fun theory, utilons, antisphexishness

musashi said that a samurai should use both of his swords, because to die without having used everything at your disposal is a ridiculous waste. so, miyamoto musashi, the first powergamer. because when it's life and death, anything less than munchkin gaming is immoral.

but gaming is really about something else. imagine all-out full-cheese powergaming, it becomes the battle of the one-trick ponies, akuma vs akuma, boring and monotonous.

this is really a player vs player or multiplayer problem, another reason why i prefer single-player: starcraft, half-life, etc. games are about speed and variety, interesting situations, solution/trick/tool comes to mind, and as quickly as you can think of it, it's available.

in games, boredom is worse, thus in many games you can suicide when things go wrong, when the situation becomes Not Fun Anymore. because Game Over isn't really Final Death For Reals.

for leonardo da vinci, concept was more interesting than execution. back in the day, playing ff7, people said there was no way to kill Emerald Weapon without the Underwater materia. i eyeballed the 14minute limit and my underpowered materia, thought hey, close shave but still doable. beating emerald was fun, he could throw curveballs and mess me up. but after killing him, i got bored and never did kill the next one, ruby. what for? i had it dialed in, going through the motions again was superfluous.

PS, the os-tans have been around a while, and there's firefox-tan, opera-tan, but why is there still no chrome-tan?