Simpson's Paradox

In ‘A Dark Room’

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Meg

Someone on social media recommended A Dark Room, which sounded great, but I promptly forgot about it. So, thank you, whichever friend suggested this!

I love text-based adventures, probably because I can never decide if I like reading books or playing games more. Doublespeak Games’ A Dark Room opens in, well, a dark room, and most of the story is conveyed in text descriptions, with a resource table. But that format adds to the mystery, rather than interfering with it.

A lot of this game relies on countdown meters, which is one of my least favorite mechanics. Normally, I would roll my eyes and give forth a long rant about designing click-and-wait games, but by the time I realized that clicking to stoke the fire wasn’t just a lead into the starting the game, but actually a core mechanic of the game, the worldbuilding had me hooked. I found scattered teeth in the traps we set, which was enough of a hook for creepiness and for a crafting mechanic that I kept playing.

There was a certain amount of click-and-wait involved, at least until my villagers were producing enough resources that I could tab over to my homework, content that essentials like cured meat and leather were being produced at acceptable rates. Resource management is key to A Dark Room. Once you have some huts, the game’s about taking care of your villagers, so they’ll take care of your resources. Manage hunting, trapping, curing meat, feeding that meat to your iron miners, mining enough iron to make a nice iron sword, and wait, is that a laser rifle lying around in the forest? What’s that doing here? I better investigate…

There’s a lot to discover in this deceptively simple game. All the slightly-off bits of descriptive text add up to a surprising and satisfying ending.

You can get Doublespeak Games’ A Dark Room on iOs or play it n your browser.

Posted in Carrboro, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture | Tagged A Dark Room, Doublespeak Games, games, indie games, iOs | 2 Comments

Essential Chinese: He Has Already Paid

Posted on December 8, 2015 by Meg

I’ve started working a couple days a week at a Chinese restaurant near my house. Now, I’ve complained a great deal about how freaking slow everything is in the south, but that’s working in my favor as I earn endless praise for being mildly efficient at a job that is, objectively speaking, not difficult. Mostly I take phone orders for takeout, and ring up, although I serve a little bit if it gets busy. Also, the American “service with a smile” is bullshit. Fortunately, I work for a Chinese family, who don’t have much interest in employee nametags, dress codes, or obsequious customer service. Here’s your delicious food. Eat it. Here’s your correct change. Take it. Bye.

On one hand, it’s a delight to have free gung bao ji ding, daily Chinese language practice, and a couple hours of downtime between lunch and dinner to study. With my classes going on, it’s not bad to have a job that I needn’t think about outside of work, and where the requirements are basically shower and turn up on time. On the other hand, I had hoped to be doing something a bit more prestigious than food service by my thirties…

When I took the job, I expected to be more helpful with my Chinese, since my strongest vocab involves food, but it turns out that wildly different regional accents and the fast pace restaurant service make it too hard for my baby Mandarin to keep up. I can help out with the occasional request for mai dan or da bao, but besides that, my Chinese skills haven’t been much benefit to the restaurant. (Unless you count the amusement the rest of the staff gets from my toneless Mandarin… and they have stopped ni de zhongwen hen hao! and started telling me I sound like a idiot.)

The advantage has gone the other way, and working here has been really beneficial for my language learning. Learning Chinese in a classroom is usually being told to memorize something, and then repeat it back to the teacher. There is no variation or application of material, just recitation of the assigned sentences. A dialogue will always begin with ni hao because that’s how the book has it. In real life, a person could open a conversation with hello, good morning, nice day isn’t it?, where do I catch the 6 from here?, or watch out, your shoelace is untied. I just don’t have the Chinese skills for that.

But in the restaurant, there are limited common conversations, with some variations. For example, a lot of my job involves handing people their takeout orders (Oh! And I can read the Chinese dishes on the receipts! Food vocab and a limited number of possible options!) and ringing up customers, so I regularly hear and use ta ge chien le ma? (has he/she already paid?) and the answer ge le. or ta bu ge le. The repetition and all the slight variations of usage really make this ideal circumstances for language acquisition.

Also, Mandarin swearing. You guys, I have learned so many different insults and swears! This is a great job!

Posted in Carrboro, Yangzhou | Tagged Essential Chinese, learning Chinese, mandarin, Meg Vs. Mandarin | Leave a comment

Come for the Zombie Slayage, Stay for the Survivor Stories

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Meg

Recently I put Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadville on my phone to play during quiet times at work. (Eventually I’m going to write you a post about my current job, and the hilarious moments as a Mandarin-speaking, er, a Mandarin-understanding white girl working in a Chinese restaurant, but I have been busy with classes and said job, so here are my thoughts on zombie strategy instead.) I picked Rebuild 3 because I really liked Northway Games’ Rebuild. I’m not really a zombie fan, but luckily I was assigned to review it for Hardcore Droid. and really enjoyed playing it. I jumped at the chance to write a Rebuild strategy guide, too, and then here’s a long interview I did with Sarah Northway, also for HD.

Rebuild 3 is still about a band of survivors reclaiming the world after a zombie apocalypse. Survivors can be assigned tasks for the day, like scavenging for supplies, repairing the power plant, crafting materials, or of course killing some zombies. This creates that addictive just-one-more-turn feeling we all love in Civ, but Rebuild adds character development and narrative to the usual strategy game experience. Oh, and I mean the old-fashioned kind of strategy game, where you apply strategic thinking to taking territory or planning attackings, not the appointment-style kind of “strategy game” where you have to wait in real time for development of buildings and units, or when you’re prompted to spend real money to get necessary resources. There’s no premium currency, daily check-ins or click-and-wait here.

New survivors can be rescued from zombie territory, or they can make their own way to the fort and ask to join. Adults can immediately be put to work, scavenging, farming, killing zed or whatever the band of survivors needs. Lost childen can also be rescued and assigned an adult guardian to look after them. I found a lost little girl and adopted her, and it was the cutest part of the zombie apocalypse. There’s a particular trait that makes a survivor enjoy caretaking, and both genders are equally likely to have this trait. (My aesthetic is buff zombie-slaying dudes looking after cute lil babies. What?)

Survivors come with a randomly generated name, appearance, and outfit, but, as you play, you can give them a weapon and an offhand item for extra stats, and they’ll earn perks every so often. These perks are great, blending character backstory and stat improvements, but I had such fun discovering them that I don’t want to say anything else about them.

Players can rename survivors, but definitely don’t take too much care with this because survivors, especially soldiers, don’t always have a long life expectancy. I actually felt really sad when some of my survivors died, especially if they’d been with me a long time, or they were born in the fort, or I got them killed doing something too risky.

My first Rebuild boyfriend got annoying. He kept asking me when we were going to commit to each other, so I felt him behind when I went to the next city. NOT GOING TO MARRY YOU, APOCALYPSE BOYFRIEND! Except I met a new boyfriend in the next city and I decided to marry him. Moving on…

As your survivors reclaim territory and grow their base, they’ll encounter zombies and as well as other groups of humans. Gustav the trader is back, and so’s the biker cult from the first Rebuild. The Government, a new faction devoted to reestablishing bureaucracy in post-apocalyptic Canada, really reminded me of Maia Sepp’s An Etiquette Guide To The End Times. Factions can be friendly or hostile, and relationships will be affected by your fort’s government choices. I had to the run the Last Judgement out of town a few times because they wanted our women to stay off dangerous tasks.

The tech tree is the weak spot in a really great game. Well, the tech itself is great, with clever names for useful upgrades. But in each new city, there are new available technologies to research, while the tech tree resets to zero, so players need to re-research technologies they already had. I was annoyed that I couldn’t research anything cool early on, and I couldn’t even see greyed out future techs in early cities. It also made no narrative sense that my engineers all forgot how to make zombie traps or watchtowers every time we went to a new city. Why, engineers, why?

Overall, Rebuild 3 is a great strategy game mixed with an open-ended, post-apocalyptic storyline.

Posted in Carrboro, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture | Tagged Android, games, Hardcore Droid, Northway Games | Leave a comment

Meaning, Translation, Scraps of Paper

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Meg

Right now, I’m using the backpack I bought in China for my notebook and textbooks, which makes dragging a schoolbag to work in order to study on my breaks slightly less depressing. It’s lovely because I keep finding Yangzhou ephemera in my Carrboro life, and I could use the reminders of my adventure back at home. I find my loyalty card from Sir Coffee or an yi yuan coin tucked in one of the pockets, and I remember that I’m someone who lives abroad and has foreign adventures, even if, at that moment, I’m also someone who’s looking for her car keys.

I’ve ended up with my Yangzhou-Shanghai train ticket as a bookmark, and my Chinese coworker happened to see it.

“A rail ticket?” he asked. “No foreigners ever take the train!”

I smiled, because this is basically independent confirmation that I see The Real ChinaTM and not the lame Tourist China. (Also, I’m still insanely proud of myself for speaking enough Mandarin to buy a ticket. That was several sentences in a row, you guys.)

“Eww, you paid full price for this.” he said, “Why would you do that?”

Posted in Carrboro, Yangzhou | Tagged coffee, Yangzhou | Leave a comment

Comforting Mini-Puzzler in iOs ‘GrowRecovery’

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Meg

I’ve been a bit busy and haven’t written too much here (and another eyeroll at another class is probably on the way), but I recently wrote about playing Grow Recovery for (The) Absolute.

Grow Recovery, though, adds a little narrative to the Grow game formula, showing an exhausted little figure in need of comfort and healing. It’s a simple human outline, but the task of looking after him is surprisingly moving. Each of the items available will make him feel better in a different way, Give him a blanket, and he’ll wrap himself up. Give him a friend, and the friend will help heal him. I think the animation at the beginning of the game is meant to show that the little grow guy is exhausted, but it’s easy to see all kinds of self-care and recovery in this tiny charming game.

The blanket levels up into a pillow and a bed, while the friend levels up into a family. Add food and the friend will cook a nourishing meal. (I was not entirely pleased by the little pink figure cooking a meal for the little blue figure, but since I express my affection through cooking food for people I love, well, that’s a bit of gender stereotyping I can accept.) All the interactions make an adorable self-care mini-sim for your phone.

from (The)Absolute Mag

Posted in Apps, Carrboro, Gaming Culture, My Other Writing | Tagged (the) absolute, Eyezmaze, Grow Recovery, puzzle games | Leave a comment

Kitchen Chinese

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Meg

Just finished reading Kitchen Chinese by Ann Mah. I was pretty much hooked as soon as the protagonist explains she only knows food words in Chinese. Hey, me too!

This turned out to be an awesome story about Beijing expat life, with so many of the tiny details right. Going to Jenny Lu’s for essential home comforts. Eating Beijing duck. Ordering without a menu because all homestyle places have the same dishes. Wait, there was some non-food-related stuff too… The part where the Westerner speaks perfectly good Chinese, and the nervous waitress confirms it with the Chinese-looking person at the table. An angry, hard-drinking Australian expat with a well-hidden heart of gold (ahem). Working in China and how much is guanxi, not qualifications.

A lot of really wonderful novels set in China present a skewed sense of learning the language. I’m not talking about the ones where the foreigner just picks up Mandarin by osmosis (ugh), but usually for a narrative to work, the character’s language skills progress in simple tiers, from random sounds to what John Pasden calls “Fine, it’s a language” to Horrible Spoken Chinese to Not That Great and onwards to Fluency. Kitchen Chinese really showed the terrible frustration in needing a particular word in a normal second-language day, or in getting the tones just slightly wrong and saying something completely different. Of course, as a waiguoren, even when I screw up the basics, most Chinese people can’t stop telling me how great my Mandarin is (pretty sure that’s Chinese for You Tried!), while the ABC protag of Kitchen Chinese gets just the opposite reaction. Beijingren keep telling her to study more, while other Americans condescending tell her that her English is good.

Most of the story is set in Beijing, but there’s a segment set in Shanghai that reminded me so strongly of Adeline Yen Mah’s Chinese Cinderella, and, if I’m honest, of my recent trip to Shanghai when I walked around the French Concession thinking of the family in that book. It was a nice sidetrack, but didn’t fully mesh with the Beijing expat adventures in the rest of novel, and I was a bit confused. Anyway, at the end of the book, I saw that Ann Mah, the author of Kitchen Chinese, is the daughter of Adeline Yen Mah, the author of Chinese Cinderella, which made everything make sense.

Anyway, you should read it, if you like food and Beijing.

Posted in Books, China, Yangzhou | Tagged Ann Mah, Beijing, book reviews, games, Kitchen Chinese | 1 Comment

Attack with PBR and Vinyl Records in Indie Game “Hipster Zombies”

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Meg

Hipster Zombies, available on iOS and Android from indie devs Sharkbomb Studios, is yet another game inviting players to battle oncoming hordes of zombies. But these are hipsterzombies, and in addition to brains, they want old records, black plastic glasses, retro bicycles and cans of PBR!

Players stand behind a makeshift barricade and try to defend their neighborhood (Is it Williamsburg? Greenpoint? Probably is.) from oncoming zombie waves by throwing hipster gear at the zombies. Mechanics are classic and the controls are simple—you’ll move side-to-side with your left hand, while choosing what to throw with your right. The game is free but monetizes on players’ in-app purchases of hipster gear like vinyl records and PBR cans, much like Brooklyn does.

Enjoy the simple game and hipster jokes as you deploy your zombie-fighting powers of irony to battle the undead!

Halloween reprint, from my story Attack with PBR and Vinyl Records in Indie Game “Hipster Zombies” on (the) Absolute

Posted in Game Reviews, Gaming Culture | Tagged (the) absolute, Android, Brooklyn, sharkbomb studios, Zombie Hipsters | Leave a comment

Homework Memories

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Meg

I wrote, in Yangzhou, about how annoying my online class is, but I don’t think I wrote about actually doing the work. One evening in Yangzhou, I was trying to finish my homework so I could go out with my friends. Everyone was meeting at a bar by the water, in fact, most of the crew was already there, and I was hoping to finish my work in time to join them. I remember sitting my room, and texting updates to my friend Rob, who lived upstairs from me, so we could share a cab downtown to meet our friends.

Finishing my homework so I could go out with my friends is not exactly how I expected to spend my thirties, and I’m not sure I expected to do it in China, either, but I plowed through my math problems and met up with Rob. We had a great chat, and an easy ride over, and met up with friends for drinks and laughs by the gorgeous canal. Some parts of Yangzhou are how I imagine ancient China, the hanging willows and curved bridges and arched roofs, and everything now is all outlined in colored neon lights, reflecting in the water. I think about that a lot back in the US.

Anyway, I’m finishing up this class at home now, and every time I open my math lab account, I think of that evening.

Posted in Yangzhou | Tagged Yangzhou | Leave a comment

Bad Airport Day

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Meg

I’d been thinking that I just need one bad China day to make it easier to go home. But I haven’t had one, Yangzhou was wonderful, minus that whole flooded bathroom thing, and my Shanghai girlcation has been filled with writing in beautiful coffeeshops down picturesque alleys and talking walks around a strange and beautiful city. I spent my last evening in Shanghai reading on my porch, and that was lovely, and I was just feeling so sad to leave my amazing Chinese summer.

On my last day, I woke up covered in mosquito bites, and the drizzle made the sprint across the courtyard to the bathroom much less fun. I gathered my things, and I got into a taxi, in the rain. After we drove for a while, the cabbie turned around, and help up one finger, and then two fingers, and then looked at me expectantly for an answer. I asked if we were still going to the airport. He held up the fingers again. I didn’t really get it… but fortunately for me, the cabbie got on the phone with his friend about a minute later, and started talking about the idiot foreigner who doesn’t even know which terminal she’s going to, even though he made it as easy as possible for her. So I figured out what the one and two were for that way. When we talk about learning Mandarin, we often talk about learning styles, people who learn well from conversation, people who learn written characters best, people who memorize HSK wordlists, and so forth. Overhearing other people calling me stupid is my least favorite way to learn.

Harold got a little phone charger/extra battery in a pile of TicketMaster swag a few months ago, and I brought it with me to Yangzhou, where it saved me several times from dead phone disaster. But when I changed planes in Beijing for my international flight, it appeared on the luggage X-ray unrecognized technology, so I found myself trying to explain what a harmless promo it is and why it’s not a security threat or am explosive or anything. Then I realized there weren’t too many situations in which arguing with Chinese customs over my unauthorized technology would work out well for me. So it was confiscated and I got on the plane.

Despite having flown through the Beijing airport literally a dozen times now, I forgot that there’s almost no food after security. Which is just as annoying the twelfth time as the first time.

This flight also included an American adoption group heading home with their new daughters. I loved seeing all those parents, completely in love with their adorable new daughters. And so many cute little babies! Of course, that means there was at least one little cutie screaming, sobbing or whimpering for the duration of the flight. I don’t think I really have a maternal instinct, but the physical horror of hearing babies cry for hour after exhausted hour… I wonder if there is something chemical in it, some kind of female hormone that makes it impossible to detach, relax, and fall sleep when there is a little one so upset nearby. Poor babies.

I rarely feel my age, and by that I mean that I’m excited and excitable, that I still see myself as a young adult, and also that I lack the maturity and responsibility one might expect to have by 30. But when I stay up all night, I’m reminded of my real age. I felt awful when I landed, because sleep is a thing, and when I don’t get it, I am cranky and old, and then I was in Newark, where they let me through customs with no trouble and then wouldn’t let me back through security because my ticket was in Chinese. So there’s that.

Actually, I’m pretty sure this is a bad airport day, not a bad China day.

Posted in Yangzhou | Tagged Harold, Yangzhou | Leave a comment

Notes From Shanghai

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Meg

I haven’t written as much as I expected to write About China, because I’ve been experiencing a reverse Dunning-Kruger on this trip. I’m realizing more and more the immensity of what I don’t yet understand about China, and so whenever I start to write travel commentary, I couch it with all these qualifiers, and I sometimes despair of making enough sense of China to write anything that friends at home could enjoy and understand.

But, Shanghai.

in China, simple things often turn out unexpectedly complicated for me. Like measure words, that toothpaste that turned out to be tea flavored, not mint, the time I ordered an entire chicken, er and liang, and all the other times I’ve been pretty sure that Mandarin is just screwing with me.

But, exploring Shanghai, with the tree-lined avenues of fashionable shops, and the bikes down small alleys, and massive chrome buildings, and the speed of a real city, with endless cafes of wonderful coffee, is exactly like I imagined.

Posted in Yangzhou | Tagged coffee, travel | 5 Comments