Weeknotes: 121

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+---
+title: "Weeknotes: 121"
+taxon: weeknotes-2021
+date: 2021-01-10 21:00:00
+---
+
+## Work
+
+This week didn't start out great, with me sleeping through my alarm
+and waking up at about 1pm.  I decided to retroactively take Monday
+off.
+
+The transition from holiday to work is rough.
+
+Other than that, it was business as usual.  A few people are still
+off, so the team's a little quiet, but there's enough to keep
+ourselves occupied.
+
+One tricky problem came up: we deployed the [NCSC password
+blacklist][], to prevent people from signing up with, or changing to,
+the top breached passwords.  For existing users, we can check if they
+have a breached password on sign in, but what about users who don't
+sign in regularly?  Well, we just have to check every password (about
+~44,000 which meet our minimum length restriction) against every user.
+Because we're using good password hashing---a pepper, a random salt,
+and an expensive hash function---this is going to take a while.  Oh
+well.
+
+[NCSC password blacklist]: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/passwords-passwords-everywhere
+
+## Books
+
+This week I read:
+
+- [Toll the Hounds][] by Steven Erikson, the eighth of the [Malazan Book of the Fallen][].
+
+  A very climactic book, with some major characters and plot points
+  being dealt with, with finality.  Malazan started out as a GURPS
+  campaign, and Steven Erikson once said:
+
+  > Believe it or not, the clash of two major characters in Toll the
+  > Hounds was decided on a single roll of the die.  If it had gone
+  > the other... well, I shudder to think.
+
+  I think I know which clash he meant, and the results of that clash
+  will have a major impact on the remaining books, it going the other
+  way would be a pretty dramatic change.  But that's what's fun about
+  RPGs, right?  Rolling the dice and having events develop in
+  unexpected ways.  The way things turned out seems a huge positive,
+  with the other way being very bad; but Malazan is a story *based on*
+  a game, not the story *of* the game, so I'm sure if things had gone
+  the other way, the books would still have been good.
+
+[Toll the Hounds]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_the_Hounds
+[Malazan Book of the Fallen]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen
+
+## Gaming
+
+I finally read about the [Threefold Model][], a predecessor of
+[GNS][], and I definitely prefer it as a model of player goals.
+
+GNS is the most widely known such model, but it's really confusing.
+GNS breaks player motivations down into three types:
+
+- **Gamists** focus on competition and game goals, leading to ideas
+  like D&D-style levelling systems, hit points, and encounter balance.
+  Computer RPGs are generally very gamist.
+
+- **Narrativists** focus on the story, but specifically in taking a
+  step outside the story and focussing on moral and ethical questions,
+  rather than simply on genre tropes.  There's a strong emphasis on
+  "playing to find out what happens" and removing the traditional GM /
+  player split in narrative authority.
+
+- **Simulationists** focus on simulating some experience.  For
+  example, simulating a world by having detailed rules for the
+  "physics", or simulating a story by codifying genre tropes as rules
+  (like PbtA games do).
+
+My major problems with GNS are:
+
+1. It is written as if gamism and narrativism are *the* ways to play a
+   game (with narrativism being *the best* way), and that
+   simulationism is something some people think they like, but they're
+   just mistaken.  GNS adherents can be very pretentious.
+
+2. Simulationism groups two *very* different types of game---realistic
+   gritty world-simulations and unrealistic genre-simulations---under
+   the same umbrella, because they're both "simulating", even though
+   one doesn't care about the story at all and the other is all about
+   the story.
+
+3. Nobody really agrees on what each category means, because the
+   original essay is kind of vague.  As said, simulationism is
+   particularly bad; but gamism and narrativism are also pretty
+   confusing.
+
+I've generally described myself as a "simulationist" gamer---which is
+already unfortunate because GNS seems to look down on us---but one who
+wants to simulate worlds, rather than think about the story.  But
+because PbtA games, which are basically the opposite of what I want,
+are also considered "simulationist" games, the word itself is almost
+completely unhelpful in describing what sort of games I like to play.
+
+
+It's like the GNS authors thought "surely nobody *actually* wants to
+play as if the game world were a real place, because that's just
+tedious."
+
+Enter the Threefold Model.  It's much better.  It breaks player
+motivations down into:
+
+- **Dramatists** focus on the story.
+
+- **Gamists** focus on fair challenges and computer-game-like
+  elements.
+
+- **Simulationists** focus on resolving in-game events
+  "realistically", as if the game world were a real place.
+
+So Threefold-Dramatism covers GNS-Narrativism and the genre-simulating
+aspect of GNS-Simulationism; Threefold-Gamism is the same as
+GNS-Gamism; and Threefold-Simulationism is actually a narrow enough
+category to be useful for describing things.
+
+Since GNS came later, and reads as if narrativism is really the best
+way to play RPGs, I suspect that it came out of the Dramatist
+community wanting to separate people who view "the story" in different
+ways---people who want to play a game with a good story vs people who
+want to explicitly play with the story---but without introducing a
+fourth category.  And I think that was a mistake.
+
+[Threefold Model]: http://www.darkshire.net/%7Ejhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/faq_v1.html
+[GNS]: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/
+
+## Miscellaneous
+
+I backed the [Little Nuns kickstarter][], for an artbook of [these
+nuns with ducks][].
+
+[Little Nuns kickstarter]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/diva01/litttle-nuns
+[these nuns with ducks]: https://twitter.com/hyxpk/
+
+## Link Roundup
+
+- [Steam's login method is kinda interesting](https://owlspace.xyz/cybersec/steam-login/)
+- [A First Look at Info Table Profiling](https://well-typed.com/blog/2021/01/first-look-at-hi-profiling-mode/)