Oh yes, I definitely have the impression that the authors started small, expanded step-by-step, and then at some point left possible streamlining of the method aside. The main page shows that they are evaluating Varth now, and the tentative score is at 28. My devil's advocate argument is that all the steps you suggest would require time and the authors at some point might have simply said Mendokusai ('what a drag', or something like that). To be honest, though, all the points you raise are entirely legitimate in my eyes: I would probably proceed along your lines, if I were to start this kind of mammoth project.Lethe wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2024 7:42 pm
It's not a serious revision, just an attempt to illustrate why, IMO, this list has the problems it has and how it got there.
It probably started out as simple rankings of "hardest Toaplan game" "hardest Konami game" etc which aren't hard to decide on. If we go back to that most basic form, the relative order of games on the wiki works fine (well, at least the well-known ones).
The scoring would have been added later as a way of representing the distance between games, then represent conditionals like loop count, then as an agnostic way to combine lists, each adding exponential complexity. Even if every other factor was properly tuned, the final step would still require re-evaluating everything. I think it's self-evident that none of those hypothetical steps have been achieved - there are even games that still have seemingly placeholder scores, like the bottom three Toaplan games are all at 3.
OK, got it now: a bit obvious, but I was not so sure.I avoided complicating factors because I don't think they contributed to the example. Grouping by developer is convenient as most only had 2-3 design ethoses each plus the occasional oddball, and people are naturally going to tribalize, which leads into...
My own personal research experience is that environmental factors are calculable if (and only if, perhaps) you have a lot of "processing power". A concrete example: I work as a linguist, and I do research that attempts to analyse how people associate meanings to words (e.g. "what is a mountain, in your opinion?"). Once we pool together descriptions of words' meanings from decent amounts of informants, we get dozens or even hundreds of single entries (e.g. "big place", "rock-based formation", "funny to climb", etc.). I suspect that this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as people may also unconsciously associate other meanings to words, too. Your example is quite fitting, since we can guess that Malc was presupposing, rather than asserting, the reasons why he liked UFO Robo Dangar. To be honest, this is a topic on which we could eventually bet on what actually facts are like (incalculable or calculable though huge?). I guess that we are already on the right track by knowing that the issue exists, if only in our mindsThe way I would view it: There are incalculable environmental factors to why one would plasticize to a given life experience (excluding essentialisms for now). For instance, I was reading Malc's old writeup of UFO Robo Dangar where he declares it to be his favorite shmup. This is implied to be 1. because he already liked Terra Cresta, 2. because he had memorable arcade competition with it and 3. because he ended up spending more time on it than other games. In other words, it stuck because it was circumstantially appealing. I'm of the belief that this happens a lot and much of our rationalizations are arbitrarily created after the fact.
To be honest, I can only see "difficulty" as an individual-based ("subjective") concept, though constructing a collective ("inter-subjective") concept should be possible. An individual defines why they find a game difficult ("subjective"), other individuals do so, and then the results are compared and some agreement is reached ("inter-subjective"). For "objectivity", I guess that we would only use the word when just about every player finds X game difficult because of mechanic Y. Since you rightfully mention prior experience, I am following this approach because it is more or less standard in the type of linguistics (and psychology) I do. So, I definitely agree that trying to even be aware of our prior experience influences us is rather hard, and so is detecting these experiences in other people's commentaries.This is, of course, the same reason difficulty is so subjective. No matter how "objectively" easy or hard something is, it always takes extra effort to swim against the current of our prior experience, not to mention the present. And it takes a special type of person to, in their own time with no outside pressure, learn to do something they've already subconsciously decided isn't working. A total Toaplan-head, rooted in a particular set of priorities, and motivated by factors beyond the objective qualities of the games, is not going to be an ideal choice for evaluating totally different varieties of shmup, or may even end up especially biased against similar games. If everyone's subject to this, then who moderates? Someone with very wide and shallow experience? Isn't that person then just not qualified for anything at all?
Case in point, I still think that in the wiki there is a prevalence of "Cave zealots" and a robust under-representation of "old skoolers", which might be a consequence of "old skoolers" being generally members of older generations (I mean, I am 44 and I played Tatsujin as a kid). My own personal working experience, though, is that having balanced samples is a *nightmare*, especially if you try to study more specific populations (here, shmups players). Your questions are really though, so I have no idea to answer them: let's say that hopefully we find increasingly good answers "later on"
I didn't think of these topics at all; thanks for bringing them up.But I agree that a lack of "the method" for shmups is exacerbating. Lots of attempts across all genres, but never an indication that any of the methods are really superior or are just motivating. For good reason too, because I expect most people don't see the point in having a method for a pointless diversion. At the end of the day those who play a lot and are in the right place in life get better at games, who could have predicted that? And somehow I doubt such weirdos are going to be the ones to stick to rigorous models.
I am generally sceptical of evaluating methods as superior or inferior, because in sports often there is a need to devise individual-based ("subjective"?) methods to obtain results. I can think of some cyclists who ended up winning quite a bit even if their style and training methods are as "heterodox" as possible (e.g. Chris Froome), but I suspect that sports are full of people who ended up becoming "winners" exactly because they found their own "heterodox" method.
Shmups or videogames as a diversion may simply not deserve all this focus, perhaps, but my life experience is that finding my own method for getting 1-CC's is a bit like making my own bed in the morning. Completing tasks, big or small, makes me feel better and more motivated. In this specific case, having a "chart" of difficulty experiences that could provide advice to other players would also feel like a "completing a task".
I know that for some people the truly relevant bit is "I wanna git gud at DOJ now with one click!", but then again I had students asking me how to publish on Nature easily, or trainees asking how to do one-hand pull-ups (sports) after the first training session. We live in societies obsessed with "victory" but not "hard work", I guess: the problem should spill out in other domains as well, as well.
If I may...I wrote scribbled down some notes on difficulty in this thread. All to be taken with tons of salt: it was a dark and stormy night, and I just wanted to jot down some notes
