suspects there’s not a lot of new LJ accounts created!
Step #3: Email theferrett@theferrett.com with your Clarion receipt and your LiveJournal handle, with a header of “HEY FERRETT LET ME IN.” I’ll do the mystical LJ gestures to get you access.
Step #4: Watch me figure out how to introduce you to the new Gwendolyn and her new challenges.
Step #5: Share this post if ya can!
A Different World. A Better World. A Noble World.
(NOTE: On Friday night, raw and exhausted, I posted this essay to my FetLife account through a faltering Internet connection. And I debated whether I wanted to publish this one here, on the open web, as it’s intensely personal to me. But I ultimately decided it was the second part of a longer essay I’d started with “Yes, Of Course” – and as such, am posting it exactly as I’d written it then with no edits.)
So last night, I drove out three hours and took a day off from work to hold my girlfriend’s hand for about an hour.
She was going in for surgery. She’s shit-scared of surgery. I’ve seen her beautiful eyes go wide as she says “No, no, no, I do NOT want any needles” and there were no needles around, just her memory of needles. So for her to be wheeled into a cold place where they were going to cut her open…
She would have made it without me. But it would have been worse. So I went.
And it was a weird day. I spent a lot of it in that liminal space between “sorta family” and “maybe not” – her dad was there, and so was her mom, and they know about me and they like me but I’m not, you know, her husband. Everyone was perfectly pleasant but there was always that weird hum of “Hi, I’m new here” even though we’ve been dating for over a year because yeah, hi, family emergency oh and look who’s here.
(And like many times of comfort, it’s hard to tell how effective you are. She tells me – and I believe her – that she only got through it as well as she did because I was there. Yet aside from a couple of tight “Don’t you fucking let go of me” moments, she looked fine. Some days, you really could use an alternate world where you peer through a window to a crying wreck and have them say, “See? That’s who I would have been this morning without you.”)
Anyway, the surgery went without a hitch, and a few hours later they rolled my love back in. And there was a brief pause because her husband went in to see her, and then her Mom and Dad went in, and there I was in the waiting room like a schmuck and eventually they brought me in and her husband and I got her back to her feet and out the hospital door and home.
Then I went to my hotel, because frankly, she was sleepy and needed rest, not “Time with Ferrett.”
And here I am. In a hotel room on the ass-end of Pennsylvania, alone, except.
Except.
She said something.
She said something magnificent.
When I saw her she was zonked out, like you are after they’ve put you down deep enough to cut you open without waking you. But eventually she told me, “Yeah. They kept asking me ‘Who’s waiting out there for you in the lobby?’ and I I told them ‘My husband and my boyfriend’ and they stammered and asked like six times and I kept saying, “My husband, and my boyfriend.’ And eventually I just told them, ‘Look, I lead an alternative lifestyle, all right?’ and they did the surgery.”
I keep thinking about that.
Because even for me, who’s pretty much as out as someone can be about polyamory, there’s still so much secrecy that it fucking burns.
“Ah, yes, this is my wife I’m checking into with this hotel room, sure.”
“Kids, this is Ferrett, he’s a… friend.”
“I met him at a – oh, well, a conference, I guess.”
And it’s never *meant* to be an erasure, it’s always with acquaintances or strangers or kids who don’t necessarily need to know who Mommy is fucking. It’s a thousand “Do I want to open this discussion with the clerk at the Holiday Inn?”s and “How much do my co-workers need to know?” and “My family’s got a couple of conservative fundamentalists, I don’t want this shit blowing up on Facebook.”
They’re not quite lies, but they’re not quite truths, either.
And they’re good reasons, you know? I want to be a value-added. I don’t want to stir up a fuss in anyone’s life. Hell, half the time I’m um-erring at someone I’ve just met, deciding whether I want to be someone’s educational experience today, and so how can I really blame someone for not wanting to blast my name out to everyone?
Yet my girlfriend did not give a fuck. She was exhausted, and tired, and when she was stripped raw the last thing she wanted to give up was to acknowledge the love that was sitting out there in that lobby for her and fuck, I’m crying now.
But it’s a moment. It’s a moment where her don’t-give-a-fuck punched a hole through to another world where I saw what it might be like not to have really good reasons not to just be buried under a tide of assumptions, and in that moment our love felt realer than it ever had before, this thing where yeah, we don’t live together and we’re never going to get married and we’ll never have once-a-week dates and all the traditional pathways designated as “serious about each other” somehow didn’t fucking matter.
We don’t call each other, but I’ll drive out to hold her hand when she needs me.
We only get to see each other once every couple of months, but she’ll fucking face down a bunch of surgeons in the place of her to tell them, Give that man respect for what he is.
And I get shit sometimes because my relationships don’t look like the relationships traditionally considered “deep,” and sometimes I buy into that. Maybe I’m shallow. Maybe my girlfriends just function because they don’t ask too much.
Then moments like that happen and I remember what love is.
I’m alone in a hotel room. Ironically, I’m texting her. She’s still up, still talking to me, and with luck I’ll see her tomorrow and go to her parents’ house for breakfast.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her.