Yeah, I’m back on Shapeshifter again, that amazingly difficult puzzle game on Neopets.
I’ve been thinking about getting back in that race again. I burned out on the puzzle back in September, but I have been getting encouraging notes from people urging me not to give up. There’s a strange community of solvers out there. People get up to about 25 on their own, then get stumped and either give up or try to write a solver.
Anyway, I somehow acquired a mentor who is going to give me encouragement and algorithmic help on my road to level 100. I’ve just done levels 80 and 81 without any significant code changes, though I did download the Python-C compiler onto my dual core machine so I could pump up the performance of my current, Python-based solver.
Now I want to translate it all into Java and multithread it, see what happens there…
It’s still a long distance to 100.
3 thoughts on “Oh no, not SHAPESHIFTER again…”
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Did I just enter some strange world of Hardcore neopets?
Yeah, you did.
You probably weren’t reading last year when I discovered the adult Neopets community. Not adult as in raunchy or child predators, but adult in that they were playing the Neopets games at a higher level. Some of the games, like the robust economy or the stock trading simulation, would be challenging or impossible for Neopets’ tween audience. The particular puzzle I am doing is easy for children for the first six levels, which gets you a badge in the game. But the game continues on until level 100, and after awhile, you have to be able to get some help from your trusty computer. And that leads into a shadowy world of carefully protected and prized algorithms and implementations.
I started another blog, She Who Shapes, to talk about Shapeshifter and the algo needed to solve it, but the thing consumed all my free time; I’d come home from work and sit right down and implement any new approaches I’d thought of while at work, study the code of other solvers and work on the puzzles themselves, trying to find out just by looking if it would be an easy one or a hard one.
I went through dozens of different search algorithms I found on Wikipedia and papers online, tried a bunch of different tree pruning algorithms, tried to figure out if a particular search tree had any hope of finding a solution as soon as possible, and so on.
It’s just madness. That’s when I realized the most important difference between a child’s puzzle game like Shapeshifter, and MMOs. Playing MMOs was making me stupid. Playing Shapeshifter was making me SMARTER.
And that got me wondering how we could add challenge to MMOs to make the time playing make you a better person as well as provide a good time?
We sit, passive, in front of our computers, moving our avatars around, but whatever we do in the game doesn’t make us better people. Probably the opposite, in fact. MORE sedentary. MORE passive. MORE receptive to advertising and empty entertainment. MORE pliable.
WHY don’t people make MMOs that challenge you and make you GROW? Friggin WoW has DOZENS of add-ons to remove any challenge that game might have. It is making people lazier than ever! They press a button, they get their food pellet! They are HAMSTERS. At least that’s what Blizzard wants them to be.
We have to turn away from this. We have to be able to enjoy our games without becoming hamsters.
That’s what Shapeshifter taught me, and that’s why I play it.
That. Was an excellent response! I think for these reasons, we must remember to take a step back from MMOs for at least a few hours each day and do something else productive like read a book (ofc I like to mine in EvE and read a book, does that count? I do HW and mine too.) I think, in an MMO eating up ALL our spare time, our free time, it can also eat up the time for personal growth in other areas. Don’t get me wrong, I will always play MMOs I love ’em, but I am starting to do some more writing, journaling, that sort of thing.
Another thing to mention, is we are on the horizon of some hardcore indi-MMOs especially from Europe that just may completely revolutionize MMOs and the challenge in the. (Fallen Earth anyone?)