FOFC Groupthink FOF 8 :Solving Quote of the Day

[bk1020]

I was listening to a youtube video that Quik, Ben, and Squirrel did a couple of years ago and Ben mentioned how the quote of the day within FOF8 has to mean something.

Whether or not it's actually relevant to FOF8 itself is unknowable, but I do believe they must form some kind of riddle.

Since we all get the same quote of the day and no one has documented all of them yet, why doesn't at least once a day someone check the game and post the quote of the day?

Today's Quote is :

"Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." George Will

"If your quarterback can consistently and wisely get the ball out in less than two seconds, defenses have to commit to coverage, and that opens up everything." Clyde Griffiths, Coach, New York Gladiators

[bk1020]

Dola, I really think Jim is trying to tell us something with these quotes.

[QuikSand]

I'll just volunteer that this is my favorite football-shade quote, that comes from a confirmed baseball guy.

[albionmoonlight]

Why do we think it has to mean something? Seems like something Jim would just do for flavor.

[bk1020]

Ben explained on the video how Jim has that somehow coded differently than anything else in the game?

As in they're so hidden that the only way to document them would be look each day and write them down.

Jim's brain doesn't work the same as yours or mine. Jim has always said he'd rather have done a baseball sim and that's his first love.

I used to think it was done just for flavor but I think it's "The Artist" if you will trying to tell us something.

There's all kind of nuggets in those quotes that give away hints to how Jim sees the game and perhaps how to apply that to FOF.

[NobodyHere]

Originally Posted by bk1020

"Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." George Will

Football is obviously a stand in for the American government. It combines the worst elements in American life with are the Democratic and Republican parties.

The violence punctuated by committee meetings is a reference to the Jan 6th riots which were violent and has been followed by the Jan 6th Committee Meetings.

[Kodos]

Originally Posted by NobodyHere

Football is obviously a stand in for the American government. It combines the worst elements in American life with are the Democratic and Republican parties.

The violence punctuated by committee meetings is a reference to the Jan 6th riots which were violent and has been followed by the Jan 6th Committee Meetings.

Of course, that quote was in the game before the January 6 insurrection. So Jim is apparently a psychic.

[bk1020]

Added today's quote to the OP.

"If your quarterback can consistently and wisely get the ball out in less than two seconds, defenses have to commit to coverage, and that opens up everything." Clyde Griffiths, Coach, New York Gladiators

[Solecismic]

Originally Posted by bk1020

Ben explained on the video how Jim has that somehow coded differently than anything else in the game?

As in they're so hidden that the only way to document them would be look each day and write them down.

Jim's brain doesn't work the same as yours or mine. Jim has always said he'd rather have done a baseball sim and that's his first love.

I used to think it was done just for flavor but I think it's "The Artist" if you will trying to tell us something.

There's all kind of nuggets in those quotes that give away hints to how Jim sees the game and perhaps how to apply that to FOF.

It's always fascinating to read something like this. I'm just a sports gamer who, at times, has felt the need to create the game I wanted to play.

I don't think my brain works all that differently, but my hearing impairment definitely makes my general communication style very different. And is why sound is not part of my work.

Because of my hearing-related disorder, I've taken several classes in neuroscience in recent years. We all work very in a very similar fashion, but I think you have to go all the way back to Freud's model of ego, superego and id to understand how people differ. It's an over-simplified model (yet absolute genius for its time), but it's a good basic model. My disorder forces a higher reliance on superego, living within my own meanderings of thought.

As for FOF8 and the quotes. Yes, some of it is supposed to give you insight into the game. And some of it is supposed to distract you. I've created a set of football "characters" there, and some are actually unhelpful more often than not. It's supposed to be like the real football world in that sense.

I go back to Sid Meier's advice (not to me personally) about game design. A good game should allow you to immerse yourself into an entertaining world, with a set of simple, yet meaningful decisions you need to make that have a definite effect on your outcome.

Football, unfortunately, is so complex that it doesn't lend itself well to game design (baseball did, until launch angles became a thing). I have to make uncomfortable simplifications because running a football team is many, many full-time jobs with thousands of meaningful (and not simple at all) decisions to make. These characters hopefully give some sort of insight as to what I'm doing. But maybe they don't.

Ben is right that I coded the archive differently. I didn't want people creating a list on day one. If you want to see May 6th's advice, you have to start the program on May 6. If I had collected and made up 10,000 quotes, they wouldn't repeat annually. But even getting to 366 from the archive I was using for collecting them required a lot of creativity and time.

That piece, in its original form, was somewhat inspired by Marc Vaughan. I visited his studio in London way, way back (I want to say 2001, right after 9/11). Even back then, Football Manager was a huge hit and SI was a growing company. They even had interns. Marc told me that the first job interns had was to read every sports page they could and curate pieces of articles about games to help build a library of text that could be used to generate text within the game.

A wonderful idea. If you have the time or the interns. I have neither with FOF, so I quickly realized that a similar approach would be so limited as to become tiresome in FOF. Quotes that didn't really apply to a particular game, or some notable phrase that was exciting to read in a story the first time, but after that, would become hackneyed and annoying. It works when massive. Not at all when less than massive.

My favorite author as a teenager was Robert Heinlein. If you're familiar with him, perhaps his best work is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's narrated by a character named Mannie (not that hard to figure out the allegory there) and focused a lot on his AI assistant, "Mike" - a riff on Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, if you're into the symbolism aspect. Mike is learning to tell jokes. Mannie explains to him the concept of "funny once" in that a big part of humor, and of gaming, I think, is that the surprise of something notable and interesting is something you can only experience once.

Long segue aside, there are things I would have loved to do with FOF that I didn't have the time or inclination to do. A curated library like Marc's. A player database like OOTP's. But I could come up with 366 quotes, even though that was a significant timesuck that no manager would ever allow if I worked for a "real" company.

For the most part, I can create the game I want even with some limitations (a tiny player database, one league format and set of scheduling algorithms). Some people accept those limitations, some don't. But the piece they cannot accept is graphical limitations. The GUI has to work. Customers will accept that AAAAA titles have animated everything and indie projects might not. But there's a base competency, and that base gets more complex over time.

Probably in the mid-'00s, FOF was suffering from its base UI not being modern enough. Then I compounded the problem by trying to create a different type of UI - one where you decided what you wanted where and when. But I didn't have the knowledge to allow you to preserve and select and organize what you wanted where and why. The "power" users of FOF can quickly get there anyway and accept the time it takes to set up, but for a new customer, it's "what the f are you thinking with this?" Which means my customer base hasn't grown as it should.

So I figured FOF8 was it and looked for new opportunities. I thought the OOTP merge was a perfect idea because they know the next step and sharing in football would be a win/win for us. Unfortunately, timing was not on our side. But I did learn a lot from my supposedly-wasted years working on that project. I was much more focused on UI and studying how OOTP had taken its steps. Ideas abound.

But the opportunity for a solo developer to do the solo thing on a project this large is long past, so when OOTP decided it no longer wanted FOF, nothing could be done with a half-finished game (function 90%, graphics 10%). Also based in the Qt library, which forces design decisions that limit something like FOF in ways I couldn't accept. So that code base was a dead end.

Point being. We all have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Who I am as a somewhat old person is nothing like who I was when I first started FOF. And what I've learned, most of all, is that it's dangerous to think of ourselves as finished products. To define ourselves. To use labels. To think those labels mean anything. We are products of time and brain and physical capacity and environment. Those are all variables, even environment, which we can change if necessary. The more you learn, the more you learn that there's always more to learn.

[NobodyHere]

Originally Posted by Solecismic

...it's dangerous to think of ourselves as finished products

This quote should be in the game, or maybe it already is?

[sabotai]

Oof, Qt. Not a fan of the Qt.

Which really isn't saying much. Can't say I've been a fan of any UI library like that. MFC made want to blow what little brains I have out. wxWidgets, WPF, they were better but still I hated working in them.

[Solecismic]

Originally Posted by sabotai

Oof, Qt. Not a fan of the Qt.

Which really isn't saying much. Can't say I've been a fan of any UI library like that. MFC made want to blow what little brains I have out. wxWidgets, WPF, they were better but still I hated working in them.

Qt is like a beautiful woman who loves football and can do quadratic equations in her sleep, but decided that it was best to live her life inside a plastic bubble and never interact with the physical world.

In other words, trying to be everything to everyone isn't always a practical approach.

I will admit a great love for MFC, even today. The List class works quickly and fairly efficiently and I can modify it to do what I need to do. That's the workhorse. The rest is limited, but so is my brain. And the enhancements they made about ten years ago are nice, though they decided against documenting them for some reason.

[bk1020]

I originally PMed this to Jim, but he doesn't accept PM's on here so I'm just going to post it here because I want him to see it.

When I said your brain works differently I was trying to do two things :

1.provoke a response (not from you, that actually hadn't occurred to me that you would see it. I mean I know you visit the board, but the connection wasn't made in my head)

2.I can tell from the political threads and how they treat you that you're uniquely unbiased. You trigger them into cognitive dissanonce. You are more aware of your own biases then they are and I can't explain that to them without triggering them myself. So your "brain working differently" was a shorthand for that.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Solecismic

Mannie explains to him the concept of "funny once" in that a big part of humor, and of gaming, I think, is that the surprise of something notable and interesting is something you can only experience once.

This reminds me of a radio thing I was taught. In addition to the various usual categories used to create the usual song rotation (Heavy, Medium, Light, Recurrent, Gold, etc) I was taught the value of what my mentor just called "Wow".

Those are basically Gold (i.e. old songs/ catalog songs) but ones that are really old, really unusual, really overlooked, etc. Designed to make the listener say "Wow" when they hear 'em.

Thing about that category was that you had to either create an ENORMOUS selection of them or use them sparingly (like one every 4 hours or even less). The value of them IS "the Wow factor" but if somebody happens to hear one of them more than maybe once a year or so, that's lost.

[Solecismic]

Originally Posted by bk1020

I originally PMed this to Jim, but he doesn't accept PM's on here so I'm just going to post it here because I want him to see it.

When I said your brain works differently I was trying to do two things :

1.provoke a response (not from you, that actually hadn't occurred to me that you would see it. I mean I know you visit the board, but the connection wasn't made in my head)

2.I can tell from the political threads and how they treat you that you're uniquely unbiased. You trigger them into cognitive dissanonce. You are more aware of your own biases then they are and I can't explain that to them without triggering them myself. So your "brain working differently" was a shorthand for that.

I don't think I was communicating as effectively as necessary to make those points. Awareness of bias is tough, because no matter how thoroughly you strip it away, there's always another layer of even tougher varnish underneath. Our brains crave faith of some sort, whether answers are found in religion or in other similar mechanisms.

For me, the process of getting divorced forced a measure of evolution. Divorce is a place where things that you thought were private are suddenly exposed to strangers. It's also a rebirth of sorts, in that you can see yourself through a stranger's eyes. I didn't want divorce. But after it was done, I saw it as an opportunity to take everything I thought I knew about the world and reassess. That felt good.

Is it enough, though? How do I prevent myself from falling into similar patterns? Especially as I get older and the physical limitations of age and a life of too much sitting in front of a computer accumulate?

One diet fad these days is called a "cleanse," in which you eat/drink a very limited range of substances for a couple of weeks, with the idea of resetting your digestive system. Proponents say it makes you feel great. I don't know. Seems dangerous to me.

But what about the mental equivalent? At least in a limited sense, focusing on something fundamental, but simple, like political identity. Cleanse it, then what happens when you start over? How do you prevent the same biases from creeping back? That's the hard part. So is recognizing that the same biases may resurface.

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

This reminds me of a radio thing I was taught. In addition to the various usual categories used to create the usual song rotation (Heavy, Medium, Light, Recurrent, Gold, etc) I was taught the value of what my mentor just called "Wow".

The part that grabbed me during those neuroscience courses was the pieces about how memory works. How our brains are like computers, but not computers that work in ways that are easily recognized as computer-like.

Search boxes have a concept called auto-complete that lead you to concrete locations that often have something to do with what you're looking for. What is the brain's equivalent, because surely a sequential search of the billions of neurons in the brain is not how memory works?

The most important part of memory is pattern recognition. In its raw form, you see a red glow, something tells you not to touch it and that's instant. But for something like a song? How is that stored? Do you find yourself able to sing along with something you heard 20 years ago, and have no conscious memory of before you just heard the opening bars a few seconds ago? How does that even work?

Our brains have to contain memory, a retrieval function, a restorage function, because our memory of the song changes when we hear it again. And, most importantly, a set of functions for producing some sort of emotional response - literally a triggering of some sort of mix of hormones. That can be a "don't touch" that's immediately carried to muscles. Or an emotion like pleasure or disgust. That "wow" is an emotion, and when you store the memory again after playing, it changes in form.

But that model doesn't explain everything, because at some point, retrieving that memory once again produces the "wow". Time somehow changes how memory is retrieved, and I don't think our neuroscientists know exactly how... yet. We have some ideas from myelin sheath studies on Alzheimer patients, but there's a lot to uncover. For instance, how much time must take place before you can watch an episode of your favorite television show again? Why is that different for dramas than it is for comedies? Fascinating stuff.