Vormithrax is basically the Lobos of Cataclysm. He plays the game with challenges that'd make it impossible for other people to survive even for a few minutes.

While his challenge runs are stunning, it is annoying that there *is* a meta.

In each, "normally I'd ___ but I can't do it so easily now, so ___"
What usually happens is someone watches a Cataclysm video, gets it, and then dies.

Then dies and dies and dies, having tons of fun in the process.
And then they learn the meta.

Grind slings to level crafting, search bushes to level survival. Make a knife spear. Stop making a knife spear, they nerfed it.
And before you know it, every game starts the same way. Like a video game, not an apocalypse simulator, or a story generator.
Cataclysm, like Dwarf Fortress or Crusader Kings, is a story generator. It pumps out narrative.

The existence of a meta, an optimal way to minmax munchkin it, removes that narrative generation unless done carefully.
Vorm gets around that, still generating stories, by constraining himself in weird ways.

He has to *work* to avoid falling into that meta.
In Cataclysm, or Project Zomboid, there's an established meta for the zombie apocalypse. Almost a chess opening or joseki, a formal series of tasks to do for optimal results.
This bothers me, the encroachment of video gamey mechanics on narrative generation.
It's not a technical problem with a technical solution. Like DPS in dark souls, there's an objective, knowably optimal strategy governed by the game mechanics, even if it makes little sense from the story perspective.
It's almost like a generalization of ludonarrative dissonance.

"Oh yeah I'm gonna help you find your father. First wait a sec while I take my sweet time looting everything in here not nailed down"
"Oh no the princess is in danger!"

*calmly loots every single broken rake in the village before leaving to find her*
But in this case, it's the inescapable dissonance of video game mechanics themselves inevitably hampering narrative generation.

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So you want to generate interesting melodies.

1. Make a file called 1235.txt containing, one per line, all 24 unique permutations of the elements 1 2 3 5.


2. Cp 1235.txt to D.txt

3. Use sed to convert the numbers in D.txt to notes. Now you have 24 permutations of the major tetrachord in D.

4. Play them each. If it sounds like it increases tension, mark the beginning of that cell in 1235.txt with a +. If it sounds like it decreases tension, mark with a -.

Now those 24 melodic cells are divided into two groups: tension increasers and resolvers.

5. Rinse and repeat for all 12 keys.

You now have 13 plaintext files, filled with stuff like + 1 2 5 3 and - D E F# A

6. Figuratively roll dice to decide, given a +/- cell, what the next cell should be.

33% chance a + follows a +, etc.

Now you're outputting a stream of dynamic tensions: ++-+++-+-+---+ etc

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