Reverse Difficulty in RPGs

This weekend, I finally decided that I would buy myself an X-box 360. I have not had the console anywhere near enough time to write a review, but it led me to thinking about something else, as a consequence of the game I purchased — Mass Effect.  Now, I already have a review of Mass Effect here, and it wasn’t very positive, so you might wonder why I bought it (a second time) for the X-box. There were a couple of reasons. First, it was on sale ($20). Second, as I said in the review, part of the problem seemed to be my dinosaurian computer system.  I heard from other friends that the game was much smoother on the console.  And so I tried it, and it is definitely much better on the console. When I finish it (assuming that I eventually do), I will be giving it a re-review.

Mass Effect, as you might know, is a Bioware game, which means it’s a computer RPG.  It is like most other RPGs in that you start out as a beginning (“Level 1″) character and the character slowly becomes more skilled and gains better equipment over time.  You can select from about 6 different classes. I chose (again, because I thought it was an interesting class last time) the “Infiltrator”, which is kind of a mix between electronics powers and soldiering skills.  What I like most about them is the sniper rifle.  I was reading up a little about the class on the Bioware forums, just to get some advice on the types of skills that help the most, and someone made a comment that was interesting, and got me thinking about RPGs and the difficulty level. The comment was, “It gets easier as you level up.”

Before I go any further, I want you, gentle reader, to think about that statement, because it is a general truth of how most RPGs — from Dungeons and Dragons to MMORPGs to Mass Effect — are structured.  Let me repeat it: It gets easier as you level up.  It’s true for almost all RPGs (the one exception I can think of is the Pen-and-paper game Champions), and I think it’s a bad thing. I want to discuss why I hold that opinion.

What do I mean by “easy”?

I’d like to discuss why this happens, but first let me define “easier” relative to “harder.” The ultimate failure in an RPG is for the character to die. In pen and paper games this is often permanent. In computer games it usually “resets” you somehow — you load from a save game, or respawn at a spawn point, or lose some experience, or something of that nature.  Therefore, death is the ultimate consequence.  Speaking in general terms, therefore, a hard game would be one in which death was frequent or difficult to avoid, and an easy game would be the opposite.  I recall my first D&D adventure. There were just two of us — my friend Stu, who was the DM, and I, who was the player. We wanted a “full party” but there were only two of us, so we each made up five characters, and then I played all 10 by myself, while he DMed and ran the NPCs.  It was a lot of fun, but even with multiple raise dead scrolls and all sorts of DM intervention and assistance, only 6 of the 10 PCs made it out of that (very long) adventure alive.  That’s a 40% mortality rate of our level 1 characters.   In the next adventure, of which I was the DM and he played all 6 characters, there was only 1 death by the end (one that “stuck” after scrolls and the like, anyway), so that’s only a 17% mortality rate.  Clearly the second adventure was easier than the first.  Our final adventure with this group had no deaths out of five, or a 0% mortality rate. I’d call that one the easiest.

Therefore, having an “easier” time in an RPG means “you have an easier time keeping your character alive.” The battles are less likely to be lethal. The enemies are easier to defeat. The traps are less likely to be sprung, and if sprung less likely to kill you.  And my assertion is that these things become easier as you level up the character.

Why it gets easier as you level up

There are a few reasons why RPGs become easier as your character levels up, quite apart from the obvious cause in any game — the gamers become more experienced.  In a regular, non-RPG, this is the only thing that really makes a game easier — you get better at it.  Turn on Madden NFL or Major League Baseball XXII, and set the game to “normal.” You will find over time that the games later in the season seem easier (notice, I didn’t say “get”, I said “seem”), because for a given (e.g. normal) setting, the game’s difficulty is constant, but after playing 16 or 100 games, or however long the season is, you, as a player, are better. That’s always going to happen, in any game, because humans learn by doing.

However, in RPGs, there is another layer of experience gain layered on top of the experience of the player, and that is the experience of the character.  As a character levels up, many things happen. He usually gains more hit points, and that makes him harder to kill.  He gains attack ability, which gives him (1) more options of ways to defeat enemies, and (2) the ability to damage enemies more or faster. And he will gain non-combat skills, like trap detection or conversation manipulation skills. This will make it easier to find and disarm traps, or to convince NPCs to do the character’s bidding.

These changes, these advances in character power, make the character less likely to die than he was in earlier adventures, and thus, make the game easier as you go.  A higher level Infiltrator in Mass Effect, to use the first example, has an easier time of it because his snipe ability gets better.  A higher level wizard in D&D can cast Power Word Kill, and one-shot kill an enemy, or Meteor Shower, which is like a multi-cast fireball.  At first level he was lucky if he could fire a single magical crossbow bolt out of the palm of his hand once a day.  At higher levels, the thief or rogue can detect traps from across the room while half asleep. At low level he could stare right at the trap and miss it.

Hopefully, as the above paragraphs indicate, this is something that happens in most RPGs. It happened in Dungeons and Dragons. It happens in Mass Effect. It happens in most MMORPGs. The characters’ survival rate goes up as they gain experience, because the experience gains lead to character improvements that make the game easier to play.

Why are games designed like this?

By now, I will assume I have convinced you that RPGs get easier to play as the character levels up. I hope you’re already thinking about where I’m headed with this, which is that games shouldn’t be designed to get easier as you go forward.  But before we get there, you might want to wonder why games are designed in such an obviously reverse orientation (you would expect challenge to go up as players get more experienced, not down). There are some reasons for this, which are the following:

• Easing players into the game. Although it’s true for pen and paper, this is especially important for computer RPGs, where the game is played in real time and there is little chance to think (as there would be in a Pen-paper game). The player has to learn to react quickly to his surroundings or else his character will die.  If you started characters with 20 or 30 abilities, all showing up as buttons on the hot bar, the new player would be overwhelmed.  In video games, then, it makes a certain amount of sense to start the character out with only one or two simple abilities, and then add one every couple of levels.  The new ability can then be practiced for a while until the player becomes comfortable with it, by which time he’s gained a few levels and it’s time for a new ability.  I have no objection to this line of reasoning and I would not suggest changing this aspect of it — go ahead and start with few abilities and then increase them.
• Lower level characters don’t need mega-abilities. Many games withhold the “mega” powers, like Power Word Kill or Meteor Swarm, to the higher levels because, for lower level characters, these abilities would be overkill. When a single dagger does enough damage to 1-shot an orc, there’s no need for Power Word Kill, a spell whose main claim to fame is that it can one-shot an enemy.  You need that in the higher levels, where it would take 100 dagger strokes to kill a foe, and one-shotting him is therefore very useful.  I have no problem with this line of reasoning either.
• Characters become more powerful as they gain experience. Most games are designed to follow a story much like a fantasy novel or a comic book. It is a standard convention of the genre that older, more experienced characters are more powerful.  Although this is a sound principle, this is where the wheels start to come off, because “being powerful” becomes equated with “being harder to kill.” And since the main thing that makes an RPG difficult is dying, becoming more powerful = harder to kill = easier to play.  And here is where we get caught in the inescapable quicksand of pretty much all RPG design with the possible exception of Champions.  When characters become more powerful the challenges need to become equally more powerful. And I will grant that RPGs try to do this… The Malta in COH, a level 45-50 enemy group, are more powerful in absolute terms than the Skull gang. But the problem is that the power increases of PC vs. NPC do not match, so that a level 50 PC is 50x as powerful as a level 1, but the enemies are only maybe 25x as powerful… making the high level enemies an easier challenge for the player, than the low level enemies were.

Why making the game easier as the character levels up is a bad idea

Now I’m going to get to the point of this whole post: Why this is a bad idea.  The reason should be blatantly obvious but I will spell it out.  Although you can sometimes have a level 1 character played by an experienced player, you will pretty much never (under normal conditions) have a level 50 character played by a newbie, and all new players generally have to start out at level 1.  The player is gaining experience as the character does. It makes no sense to present the most difficult challenge to the player and then make the game easier as the player gets better. That’s why so many RPGs and especially MMORPGs get boring in the upper levels.  The game is super hard early on because you are weak, have few abilities, and can die in one shot (Magic-users in 1st edition D&D with 1d4 hit points, anyone?).  Then as you gain levels, it slowly becomes easier as the character’s ability to soak up hits increases.  What’s going on here is that higher level characters give their players much more margin of error. But a wide margin of error is needed by new players, not veterans — so why are we increasing the margin of error as the character (and by extension the player) becomes more experienced?  That’s what I call a bad idea.

Before anyone tries to claim that this lowering of difficulty as you go up in level is an illusion, I want to provide a few examples of how it’s not just all in my head.  The two I will use will be Dungeons and Dragons from pen-and-paper, and City of Heroes from MMORPGs.

In Dungeons and Dragons, weapons do a fixed amount of damage. A dagger always does 1d4. A longsword always does 1d8.  Higher level enemies might have a small additive bonus to their attack (e.g., 1d4 +2), but that’s all. Hit points, however, go up much faster than damage bonuses do. In 1st edition AD&D for example, most NPCs got +1 to hit and damage per level, but even the weakest class (in terms of hit points), the  Magic-User, got +1d4 hit points per level, meaning that he rapidly outstripped the dagger’s damage. Thus a level 1 mage attacked by a dagger-wielding kobold had a 1 in 4 chance of insta-death. By level 10, that mage would have (on average) about 25 hit points, but the level 10 kobold (still wielding a dagger) would be doing 1d4 +10 (at most), averaging less than half the number of hit points per blow as the mage has, and making it impossible to one-shot him.  (We are leaving aside spells the mage could use to buff his hit points, whether the mage has a CON bonus, and other possible weapons, just to make the example easier).  Now, later editions of D&D have done some to correct this, but the problem still remains: at low levels, one or two hits can kill you. At higher levels, it takes a dozen hits to kill you. This dramatically increases the player’s margin of error, making it much harder to die by accident at higher levels. But again, it’s the new players that are more likely to make mistakes, so why aren’t they the ones given the higher margin of error?

Or, consider the game City of Heroes. I played a martial arts/super reflex scrapper to level 50.  Then I played more characters. Then I made up another MA/SR scrapper. At level 1, I had a much harder time surviving than I had with the same (essentially, other than name/costume) character at level 50. Why? Well, first, over level 25, I had health and stamina, which helped my character recover faster. Over level 25, I had “Single Origin” enhancements which could basically double the power and accuracy of my character.   Enemies get a little more versatile as you go up in level in COH, but they don’t become more powerful relative to your character. It takes about 3 kicks with martial arts to bring down a white conning enemy at level 1, and about 3 to bring him down at level 50.  Because living long enough to deliver 3 kicks is harder at level 1 than at 50, that means the game at level 50 is easier. In fact, at higher levels I used to talk on the phone or watch a video while playing the game, and not die once in a long mission. If I tried that at level 5 there would be a lot of face-plants. And remember, I’m not talking about back when I was a new player… I mean after I already had gotten the same character type to level 50.

I could give a lot more examples, but for the sake of space I will end with those.  The point here is that RPGs, by their very nature, almost always get easier for the player as the character levels up. This is a bad idea, because it’s the new player, not the veteran, who needs the easier experience, and yet it is the level 1 experience that is, in most games, the most difficult to survive.

Solutions

So what possible solutions are there?  When giving the reasons why the difficulty goes down as level goes up, I didn’t really disagree that the reasoning in most cases was sound. We do want to ease players into the game by giving them less options and thus hopefully less confusion. We do want to have characters grow in power as they gain levels. But there needs to be some sort of increase in the power level of the enemies as well, perhaps also an increase in AI… something to make the difficulty higher as you level, and lower at the start.  So here are my basic suggestions:

• Give the best AI to the highest level enemies. A few games give a token nod to this idea, but I’ve not seen anyone do it well yet.  The higher level AIs should be smarter, not just more powerful.
• Give new characters (and new players) some “panic buttons”. Things like (full h.p.) healing potions or scrolls of invincibility seem to only crop up at higher levels, when the characters are able to cast those same spells or do those same things. Here’s a news flash for game designers: a high level character is probably never going to need a scroll of invincibility. He is already nigh-invincible. The guy who needs it is the level 2 with the newbie player, who doesn’t realize that poison arrows are done as a “save or die” roll.
• Give low level characters a bigger margin of error. This really has to do with the problem of hit points and “how many hits” you can take.  One way or another designers need to make sure that level 1 characters can take as many hits as level 10 or 20 characters.  If you are expecting a new player to be able to make all the right decisions or else die in one shot, you are asking for trouble in terms of player frustration.  I veteran player may know how to deal with potential one-shots. A new player will not.
• Start the game out slowly and then speed it up. One big problem with computer games is speed.  Right now the idea is to give players few abilities to start with and then add more abilities as they level up. This effectively “speeds up” the game slightly as the player has to train himself to consider more and more options over time.  But it’s not the only way to speed things up. You could have things actually go more slowly at lower than at higher levels.  Have enemies attack, for instance,  once every 4 seconds at level 1, every 3 seconds at level 10, every 2 seconds at level 20, and so on.  (I am not suggesting these actual timings but just the idea of having it speed up over levels.)  Let the player ease into the speed rather than easing into the options.  Too often the game play speed doesn’t change, so if the player is having a hard time at level 1, there is no remedy but to somehow level until it “gets easier” (that is, the character lives long enough that the speed is no longer an issue).

I’m sure there are other ways to deal with this, but those are four obvious ones that came to my mind as I was thinking about this. New players are going to be poor players by definition — why give them the hardest time? The vets are the ones who can handle the tougher game-play.

You may be thinking “well that sounds good but it can’t be done.” I’m not so sure. Most non-RPG based games are already doing this. Most racing games start you out on easier tracks against slower cars and dumber (in terms of AI) opponents and then ramp it up as you complete races and prove that you can handle it.  Most fighting games in the vein of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat are the same way. Arcade games have been doing this for years. Each wave of Space Invaders or level of Pac-Man was basically identical except each went slightly faster.

Right now, most RPGs and especially CRPGs and MMORPGs are designed in reverse difficulty order… they make the lower levels harder than the higher levels, which makes it so that veteran players are facing substantially easier challenges than newbies are.  I can’t see how this could be thought of as anything but backwards, and although I know it has been a part of RPG design for as long as there have been RPGs, I think it’s a bad idea… and that designers need to re-think the whole thing.

Wow that was fast…

As readers of my blog will know, I tried the Open Beta Test of Champions Online back in August. My view of it was not very favorable, and my gut instinct after that weekend was to beg off.  However, a good friend of mine was really into it, and for some reason I found, after Open Beta (OB) ended and the pre-launch period began, that I was missing it.  I’m not even sure what aspect of it I missed, to be honest. But I turned it over in my mind for the time between OB and Launch (on Sept 1) and decided that I’d go ahead and get it (as I explain in the comments of that first post).

I played the game for about two months, and I have to say for the first 10 levels or so, the first maybe 10 days, it was fun.  Then as I got into the higher levels, all the flaws I had noticed in OB started to reassert themselves — or rather, they’d been there all along but the shiny newness of the game and in particular the fun of gaming with a friend of 30 years again, obscured those faults.  I won’t get into the flaws here, as I’ve already discussed those in my earlier post.

Again, if you’ve read my blog, you know that I am a roleplayer, and that I usually try to find a roleplay-oriented guild (or in CO/COH parlance, “Supergroup”) to join, as I find that enhances the experience. And so right away, I went looking for RP organizations in CO. I found a site called “Champions Online Roleplayers”, or CORP, and they had a listing of supergroups.  I looked around for one that matched both my style and my character’s, and I found one. It seemed fairly active, and had a simple enough application process, so I applied to them.  I had an interview/RP session in a day or so, and was duly accepted into the team.  They were good people, and I had fun with them for a few weeks, until the game wore on me to the point that I started logging in only for the RP sessions. And while those are good, I’ve been down this road before, and I know enough that once I stop playing the game for its own system, it’s time to go.  I canceled my account yesterday, and thus ends my adventure into the Champions Online arena. I doubt if I’ll be back, but you never know.

Now, that’s not what the title (“That was fast”) is about.  The interesting thing about this guild, and the thing that was “fast”, is the vast difference in speed between joining and leaving it.  Although the application/approval process only took a couple of days, it took them something like a week and a half to get my board permissions set up. I had to ask repeatedly, and finally after the third or fourth time it was rectified. In the mean time, for the first 10 or so days I was on the guild, I could not read any of the private areas of the guild forum, despite the fact that I was entitled (conceptually, if not in “forum code bits”).  So, it took them a really long time (relatively speaking) to get the board permissions changed for “off” to “on.”

What I find interesting, and more than a little ironic, is how much faster they were at revoking my permissions when I informed them of my departure. I want to be clear that I left under no acrimony whatsover. I never said or posted anything negative there about the game (and I don’t think they know that this blog is in any way connected with my login on their forum, as the names are not related, and I’ve never mientioned it).  I have never said anything negative about the game on their in-game chat channels. So even though I was thinking highly critical thoughts about Cryptic Studios and Champions Online, they could not have known about those, and I had not done anything to upset anyone in the slightest (so far as I know).  I participated in their RP and my relationship with them was 100% friendly. I point this out because they had no reason to suspect, as one might suspect with an acrimonious split, that I might post anything vile or do anything damaging to their forums.  And yet, literally within a few hours of posting my very simple resignation — a resignation in which, even on the point of departure, I did not criticize the game, citing only a “lack of time” as the reason for leaving — my posting status had been changed to “retired.”  I realized this mainly because the number of visible forums upon logging in changed from morning to afternoon. At that point, I thought, “Wow, that was fast!”

I want to make it clear, that I have no problem with them revoking my membership status. They should have done so, and I don’t mind that it was done at once.  It shows they are on the ball. But I thought it was slightly humorous that they were so efficient at revoking membership, while they were so slow at awarding it.  It seems to me they’d be better off doing the reverse.  When a new player comes in, you want that player active and involved ASAP. At once. You don’t want the player to have to wait days, or more than a week, to be able to read guild posts or make posts himself.  Although I liked the group there was a general lack of efficiency in the admin corps, and I wonder if this doesn’t show why — they’ve got their priorities a bit skewed, perhaps.

At any rate, both my membership status change, and more generally my membership in both guild and game, were pretty fast. And now I’m looking for something else to fill the time with (game-wise). For now I am trying to work on a Sims 3 Legacy. I’ve never taken one past the 3rd generation. We’ll see how it goes.

You can lead a man to college…

Back when I was a high school senior, one of the things you had to do was generate a yearbook quote (I assume this is still the case) .  I worked in a local public library after school, and so I checked out a couple of books of quotations to try to find a good one.  I found three or four, and I debated which one to select. Finally I chose one, and I sadly can’t remember who first said it (a Google search turned up hundreds of conflicting attributions):

You can lead a man to college, but you cannot make him think.

At the time, I simply thought it was clever, and since all my friends were going to college, it was a way for me to give them a bit of teasing. Of course, it is a play on an even older quotation, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”

As those who read this blog with any regularity know, I am a college professor. Every so often, when interacting with my classes, I am given occasion to recall that quotation.  Just such a moment happened late last night.

I teach an upper-level biology class for seniors. One of the class requirements, for a good chunk of the grade (15%), is to write a paper. I assigned the paper on the very first day of class. Now, knowing students will procrastinate until the very last minute and not even start it unless I force them to do so, I had certain “landmarks” set up through the semester. By mid-September, 1 month after the start of class, they were to have topics selected. The day this was due, I even took them physically over to the library and had a librarian show them how to research their topic, just in case that somehow, by their senior year, these students didn’t know how to do that. By mid-October (tomorrow, in fact), the students are to hand in an outline of their paper, and include with it a bibliography listing at least 5 sources that will be used in their paper. In November a rough draft is due, and then a final draft is due in December.

Unfortunately, even this landmark system is not foolproof, because the students can still hose themselves by waiting until the last minute. For example, more than half the class waited until the day in the library, the last possible day, to choose a topic… meaning that they rushed in their choices, and didn’t do the smart thing — which would have been to spend the whole first month checking on whether their topics were viable (whether there was enough literature to support an 8-10 page paper, in other words).  And so I led them to the water but they didn’t drink the first time.

That having happened, you’d hope some of them would have wised up, but apparently not. Last week, when I reminded them that in one week they had to turn in their outlines, the room was full of shocked, panicked faces. Again, this has been on the course syllabus since August, and we went over it the first day of class… but they seem to have not written it down or noticed it explicitly.

And now we come to last night. After all the landmarks, and the reminders, last night at 8:07 PM, only 40 hours before the outline is due, one of my students e-mailed me and asked me if I could tell her what her topic was.  Now what does this mean?

First, it means that she hasn’t started to make her outline until two nights before the due date. But it’s actually worse than that. It means that in the 1 month since she chose her topic, she apparently has not done any research at all. That means that her outline couldn’t have been any good anyway — she hasn’t looked up or read any papers, articles, or book chapters about her topic.  She certainly won’t have time to do that in just over a day and a half.

Her e-mail, then, tells me that she has done exactly zero work on her paper in the two months since she was given the topic.  So even though I tried to lead her by the nose through her project, she didn’t do it.

And so as somebody wise once said, “You can lead a man to college, but you cannot make him think.”

Absolutely nothing on this site has ever been paid for.

The Federal Trade Commission is apparently enacting a regulation requiring all bloggers who have been paid to review a product, to say so in a conspicuous and clear way somewhere in the text associated with their review. I’m of two minds about this, but before I get into my comments about the new regulations, I want to be perfectly clear:  nothing on this site, not one review, not one comment, not one byte of information, has ever been paid for in any way. I don’t work for any of the companies about whose products I have provided opinions. I don’t work for the guys that I’ve given positive reviews, like Samsung or Company of Heroes. And I don’t work for the competitors of the guys I’ve given bad reviews, like Spore or Champions Online.  I’m a consumer, who has no connections to any of the products about which I write… I’m a consumer who doesn’t like being burned, and who gets tired of being unable to find good reviews by fellow consumers about the products he has tried to buy. For example, one of the reasons I gave a long, wordy review of the Samsung HDTV that I bought last year, is because I couldn’t find many good, reliable, thorough reviews of HDTVs anywhere.  Doing these little reviews is my way of providing a little bit of service to my fellow consumers out there.  So again to be clear… I’ve not received any kickbacks, and I don’t work for anyone whose games or products I have reviewed. Never have.

Now about the new regulation, as I say, I am of two minds. My gut reaction, my first thought, is that this is regulation of speech, and the government ought not to be in the business of regulating bloggers.  And I think that argument to some degree will hold up no matter what.

However, it is also the case that many online reviews are hard to rely on for just the reason that is making the FTC crack down: some of the people doing this are shills. I remember, again when I was looking into HDTVs, asking a friend who is really up on electronics for his advice and we were checking out websites (he from his computer, me from mine, while chatting on Yahoo! chat) for reviews. One thing he said right away: if a product has less than 100 reviews, discount the review average and most of the reviews. He said that companies pay people to log in multiple times and post lots of good reviews. Now he figured most companies don’t have people do this 100 times, but more like 10 times… so if you see something with hundreds or thousands of reviews, the bulk of those are probably honest. But if you see something with just 5 positive reviews, those are probably at least some shills, and possibly all shills.

It’s disappointing but not surprising that companies do this, and unfortunately it cuts down the value of these reviews. It’s also the case that some review sites, especially for games, are known to take money from the companies who then give them games to review.  Most of these sites claim that there is no obligation to give a positive review, but… just how much can we believe that? I find it a tough pill to swallow.

And so in the interests of consumer protection, I can definitely see the FTC’s side of this.  I want blogs to be as free as any other speech, but if someone has written a review on which I might base a purchasing decision, and that person is working for the company that made the product, I want to know it, so I can discount that review and look elsewhere.

My big problem is, how do we prove this? Let’s say the FTC notices all the game reviews on this site, and starts suspecting that maybe I’m one of the shills. How do I prove I’m not? That part is not clear. They say if you are being paid by someone you have to reveal it, but if you aren’t, how do you prove you are not under any obligation to reveal anything (since there’s nothing to reveal in the first place)? That part is not readily apparent from the article about this… maybe it will be cleared up in the future.

In the mean time, to reiterate — I’ve never been paid to write one sentence on this blog… I make no money from it, no compensation of any sort. I only wish I did! But alas…

ED gets a facelift

I’ve had this blog for a couple of years now, with my posting activity varying from nearly-daily at some points, to barely once a month at others.  I had one theme the whole time — “Ocean Mist” — which has been a great theme. But, it’s time for a change, so I decided to try another one.

The current theme is called “Rubric” and I like it quite a bit. It still feels slightly odd, because I got so used to the Ocean Mist theme. It’s sort of like moving into a newer apartment. Even though it was time for a change and I wanted the change, the new place doesn’t feel quite like “home” for a while.

Of course, I might decide that I want to go back to the old theme, or try yet another theme, after trying this one for a few weeks. We’ll just have to see what happens.

I’d also like to try to make posts here more frequently, because I do enjoy it… but I just have to carve out the time to do so. So what’s been taking up my time?

Well, first of all, I’m busier at work than I’ve ever been. I’m on more committees now than ever before, and I’ve taken over coordinating one of the large (700+) non-major courses. So that gives me less free time to begin with.

Then, on my free time, I’ve started doing a lot more reading lately.  I have always loved to read books, but at some points in my life, including recently, I allowed reading to take a back seat to things like video games or (ahem) blogging.  Late in the summer, though, I got back into reading again. I went to the local Barnes and Noble, mostly looking for nature books or perhaps something interesting on evolution. I did find one, Ersnt Mayr’s book What Evolution Is.  But that’s an older one (ca. 1999) and there was nothing else really interesting in the nature section of the store.

For some reason, I wandered over to the mystery section, and what hit my eye was a shelf of Agatha Christie novels. Now, I haven’t been a mystery reader since I stopped reading the Three Investigors books when I was younger. After reading Lord of the Rings I became almost exclusively a fantasy/sci-fi reader (in terms of fiction). But as I looked at the Christie novels, I remembered a friend of mine who, in high school, had spent one summer reading almost every one of her books from our library (where I worked, at the time). He raved about her, so I decided to give her books a try. I purchased the first Hercule Poirot novel (Poirot is Agatha Christie’s main detective, appearing in dozens of her novels), The Mysterious Affair at Styles.  This book was really enjoyable — a quick, easy read; a good, interesting mystery; and a fun detective character in the star, Poirot.  I quickly went out and bought a couple more, and then a couple more… and now I am on something like the 8th or 9th Poirot novel, and the next one is perhaps the most famous — Murder on the Orient Express.

Reading’s keeping me somewhat busy, so I haven’t been blogging as much. When I do sit down for some free time at the computer I’ve been playing Champions Online some… but it’s just not addicting me the way most MMOs do. I play maybe an hour a night, if that. Just tonight I played 45 minutes, got bored, and logged off to — you guessed it — read more Agatha Christie.

At any rate… the blog has a new appearance, a facelift, as it were. I look forward to people’s comments about whether they like this new theme better, worse, or the same, as the old one. I’m open to bringing the old one back if everyone’s just in love with it, but I do ask that we all give the new one a try first, before deciding we want to go back.