Pet Dragons Part Two

Nostalgia for Infinity, my PD 2 Dragon

Just over 3760 days ago I started playing Pet Dragons 2. This was late in the day, there were so many people attempting to play the new game that I had to wait until after work to do so (or maybe I did at lunch time), and after choosing a place to live on the world map, the dragon egg hatched and there was Nostalgia for Infinity.

Pet Dragons 2 had the same basic game play, players trained their dragons, they attacked other dragons but could only do so in a certain size range, and friendly dragons could try and assist someone being attacked. It was, however, a much more complicated game.

Screen shot of Nosti after the game stopped.

While some clan mates from the Order had done playtesting, along with other experienced trainers from across PD1, I had not and it took some time to orientate myself to the new game. Amongst the changes were; there were many more statistics, from replacing the old fighting strength, speed and vision affected the agility of the dragon, which determined hitting and missing, strength affected the amount of damage done, health the number of hit points, there were elements that the dragon could learn, a world map for dragons to choose their cave location, a stealth statistic, and a multiple opponent statistic, that affected how well a dragon fought when there three in a fight, not two.

Trinity, who never collected gold, and focussed on a high multiple opponent score

 The terrain that a dragon's cave was located, and the element of the dragon affected the benefits gained from training.

Table showing adjustment for Ice dragons by terrain type.

There were some features that added to the game, but were not about game play as such, the ability to make friends within the game, not affecting facebook friend status, and the message facility that allowed dragons to communicate with each other in game, but also allowed for multiple player threads, creating a social aspect to the game.

BRT the founder of the Order of the Rose

There was meant to be an in game clan function, that included clan versus clan combat, with the aim of raiding the clan's treasury. Unfortunately late in play testing that feature proved to be broken and it was never implemented. So the organisation of clans remained outside of the game.

Kali, an admin for the Order

There are no statistics for the clans, and without the official clan versus clan mini game there can be no reliable statistics. However, the Order rarely missed an assist, and many of the assistants for the clan had an overall winning record when assisting.

LJ an admin for the Order

There are multiple reasons why the Order had such a good record when assisting. We were ultra organised. I have never been that good at keeping chaos at bay, luckily several of the admins for the order were very good at it. When the game was in full swing we had a database of every dragon that had ever attacked an order member. We had an ingame intelligence thread, where people reported the element of any dragon they had seen, and then several of the admins would  transfer this information to the data base. This was important because having the right assistant element for any given attack was very useful. We also had members around the globe, so while trainers might sleep the Order never slept.

After some years the game play element of Pet Dragons diminished, but by then I had made a number of friends through the game. I have met several of the dragon trainers in real life. We have shared joy for each other, and shared grief as people playing the game died.

Finally the reason I kept playing the game was The Tavern. Char the Sky Pirate and Scales were the other ever present members of the Tavern, Nosti would often eat breakfast there, and spend long evenings eating wonderful food and drinking merlot. So a final toast from Nosti to Pet Dragons and the Tavern.

Pet Dragons; an appreciation, part one.

A picture for Wisdom Like Silence, my Pet Dragon for PD1

More than twelve years ago I joined an application called Pet Dragons on facebook. Not sure exactly when, but the earliest picture of my Pet Dragon has a date of 22 November 2008. By then the dragon was called Wisdom Like Silence, and the reason I know that is the watermark on the picture, proclaiming that I was a member of the Order of the Rose.

Pet Dragons One was a fairly simple fighting game. People 'adopted' a pet dragon, as far as I can remember each day the dragon's trainer received points to spend on their pet. They could grow the dragon, train it for fighting, or collect gold. The fighting statistic was limited by how big the dragon was, and dragons would also gain fighting strength by losing in fights. The fighting mechanism involved someone raiding another dragon, if they won the raid they would gain treasure, and the defender would lose treasure. There was also a mechanism  so that only dragons in a certain weight range could be attacked. Finally there was a mechanism whereby a dragon under attack could be aided by a facebook friend who also played the game. Attacks took a certain amount of time before they landed, and friends could help if they sent their dragon before the attack 'landed'. The amount of help that could be given was 'capped' and once a capped assistant was in place they could not be bumped, before then stronger dragons could replace weaker dragons.

Dark Lord was one of the strongest t assistants in PD1

The assistance mechanism led to the setting up of a number of unofficial clans, groups of people who would help each others dragons when they were attacked, and who also swapped hints and tips. Because they had to be facebook friends it also led to people connecting via the game. I have a lot of 'Dragon Friends' on my facebook list because of that mechanism. When one was a friend of a dragon under attack you could see the fact that they were being attacked, but not when the attack would land.

I know I had been playing PD1 for some time when I joined the Order of the Rose (hereafter the Order). The game had a lively forum attached to it. In the forum I was recruited to a small group of dragon trainers who would help each other out and try to spread fun and chaos across the game. They had no indication on their dragon pictures that they were a group, had set up their own forum, and knew a trick whereby a dragon could assist another dragon without being facebook friends. So the group were not necessarily all facebook friends. This group wanted me to join the Order and so I did. Nothing nefarious ever came out of that, and I quickly went native as an Order member. One of the main things was to fill in a database of which dragons were being attacked, and try to find out when the attacks would land. The Order had members from around the globe and it was very rare for an Order dragon to be unassisted.

Once Pet Dragons 2 was launched I  became less interested in PD1.

In part two I will do a brief personal history of Pet Dragons Two.

Virtues and Flaws in roleplaying games

Inspired by the discussions that the Grand Tribunal bunch were having  about the future of the game here are some thoughts about merits and flaws. Of course Ars Magica is not the only game that uses them, and amongst the games I have played are the World of Darkness and Exalted games that were published by White Wolf. My thoughts are probably more influenced by WoD than AM. As far as I can remember in WoD games the term merits was used rather than flaws.

Why use Virtues and Flaws?

Plenty of games do not have a virtues and flaws system, and of course the system adds to the complexity of character design for players. More narrative systems tend not to have this mechanism, although there might be an instruction to take some negative character trait this is not explicitly 'balanced' by a merit (I'm thinking of Heroquest and Over the Edge for examples). Other game systems do not have anything equivalent.

One argument for using them is to personalise the character. This seems more important in a game that means the characters will meet others that are similar to them. If there is a community of x type of vampire, mage, wizard or whatever a player might want to make their wizard of type x stand out.

Another argument for using them is that they can act as a signal to the person running the game that a player wants to explore a particular part of the game world. Of course this could also be achieved by just talking beforehand about what people want to get out of the game.

Arguments against using them include the increase in complexity during character design, and they encourage a more min-maxing approach to character development.

Beware the economy of trading flaws for build points

In WoD games flaws could be balanced by merits, or could be balanced by gaining bonus points to spend during character creation. In part because the whole bonus point for character creation and experience point for character development was so badly out of alignment this could lead to some very out of kilter beginning characters. That by itself would only be a problem if the player then used that to hog more screen time than other players.

In AM flaws have to be balanced by virtues. However, there are virtues which give the equivalent of build points, for example Skilled Parens. The shorter the chronicle the more benefit a player's character gains from this trade off. Although if you are like me that just adds to the general feeling of being overwhelmed by all the choices available.

Flaws that affect the whole group should be balanced by virtues that aid the whole group

 In white wolf games the 'Enemy' type flaws might affect the whole group, expecially in those games like Werewolf, Mage and Changeling that encouraged the group to play together; the whole pack would have to deal with the enemy. In games like Vampire, and some Exalted games characters would have personal goals that the enemy could try to thwart that would not negatively affect the whole group. This could lead to all sort of issues, a pack could easily deal with a single enemy; and I have seen some people that run games make the enemy powerful enough to be a credible threat to the group, at that point other characters should also get virtues to make up for the flaw.

In AM these types of flaws would probably be better as Covenant flaws, balanced by a Covenant vritue. This might also apply to some of the other Story flaws.

Then there are flaws like Blatent gift that mean that the rest of the group have to make up for the deficency in some way. It is those flaws that I think should be balanced by virtues  to the other characters and not just the character with the flaw.

Flaws that are not flaws
 
Various of the personality flaws just seem like character description rather than flaws. Across systems I have a particular dislike of over confident.

Final thoughts

Flaws for personalisation seem more important for grogs, and some companions (i.e. companions that don't have a supernatural aspect). Magi have a lot of personalisation options through the choice of Techniques and Forms. 

Writer’s Block notes towards an autoethnography

OK an odd blog post, mostly for me. First a listing of the writing projects that have gone nowhere this year. As I was writing this, if for no other reason than trying to write something, I tried to capture my stream of consciousness about the my process of writing. This, isn’t a real autoethnography.



Description

Writing projects that I done very little work on.

Witch Marks

A Call (or trail) of Cthulhu adventure based on this news story . The idea involved having players playing two characters, one above ground character and one below ground character. The above ground characters would be loosely based on Time Team, and the below ground characters on Most Haunted.

A Mage the Ascension game. Set current day. While the Technocracy ‘won’ the ascension war about 20 years ago since then the Technocracy has been in decline. They no longer get any support from government (some parallels with end of the Cold War), and former embedded agents have been or are being pension off). Meanwhile the forces of anti rationalism are on the rise, the growing conspiracy theories, the rise of popularism, the pressure on the EU, the anti vaccination movement, the wellness movement and so on. The characters will be young, idealist, technocratic mages trying to hold back the forces of anti rationalism. Plenty of newspaper stories have referred to the EU as a technocratic exercise. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/16/europe-technocrats-politics



An idea for a novel, it would involve  some elements of transhumanism (which I think is a silly idea) because I want the central character to live through  a long stretch of the climate crisis. It would also explore this idea https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/climate-crisis-mental-health-environmental-anguish, which coincidentally appeared in the Guardian today, although I have been thinking about it for six months or so.

Finally an idea for a set of blog posts, ‘what I learnt from psychology’ I have half written one of those.

 Interpretation

So as I think about writing something I start thinking about how to write it, and that gets more and more complicated. So for this piece I am imagining writing a series of explainers for the various terms I am using, so a post on what autoethography means, on the RPGs on Cthuhlu and Mage, Transhumanism and so on. Of course that make the thing far too difficult to write. Instead I can use links to wiki.

I have written stuff before, how did that work, not going back to the beginning with this, just after I was working. The book chapters were based on lecture slides. I never wrote lectures, I did write lecture slides, originally directly written on to OHP acetates, then printed on printable slides (lots of printers with melted plastic inside from colleagues who did not check carefully if they were loading the right type) and then finally powerpoint and keynote slides projected on screen. I wrote the slides by imagining what I wanted to say, then writing headlines for that. Occasionally with what I felt were important quotes from research papers, later some links to things like you tube videos in place of quotes. Then I used those slides to guide the subsections of chapters I was writing. A two hour lecture would turn into a book chapter. So my writing process was about turning an ad libbed performance that I had read up on and thought about into a written record. Personally once I wrote those chapters I rewrote the lectures so that the lectures had fresh material compared to the books.

As I was thinking about the above paragraph I began to feel anxious or stressed. My writing process has become enmeshed with the situation at former work. There is a myth that teachers and educators are told; once you have developed your materials the job will get easier. Now I know some people for whom that might be true. A senior colleague when I first joined had files of yellowing paper that they carried into lectures. I have heard other colleagues, when negotiating lecture slots in a series of lectures say things like ‘I have written a lecture on x so I could do that’

In my final term I had a brand new set of (6, 3 hour) lectures to give on Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. For my third year and MSc lectures I would try to do some updating of every session every year and did extensive rewriting of the 12 (3 hour) sessions on social psychology I delivered for the MSc. In my gender and sexuality lecture series (12, 2hour sessionsI used up to date figures on things like sex crime statistics, mental health statistics, also trying to incorporate literature from the prior year. I did no more than try to put right some things that didn’t work for the 6 or so 2 hour lectures I did for the first year lectures (that isn’t all my teaching in the final term). In the balance of duties allocation we had approximately 1 hour preparation time for each 1 hour of lecture. That is impossible unless all that is being done is no change at all. So writing lectures was, in the last decade or so of my job time pressured and stressy. That I still have those feelings now could be explained in terms of Classical Conditioning.

Tentative conclusion

Well I started writing this about 23 hours ago, but I seem to have finished writing it, and it is not as if I have deadlines any more. When I was working I was more productive early mornings, by lunch time my head was just so full of daily stuff I found it hard to be productive. These days I find it hard to start doing any writing until around noon.

Gender and Psychological Distress

Gender and Psychological Distress

You have probably got here because you know me, or know of this blog. However, there is just a chance you got here after a search engine search and were hoping for something helpful. So here are some links out to places that might help. My top four audience sources appear to be the UK, the USA, Russia, and France. I couldn't find an English language site in Russia and have added a world wide one instead.

UK Help https://www.samaritans.org/
USA Help https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
France Help http://www.soshelpline.org/ 

Worldwide https://www.befrienders.org/

I am going to start by extracting some charts from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey for England, data collection done in 2014, published in 2016. It is worth just thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of the survey.

We used to get data for the UK, but now there are different data collection and reporting regimes in the consituant countries of the UK.

It is a household survey, so various groups of people are excluded from the sample, for example prisoners, homeless people, some members of the armed forces, students living in halls of residence, people in hospital.

This is not the same as people who have accessed services, and while the survey is carefully carried out, and there is good training for the people carrying out the survey, it is not quite the same as people going through a diagnostic process.

The survey uses proper sampling techniques, so the sample is not self selecting, and with the caveats I have already mentioned is representative of the population of England.

You might want to look at the earlier examples of the survey to get some idea of trends, but be aware there are differences between precise questions asked and what categories are used.

GAD is generalised anxiety disorder, OCD is obsessive-compulsive disorder, CMD-NOS is common mental disorder not otherwise specified. Statisitical significance in the difference between men and women is found for GAD, phobias, panic disorder and CMD-NOS. The question was about symptoms in the past week.

A third (35.6%) of people identified by the survey as currently having a CMD had never been diagnosed with one. I could not see (but they may be there) any gender breakdown on that figure, which is a shame as one commonly held belief is that men are less likely to seek diagnosis.

Any sex/gender effects are much smaller than the following

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Overall, 3.0%of adults screened positive for current PTSD. While men were more likely than women to have experienced a trauma; there was no significant difference by sex in rates of screening positive for current PTSD (2.6%of men, 3.3%of women).

Suicide attempts

Previous surveys had  reported self harm and suicide attempts together, the current survey recognises that people self harm without intent to kill themselves.

 

This is attempts ever. I will note that women attempt suicide more often than men, and perhaps, while of course it is important that men are more likely to successfully commit suicide, the public frameworking that suicide is a male problem is perhaps unhelpful.

Explanations

There are some researchers who persue the idea that, compared to men, women are biologically vulnerable to psychological distress. Wiener et al (2014)  doi:10.1016/j.eurpsy.2013.05.006, outline this idea

“Studies have consistently shown that oxidative stress is a common feature across major psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD)”

They go on to analyse their data, finding a sex difference in oxidative stress, but their analysis led them to conclude that was not the cause of gender differences in diagnosis.

There has been work on social factors, while the paper I cite is quite old is, in my opinion, an excellent example of the genre.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Larson, J., & Grayson, C. (1999). Explaining the gender difference in depressive symptoms. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 77(5), 1061-1072. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.5.1061

They have an impressive sample size, they used a community based (i.e. not in-patients) sample of 1,100 people aged 25-75. They were measuring depressive symptoms, not diagnosed depression.

“The results of this study suggest that women carry a triad of vulnerabilities to depressive symptoms compared to men: more chronic strain, a greater tendency to ruminate when distressed, and a lower sense of their mastery over their lives. In turn, these variables contribute to each other. So what is a depressed woman, under chronic strain and ruminating or lacking a belief that she can control her life, to do? Helping women achieve a greater sense of control over their circumstances and engage in problem solving rather than ruminating should be useful. Changing the social circumstances that many women face so that they do not have so much to ruminate about is equally important.” p1071

Taking a step back from the individual with psychological distress there are other things going on. The criteria for depression may not include the behaviours that (at least some) men engage in when depressed. Men who seek help may not get a diagnosis, with the normal caveats about memory being unreliable, when I saw a GP aged 17 because a school teacher was worried I may be depressed the GP told me that young men don't get depression, something I found very unhelpful. Less anecdotally GPs may be more likely to diagnose women, and less likely to diagnose men (Lyons and Janca 2009).

So in summary. There are differences between men and women with regard to psychological distress. In the survey cited above there is not a statistically significant difference in depression. Trying to unpick cause and effect is really difficult.